"I remember clearly how I woke up that morning. I think it was Tuesday but I am not sure. I was going to work as usual, of course. I had the radio on, of course, and I could hear the roar of the planes that were still coming over. I was wondering what it was. Then the radio said the Soviet Union had just done this thing. Of course, I wanted to know the details, so I hurriedly got dressed and went to work. I worked at the City Post Office. My first concern was making sure that people got their money, their pensions and regular pay, because the post office was already occupied by the Soviets."
"See, we knew an uprising was going on in Prague, but I went aimlessly, just to know. I guess I waited until 10 or 11 May, not sure. I just told the postmistress, or maybe she allowed me to go. Of course she let me go. I walked from Kokořín to Vysoká, the landscape is fields and small groves. Vysoká is near Mělník and it's a village that was downright rural, peasant. It's all lowland. I went to Vysoká and had to stay there for about two days because I had to help collect revenues. Then I walked across the fields to Chloumek, which is a wooded hill where the Mělník radio station was. I walked across the fields, and every once in a while I had to crawl into a ditch and hide because there were still fighters flying about on sweep missions and firing at everything alive. I'd always crawl in somewhere where they couldn't see me, then I'd come out again and run a bit. And on Chloumek there were already Czech guys who had taken over the radio station. There's a little grove rest. When they saw me, they stopped me and we told each other what we knew. They said, 'We don't know what it looks like in Mělník,' and took me away - they were armed with rifles - and guided me through that wooded Chloumek and I ran through a field towards Mělník again. I went there to find out that my parents were alive, that they were well and holed up in a shelter."
"When the war started and the air raids began, they obviously targeted lighted places. Plzeň and other cities just shone... In order to limit damage due to the air raids, blacking out was ordered. No light was allowed at all. You couldn't have local lights, no public lights in the streets, of course, and the windows had to be blacked out. We taped up the windows in a cross pattern because if the glass broke in an air raid, the panes that were taped up did not shatter. They just broke into these big chunks. What could you do with shattered glass? We weren't allowed to have any light at all. Everything in the house was blacked out so no light would shine through the curtains. There were inspections, patrols going house to house and pointing out any cracks that let light out. When it all started, we were these ten- or twelve-year-old girls and we'd say, 'Geez, now if I walked poorly clothed, nobody would recognise me,' and they certainly couldn't tell because it was dark, and if you walked out you recognised people by memory or by voice. The inspectors were so strict really - not a spark or a single ray of light could be visible."
Marie Koubová was born on 8 February 1924 in Prague-Zbraslav where her father‘s family worked as castle servants. Her father Oktavián Kouba was wounded in World War I and moved to Mělník with his family as a clerk of the district court later on. During World War II, Marie faced a threat of total deployment, which she avoided, and started working at the Kokořín post office in 1944. After the bombing of Mělník on 9 May 1945, she walked through fields and forests to check on her parents. She continued to work at the post office after the war. She joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, graduated from the University of Economics and started a stellar career at the Central Administration of Communications. In August 1968, she ensured the flow of money interrupted by the occupation of the Main Post Office and, after party checks, held a senior position at the Federal Ministry of Communications. She retired in 1984 but continued to lecture at the University of Economics for a long time. At the time of filming she was living in Prague and had already celebrated her 100th birthday.
