There was no place to wash, nor a toilet to go to
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Emilie Hošková, née Rovná, was born October 4, 1912 in Zvolen in Slovakia. Her father worked for the railways, her mother was a housewife. When she was fifteen or sixteen, she left the family and moved to Zlín to her cousin. She became a staunch communist. In the local communist group she met her husband-to-be Jaroslav Hošek (Jarin Hošek, who later became a communist journalist). Jaroslav went to fight in Spain, where he was wounded by a dum-dum bullet. Sometime in 1939, after he recovered, he returned to Czechoslovakia. Fearing Nazi interrogation and imprisonment as a consequence of Hošek’s activity in Spain and the communist conviction of both of them, they escaped to the USSR. This was done legally, as the Soviet embassy officially declared them as its employees. At first they lived in a dormitory, in a “rest house” in Sochi. They then moved to Ivanov, where they briefly worked in an international children’s school. While there they met the children of the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Jan Zika. The Hošeks later joined the Comintern and became broadcasters of the Czech and Slovak radio broadcast. Emilie gave birth to her daughter Jaroslava in Moscow in 1940. After the war they returned to Czechoslovakia. Jaroslav worked for the police and Emilie later began working in a library in Zlín.
