"It was my grandmother's, and my grandmother had it taken away from her in '54, I think. And my dad was still here, I wasn't born yet in '54, and my grandmother wanted to burn it down, that she wouldn't give it to anyone. Daddy said he had to watch her all night, that she said it would burn to ashes, that she wouldn't give it to anybody. In the end, Jednota had it, they let grandma work there, she had to pay one hundred and twenty-eight crowns rent for the room where she lived, in that one room, in her own. Outside she had this laundry room where she washed everything, cold, freezing, a terrible washing machine. Here it was all hanging in the garden, it was always hanging in the hall, the tablecloths, because she always put clean tablecloths, that awfully grandmother was toiling here, and I think that Jednota, what they did to her, that they still let her pay rent in her own, that was very rude."
"Then we had beer on tap, people were serving themselves, sitting outside, in the pub, everywhere, they had blankets, they were sitting on blankets. I think it might have been around five o'clock, the local committee called here, Mr. Vališ, I don't know who was there at the time, Holoubek, Šafář, they were all commies. And they just said on the phone, Petr answered and they told him to stop spinning beer immediately. But he was a bit of a rebel, he said, 'I don't give a damn about them, I won't listen to them.'' And my dad was such a calm guy and said, 'Hey, Peter, don't be stupid, stop spinning that beer.' So my dad ordered and said, 'We can't give anything out now, the committee has banned it.' Before he could finish, before he tried to explain to everyone that he just couldn't, the cordon came, the bus of the cops, and it came in and it started, a massacre. They started beating them up."
"It used to be, the herbs had to be collected, you had to collect a compulsory amount of herbs, you had to take, bring some papers confirming that you took paper to the collection. They did these herb collections, you'd bring it to school, you had to dry it at home, if you didn't dry it you could get a mark 2 in conduct, that's the way it was in those days."
Marcela Machnicová (née Kobylková) was born on 23 March 1958 in Klatovy. In the 1950s, the communist regime nationalized her grandmother Maria Kobylková‘s restaurant - the Na Americe pub in Rudolfov near České Budějovice. The family business was transferred to the state enterprise Jednota and Marie Kobylková was allowed to stay there as an employee, but she had to pay rent. Marcela often came to the pub to help out and this was the case on 30 March 1974, when a concert of the underground The Plastic People of The Universe, Dg 307 and others was to take place in Rudolfov. The event was brutally dispersed by the state authorities and is still remembered as the Rudolfov massacre. Marcela Machnicová witnessed the police violence right in the restaurant - the family had to vacate the bedroom, and then the Public Security officers brought the long-haired concert-goers into the bedroom, where they brutally beat them with truncheons. Further violence took place on the road to České Budějovice, where the police officers chased the long-haired people to the train station, where a train was already waiting, dispatched especially for the occasion. Before boarding the train, people were again brutally beaten in the underpass leading to the platform. Soon after the event, the regime closed down the Na Americe pub and built there a fruit buying office and a Jednota warehouse inbstead. After the Velvet Revolution, the family received restitution and reopened the business under the same name. In 2010, the first commemorative concert of The Plastic People of The Universe was held there and a commemorative plaque was also placed on the house a year earlier. At the time of the interview, Marcela Machnicová was running the Na Americe pub and was living there.
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