"When we were kids, we were playing in the village and suddenly there was a balloon. A balloon flying across the border. So everyone was gobsmacked. One lady jumped out of the window. Everyone who could was running. And the balloon burst, leaflets started flying. It fell a little bit behind the village, in the meadow. They wre picking it up in a hurry. Soon they arrived, I don't know if it was the border guards or the Public Security. They were chasing people to pick up the leaflets and hand them in. This happened right in Zámělíč. And there were more cases like that."
"That was when I was nine, or even younger. It was in a fashion [saying] then that the American potato beetle was threatening the potato crop. I remember there were big posters hanging at the national committee house with the potato beetle on them. All the children were called by the local radio from the village. Each child had to bring a jar and we, led by Mr. Behenský, he was one of the newcomers, were walking around the field behind the bus stop, I remember long rows. We pickled up the potato beetles in those glasses. That was until they discovered DDT and they sprinkled it on the fields and killed the partridges and the potato beetles. Then we didn't go there anymore."
"The Webers lived across the creek and had two sons. One wanted to join the police - in those days it was called the VB [Public Security]. Their mother even wrote to the president [Gottwald]. She got such a reply that finally one morning the neighbours came and found the farmhouse empty. There were still cattle and a dog. They just took what they had, what they could take, suitcases and so on, and moved to the other end of Bohemia. They never came to Zámělíč again."
Marie Špačková was born on 27 March 1946 as an illegitimate child in Všekary near Domažlice. In her early childhood she went with her mother to settle in the village of Zámělíč in the German border region. She experienced disillusionment in the village after the formation of the cooperative farm (JZD), when many of the first settlers left in protest and were replaced by the so-called second wave in the 1960s. She witnessed the transformation of the borderlands after the Iron Curtain emerged in 1948 and the end of the originally friendly Czech-German relations and their later partial renewal. As a child, she perceived the strong influence of the border guard unit in the region. In 1964 she went to study at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, where a year later she attended the legendary student Majáles (May Parade) with its king, the writer Allen Ginsberg. In 1968, she met the occupation troops in Prague and in the border region, where a special Soviet battalion later took up residence in the nearby town of Hostouň for twenty years. In the 1970s she was prevented from publishing a book of fairy tales due to her lack of political involvement. Her husband left the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which caused problems in her employment. After November 1989, she published eleven books and was interested in the history of the region for a long time.
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!
