"Well, Czech Christmas... We went to the palm grove, we cut a palm tree, a branch from a palm tree, and we put it like this in the dining room. And I, what were these ordinary little candies, so I put a piece of chocolate in it and I hung that on the tree and that was our Christmas. And then we had carp, because there was plenty of fish, and salad. And the soup, I made it the Czech way. And when the Arabs came and we invited them, they ate with us. Because they eat fish, they don't eat pork."
"Well, you know, when we were seventeen, we were just so worried about where we were going to dance, weren't we, because it was so open. And even during the war they used to go dancing in the villages, in certain cottages, you know? Somebody who had a big cottage, with a big sitting room, and there were young people, you know, so they'd invite others there, and so they'd always go dancing in those villages." - "And there was a band playing, or somebody playing?" - "Somebody played the harmonica, there wasn't a band, you know, they weren't allowed to do that yet anyway. No, you weren't allowed to, but there weren't people to do it, that's how it was. During the war it wasn't allowed, but after the war it was like that then people were coming back and came back from Germany, so even the young boys, and who knew how to play the harmonica, well they played."
"Well, we didn´t see him often. Daddy always left at the end of January or so and then came back in December. That wasn't the time to perform, in the winter, the circuses didn't go on those tours. But it also happened sometimes that he didn't come that year, that the circus had people interested and went to Italy or somewhere for the winter. They went a lot around the world, to Switzerland and Italy and Romania and Denmark and Sweden. So then we didn't see him until after that year. But then he was at home for maybe a month and a half."
Marie Vacková was born on 9 September 1930 in the Šumava village of Mlýny near Nespice, not far from Vacov. There she spent her childhood in a secluded place in the middle of forests and during the Second World War. She attended primary school in Onšovice and municipal school in Vacov. Her father traveled as a saddler with circuses in Europe to earn more money. Her mother took care of the household, little Marie and her five years younger brother. They didn‘t see Dad very often, sometimes for more than a year. During the war, she experienced the parish priest being taken away from school by the Gestapo, and she remembers the decline of the German population after the deportation. She studied for two years at a business school in Vimperk, then started working as an accountant to help her family financially. In 1955 she married and with her husband moved to České Budějovice, where she found work as an accountant in the Mills and Bakeries. Her husband worked at the Mill Machinery Factory (TMS) and in 1969 he was sent to Egypt to supervise the commissioning and equipping of the large capacity electric mills. Marie Vacková stayed with him in Aswan, central Egypt and Cairo until 1975. She also worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy. In 1979-1983, her husband worked as an expert in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where she also went with him. In 1983 they both returned to Czechoslovakia, her husband died a year later. Marie Vacková worked in the Mills and Bakeries until her retirement, then she worked as an accountant at the municipal office in Úsilné until she was eighty-two. She continued to pursue her hobby, travelling, visiting for example China and several countries in South America. She died at the age of ninety-three on March 1, 2024.
