Marie Tobolková

* 1940

  • "I was working my shift, and the first thing I did was call my parents. You could hear the tanks in the hospital, it was an unimaginable roar. And I said, and I just said to my parents, 'It's a terrible mess here. Go and buy some food. The Russians are here,' and from then on, there was no communication. That was terrible, terrible. My parents were already old, they were alone, my brother had died, and I was in Karlovy Vary. I had a very hard time getting to Prague. The buses didn't run, I didn't have a car back then. It was not a good situation. That '68 was truly terrible."

  • "They fired him immediately, and he was then employed at Geoplán. That was on Na Příkopech Street, there was some kind of organization that was agricultural and he worked there as the administrator of all that, somehow... You know, it hurt his feelings very much. He would come, every Thursday a car would come and pick him up and he would go to the interrogations. And my mother and I, I was what - nine or ten years old - we didn't sleep at all until my father came back at twelve, for example, he didn't talk. Those were terrible times. And when they came to our apartment, they would go to each cupboard and throw everything out like that. And the youngest one, there were always three of them. They had these leather coats and hats and they were so rude. But they wouldn't beat us in any way, they never laid a hand on us, but the way they spoke was vicious, awfully bad."

  • "But as children, we knew practically nothing about the war, until we were in pre-school, around the age of six, my brother was older, so my parents took us for a while to - I can't remember now what it was called, there was a road from Klatovy - Běšiny, I remember now. That was a bigger village, and there were my dad's brothers and sisters, so we stayed there for about a week. And our experience was that they had this little cottage by the road, under the road, and there was a ditch on the other side, and the Americans used to go through there, after the war, and they always nodded at us with their feet. They had this unlatched gate, and they'd sit in the front, and they'd always put their feet up, and we'd wave at them. And they would throw us these little grey boxes with chewing gum in them, and chocolate and spread like they make today, like an almond spread or something. And we were just out of our minds. So we were there for about a week and we didn't want to go home because we always waved to those Americans. And we also tried to learn a greeting. I don't remember how well that went."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Cheb, 16.06.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:01:49
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Men in leather coats came in. They didn‘t lay a hand on us, but they were awfully mean

Marie Tobolková in 2022
Marie Tobolková in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Marie Tobolková, née Havlíčková, was born in Prague on 14 March 1940. Her parents came from the Klatovy region - her mother, Kamila, worked as a stenographer, and her father, Emanuel Havlíček, was a deputy for the People‘s Party. During the war, he became the head of the Benedictine estates of the Břevnov monastery. In May 1945, Marie and her brother stayed with relatives in Běšiny in the Klatovy region, where they experienced the liberation by the American army. After the war, she briefly attended the Břevnov scouts and met the Břevnov abbot Jan Anastáz Opasek through her father. She remembers February 1948 and the rise of the Communists to power. It meant the imprisonment of her aunt Emilia Zdráhalová in the 1950s and repression for the Benedictines with whom her father was in contact. The family found themselves targeted by State Security (StB), and the father was fired from his job. After high school, Marie graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University, majoring in paediatrics. She got a placement in Karlovy Vary, where she experienced the invasion of the occupation troops in August 1968. Although she came from a family of class enemies and never joined the Communist Party, she passed the examinations at the end of 1970 with the help of the Karlovy Vary senior doctor. In November 1989, she participated in several demonstrations in Karlovy Vary. After the revolution, she held the post of head of the children‘s ward in Karlovy Vary, later going into the private sector. She taught at a secondary medical school. She and her husband raised two children. In 2023, she lived in Karlovy Vary.