"My father was sentenced to twelve years and was sent to Leopoldov. I went to Leopoldov to visit him with my son, who was about two years old at the time. We traveled by train overnight. When we came to Leopoldov, it's a fortress, grey, gloomy, terrible, I saw a dandelion blooming there. And that really made me cry. First we came to the gate, then they sat us down at the window behind the glass in this bigger hall. After a while, Daddy came in. He looked very bad, he was hairy and understandably unkempt. I was used to him groomed as a diplomat, so even that little thing surprised me. I could tell he was a little worried about what questions to ask, so we talked mostly about the baby and how we were working. I had the little boy on my lap, he was leaning over to his grandfather and his grandfather wanted to caress him. The guard yelled that it was not allowed: 'Don't touch!' That's how I remember Leopoldov."
"Germans in uniform were staying on our farm, there was free land and so on. It was a large structure. They were commanded by an officer. I remember one day, we were sitting in the kitchen - my grandmother, myself, and two friends. There wasn't much to do, so we sat and waited. Then the door opened, and a German officer came in, an older gentleman. I imagine he had a monocle, but that's nonsense, I saw that in the movies later. He came in and asked if he could make coffee on the stove. Grandma said yes, of course. But my friend, who was older, about eighteen, locked the door. We giggled at that. But the officer came in and started banging on the door, and Grandma figured it might be trouble. I know my grandmother was shaking, my friend crawled into another room, and I watched with interest. My friend spoke perfect German, and I remember he stood up, putting his heels together like that. The officer's face was twitching, and he said, 'How dare you, I am a Reich soldier. Do you understand you could be shot on the spot?' And my friend said in German, 'Take it as a childish joke, we apologize to you.' He didn't make the coffee and disappeared."
"I also have to say - it's a thing that's a little bit clouded because my parents arranged it. They didn't tell me. After the war, I thought, how is it possible that [Ota] Pavel, the writer, that those boys had to - when they were 14 - pack up and go, and I didn't? The thing was - when the fourth grade of town school was ending, the headmistress came - God bless her - and said to me, 'Evička, you would have to be deported. We'll do it this way, don't tell anyone in the world. You'll go to the school in Slezská Street to repeat the fourth year of town school."
"I have one more story from the war. One of my dearest Jewish uncles, Uncle Rudolf, did not go straight to a concentration camp but was sent as a slave to Heydrich's widow in Panenské Břežany. It was actually a certain privilege. It was a coincidence that he lived and worked there. He worked there until the end of the war, until 1945 when he was deported at the last moment and murdered. But they allowed me and my father, not his Jewish sister, to visit him and talk to him. So Daddy and I went to Břežany. We came to the courtyard of the castle and there, after a while, they brought my beloved uncle in his uniform with an embarrassed expression. He started talking to us. I know he was understandably reluctant to tell any truth, so my father and I told him how we were doing, where we went on trips, what my grades were at school. My uncle was very attentive to my education. He used to give me books. I got a crown from him for every A, so he spoiled me a bit. If I got a good report card, I'd get a book and ten crowns or something. He rewarded me for that. So we told him stories. Then a very young officer came in. I don't know if he was SS, to me he was a German in uniform. As soon as he got there, he smiled and took me by the chin and said, `That's a pretty little girl.` And the blood rose inside me. If I had a knife, I would have killed him. That was the first time, that effect. Mainly because my uncle, as he stood there, I saw that he had these work boots, and he put his heels together. So he must have known him."
Eva Bartošová, née Zendulková, was born on 26 September 1930 in Brno to a mixed couple. Her mother, Zdenka Zendulková, née Steinerová, was of Jewish origin. In the mid-1930s, the family moved to Prague, where her father, Stanislav Zendulka, an engineer in economics, took a job as a clerk. From 1941 onwards, all members of the Steiner family were deported one by one to concentration camps. Only the mother and her brother, Oldřich, survived and returned home. Both of them had non-Jewish partners. The mixed marriage of the Zendulka family protected the family from deportation for a long time. In the autumn of 1944, the father was interned, went through a concentration camp near Wroclaw, and later got transferred to a camp for mixed-race Jews in Bystřice near Benešov. In January 1945, Zdenka Zendulková was deported to Terezín, from where she managed to escape in May 1945. Her parents saved the 14-year-old Eva Bartošová from possible transport by having her repeat her last year of town school. In her parents’ absence, she took care of her two-year-old sister, Jana Zendulková, on her own. She reunited with her parents in June 1945. After the war, she graduated from the Faculty of Science at Charles University. In 1958, her father was arrested and spent two years in the communist camp in Leopoldov. In Košice, Slovakia, she and her husband Jiří Bartoš, under the guidance of Ivan Šetlík, built the first prototype of an outdoor cultivator for growing algae for the new biological department of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV). Later, they moved with the whole scientific group to Třeboň, where they founded the Laboratory for Algae Research, where they worked for the rest of their lives. For several years, she lived and worked with her husband in Cuba. In 2023, Eva Bartošová lived in Třeboň with her sister Jana Zendulková.
photo: National Archives (hereinafter referred to as NA), f. Police Directorate Prague II - general file room 1931 - 1940 (hereinafter referred to as PŘ II 1931-1940), sign. S 5854/13, card 11 079, Rudolf Steiner, born 9 July 1894
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View of the concentration camp Bystřice u Benešova, 1945
View of the concentration camp Bystřice u Benešova, 1945
photo: Podblanicko against the Occupiers, edited by Jaroslav Charvát, 1966
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