“A Jew came into the workshop, Heitler was his name. They owned Fasto, which was a liqueur factory. He said he’d bring Brousek something. They didn’t say what in front of me. But he couldn’t come the next morning because they’d locked him up. The only one to come back from the whole family was Hanka. She’s still alive.”
“I was at school, and we put up posters. First in English, then in Russian. These kind of banners. And we would always get a rumour that someone had been up here from Beroun, from the English army, but that they’d had to withdraw again. [Q: Where did you put up the posters? Or whom did you distribute them to?] We put them up outside, in the streets. Big, long [posters] they were.”
“When were those Ruskies in the square here? Oh, that was in sixty-eight, when it was said we shouldn’t give them anything to drink. And my father kept wanting to talk with them, and my mother forbade it. My father spoke Russian. Back when they were here in forty-five, they suspected him of being a fugitive from Russia. He had... I still have the book here... Nyeva... and he would read it. So he knew good Russian, even in forty-five. [Q: So they thought he was Russian?] Well, they thought he might be.”
“[Q: How were you supplied during the war? Did the Losiny work?] We had what we could scrounge up. We also made our own parchment. From kid and rabbit skins. Luckily, we were right next to the pond, because we washed the skins there to get the hair off them. I still have a piece of the parchment we made somewhere.”
Naděžda Stejskalová, née Malá, was born on 15 April 1925 in Kyškovice near Roudnice nad Labem. Her father was drafted during World War I and fought on the Eastern Front in Russia, where he was captured. He returned home as a legionary in the last ship from Vladivostok. After the war her parents lived with her grandparents in Kouřim; when her father found employment as a bailiff in Prachatice, the family moved there. They were forced to abandon their home in 1938 and ended up settling in Unhošť. The witness suffered from palsy as a child, which affected her leg. She attended primary school in Unhošť and trained as a bookbinder under Josef Brousek. They printed Modlitba za vlast (A Prayer for the Homeland) by V. B. Třebízský, or Velikonoční poselství (An Easter Message) by Eduard Beneš. After her master’s death, Naděžda Stejskalová took charge of the workshop, later a small business, and continued to print books there until 1971. She was then employed as a librarian at the newly established library in Unhošť. She has been documenting the lives of members of the Malý family and writes articles for the website Sensen. She works with the Melichar Museum of Local History in Unhošť.
