Before escape from Czechoslovakia, he told me to listen to the radio
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Marie Šurnická, née Mrázková, was born on 29 April 1937 in Benešov, but grew up in Vojkov in the family of a pub keeper. During World War II, the village was incorporated into a Waffen-SS training area and her maternal relatives from Vrchotovy Janovice were among the families displaced by the Nazis. After February 1948, the family pub was nationalized and incorporated into the national enterprise Jednota, so that the parents became tenants in their own house. Marie trained as a confectioner and later worked in the dairy and school canteen. At the age of sixteen she met Milan Šurnický, who was sentenced by the communist justice system in the 1950s to a two-year sentence in the uranium mines in Horní Slavkov for attempting to cross the state border illegally. She waited for his return to freedom and after his release they married in 1958. He did not obtain rehabilitation until after 1990. They lived together for fifty-two years until his death in 2010. In February 2026, Marie Šurnická was living in Sedlčany.
