The Germans, they were people who did not speak
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Marie Nováková, née Marková, was born on September 11, 1934 in Dolní Čermná near Ústí nad Orlicí. She spent her school years and the war in Opočné with two sisters and a brother in a close-knit family that led the children to love music. To this day, Marie regularly attends classical music concerts. After graduating from the Higher Medical School in Prague, she went with her husband to Liberec, where her husband helped to found the new Czech Engineering University in a traditional German environment after the war. At first, Marie worked as admin at the university; later operated the first MINSK computers at the University of Mechanical and Textile Engineering (VŠST) and then at the Liberec Textilana. At the end of her professional history, she returned to healthcare. In the 1950s, the family was traumatized by the fate of their uncle Vojtěch Novák, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in a fabricated political trial. He ended up spending seven years in prison. It was known in Liberec that Maria and her family did not agree with the regime, but VŠST needed good mathematicians, which is why her husband was allowed to teach until 1970, until the normalization purges. After being fired, he found a job in Lanškroun and was allowed to return to the university only in the 1980s. Their three children, excellent students, were only allowed to study technical subjects. From September 1989, Marie Nováková began to study a one-year course in Prague entitling her to teach religion at an elementary school. She taught religion for 20 years in various Liberec schools. Today (2021), Marie Nováková has a large family, three children, 13 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
