Marie Snášelová

* 1930

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  • "So [my husband and I] went to get our passports, because they had expired. So we went to [Nový] Jičín to get our passports. And there at the passport office, when we came to the line, the gentleman who was in charge said, 'Wait a minute. I have to talk to you.' And he took us aside, saying that he would take us in the end. So he finally took us and he said, 'Your son escaped, didn't he?' We said, 'He didn't escape. We've got both our sons at home.' And he said, 'But he did run away. Where was he?' I said, 'Well, he was in Slovakia. He was there collecting canned food and cleaning the Low Tatras.' 'No, we have a record here that he emigrated.'"

  • "The way I remember the liberation is that we lived in the cellar for fourteen days towards the end of the war, because our apartment was occupied by some military commandos and we had to stay in the cellar. We cooked there. It wasn't just us, a family of four with two aunts, or six. But there were also neighbors who didn't have such cellars that they could use them as air-raid shelters. Well, we had a cellar prepared like that. We had a stove for cooking. A little cabin. We even slept there. There was coal in the corner, but otherwise we had a spacious cellar under the whole house and we waited to see what was going on outside. That's when mom always came out. She'd just seen someone crawling in the garden. It was a German soldier and he was hungry, so my mother gave him a cup of soup, but then she was called back to the cellar because there was a threat of bombing again."

  • "As children we saw [the Germans coming] as a change. A change in standard, ordinary life. That something new was happening. At school, we noticed it by changing the picture at the head of the classroom where Dr. Beneš was. And then the new head statesman was hung there, it was Hitler. And I had nothing else to do but... I liked to draw. Back then, not now. That I drew [Hitler] with a few strokes in the dictionary and the teacher admired it, that it was a faithful likeness of our Leader. I brought it home, I showed it, and the teacher praised it, so my mother shed a tear."

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    Ostrava, 04.06.2024

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    Ostrava, 19.06.2024

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Work, test tubes and the lab, that was my life

Wedding photo, 1958
Wedding photo, 1958
photo: archive of the witness

Marie Snášelová was born on 9 October 1930 into the family of František Perník, a tailor from Klimkovice, and his wife Marie, née Pavlíková. The Nazi occupation interfered with her happy childhood. The majority Czech Klimkovice was incorporated into the Sudetenland. The German army marched into the town exactly on the day of the witness’s eighth birthday. In 1944, she finished the municipal school and was threatened with forced labour. To avoid this fate, her father took her to an apprenticeship and she attended a German continuation school. In 1945, she entered a grammar school in Ostrava. Four years later she went to university in Brno, where she studied pharmacy. It became her lifelong passion. After graduation, she got a placement at the Pharmaceutical Control Institute in Prague. Thanks to the secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Ostrava, Oldřich Černík, she was able to transfer to the control laboratory in Ostrava, where she held the position of head. In 1983 and 1987 both her sons emigrated. After the emigration of her second son, she could no longer hold a leading position at work. She loved her work so much that she accepted a position at UNIGEO at an advanced age. She retired from there in 2022 at the age of 92. In 2024, she lived with her sister in a First Republic villa in Klimkovice.