“He was born to me, I was still in Třebechovice, my first son was born there. He was baptized because of my grandmother. My grandmother wanted Dimitri, so we agreed to name him Boris. And she was Russian and Dad was a legionary, that is my husbands father. And he was in Russia. They arrived really late from there, all the way from Vladivostok over Japan here. Sadly my Dad was executed as he was the post office staff and kept certain letters, which went to the gestapo. So he was sentenced to death right at the trial. There were just a few of them, they have a memorial at the post office in Hradec Králové saying: ´They fell so that you could live.´”
“So we had to do, but we weren't hungry. My parents did not even have to change anything; we already had everything. But then they took it from them, the field, because it was in the field of collective farms, and they took two dad's horses. But the chairman came and he told him to take the scum, that he wouldn't obey even if he killed him. He got stuck and didn't keep going. He only obeyed my dad.”
"We were totally deployed in Skoda. Not in Reich, but in the factory. You were ordered to board the next day and get there. And mostly it was in Reich, but I was lucky. Some were in Nova Pace at Benz, it was a few kilometers from Bělohrad. But I didn't get there and I got to Hradec to the Škoda factory, which is only 50 kilometres away."
Jarmila Drábková, née Šťovíčková, was born on April 8, 1926. She grew up in Lázně Bělohrad. Her mother had a large farm on which Jarmila had to work, the father had a carriage business. She graduated from business school, during the war she was forced to work in the Škoda company in Hradec Králové. She took part in the All-Sokol rallies in 1938 and 1948. Jarmila’s parents refused to join the collective farm, the regime confiscated their property and in 1951 her father lost his business. Jarmila worked as an accountant in Autodružstvo for 40 years. Jarmila Drábková died on September 4, 2021.
