Marie Viková

* 1935

  • "Then, that army from Slovakia was passing through both Bystřice and Chvalčov. Everyone said that the army takes away livestock, whatever is in the house, they take it. My uncle went to drive the livestock to the forest as well, to save it, and we stayed all alone at the manor, me, mommy and my smallest brother. I have this memory, in the yard, not far from the barn, there was an outhouse, I had to go there and just at that time, the soldiers came. There was this huge gate and they started bang it. I thought to myself, now I'm going to die, everyone will start to shoot and I'll fall in the septic tank. But they did not shoot. They were half Slovak, half maybe Ukrainian, I don't know for sure. They were lead by a [female] captain. They brought their own food and mommy cooked a stew from that. All of us had to eat with them, maybe the captain wanted to be sure that we would not want to poison them. So we ate with them. The Slovak captain then told what horrible things the Germans did in Slovakia. She said, for example, that they came to a farm, they wanted to know where the man is, the woman said that she doesn't know and they just replied that in that case, he's with the resistance in the mountains. And one picked a baby from the cot, tore it in two and threw it back."

  • "I remember how they interviewed me. There was a member of the public who had to decide whether I can keep acting, whether I have the right opinions. There was our financial director as well. So they asked what I thought about the presence of the Soviets. I said that I think that it is not right and started to elaborate on that. The financial director listened for a while and then said to the member of the public: 'Comrade, you know, comrade Viková has many worries now. She has small children and her husband works in Prague, it is not good either. Maybe we could tell her to leave now.' He said: 'Well, when she has troubles with children...' And that's how it ended when they questioned me whether I agree with the arrival of the [Soviet] armies."

  • "Obviously we played Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named Desire. When I talked about it in Olomouc theatre, they wondered that I play the leading role. Playing Blanche is every actress' dream. And it was us, young women who were with the company for barely two years. I alternated with Nina [Divíšková]. There were always two actors who alternated in playing the three leading roles."

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    v Ostravě, 14.05.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 02:36:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

People are either decent or not, in any régime

Marie Viková in the play Šerif se vrací [Return of the Sheriff]. 1961
Marie Viková in the play Šerif se vrací [Return of the Sheriff]. 1961
zdroj: Archiv Marie Vikové

Marie Viková was born on the 4th July of 1935 in Olomouc. In 1945, she lived in Chvalčov near Bystřice pod Hostýnem where she witnessed the end of the WWII and the war front passing from Slovakia. In Olomouc, she graduated at the teachers‘ college which trained teachers of the primary schools. Then she went to study acting at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she graduated in 1959. She and her circle of classmates around the stage director Jan Kačer accepted jobs in the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava. Her colleagues left in 1965 to start the Činoherní klub Theatre in Prague. She stayed at the Bezruč Theatre until her retirement and in here, she played many outstanding characters in regular plays as well as in melodramas. She also played in several films and TV series and performed in melodramas. She taught acting at the Popular School of Art and at the Ostrava Conservatory. [Note: in the Czech context, melodrama is not a sensational theatre piece but a specific sort of drama in verse accompanied by stage music.]