"It was near Rovno, I don't know the exact name of the place. They were a bit special because they didn't live in a Czech village. They were a big Czech family living in a Ukrainian village. That's also why [great-grandfather] married a Ukrainian. She had to integrate into the family, and then the mill was taken over by the Bolsheviks, and then came Poland - the partition of Poland at the beginning of the war. They came under Poland, and my grandmother went to a Polish school. Then the Germans occupied it [the territory]; they had experience with the way Hitler progressed. Sometimes some German soldiers appeared and they witnessed atrocities but that didn't seem to hit them where they lived, though it hit Český Malín hard. Then they had very difficult memories of the Banderites that thy often shared. Since they were a mixed family, when the Banderites came to take things from them, as guerrillas do in war, they would look for my great-grandfather because he was Czech. They blamed my great-grandmother for marrying a Czech or 'thinning the blood.' It was tough on all sides, which is why they didn't hesitate when there was a chance of repatriation. They wanted to leave."
"I have to say he had a great eye for people, maybe not rationally but emotionally, I would say he really had charisma, whether in a spiritual sense or mental sense. He had the ability to discover something in people, listen to them, and find what they needed, how they needed to develop, and he had a wonderful means to do that - he had the time. Time played no part in his life. He was very happy when he had visitors from the morning, somebody was there who he interacted with in some way. I appreciate it all the more, and to this day we keep in touch with Mrs. Vargová and try to help her and make her a family, because they made a family for us. Not that I had any strained relations with my parents; at first they didn't really like me going there, but then they got used to it and they got used to Julek. I think the Varga family were of course happy when Julek was happy, when he had company, but on the other hand, imagine having someone over at your place all the time... You don't have any privacy at all, because there's always someone coming in. Moreover, they knew he was under surveillance and the phone was tapped, and they faced some trouble because of that."
"It was mimeographed at the Gardášs' place, which was quite a heroic thing to do because the membranes smelled bad, as I told you. We brought the paper in and about ten people would transcribe it onto the membranes, because as I brought it in here today, it was about thirty, forty pages long. To make it go fast, we retyped it in parts, then we mimeographed it at the Gardášs' place and completed it. They had the biggest flat. The mimeograph covered it with ink, then it had to be left to dry, then it was in piles. Somebody would fold it, staple it, and then it would be taken right out of the flat. Everybody grabbed five or six copies and gave them out, preferably to trustworthy people, which sometimes wasn't quite the case."
Hana Havlíčková, née Fukanová, was born in Šumperk on 5 October 1970 as the elder of two children to Petr Fukan and Věra Fukanová. Her mother’s ancestors had repatriated to Czechoslovakia from Volhynia in 1947. Almost all members of her grandfather Vladimír Heliks’s family died tragically in 1943 as the Germans burned Český Malín down. Vladimír Heliks then joined General Svoboda’s army corps with which he reached Czechoslovakia. His future wife and Hana’s grandmother came from Volhynia with her family. On arrival, they settled in Hrabišín and later in Petrov nad Desnou. Her mother Věra Fukanová, nee. Heliksová, was born in Hrabišín. She studied clinical speech therapy and worked in the field. Her father worked as a timber industry engineer. Aged five, Hana and her parents moved to Šumperk. In 1986, a friend introduced her to Julius Varga, a seriously ill dissident and Catholic activist at whose bedside dissidents, the underground people and the underground church gathered. Hana converted and began attending residential seminars on theology. She met her future husband Jan Havlíček, a student of Prague’s Czech Technical University. He brought printed samizdat to Šumperk, which he further disseminated with the help of friends. Hana soon joined them. She rewrote, printed and circulated the samizdat publications. In 1988, Hana and her future husband, Jan Havlíček, became members of the Independent Peace Association. She got in the StB’s sights. From 1988, she was listed as under investigation and interrogated, and was offered collaboration in exchange for university studies. Having graduated in 1989, she worked as a paramedic in a retirement home for a year. She was active since the beginning of the Velvet Revolution in Šumperk and was one of the founding members of the Šumperk Civic Forum. She and her husband raised three daughters - Františka (1993), Šárka (1995) and Zuzana (2004). While on maternity leave, she studied theology and pedagogy at Palacký University in Olomouc. She co-founded non-profit organizations in Šumperk in the 1990s - Counseling for Women and Girls in Need, and Center for Family. She founded the tradition of the Šumperk Advent Concerts, the proceeds of which went to non-profit organizations for twenty years and since 2019 have been used to finance the Stones of the Disappeared project in Šumperk. In 2013, she began teaching at the Šternberk Gymnasium, where she still works. She lived in Šumperk in 2024.
A visit from grandfather's surviving cousin, Valentin Domský. Pictured in the front row, left to right: Hana Havlíčková, née Fukanová, on the lap of her grandfather's cousin Věra Heliksová; standing above is grandfather Vladimír Heliks; his wife Tamara at right; next to is her Valentin Domský, Petrov nad Desnou, 1976
A visit from grandfather's surviving cousin, Valentin Domský. Pictured in the front row, left to right: Hana Havlíčková, née Fukanová, on the lap of her grandfather's cousin Věra Heliksová; standing above is grandfather Vladimír Heliks; his wife Tamara at right; next to is her Valentin Domský, Petrov nad Desnou, 1976
