"I got a phone call from my brother, it was after the burning of Zajíc, who was a graduate or went to an industrial school, a high school, to see if I could do an acute rapid examination of a high school student who had collapsed. She came accompanied by a theologist, Vít, who was on a hunger strike on St. Wenceslas Square. It was a grammar school student who was singled out as the third torch."
"The seven years of war, the Second World War, in that humiliation... We took it as humiliation. My mother was always crying when I came home from the school in Český Brod for lunch. I just don't know how to explain it any further. We ran away. For me, it was an involuntary escape for nothing, in the '38."
"Munich came, demobilization came, and Dad arrived, and he couldn't even change out of his reserve officer's uniform, and we drove from here to Bohemia where Dad still had his mother. She lived near Nová Paka, and that's where we fled. And Daddy was in uniform, and I remember that the escape was very dramatic. Mum and Dad were still here arranging to move from that house, and they took us to the village in Jedlí, and there was a chauffeur with a car who took us to Zábřeh so that we could leave. My father was not able to change out of his uniform, and we took the last unchecked train, which was completely overcrowded - we stood with my parents and my brother on the last steps of those old carriages, an open plateau it was. That was the last train the Germans hadn't checked, and we went to Bohemia, to Nová Paka."
MUDr. Blanka Pálková, née Medlíková, was born on 16 October 1931 in Šumperk into a family of teachers. She grew up in the Czech quarter of the town, whose population was mostly German. From an early age, she perceived the tense relations between Czechs and Germans and eventually witnessed the unfortunate fate of some Jewish families. After the Munich Agreement, Šumperk was surrendered to Hitler’s Germany as part of the Sudetenland. For the family of the witness, this meant fleeing to Central Bohemia. They settled in Český Brod in the Kolín region, where they survived the war years, which they perceived as a time of latent depressive atmosphere full of fear and hopelessness. After the end of the war, the family returned to Šumperk. They moved into their original house, which had been occupied by a German family, but they were soon evicted. At the beginning of the 1950s, the witness studied medicine and worked in the fields of paediatrics and child psychiatry. She belonged to the reformist communists and was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for her views during the normalisation inspections. She worked as a doctor until her retirement age. In 2023, she lived in her family home in Šumperk. She died on 11 August 2024.
