"My mother told me that she used to sew shirts at home, knit slippers out of linen and ride her bicycle to the village to sell them. She also traded it for food and said she traded some for poppy seeds back then. And poppy seeds were punishable by death because they were made into oil. So she would take the poppy seeds and bring them home. Suddenly, she saw a car pulling up to the house and Gestapo men going into the house. My father was at work. Mom said there was nothing to be done, she prepared a noose, she was going to hang herself. She said she was ready, but they went next door to the apartment where they knocked on someone and then took him away. She said if they hadn't knocked on the next apartment she would have hung herself. She thought someone had turned her in or that they were going to search her and would find poppy seeds."
"What my parents built, they lost everything. That was one thing. And the other thing was the memories. If you take that, my father, where he was born - demolished. My mother was born in Komenda - demolished. My sisters went to school on Masaryk Avenue - demolished. I went to Fucik's Orchards - demolished. I used to go to Załuží u Most to study - our school and the whole Záluží were demolished. In addition, my father's parents were buried in Dolní Jiřetín, you can't go to the grave because it's also liquidated there. So [it's] like you are torn from everything. Only you are left with memories. And sometimes at night, in the evening, I dream about Most. I walk through the streets and I think, it was a hard place to live, but it was beautiful. You were young, resilient, and nothing bothered you. Lots of people enjoyed the demolition of the old Most. There was no more investment in the houses, so it was bad. When I was washing the window in our house, it was all over, I was afraid it would fall down. A lot of people were looking forward to the new Most for warmth and hot water. We didn't really, it suited us just fine. My parents didn't want to go into some closed shed. They liked the air and the gardens. So they bought a house in the Souš, but my father didn't enjoy it much anymore."
"We had the river Bílina, or Běla as it was called, behind our house. It didn't just smell of phenol, it smelled crazy. It didn't even flow. We had two rivers behind our house, one Běla and behind it another Běla. The first Běla, it was phenol, and it didn't even flow, it was sediment. When the weather was bad, it smelled too bad. I remember the youngest of us, my brother, when he fell in it one time while riding his bike, he didn't even get hurt, he got a little bit wet, he couldn't even get wet because it was really Vaseline. But I remember my father and mother telling me that the water in Bílina used to be wonderfully clean. My father said he used to go there to catch pike. When the pike were upstream, he would make an eye out of a wire, and that's how he would catch them. And my mother said that at Easter she took a bucket of water, scooped it up in the Bílina and everybody had to wash in that water to keep it clean and fresh all year round. That's how clean the water in the Bílina River used to be! The other Bela was by the park, it wasn't so dirty there. There was the Marta Gottwald Children's Home, around the park, it flowed! There was more there that was running off, so it didn't smell so bad, but it was still a crazy smell."
Božena Procházková, née Uxová, was born on 30 July 1950 in the old town of Most. She lived with her parents and four siblings in a house on II. náměstí. Her mother often sold at the market on the square right under the windows of their house. The witness describes old Most with affection, speaking, for example, of the Repre cultural house, the Minorite church, the fountain from which children were allowed to take small coins thrown in, or the Bílina river, which, in her words, smelled unimaginable. Her parents were avid gardeners. They lost all three gardens, which they gradually acquired, due to the demolition of the old town and the construction of the new town of Most. In 1965, the witness began her apprenticeship in Załuží as a salesman of industrial goods, majoring in clothing. In the old Most she experienced the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops on August 21, 1968. It was especially difficult for her parents, who lived through the Second World War. The witness recalls seeing German and American tanks filming the movie Bridge at Remagen under their windows shortly before the invasion. Shortly afterwards, they were replaced by Soviet tanks. She married in 1972 and she and her husband raised a son Robert, and a daughter Marketa. They built a cottage in Brandov in the Ore Mountains. They were allowed to use material for construction from villages slated for liquidation due to coal mining. In the mid-1970s, the family had to move out of the centre of the old town of Most, and her father bought a house in the Souš district. From 1977, the witness worked at the Krusnohorské strojírky in Komořany. Later, Božena Procházková and her husband acquired a terraced house in New Most, where from the 1990s until 2009 she ran a convenience shop. She lived there also in 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
