Hana Přikrylová

* 1944

  • "The faculty was udergoing a backgroudn checking process. Because I actually belonged to the faculty by membership. These were held in the early 1970s and the chairman of the committee was Associate Professor Haubelt, who was an important figure at the checks. I don't remember the exact process, except I know that I said I didn't want to stay in the party. They asked me why, so I said that I did not agree with the entry [of the occupation troops] and that I was not able to vote, to raise my hand on command. And they said to me, 'Comrade, that's just what we need!' And I said no. So I was struck off. Not expelled, but I was struck off at my own request."

  • "They wrote to me that because of the capacity of some - I looked into it recently - I was not admitted and that they recommended contact with the working class. So I went into production." - "And where did you go?" - "The metalworking enterprise of the capital city of Prague. That's where they made table sharpeners. First I worked at the drilling machine and then I worked on the lathe turning pinions. I wasn't very happy there because the environment harmed me, I had skin problems from that workroom. So I wasn't happy there, but I told myself I had to stand it. I needed a reference from them that I was behaving well and that they recommended studying."

  • "On 5 May 1945, my father came to Žamberk with my mother and me in his arms, and there was a commotion because the Jew who wanted his things back had returned. And so he was not received with any cheering in the town." - "Does that mean that people took their things?" - "I guess the Hostovský family hid something at their neighbors. They may have taken something, but I don't know exactly, don´t want to accuse anyone. But I do know that [my parents] had trouble getting things back. Or they denied having them, saying that maybe times had been hard and they had had to sell them and stuff like that. But my parents didn't cling to it. My mum was from a poor background, so she didn't care, and my dad was glad he survived. They didn't worry about property things."

  • "It is just that he [father Jan Hostovský] did not join the transport. They gave my grandmother an injection and he went into hiding. In Kněžství, there were five cottages. The people there must have known, it was unbelievable. And they were supported materially with food by the local miller, because there was another person hiding at the Kytlic family. He was a Pole from Vilnia and he was a partisan. He was called Big Eda. He was executed later. Pietraszyn. And during one accidental visit of the Czech gendarmerie in Kněžství, the gendarme mentioned that a Nazi action was being prepared, and it was necessary to hide these two fellows, my father and Big Eda. So the son of the Kytlic family went to Žamberk and looked for a girl, I don't know her name, who had been my father's sweetheart before the war started, to see if she could hide him. And she was afraid, so she refused. And how my mother found out, I don't know, but she found out that my dad needed help, and she hid him actually in the sanatorium in this sort of garden house where she was living alone. And there he stayed with her for about three weeks - and they decided their future life, that they were going to get married."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 27.11.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:47:05
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 15.01.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:02:36
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Dad was hiding from the Nazis, I was born out of forbidden love

Hana Přikrylová at her graduation in Karolinum, 1969
Hana Přikrylová at her graduation in Karolinum, 1969
photo: Witness´s archive

Hana Přikrylová, née Šustová, later Hostovská, was born on 28 November 1944 in Prague. Her father Jan Hostovský came from a Jewish family from Žamberk. During the World War II he was briefly imprisoned in the Terezín Small Fortress on suspicion of resistance activities. After his release, he was sent to forced labour in the forest and on the construction of a German factory in Plotiště. He was summoned to a transport to Terezín, which he did not join. He faked his death by drowning and hid on the farm of the Kytlic family in the village of Kněžství. Her mother, Hana Šustová, was working as a nurse in a lung sanatorium in Žamberk at the time. She met Jan Hostovský in 1942 and a year later, after she had also sheltered him for several weeks, she secretly married him. After the end of World War II, the couple made their marriage legal. After 1948, the Communists stripped the family of all their property, leaving only debts. At the beginning of the 1950s, the Hostovský family moved to Prague, where the witness graduated from the grammar school and then from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FF UK), majoring in Czech language and history. In 1967, hoping for a possible reform of the socialist system, she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In the spring of 1968 she married Jan Přikryl, with whom she raised three children. After the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 and the political background checks that took place at the beginning of the normalisation, she left the Communist Party. She devoted her whole life to the teaching profession. At the time of the recording in 2024, she was living in Prague.