She went to her new home in a wagon with a cow and a goat
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Anna Marková was born on 19 April 1943 in Pustiny near Kyšperk/Letohrad. Her father František Hubálek (1908-1982) was a carpenter, her mother Marie (1911-1987) a textile worker. The Hubálek family had six children. Besides Anna, there were Marie (born 1937), Marta (1939-2023), twins František and Karel (1948) and Věra (1950). In June 1945, the Hubálek family moved to the border town of Celný, to a farm left by the displaced Germans, and farmed thirteen hectares of hilly land. Anna started first grade there in 1949, along with several German children who remained in the village. In 1948, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power in the state. As private farmers, the Hubálek family had to make compulsory deliveries and lived through the worst time of agricultural collectivisation in Celny. In 1950, a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD) was established there and František Hubálek, as a competent farmer, was forced to become its chairman. Thus, his father became unpopular in the village because he demanded work from the people, and the new settlers mostly did not want to work. After a house fire in 1954, they moved to Kunvald, a village where several peasants became victims of the collectivization terror in 1953. The first impression she had of a car arriving in Kunvald was the sign on the barn: Here lives a kulak. Her parents joined the JZD in the village and worked in pig farming. Here, too, the Hubáleks worked hard. At the end of the 1960s, her father had to sell his beloved horses, and this drove him to leave the JZD. In 1957-1961 Anna studied at the Secondary Agricultural School in Kostelec nad Orlicí, majoring in breeding. Until 1968 she worked as a zootechnician in JZD Kunvald. Then she married Bedřich Marek (1939-1998) and moved to Letohrad, where the couple had three sons in 1968, 1970 and 1975. She worked in agriculture until her retirement. In 2024, at the time of filming, she lived in Orlice-Letohrad.
