"I experienced the events on Národní třída in Bratislava on a school trip. I didn't know about it, and now suddenly someone says, 'Did you know that something happened in Prague?' And then it went very fast. And it was clear that when the name Havel came up... and I organised a trip to Vienna during the Christmas holidays. A friend from Hodonín called me and said: 'Hurry up and organise it, who knows if we'll be there again.' I'm crazy about it.' Those were moments like that. And we were completely beside ourselves in Vienna. It was a different world."
"When the grammar school was reopened, academies etc. were being planned. I was the head of the recitation ensemble and we made a band of poetry from the graduates of the grammar school, from Blatný through Konečný and of course Rotrekl etc. The band was very nice, very successful, everything went well, and two days later I was called to the headmaster's office and a comrade sat there and said to me, 'Comrade, whoever wanted to could see the anti-socialist sentiments in that band,' because it was cold, etc., 'it´s your fault.' I said to him, 'Dear comrade, whoever wanted to see, saw, I didn't want to see, so I showed the band as it was.' And it went on for a month, and the conclusion was, 'Disciplinary proceedings by the regional party committee for ideological deficiencies in the work.' "And I was crying, and director Skopal told me: 'Sign it. I’m not allowed to give you a bonus twice, but I will never fire you.'"
"My first perception of the Protectorate is an interesting story, when three or four Gestapo men, I don't know if it was three or four, broke into our apartment, I hadn't gone to school yet, and I was... next to the shop there was a room called an office. I was playing there and the door fell down. I can still see the grey coats. I flew curiously after them, and they pulled me away, slammed me down on the sofa and flew through the whole apartment, including the attic and everything, without saying a word, and left. Mum was at the doctor's at the time and of course she came back crying when they told her. I know my parents waited a long time to see what would come of it. And when a car pulled up in front of the house, they always said, 'They're going to get dad.' We don't know, it was probably some kind of denunciation, maybe they were holding someone. The second thing is that in our house they listened to the Western radio, a doctor from Brodek came there every week and they listened. I knew about it, but I wasn't allowed to say anything. They had a chess set there, by the radio. Dad was such an enthusiast, he had one of the first concession radios in that area. So it was, 'Go away!' Maybe that was the reason, I don't know."
Marie Niedermayerová was born on 21 March 1937 to Mr and Mrs Novotný from Želč in Prostějov region. Her father Karel Novotný owned a general store, her mother Marie worked as a teacher. The witness has several memories of the war period, when the Gestapo raided their home on a tip-off, but above all of the liberation. After February 1948, the communists nationalized the family’s shop and took away the farm from her mother’s family as part of collectivization. After graduating from the municipal and burgher school, Marie studied at the gymnasium in Prostějov and in 1955-1960 Czech and Polish at the Faculty of Philosophy in Brno. After graduation, she worked briefly at the Brno Armoury and from 1964 worked in education, first at the primary school, then taught Czech for over twenty years at the Gymnasium tř. She was a teacher of Czech language in Brno for twenty years. In the early 1970s, she put together a poetry programme with her students, including poetry by disagreeable authors, for which she was disciplined. After leaving the grammar school, she worked as a school inspector in the 1990s and then, at the age of retirement, taught for several years at the Cyril and Methodius Secondary Pedagogical School in Brno. In 2023 she lived in Brno.
