"She was a children's doctor and several times she gave children, even Czechs, some medicine or helped them when they were at their worst. She behaved well. My mother was terribly grateful to her because they actually had a flat next to us, on the second floor next to us this doctor had a flat. My dad listened to someone else's radio and my mum would go crazy, she'd say, 'We're all going to be arrested and the children shot because of this!' And he wasn't very smart, so he got mad, he said, 'All right, I'll shut it down!' But he was so angry, he turned it up, you could hear it all over the house. And Mummy goes, 'There we go! We're done, we're done!' But 'she' didn't say anything to anybody. She must have heard it! Nobody turned us in. So that was the Czechs... she didn't say anything... And then they threw her boyfriend down the stairs and they wanted to throw her down too. We didn't know what was going on, and there was a baby screaming, crying in the corridor! So Daddy opened the door: 'What's going on here!' And they, they were some kind of revolutionary group, we didn't know them at all, they weren't from our house, not even from the street, and they came there like that to make order. They found out that there were Germans living there."
"It just turned out to be such a stupid plan - which the magazine had - because 'young writers', it was so vague, who was it supposed to be? There weren't many young writers, and the ones who applied were mainly those who wanted to start writing, the only good ones were perhaps Čepelka and Gruša, as far as I remember, they had been already writing. But the others were beginners. It wasn't really a given magazine plan - young people. So then we changed it, and I got together with some other friends, and we changed it into a magazine that would have a different position. And most importantly, I got in touch with Mandler, Emanuel Mandler, who was a historian, originally a communist, so he was Jewish, he had a difficult Jewish youth. Then he stepped aside from communism a little bit, and we took some of my friends from the Faculty of Arts, some of his friends, and we had a catholic Němec, an evangelical Hejdánek, and just a lot of... just this Emanuel, again a Jew, and our goal was to print what was not allowed to be printed, and yet people should have known about it, because socialism selected literature, cut it off a lot of things, and people didn't know about a whole lot of writers."
"I had such reliable people. There was also a friend who was like, 'No, no, I can't do it because my mum is scared. She says - I wouldn't sleep if they wrote it under your name!' So I said, 'We can't do that to Mummy,' and I found someone else. But he had to know the language! My husband said, 'Well, write me.' And I said, 'Yeah, yeah. And do you know English?' You couldn't do that easily, you just had to do it in secret. So, I was helping, of course, I was also helping myself in that I had less work to do. I knew that Libuška would give me a really good translation, that suddenly nobody would write that it was badly translated or something. So it was good for me and I was helping them at the same time."
Marie Šolleová was born on 2 June 1936 in Prague. Her father Eduard Wiesner was a lawyer from Prachatice, and her mother Marie Wiesnerová, who came from Bernartice in Písek, worked as a teacher. The Wiesners spent the war years in Vinohrady, supported by their grandparents, the Vujtěchs from Bernartice, who later survived the Bernartice massacre in May 1945 under dramatic circumstances. After 1948, the Wiesners were persecuted for political reasons. The witness decided to study Bohemian Studies in combination with Lusatian Serbian, which was usually not very attractive for applicants, in order to increase her chances of admission to the Faculty of Arts. After her studies, she taught Czech for a short time and then moved to the newly founded magazine Tvář (Face), the shape of which she helped make for several years. In 1964 she married the historian Zdeněk Šolle and a year later her son Zdeněk was born. She worked on the Zvědavá kamera programme with Otta Bednářová and wrote scripts for several television evening stories for children. In the 1970s and 1980s she was employed at the magazine Ahoj na sobotu, where she allowed banned authors and translators to publish under other people´s names, and met her second husband, Karel Paška. In 2024, Marie Šolleová was living in her Prague flat and often visited Libuše Kozáková, who was one of the aforementioned translators and with whom she had a deep lifelong friendship.
