Marie Sobolová

* 1943

  • "The boys were curious, so in the morning they knelt on the radiator under the window and looked out. A tank was just driving behind our apartment building, and it looked like it was coming towards us, so I grabbed them and put them under the bed, crying. Then my husband came home, told me what the situation was, that nobody was working, everybody was on strike, the Communists were throwing away their party books. I cried and said that I would not be in Hradec and that I would go to my mother's in Dolní Újezd, that it would be quiet there. And the neighbour above us said that the shops were closed. So I dressed the boys and went with them to the station in Hradec Kralove, saying that we would go to Litomyšl. The driver told me to buy a ticket, but that he couldn't guarantee if we would get there. We went by bus and in Ostřetín, I still remember it, there were troops on both sides of the road, tanks. They stopped our bus, two soldiers came with machine guns, one boy was sleeping on my lap, they looked at us and we drove on."

  • "When dad came home from court, I remember, it was the morning of the next day. Suddenly there were strangers in our room, everywhere, writing down our things. Mum asked them if she could make breakfast for the children and took us to the kitchen, where we hadn't been allowed to go all day. There were strangers everywhere in the yard, and those from the village, and they began to divide up our animals. Chickens, geese, goats and later they took the cows and the worst was for dad when they took the horses. It was on the 25th of August. In September, the school year was starting, and my mother's brother from Kolin, my godfather, came to us and took my brother and he entered the sixth grade and stayed with him there."

  • "Mr. Černovický, the head teacher at Sedlec, because I had a memorial book at that time, wrote a dedication to me: 'Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Learn, learn, learn.' I just remember that my dad said something that he is an idiot. My mother told me that I must never say what my dad just said anywhere. I haven't forgotten it, but I haven't said it anywhere either."

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    Hradec Králové, 17.03.2023

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    duration: 01:45:22
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
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Dad was never allowed home again. He used to put flowers on his parents’ grave secretly in the dark

Marie Sobolová in 1947
Marie Sobolová in 1947
photo: Archive of the witness

Marie Sobolová, née Kučerová, was born on 14 April 1943 in Sedlec near Vysoké Mýto, where she grew up together with her older brother. Her father, Stanislav Kučera, served as mayor of the village during the war and after the February communist coup, he first resisted the absurdly high deliveries he had to make and ended up in court several times. In August 1952, a court in Vysoké mýto finally sentenced her father to an eight-month prison sentence, which he served first in the prison in Chrudim and later as a prisoner building the Křižanovice dam. The family had to be separated. While her father was serving his sentence, her brother had to move in with his uncle and Marie and her mother found refuge in Janov u Litomyšli, where her mother’s brother lived. As the daughter of a kulak, Marie faced ridicule and bullying at school, not only from her classmates but also from her teachers. Because of her poor grades, she was not admitted to her dream secondary school of education, so she became a shop assistant. In 1963 she married and she and her husband moved to Hradec Králové, where they raised three sons. After the revolution, she managed to get back some of the property that had been stolen from the family in the 1950s. In the 1990s, she was active in the Confederation of Political Prisoners, where she found not only friends but also legal help. In 2023 she was living in Hradec Kralove.