I was speechless and suddenly I spoke
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Olga Castiellová was born on the 20th of March 1936 in Prague. Her father Egon Hostovský was a writer. He went on a business trip to Belgium in February 1939 and due to his Jewish origin did not return after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. He and his wife agreed to get divorced. His ex-wife moved with her three-year-old daughter to her parents in Opočno. Olga’s grandfather Cyril Ondrák was arrested because of his cooperation with resistance movement and executed in Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1942. The family could not come back to living together after the war as Egon Hostovský had remarried in American exile. The witness and her mother moved to Prague. Olga passed a secondary school-leaving exam at a grammar school in Vršovice in 1954 and applied for admission to Slavistics at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and she already worked as an interpreter during her studies. Having graduated, she received a job placement as a teacher in Nový Knín. At the same time she started writing for literary magazines Plamen (The Flame) and later Tvář (The Face). She had a bad cadre profile due to the fact that her father lived in emigration in the West and it was hard for her to find a job. She finally found a job in the language editorial office of the State Publisher of Children’s Books (later the Albatros publishing house). She married an Italian citizen Gennaro Castiello in 1996, and she, her husband and two children legally emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Italy in the early 1970s. She returned to Czechoslovakia in 1980 and worked as an administrative officer in the Albatros publishing house. During normalization she cooperated as a translator with a poet Josef Hiršál whose work was prohibited. Having gained freedom after 1989 she started to focus more on her own work and she prepared and edited a publication Spisy Egona Hostovského (The Collected Works of Egon Hostovský).
