Marta, do you want a pair of shoes?
Marta Mezerová was born on 21 May 1941 in Nezamyslice as the youngest of three siblings to parents Ilona and Tomáš Outrata. The family lived first in Nová, Slovakia, and later in Stará Halič, where they had two children, Jolana (1922-1982) and Bohumil (1929-2016). After the establishment of the independent Slovak state in 1939, they moved to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where in Nezamyslice her father got a job at the post office. She lived through the war period as a young child, but she has some strong memories of the end of the war in particular. Her cousin was Leopold Färber, a fighter against both totalitarian regimes, who received the Memory of Nations Award and the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 3rd Class in 2012. At the age of 14, after finishing primary school, she went to work at the Clothing Factory (OP) in Prostějov. In 1963 she married Pavel Novotný and they had two sons Pavel (1963) and Tomáš (1966). She worked at the railways, then at the local post office, but in 1974 her husband Pavel died tragically when he got killed on a motorcycle. Seven years later (1981), Marta married for the second time, to Antonín Mezera. A year later she returned from the post office to the railways again and in 1988 she went to work for the cooperative farm in Tištín. From there, two years later, she moved to the Social Welfare Institute in Víceměřice to work as a cook, where she remained until her retirement in 1996. Her brother Bohumil is listed in the Security Forces Artchive as a State Security agent from 1972 to 1985. She has been very active all her life, helping to organize village entertainments, playing amateur theatre, organizing the May pole cutting and other cultural events in the village. Since her birth until now (2023) she has lived in Nezamyslice, since 2014 in a nursing home.