Accepting what life brings you
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Jaroslava Blešová was born March 12, 1943 in Prostějov. Her father Břetislav Kirschner was a forced laborer in Germany at the time and later died in a bombing. Mother Helena was trapped by financial constraints. That’s why she put her daughter up for adoption right after puerperium. She was later forced to labor in Germany as well. Little Jaroslava was adopted by Čeněk and Emílie Zlámalovi from Slížany whom she remembers as kind and hard-working people. They raised her in faith and to love her motherland and became her actual parents. Mother Emilie led her to perform good at school, which made Jaroslava want to apply to a secondary pedagogical school in Kroměříž. Despite being a straight A student, the headmaster told her that she could only apply to be a nursery school teachers, because of her parents who went to church and were not Party members. Jaroslava Blešová successfully graduated and got her own class in a nursery school in Morkovice in the third year of her studies; she then worked there for the following ten years. During the screenings that followed the August 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, she declared her disapproval of the invasion. Despite that she was able to keep her job, probably thanks to her superior’s benevolence. She refused two offers to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 she became headmistress of a nursery school in Slížany, where she stayed until 1994. She never met her blood mother Helena, although her mother did try to get in touch with her. When she remembers her lifelong teaching career, she says she loved her job but had to compromise a lot because of it. As a teacher, she couldn’t go to church and feels sorry that she couldn’t lead her two sons, Přemysl and Tomáš, to faith.
