Marie Horňáková

* 1941

  • "So when we got back home that day in such a dramatic way, of course there were no supplies. And I went shopping here in Dukat, it was a shopping centre, that I had to buy something to take home, but there was nothing. There was no rolls, bread, flour, milk, just basic foodstuffs completely gone. And here you had just enough for the day. So I know that then I put the baby in the pram and I went through the woods to the Divis district, and someone told me that there was a little shop there where they still had some. It was hard!"

  • "Russian soldiers invaded, they were like... Well, teenagers, more like eighteen to twenty-five, who were looting and looking for something to steal, so they burst into our cellar and demanded drinks, vodka. We didn't have vodka, but because it was Slovácko, there was slivovice, which our neighbour had stored. Of course, they discovered it immediately, but in order not to give them something that could poison them, one of the grown men, which was my dad and the neighbour, always had to drink beforehand. And then they drank too and they made these gentlemen drink too and I know it ended up that my dad got straight alcohol poisoning, he was lying there like a dead body and we were crying over him, that he died and everything, so it was such a powerful experience."

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    Brno, 14.06.2023

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As a gendarme, Dad didn’t fit into the communists‘ plans.

Witness at the eleven-year school, 1950s
Witness at the eleven-year school, 1950s
zdroj: archive of a witness

Marie Horňáková, née Müllner, was born on 14 March 1941 in Žarošice near Kyjov, where her father František Müllner worked as a gendarme. Before the war he worked in Slovakia, but after the declaration of the Slovak state in 1939 he was deported to the Protectorate with his wife and elder daughter. After February 1948, he was dismissed from the newly formed National Security Corps and had to earn his living manually. Because of her father, Marie later had problems with her studies. After graduating from high school in 1958, she was not accepted to medical school, but managed to study mathematics - chemistry (later biochemistry) at the Faculty of Science in Brno. While still a student, she married Kamil Horňák, a literary and theatre critic who was involved during the Prague Spring and blacklisted with the onset of normalisation. His political scandal brought problems to the whole family, the witness was bullied at her workplace and their daughter was unable to study at the gymnasium despite her excellent grades. Marie Horňáková worked all her professional life in the field of biochemistry, in the sixties in research, and from the seventies in the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at the Hospital of the Brothers of Mercy in Brno, where she held the position of head of the department after the Velvet Revolution. In 2023, she was living in Brno.