"It was terrible. Really, it's indescribable. It was terrible, it's indescribable. It was targeted by the Gestapo, they just wanted to get someone under their protection. I was constantly being convinced by my parents to say: 'I don't know, nobody was here, I don't know anyone' and so on. Just 'I don't know.' Finally, when I was at school, the Gestapo would come to the school and try to get information from me that way, but I kept saying, 'I don't know, I haven't seen anyone, I don't know.'"
"We had to pretend we didn't know anything, we weren't anywhere, we didn't see anyone. And that was terrible for me as a child, it was really very tiring, that I had to constantly think that the Gestapo was following us and that we were in danger of our lives. They already had my dad in front of the railway building in Hlinsko. It was really a very tiring day because they told us that dad was in front of the railway building and the Gestapo was going to shoot him."
Olga Malinová, née Balková, was born on February 8, 1936 in the village Pokřikov, located near the town Hlinsko in Bohemia. Her father worked on the ČSD railway and her mother made a living by embroidery. From 1940, the family moved to Hlinsko to the house of the Jewish factory owner Josef Taussig. Olga and her parents met regularly with this Jewish family, but only at night so that no one knew about it. Also one other Jewish family, called Löwy, visited them. Olga experienced Gestapo visits on a daily basis. The Gestapo even pursued her at school and tried to get some information from her. However, Olga never revealed anything. Unfortunately, both Jewish families were taken away by the Gestapo in 1942. Only many years later did Olga learn that they had died in a concentration camp that same year. After studying at the Pedagogical secondary grammar school in Pardubice, she worked as a primary school teacher all her life. In 2022, she lived in Hlinsko, Bohemia. She died on December 5, 2024.
