“And I remember dad told me back then that – dad became completely grey there – they were bombing it there and people who were at the stations were stuck to the walls because of the currents from those planes, one allegedly would get mad because of that. My dad returned from there completely grey.”
“My dad was supposed to serve in the morning and he went through gardens, fields, meadows and he was so honest that he went to work. So he was walking there and they caught him by the river that was where they caught everyone. They took them to a Sokol gymnasium and we did not know anything about it. We got to know about it from people who had seen it when the men walked to the Sokol gymnasium. And back then you had to close the windows so that nothing would be lit, you could not see anything. We had wood window shutters, so my mum would close them and nobody could see us from the street and persecute us. And that is why we did not know where our dad was until we found out secretly they were in the Sokol gymnasium. So my grandma, the only heating was only in the kitchen in the stove because back then we could not even heat, we had nothing. The heating was there and we let it to other rooms and we were sitting there in the dark and only light through the door was shining at us and we were counting our beads so that dad would not get hurt.”
Jaroslava Ambrožová, née Pospíšilová was born on 23 January 1930 in Zdice not far from Beroun. She grew up with her younger sister Marie and her brother Josef was born later; he became a musician when he was an adult. Her grandfather worked as a station master and her father Jaroslav Pospíšil was a guard. He experienced the air raids on Munich during the Second World War. Her mother was a chief of Sokol. In 1944, Jaroslava Ambrožová started to attend Baťa’s school of work and met her future husband Miloslav Ambož who became leather tanning engineer and worked in a research institute in Otrokovice. Thanks to his professional work, even under communism, they travelled around the world together, visiting, for example, the island of Ceylon. They considered emigrating in the 1970s but at the end, they did not bring themselves to do it. The witness spent most of her life working as an accountant in an office. She lived in the Home of the Holy Cross in Kroměříž in 2023.
