" [It was] there sometime in the late 1950s. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, I think. Later, I asked his wife when it was. She puts it a bit further back. They had been reported to the police, but it was a kind of an excuse to destroy pharmacists and doctors. So there was a monster show trial going on here in Šumperk. Both the head of OHES [District Hygienical and Epidemiological Centre], Mr Matuška, and the pharmacist [from the shop] opposite the theatre, Mr Buchar, were arrested. Then there was the pharmacist from the hospital, and more doctors. I remember Matuška the most, because I knew him. That concerned me, because my dad was the manager of OHES and he was in charge of various things. I used to go with him, for example, to feed the mice and rabbits on Saturdays. And his [Matuška´s] wife, Dagmar Matušková, worked in the same office with my dad. I think she was a lab technician there, but I don't know exactly. But she was there, and I always heard that name as a child. I was the youngest one, the one nobody ever wanted to talk to, because I spilled out everything. When that Matuška got arrested, Dad was out of work for a while, too, and then he ended up working in the hospital in the accounting department."
"There it was even so... The boys soon found out that they eavesdropped on us through the wire radio, so we let water run or we talked somewhere else. And we were under surveillance. There were for example guys from Lithuania and they were different from the Russians, or the Ukrainian Jews were different. We socialized with a kind of an elite of journalists and people from the culture field."
"For my mother's sake, I took an internship here in Šumperk at Naše slovo [Our word] and I experienced the occupation here. I also collected eyewitness´s accounts, and went around with the newspaper and handed out leaflets, and we printed in the printing house. I witnessed the '68, the invasion, here. I also have [written] a long story about it called When Margaret Threw the Sickle into the Rye, which was published in both Czech and German, and it is about the political situation in Šumperk and it is about Our Word, how the media reacted there, how it looked right there."
Marta Pelinka-Marková was born on 30 September 1947 in Špiklice (since 1948 called Nová Seninka) at the foot of Králický Sněžník. Her father Jan Marek worked there as an employee of the financial (border) guard. After the financial guard was abolished, the family moved to Šumperk in 1950, where Marta Marková graduated from a grammar school. In 1966 she entered the Faculty of Social Sciences and Journalism at Charles University in Prague. She experienced the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops while working as an intern at the regional newspaper Naše slovo [Our Word] in Šumperk. There she was collecting eyewitness´s account of the events. Because of this activity she got into an argument with the editor-in-chief and had to give up her cooperation with the weekly. After finishing her studies, she worked at the state medical publishing house Avicenum in Prague as an editor of the magazine Zdravotnická pracovnice [Health Care Staff]. From 1976 to 1980 she also worked for Czechoslovak Radio and its literary department. In 1980 she emigrated to Austria with her husband and two children. In 1989 she returned to her profession and has been working as a freelance journalist ever since. She has also made a living as a teacher at the University of Innsbruck and has written several books. At the time of filming in 2021, Marta Pelinka-Marková was living in Vienna with her second husband, a well-known Austrian academic and political scientist, Anton Pelinka. She still returns to the Czech Republic regularly, not only because of her profession, but also because of her family home in Rohle. She took it over in a decrepit state and has been trying to restore it to its original state for years.
