People are afraid to say the word home country so that it is not just a blank motto. Like when we wore banners with the Soviet Union for the eternity.
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Jana Vítková (nee Kloučková) was born shortly after the outbreak of World War II on December 3, 1939 in Rakovník. Her father Josef Klouček, a professor of the business academy and an officer of the Czechoslovak army, joined the military resistance organization Defense of the Nation at that time. The group he belonged to, operated around Rakovník and organized itself around Jaroslav Fraňek. In the forests of Křivoklát they were hiding their weapons and preparing for armed resistance against the Nazis. But at the beginning of 1940, they were betrayed and arrested. Josef Klouček, after interrogation at the Kladno Gestapo, was taken to the prison in the Small Fortress Terezín and after a year to the Gollnow concentration camp in Poland. In March 1943, shortly after his transfer to Germany, where he was to be judged, he died. Jana Vítková had no chance to meet her father, she grew up only with her mother. In later years, she made a lot of effort to learn more about her father. It was even more complicated because under the previous regime the merits of the non-communist anti-Nazi resistance were deliberately reduced and information about it concealed. The fact that her father was a member of the Defense of the Nation was not discussed outside of her family. During his imprisonment in Terezín, the family was given dozens of drawings, mainly caricature portraits of prisoners from the Small Fortress, which he created there. They are currently stored in the local Memorial and have become an authentic documentary life in prison. The grandfather of the witness, a former legionnaire, who then made up for her father in many ways, was a tradesman. He owned a laundry with a cleaning plant, which the Communists expropriated after the revolution in 1948. Even his granddaughter could not start studying at university because of the class origin. Yet in the 1950s, she lived in an atmosphere of Masaryk traditions that her family and the close circle of their friends and acquaintances tried to maintain. Her life mission was to work with children, teaching at first, then at the second stage of an elementary school. During the Velvet Revolution she helped in the Civic Forum in Mariánské Lázně and a little later she was involved in the restoration of post-November education in the Cheb region. She’s a widow, she had two children, a daughter and a son. Unfortunately, her daughter has already died. Even after she left for a retirement, she still works with children. She lives with her family in Mariánské Lázně.
