The secretary was eavesdropping behind the door of my classroom and informing the communist authorities
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Jaroslava Slavíková was born on September 7, 1927, in Hoješín in Železné Mountains. Her father Čeněk Novotný (1902-1983) was a teacher and her mother Bohumila Novotná (1904-1990) a seamstress. When Jaroslava was four years old, the family moved to Přelouč region and soon after to Svítkov in Pardubice area, where her father became the headmaster of the local school. As a patriot, national revivalist, and a conscientious teacher, he was a role model for his daughter. As a four-year-old, she saw president T. G. Masaryk at an exhibition in Pardubice. She started attending school in September 1933 and in 1938, transferred to grammar school in Pardubice. She knew her parents were worried about the international affairs threatening Czechoslovakia. Although she was enjoying her youth, no one was free of worry about the war at the time. Every knock at the door panicked people into thinking it was the Gestapo. As a student, Jaroslava witnessed how a German school inspector marched a Jewish classmate straight out of the classroom. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, she witnessed the arrest of the resistance fighter Luděk Matura at the cinema. Her father was also interrogated by the Gestapo, who wanted to know why his students did not like their German classes and questioned his political commitment. He heard the same reprimands once again only a few years later from the communist ideologists at the school in Svítkov. Jaroslava graduated from grammar school in 1946 and left for Prague, where she started studying at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. As she was staying at the flat of some family friends at the Prague Castle, she was acutely aware of the events accompanying the communist coup and Jan Masaryk’s death. She was threatened by being reported on by the school caretaker in front of whom she had defended the student march in support of President Edvard Beneš in February 1948. In 1940 as a fourth-year student, she was already teaching at a primary school in Pardubice. One year later, she had got her degree and started teaching at a medical vocational school. In 1951, she married Miroslav Slavík (1926-2017) and in 1956, their son Jaromír was born. Her favourite position was at the Electrotechnical School in Pardubice, where she taught Czech for 28 years. Nevertheless, not even there was she free of political bullying by the local Czechoslovak Communist Branch, despite the fact she was a youth leader at the local Pioneer division. In 2022, she was living with her son in Pardubice.
