There were sick people lying around, even dead people with those yellow heels, each with a number on it.
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Olga Kurfurstová was born on November 8, 1927, in Zábřeh as the eldest child of Olga and Jaromír Homola. In 1934, the family moved to a village of Komňátka in the Šumperk region, where her father got a job as a class teacher. During the Second World War, her father joined the resistance and Olga had been helping him with carrying confidential messages. During an extensive raid in the summer of 1944, Gestapo came to arrest Jaromír Homola. He managed to avoid being arrested and he went into hiding for several months. He created himself an elaborate hideout in his flat, under a harmonium. Despite that, he couldn’t escape being arrested, and Gestapo came even for his wife and his daughter, Olga, just seventeen years old at that time. They both spent three months in Gestapo prison in Šumperk. Her father had been taken to the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt, where he eventually contracted typhoid fever, so he managed to get home only several weeks after the end of the war. In 1947, Olga married Jaroslav Kurfurst, who reportedly joined a partisan unit operating in the Bouzov region during the war. Her husband had been a Czechoslovak Railway employee, so their family had to move often because of that. They had been living in Dolní Lipová, in Stření, in Červenka and in Olomouc. Olga Kurfurstová didn’t hide her resentment towards the Communist regime and she often expressed her opinion in public. In 1988, she took part in protests in Olomouc, demanding Catholic activist Augustin Navrátil to be released from a psychiatric hospital, and a year later, she signed the ‘Just a Few Sentences’ manifesto. After her husband’s demise, she moved to Mohelnice, where she had been living in 2020, when the interview was conducted.
