"When you see someone, you haven't seen for a long time, you are obviously very happy. My mother came to see me at Velehrad. She came there with t Mr. Baďura on a motorbike. There was this old guard, I don't know his name, they called him 'Papa Gajda', he was a Russian, and he came to me and he said, 'Hey, Štrbík girl, go take a piss.' That's what he said to me, 'Go take a piss, you have your mother there.' So my mother and I were there hugging in the toilet."
"And then in the spring we went to Velehrad. There was a big Cooperative (JZD) there and they were lacking people. So we went to work there. But we were terribly weak, so the people there were scolding the guards for treating us badly. We were picking potatoes at that time and we just kept falling into the furrow. And then the man in charge said, 'Well, we have to give them food,' so they gave us food every day. A big slice of bread with lard on it. We stayed there until we got fatten up."
"We had the trial in the Big Cinema in Zlín. And the trial was a reward for people who worked well. For the productive workers. So they got a ticket. It was such a thrill for us to see people. We were all living in the hope that the truth would come out, that we would go home."
It was impossible to drink or to wash. There were dead rats floating in the milk tub
Marie Zhofová with a photo of her husband Bohumil in 2022
photo: fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2022
photo: fotografie byla pořízena při natáčení v roce 2022
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Marie Zhofová was born on 20 March 1930 in Jemnice as a daughter of the gamekeeper Karel Štrbík and his wife Rozálie. The family was severely affected by the onset of communism in February 1948. During the forced collectivisation of agriculture, Marie’s uncle Adolf Kamenec was killed. Due to the fact that the Štrbík family provided accommodation to Jaromír Vrba, a resistance fighter from the anti-communist organisation Světlana, Marie and her father Karel were arrested by the State Secret Police on 14 June 1949 and taken to Uherské Hradiště for interrogation. Marie was interrogated by Alois Grebeníček. Karel Štrbík died while awaiting trial, and Marie was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She served half of it. She was in prisons in Uherské Hradiště, Tuněchody, Pardubice and Želiezovce. Soon after her release, she married Bohumil Zhof, a man with a similar fate. Together they raised two daughters, Magdalena and Jitka. She died on August 10, 2023.
