“A lady came to us from Ravensbrück and said: ‘The prisoners will only get the package if it isn’t spoilt. It’s in the post for three weeks. Bake some sweet loaves and bread, dice them and dry them out - and it’ll be good.’ Mum also sent word by the lady that we should melt butter and mix it with cocoa. In Ravensbrück Mum fed one French woman and one Russian - the French and the Russians didn’t get any lunch at all at the factory. And so Mum had a pouch tied around her waste, and when she went to the toilet, she gave each a handful of food. Thanks to her those fellow inmates survived. They even wrote to Mum after the war, but I couldn’t find their correspondence.”
“My teacher Mrs Racková asked me: ‘Do you know what the Old Testament says?’ I answered: ‘I don’t know what you want to hear.’ She retorted: ‘Envy and hatred make the bones rot.’ I was completely dazzled, then she showed me the quote in the Bible [probably an allusion to Proverbs 14,30 - trans.]. If you fill yourself with hatred, you’re hurting yourself terribly. The person I don’t like doesn’t care one bit what I think of him. So why should I cause myself anguish?”
“Dad’s investigation was in Ostrava. After about a month a lady came and asked us: ‘Are you Rudolf Smutek’s family? I have to tell you something. Just imagine, they knocked all of Mr Smutek’s teeth out, and he taught us The Bartered Bride through the toilet pipes, to cheer up those who were afraid. So we sang arias and choruses from The Bartered Bride.’”
“The doctors took turns to come visit, and no one found it strange, because Mum was a severe asthmatic and doctors were constantly coming and going. When they healed his leg up so that he could stand on it, with pain, but he could... They cleaned it up for him perfectly, padded the heel of his shoe, they got civilian clothes, and they drove off to Tesák. It worked out well, luckily, because there on the way from Bystřice pod Hostýnem to Tesák, there was a partisan route there and they were checking people there all the time by then. Luckily they did get to Tesák. They were there for three months, until Hen’s heel healed completely. Well, and one member of the German air force staff was also in Defence of the Nation, and he organised for them to be taken to Přerov and put on an express train. Hen wasn’t really interested in anything, but Tom was... I’d come home from school and we’d have to sing songs and rhymes together because he wanted to get the feel of Czech. You see, they gave them KEN cards, those were the ID cards of the day, they gave them KEN cards with such Czech names that it was completely dreadful.”
“I came home and the phone was ringing. They knew I wasn’t usually at home in the afternoon, right. Some polite voice said: ‘Could I speak with Doctor Bošek?’ It dawned on me, and I told them: ‘Look, please, he’s not up to anything, trust me, but he’s already had one heart attack, if he gets another one, he’ll die on me.’ And they were lawyers, they weren’t simpletons like in the NSC [National Security Corps, the police - transl.], so he said: ‘We’ll just ask him a few questions.’ Well, they questioned him for four hours, he came home with dark circles under his eyes. And because they knew he was afraid of them, they always informed him a week ahead of time, and he didn’t sleep the whole week. And he died of that, of course. So Dad was killed by Hitler, and Pavel was killed by our State Security.”
“I got a new bike - I was ten at the time, back in thirty-nine - and I rode it to Bystřice pod Hostýnem at least twice a week. That was the connection point of western and eastern partisans, my dad was in charge of that. I got myself into all kinds of complicated situations, but because I was still a child... Dad and his resistance friends wrote some codewords they had already prepared on Japan paper. I had lots of hair, so I stuck it behind my ear with a chewing gum, we already had those back then, so I rode with no worries at all. When the Germans stopped me, they asked: ‘Where are you going?’ And I would say: ‘To Granddad and Grandma’s.’ Well, so they let me go.”
Eva Bošková was born in 1929 in Přerov. She grew up in an Evangelical family. In March 1939, the German army occupied Czechoslovakia and her father joined the resistance group Defence of the Nation. Little Eva helped her father as a messenger. She had a lot of hair, and so she would stick the secret messages behind her ear with chewing gum; she was never found out by German patrols. Unfortunately, Defence of the Nation was infiltrated by one Gestapo confidant, who informed on her father, who subsequently stood on trial in Brno, found guilty on three counts of high treason, and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, never to return. Eva’s mother was arrested some time later and sent first to Auschwitz, then to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her mother survived and came home intact. After the war the witness studied singing at a conservatory and married Pavel Bošek, who was an acquaintance of Václav Havel and was thus regularly interrogated by State Security. He would receive his summons a week ahead, and each time he was so frightened that he didn’t sleep the whole time until the interrogation. In the end, fear and bad nerves were the death of Eva Bošková’s husband.
