“I entered the convent of Sisters of the Holy Cross in Napajedla together with that girl student, and I studied the home-making school there and it impressed me so much that when the nuns asked me one day what I planned to do next, I said that I would enter a convent. I thus entered the convent in Kroměříž; it was on 21st November. I stayed there until March, that was the preparatory stage, and I was a candidate. Since I have not finished the home-making school, I still had one year left, a decision was made that they would send me to a school for dieticians in Ostrava. This was a one-year advanced school of nutrition. This was followed by another study at a school for nutritionists in Brno. I studied the school there for less than a year. Before the end of the school year, they drove us away as sheep. I lived there in a nice family villa, there were only about six sisters there and they taught us how to play the violin and piano. One day we came back from school and the house was already surrounded by soldiers. We came in and we were no longer allowed to go out, it was cruel.”
“Soon after we arrived to Bohosudov, they informed us that we would go to work in a factory which produced screws. I was there with Pavla and there were about three other sisters. I liked it there a lot, because it was the best time for my spiritual life. We were doing a monotonous work, handling screws, but we did not have to think about this activity. We were dirty like mechanics. We were even afraid to touch one another, but we could think of good things, and so I remember this period to be the nicest part of my life, in peace, in the convent.”
Marie Štiková, née Chytilová (later S. M. Klementa) was born November 23, 1927 in the Prostějov region as the third of nine children. She attended the home-making school of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross in Napajedla. She joined this congregation without telling her family. Marie studied an advanced school of nutrition in Ostrava and a school for dieticians in Brno. Together with other nuns she was taken to the monastery in Bohosudov where they had to work in a factory which produced screws. When they learnt that all candidates would have to leave the nuns, all of them quickly entered the novitiate on March 11, 1951. Marie Štiková adopted her religious name S. M. Klementa. Five nuns got transferred to Kladno, and later only two of them remained there: Marie and S. M. Ema, or Jiřinka Kuželová. They lived together until their retirement age and they were going for visits to the sisters in Broumov, but due to the pressure by the state-appointed secretary for church affairs they eventually had to return to civilian life. For the entire time they sought to adhere to the rules of a monastic life. Marie Štiková completed a nursing school in hospital and she worked in a dairy kitchen and in the otology department. About five years before her retirement, she and Jiřinka Kuželová went to work together in the infant-care institute in Kladno-Rozdělov. Marie married - her husband was a widower with four children. They lived together for thirty-five years until her husband’s death. One of her granddaughters is a nun.
