“The war was ending here. Those were the last cries of the Nazis. Our street in Žďár, towards Bohemia, it was crammed tight with fleeing Germans. They rode on horses, they ran on foot, they couldn’t fit into the street or on to the bridge at all. People waded through the water by the side to get further down the road. Then, when dawn came, the Russians shot at them with machines guns from the air.”
“No one in the vicinity knew, only the mayor of Stržanov. That was a Czech village - there was a border stone between us and Stržanov. He was an intelligent gentleman. Very decent. And I approached him. I told him what the situation was and that I was asking him to issue some papers for her that would say she belonged to their village. To give the girl a different name and to claim she was resident there. If the cops came and found her in my house, well, I had a document saying she was from Stržanov and that she was only visiting. So in that way I wasn’t at all worried about getting found out.”
“I know that they visited Táferna one time as well, that group of partisans. So we gave them all the sausages from the butcher’s shop. Everything you could eat, we crammed it into them. Even loaves of bread. We baked our own bread, we had a big oven for six loaves. The partisans were in Táferna in the early hours of the night, and then they left.”
Jaroslava Doležalová, née Vlčková, was born on 31 January 1925 in Žďár nad Sázavou. Her family owned a restaurant called Táferna, a butcher’s shop, and a small farm. She attended grammar school in Žďár nad Sázavou. She married a classmate at the mere age of 19. It was a marriage of convenience. If she had stayed single, she would have been assigned to forced labour in Germany. In 1944 she found out that the Wilhelms, a Jewish family that owned a factory for small agricultural machinery in Prostějov, were looking for a place to hide their children. Jaroslava offered to shelter their five-year-old daughter Jaruška. She obtained false papers for her, cared for her, and hid her several months until the danger that the child would be deported had faded away. After 1948 her family’s property was confiscated - they lost the pub, the butcher’s shop, and the farm. Jaroslava stayed at home and cared for her three sons and her ill aunt. She then took up in various office jobs. She never joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and she did not hide her aversion to the Communist regime. After 1989 the family’s property was returned, and management of the pub Táferna in Žďár nad Sázavou was taken up by her niece. Jaroslava Doležalová passed away on February, the 17th, 2018.
