Marie Polívková

* 1939

  • "Those women who had houses and moved into apartment buildings paid the price for not knowing what to do with their free time. They were used to running out in the morning to the garden to the rabbits, to the chickens. It was their life and they were happy. And now they were sitting on benches in front of apartment buildings, dying one by one. The first few years after we moved in, a few women who we thought were still sturdy, sadly left. They couldn't cope mentally. Those who didn't find an activity paid the price."

  • "When Jan Palach was burned to death, on the anniversary in 1970 I made a bulletin board in the waiting room of the health center with his photo, a flower and a memory of him, that he sacrificed himself for us. And the next day I was fired from my job. I went from the health center to the hospital to the internship. With three kids, it wasn't good. Luckily, my mom helped me out when I was working shifts. But the guys at the shaft, then it was back to Alexander Mine, they spoiled me and were upset that I had to quit my job and decided to write a petition that they wanted me back. So I was interned for six months, then there were vacations, holidays, and by September they wanted me back."

  • "When it was the anniversary [in August 1969], we [Dr. Pittner and his colleague and wife Hanka Pittner] wore black ribbons and he wore a black tie. It was a big problem, too. And the next one was, since I was a member of the Communist Party at the time, I wrote [a letter] saying that the party that uses aggression to govern itself, arrests people, can't stand the truth, and that I had learned about the concentration camps, the gulags that were in Russia. That it was so shocking to me that it was all run on the basis of violence and not on the basis of making our republic prosper, that we are so oppressed. I read the letter at a meeting of the Communist Party. At that time I was saved by the fact that Dr. Redl, with whom I served at the Alexander mine, was the chairman of the Communist Party in the hospital in Duchcov. When I read the letter, I gave it to him. He immediately traced it and the next day the security was there and they wanted the letter. He said to them, 'Please, there was such a storm afterwards, the letter was lost, I don't have it.' Because they didn't have it, they couldn't do anything and I slipped away."

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    Ústí nad Labem, 25.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:36:06
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
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I lost every home I had, I lost my past.

The witness with her daughter Maruska in the settlement of Pokrok in 1959
The witness with her daughter Maruska in the settlement of Pokrok in 1959
photo: witness

Marie Polívková was born on 17 December 1939 in the mining village of Pokrok near Duchcov in Teplice. Her father worked as a mining foreman, her mother took care of her five siblings. The family migrated between the settlements of Pokrok, Hrdlovka and the village of Břežánky, depending on where the father worked. The witness attended primary school in Jenišův Újezd. In 1957, Marie Polívková graduated from the Secondary Medical School in Teplice and started working as a nurse at the Alexander mine. A year later she married Bohumil Polívka and they lived in the settlement of Pokrok. In 1969, on the anniversary of the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops, she resigned from the Communist Party and read aloud a letter condemning the August invasion at work. On the anniversary of the burning of Jan Palach in 1970, she created a commemoration of his act on the bulletin board outside her office. As a punishment, she was transferred from the factory surgery to the hospital in Duchcov. In 1977 she founded the Athletic Club in Duchcov. In the mid-1980s she moved with her husband and three children from the settlement of Pokrok to Duchcov. In the 1990s she initiated the creation of an educational trail about mining settlements. In 2024 she lived in Duchcov.