"My mother was home alone once, so they said, they were poorly again… It was probably very difficult, because my mother didn't really speak Czech, she could only speak Russian. Once she was home alone, Dad was at work and my mother said that suddenly two men entered wearing leather coats, and they began speaking to her in Russian, asking where her husband was. My mum just froze with fear as she knew they were probably the secret police assuming that my father in fact ran away from the Urals with his family, so they were quite afraid of what would happen. But nothing happened because my mother said they had whispered something, one waved his arm and left. And the parents thought and said to themselves that when they saw the misery… Because they had nothing there, they actually had only what they were wearing and one briefcase when they returned back to Bohemia.”
"I was rather worried about the injustice. I think today you could defend yourself a bit… I really wanted to be a hairdresser, I would really like that. But at that time they only took one or two hairdressers in the whole district. So the odds, even with the best grades, were so terribly low and Jitka Chaloupková came in, just a girl who was learning very badly, I don't think she was very skillful, and she came to class and said she was going to become a hairdresser… A we were just astonished! So I know I almost cried a few tears, because… Well, yes, because the mother was friends, she was some kind of a director, so in this I think that today if a person appealed, but then there was no appeal. That's when it was just decided, who was in and was not… "
"Year 1968… So the first thing I heard in the morning: Sister, get up - that's how my brother pounded me - sister, get up, it's a war, we've been attacked by the Russians! And my head was spinning, what about the war? Because we heard such terrible things about the war… I went to the first grade at the time, I know there was a lot of strikes, I know that in the streets we fastened or did not fasten young tricolors, but in fact it can be said that by attending the agricultural school, so if there were no people, but in fact, we were fifteen, sixteen, they took us to Měcholupy near Žatec from school and we were actually there, at six o'clock in the morning we were woken up, that's for sure, and at ten o'clock we finished. We were at the combers, where hops were brought in, and we worked at the combers to process them. And in fact, there were soldiers here at the time, and what happened next went beyond us. Like someone, maybe my husband said, tanks and talked to soldiers… So we were at that time, it was August, we worked, from morning to evening we worked, before we went to school, maybe sometime in September, we only went to school sometime in mid-September."
Marie Martinková née Pastorková was born in Žatec on January 24, 1953 into a family that moved to Czechoslovakia as part of the post-war repatriation. Father Antonín Pastorek, a Volhynian Czech, fought in the ranks of the Red Army in the battle of Stalingrad, before the end of the war he and another group of Volhynian Czechs moved him to Ufa to construct military buildings. There he met the mother of the witness Maria, who came from eastern Ukraine. In 1947, the family moved to Žatec. In 1949, his father was arrested for alleged resistance activities by the state security, after some time he was released due to lack of evidence, and even many years later he lived to receive compensation. Marie attended primary school in Žatec, went to Pionýr obligatorily and tried not to give up the cause of the problems with the regime. He recalls the August occupation of 1968, the then fears of the outbreak of war and the following years of rigid normalization. She graduated from an agricultural high school in Žatec and worked in the field for some time. Then she worked as an accountant for firefighters in Kutná Hora, where she worked until 1989. After the Velvet Revolution, she worked in the State Fire Supervision, later in a similar position in a private company. In the revolutionary year of 1989, she lost her eldest daughter during a railway accident, and the sad fact led her to faith. Today he lives in Malešov near Kutná Hora.
