Marie Podařilová

* 1936

  • "I didn't like them coming, and saying you have to. They came to me too. You have to. And that was when I went to the National Committee. The condition is… I said I'm not interested, I won't go there. So they stopped telling me I had to and I accepted the place. But I was already established in the district of Hradec, so I went there. Mayor Kocar arrives: 'You have to party, it's an ordinance.' I say, 'Are you serious? I'll pack my things and go home. '' No, sign it, you don't have to be there all the time. '' So I signed it, too, to the Communist Party. My year was over. I returned their ID. And they said I can't do that. I said that I would only make it for this one year, no longer. I said, I don't want to be a member anymore. Although I'm not saying I had a bad life under the Communist regime. I'm not saying that, but you had to work because if you weren't working, you were imprisoned because you were a parasite. But this omnipresent obligation, that made me angry. That everything we did, was so forced that it was not voluntary. If I want to do something, I will do it voluntarily and I will not do it forcibly. You have to, you have to... I don't. I simply don't have to. It's like that."

  • "I was already 19, 20. So behind us were the PS, the Commander of the PS, asking us to go work as border guards. So five or six of us from Hůrky signed up. And so we went to watch at night, and in case an unknown person walked by, we had to ask for their ID cards, we could legitimize them, we had badges. We were never lucky enough to detain anyone, there was no movement at night. "And where did you guard, right by the village or somewhere in the woods? "Around the village, there was a waiting room, but we were behind the waiting room, hidden. And there we guarded. And we went here and there. There were no more barracks. It was covered in mud, that no one would come there. It was one patrol there and the second one on the other side. So we helped them like that. " Did you have any money for it? "" No, we did it all for free. It was so much fun for us. "And what did you think of the people whom you were supposed to watch? What did they tell you about them, why should you guard them? ” They told us to detain, or we should call Bystřice by phone, that in any case, we should call. We did not need to be afraid. There were always two of us patroling"" And have you wondered about the situation of the people who were escaping? They mostly said they were smugglers. The smuggler for us was that someone was carrying something across borders. So we mainly made sure that it didn't happen in Bystřice. In fact, the forests could go through Osika. It was all so open there. So we weren't lucky. "

  • "How it affected you as a child when you arrived, got out of the car. What do you remember as a child? ”Well, it was so different, so scattered, because we were used to it there. So when we arrived, there was a terrible mess. Mom was crying. And we said, 'Mom, we'll stay here.' There was a pond in front of the house, a large garden there, full of cattle, pigs, geese, goslings. In short, it was nice there. I felt that way as a child, I was eight years old, my brother was ten. " Were there any things left after the natives? "There were beds we threw away, duvets, but they were cut, we had to throw them away, too. It was full of things, but all of them were unnecessary. But what was interesting, there was a roasting pan with a roast goose in the oven. The roast goose was in the oven. After the Germans. "

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    Slavonice, 03.08.2020

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The obligation, that angered me the most

Marie Podařilová (early 1980s)
Marie Podařilová (early 1980s)
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Marie Podařilová was born on June 15, 1936 in Havlíčkův Brod (then Německý) Brod. In May 1945, she and her parents came to Dobrá Voda in the Jindřichův Hradec region, where they settled at the farm after the expelled Germans. In 1953, she graduated in České Budějovice from the field of plaster mason. For the next four years she worked at the Military Design Institute in Karlovy Vary. In 1956 she returned to her parents in Dobrá Voda. After the father refused to join the unified agricultural cooperative, the family had to move out of the farm and moved to nearby Hůrky. In the years 1956–1958, the witness was a member of the border guards. She worked as a seamstress, a worker in the woods and in a cowshed. After retiring in 1991, she helped out at a guesthouse with a restaurant. In 2020, Marie Podařilová lived in a nursing home in Nová Bystřice.