Today, one applauds to that and later to that, then it’s up to the young ones to distinguish between what is good and what is not.
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Jiřina Fořtová, née Kondrová, came to the world on 27 April 1924 in Duchcov. Her father, Václav Kondr, worked as a geometer; her mother Magdalena, born Šedivcová, stayed in the household. In 1929 the family moved in to Pilsen. The witness attended the Bolevec elementary school for five years, then spent four years at the girls’ grammar school in Veleslavínova street and three years at a family school in Pilsen. In the summer of 1938 she participated at the X. All-Sokol Meeting in Prague. On 15 March 1939 she and her father witnessed the arrival of German troops in Pilsen. Her brother, Miroslav was arrested in 1939 for attending a demonstration related to the funeral of Jan Opletal, and was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two and a half years. Her cousin spent the war in the concentration camp Dachau. She experienced the bombing of the Pilsen by the Allies on 14 May 1943, when the bomb fell down near their home. She remembers the liberation of Pilsen by the Americans. In the winter of 1945 she moved to Nejdek, where her husband Stanislav Fořt arranged business transactions with foreign buyers of wool, while she worked in the fruit company and then in the book shop. He remembers the expulsion of the Germans from the border. In 1948 communists seized the family fields and forests. She returned to Pilsen in 1958. She was first employed in the book shop, and then worked for construction factory and since 1968 in Škodovka, where she worked until 1993. In 1968 she visited friends with her husband in Austria, where she first experienced the huge difference between life in a totalitarian country and in a free country. In 1977 the Communists seized and demolished their family house in Bolevec without any compensation, due to the construction of the tram track at Košutka. She had one son. Jiřina Fořtová died on October 7th, 2019.
