"I told the man: 'Would you like some coffee? I'll make some coffee. And he said to me, 'This is the first time in my life that a detainee has ever made me coffee.' And I said, 'What? I'm detained?' And he said, 'Yes. For the past fifteen minutes.' So I developed the film. In the meantime, the musician Zdeněk Haloun came in and started to tell me jokes about the explosion, so I kicked him out, because an officer from the "lanovka" was sitting there. I developed the film. I showed him that there was really nothing there and that I hadn't shot it, that it was a camera. And he said, 'We're still going to go in for questioning,' so they took me to the back of the 'lanovka.' I was there for about an hour and a half and they asked me all sorts of questions. There I found out that I had a book by Mňačko at home and that it was forbidden. I said, 'I graduated from Mňačko in 1968 and I bought it in those years. But then I was very afraid of signing something. That's the controversy that's going on now, and it never gets resolved, that some of the people who are on those lists say they're there by mistake. My husband claimed that was not possible. I was very careful when they had me sign the papers what I was signing. I read it all 20 times so I wouldn't do anything to get them to sign off. And it didn't happen."
"It was so, children, that my parents didn't tell us about it because they were afraid that we would say something somewhere. I didn't find out everything until the sixties, because in the fifties the pressure on the family was so great that it wasn't talked about at all. It wasn't talked about at all at home. I only found out as an adult when my parents told me. I had a happy childhood. I don't remember there being any problem. I only remember when I was ten years old, strange men came flying through the apartment and knocking on the walls. I didn't find out until later that it was the last time. They were looking for something that we had hidden in there from my grandfather. Our mom was so scared, she disposed of a sea of stuff. She didn't even want the sweaters or anything we had. I have two gloves at home that Grandpa made."
"I was terribly bothered by the way people behaved after '68, when normalization began. When people were crossing over to the other side. When my husband said he didn't agree with the troops coming in, there were people who stopped talking to us. They switched sides when they met us. It bothered me terribly how people, for their own benefit, almost overnight, it took time, it has a certain evolution, but for their own benefit they completely drove their ideals into the ground. And they started saying, 'Yes, that's right, it's red. It's red.' Then, 'It's blue. It's blue.' They did it for twenty years during the time of normalisation."
Bohuslava Maříková was born on July 1, 1950 in Počátky, but she lived in Nová Včelnice since her birth. Her parents, Kamil and Bohuslava Maříková, came from completely different backgrounds. She remembers her childhood very fondly. She lived it happily in a large family with three other children, her brother Kamil, four years older, and her cousins Eva and Maria, their parents and grandmother. Her grandfather Bohuslav Hrůza founded a successful business in 1919 in Nová Včelnica, then called Nový Etynek, at the age of twenty-one, which the family lost after the nationalization in 1948, including the family house. Bohuslav Hrůza did not live to see the nationalisation of his property because he died tragically in July 1945 at the age of 47. When Bohuslava Maříková was about ten years old, she recalls a visit by foreign gentlemen who thoroughly searched their house. Only later did she learn that they were members of the State Security. After graduating from high school in Jindřichův Hradec, Bohuslava Maříková began working as a photographer at the South Bohemian Theatre. While still working, she graduated from the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Brno. In 1975 she married and had a daughter Helena. Her husband became JUDr. Stanislav Bíca. Thanks to her work, she met many interesting people and documented important historical events, such as August 1968 or the Jan Palach Trial in January 1969. In 1989 she signed the petition Several Sentences and in November she became one of the faces of the Velvet Revolution in České Budějovice, documenting all events from the beginning. In 1997-2001 she worked at the Alš Gallery in South Bohemia. From 2011-2018 she taught at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Český Krumlov. At the time of filming she worked as a curator at the photographic gallery Nahoře in České Budějovice.
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