Relatives in the Soviet Union knew about the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as early as the beginning of August
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Zuzana Motlová, née Cenknerová, was born on 6 June 1942 in Perečín in what is now Ukraine. After the war, the territory fell to the Soviet Union and the Cenkners moved to Cheb. Father worked as a carpenter and mother took care of nine children. When the witness started primary school, she did not speak Czech. At the end of the 1950s, the family moved to Starosedlský Hrádek near Březnice because of mother’s health. She trained as a pastry chef in Pilsen and worked briefly in a pastry shop in Příbram and with her sister in the kitchen of Bytíz Prison. She married in 1963 and raised three children with her husband. They lived first in Nestrašovice, later they moved to a company flat in Příbram. After her maternity leave, she started working in an agricultural computer centre. At the end of July 1968, she and her family went to visit relatives in Perečín for two weeks, but they returned home early because of the upcoming invasion. In Mukachevo she witnessed the arrival of a government delegation headed by Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. In November 1989, together with her colleagues from the company, she went on strike in the square in Příbram, where she rang the keys and waved the Czech flag. After the revolution she ended up working in a computer centre and in retirement she devoted herself mainly to her family, travelling and gardening. In 2024 she was living in Příbram.
