Marie Petrová

"For a very long time, for how many years, at least ten or fifteen years, I had dreams about Kralovice, how it fills with water, how I somehow make my way there. Or how the water receded and the Kralovice was restored, I dreamt about it very often. And the memory is not the only one, but it's like a whole that I always have inside me and it never leaves me."

"Right after the war, they actually found out in Prague that they had a shortage of water for Prague, that they would have to look for a water source, so they looked around, they chose several rivers, but they liked the Želivka the most, of course, because it had the cleanest water, it was actually a valley, so it was suitable. Originally they thought that they would make three such reservoirs in a row, smaller ones, and that would save Kralovice, but in the end they decided for a big reservoir. So from the 1950s onwards, you weren't allowed to build there, you weren't allowed to repair it, and people were actually slowly... the town was slowly dying out because the young people were leaving, they couldn't build and live there. And after the war, there wasn't much work there, because they nationalized everything and those people had no place to work. There were no factories, so they went to different towns."