"Then, for example, I experienced going into a shoe store, and an officer came in with two—well, we used to call them 'lackeys.' They had big suitcases, and he said, ‘Everything!’ So the lady gave him all the shoes she had, packed them into the suitcases, and he paid with brand-new money—freshly printed, just perfect bills. He just handed them over and left. And I said, ‘What about us? What about me?’ Nothing."
"At school, when I was still in that religion class, when they were laughing at us and stuff, I remember very well, as I do today, that the headmaster, the comrade headmaster then, was telling us the subject we had, and suddenly he put in how religion is utopian, what a utopia it is, what a fairy tale it is, and I don't know what. And I volunteered, I held up my finger like this and I said to him, 'Comrade Director, nobody has come back yet who has died to tell us whether or not there is eternal life,' and I sat down. The headmaster got quiet, the kids got quiet, and I got scared myself about what I had said."
"But then, as time went on, later on I got to know... or there were two Salesians, I know their names now, who were not arrested, but they had lost state approval and were painters and they came to us secretly. And I found this out one morning when I went to the bathroom and there was a table set up in our kitchen, candles, a cross, and Mass was being celebrated. And just, my parents told me that I couldn't say it anywhere, that these nice gentlemen would be arrested, and then I was able to participate after that. Or they used to come and visit us. They were Salesians; one was named Augustin Holík and the other was Foglík, and the name... it’s slipped my mind now."
"I wondered all the time if I was ever scared, but I found out that I was. I was scared when my husband and I went to forbidden Christian events that lasted from Wednesday to Sunday, and we had the children at my parents' house. And sometimes we would run out through the window when the SS came - so sometimes I was afraid if we would go back home and get arrested, that's what I was afraid of."
"That's your question, how I realized as a child how monstrous the communist regime was. My parents hid two priests, and we lived in an attic in Šumperk, and there was this attic, and they were in that attic. And I happened to come out one day, I needed to go to the toilet, and there was a table in the kitchen and there was a mass. And my father said to me, 'If you say this somewhere, you mustn't say it anywhere, lest they go to jail. And if you keep quiet, you'll be able to attend.'I saw for the first time in my life - I was five years old - that this event was happening in our house. And then I learned that the chaplain of Šumperk took it upon himself that the priests were being hidden by my parents, and my father did not go to prison, and the chaplain of Šumperk went instead. And I liked him very much, he was a good man, and this, what they did, stayed with me forever, and I knew that this was a monstrous regime that was locking up good people for nothing, just because they wanted to help someone."
Marie Jílková was born on February 8, 1950 in Šumperk into a strongly Catholic family. Her parents, Josef and Amálie Hanák, hid priests who were persecuted by State Security in the 1950s. Marie graduated from the Šumperk Mechanical Engineering School, and her classmate there was Jan Zajíc - a young man who, as human torch number two, followed the actions of Jan Palach, who burned himself to death in January 1969 in protest against the growing lethargy of Czechoslovak citizens against the August 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. In 1969, the witness attended a student memorial service for Jan Zajíc and also attended his funeral, where her then husband-to-be Adolf Jílek took photographs. The photographs have been preserved. Throughout the entire period of normalisation, she faced harassment because of her faith. Nevertheless, in 1974 she graduated from the Brno University of Technology (VUT) as a mechanical engineer. Together with her husband, she participated in secret religious seminars organized in the region by the priest and philosopher Josef Zvěřina. After the Velvet Revolution, Marie Jílková and her husband became involved in municipal politics, in which she was still active at the time of the interview (2025). She and her husband Adolf raised four children, and in 2025 they lived in Dolní Studénky.
