Marie Žlábková

“Whenever there were elections under Communism, I said to myself: I won’t vote them, even if I get in trouble for it. They issued these absentee voting cards in case a person wasn’t at home. And we have a cottage in southern Bohemia, in Nežárka, and drove off there, surrounded by deep forests, nobody looked for me there.”

“Mum took the food [by train], one time they actually caught her with a tub of goose fat at the station. And they took her to the Pečkárna for two days, she was locked up there. And if it wasn’t for my uncle, František Ventura, an Olympic champion, who - not that he was a collaborator - but he did have some connections, then she’d have ended up in a concentration camp. Because of some fat!”