Every beginning is hard, no matter where you are
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Vlasta Najmanová was born on February 4, 1939, to her mother Marie, née Brumková, and her father Václav Šára in the settlement of Reflektor on the Bolshoy Uzen River near the city of Saratov in the Soviet Union (USSR). Her parents’ families arrived in commune, later a cooperative called Reflektor, in 1925 and 1926 to start a new life in the harsh steppe and help build communism. They worked hard, building the village from scratch, but in the 1930s, they were affected by the Soviet regime’s repressions. In February 1938, Leopold Brumek, Vlasta Najmanová’s uncle, was arrested, falsely accused of espionage, and sentenced to eight years in a gulag. He died in the Bulatovo labor camp on the exact day Vlasta was born, unable to withstand the harsh conditions and inhumane treatment. In 1941, Vlasta’s father left to fight with Svoboda’s army alongside Soviet soldiers against the Germans, but he died in Poland. After the war, the family decided to return home, and in 1950, they arrived by train in Svinov, near Ostrava. Her mother had to support three children and her parents, who were not granted pensions for the years they had worked in the USSR. Vlasta Najmanová graduated from secondary medical school and began working as a midwife in a hospital. In 1962, she married Karel Najman, who had also spent his childhood in Reflektor. They raised two children together, a daughter Jiřina and a son Václav. The family moved to Nové Strašecí, where she first worked in a nursery and later, until 1994, in a hospital in Kladno. As of 2024, she lived in Nové Strašecí.
