Marie Žlábková

* 1930

  • “And I had my mother here, she had a laughable pension because mothers didn’t go to work beforehand, when I was little, Dad earned our keep. So she had a pension of some six hundred crowns. And my husband would write various screenplays for people who were employed at the television, and they published it under their own name and gave him half of the money they got for it.”

  • “Whenever there were elections under Communism, I said to myself: I won’t vote them, even if I get in trouble for it. They issued these absentee voting cards in case a person wasn’t at home. And we have a cottage in southern Bohemia, in Nežárka, and drove off there, surrounded by deep forests, nobody looked for me there.”

  • “Mum took the food [by train], one time they actually caught her with a tub of goose fat at the station. And they took her to the Pečkárna for two days, she was locked up there. And if it wasn’t for my uncle, František Ventura, an Olympic champion, who - not that he was a collaborator - but he did have some connections, then she’d have ended up in a concentration camp. Because of some fat!”

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    Praha, 07.08.2014

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    duration: 01:25:14
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The revolution in 1989 was the most beautiful moment of my life

Marie Žlábková
Marie Žlábková
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Marie Žlábková was born into the family of a professor of economy in České Budějovice. The family moved to Prague when she was six. After 1948 her grandfather, the owner of a brickworks, was declared a kulak. After 1968 and Communist background profiling checks, her husband was degraded and fired from his job at the television. Marie Žlábková supported her family with the wages from her office job at Pražské informační služby. (Prague Information Services) Together with her husband she raised three children.