"At that time, it was already the affair with the parish priest Toufar, and we heard on the radio and in the newspapers that he had staged it, the movement of the cross, that he was going to be tried, that he was locked up and so on. We were both surprised, and we both said that Mr. priest could never have done that, this, to set it up somehow, because it was said of him that he was clumsy at work, that he couldn't even screw in a light bulb. That's what they said, that he was very clever, handy, nice, but he wasn't good at manual work. Well, so when we found out that they started showing the film in Prague, we went to see the film together. We both said that it wasn't the parish priest, that someone was representing him, but it was him, he was so tortured that we didn't recognize him, he was in a terrible state. So that's what we concluded, we were wrong about that. Well, this Karel, when we found out about this, he wrote him a letter saying that what was the rumor and that the film was being shown in Prague and how it was. And what surprised me about the parish priest was that he replied to Karel."
"I took the exams in Prague for the grammar school, for the fourth year. Well, yeah, but I found out that those students had Latin since the third grade. And now there was a problem, so Latin was nowhere to be found, so I contacted Mr. Toufar, the parish priest, and he said without hesitation that yes, he would teach Latin during the holidays. He got me a book, yeah, the basic one, and I commuted to him in Zahrádka for about a month for the Latin."
"The priest... I experienced him actually, I started going to the first class in the thirty-ninth year and he, when he was in Zahradka, he was also in charge of the rural schools, so he used to come and teach us. Then I went to the burgher school during the war in Dolni Kralovice, because there was no burgher school here, elementary school. And so actually after the war they opened the burgher school in Zahrádka, and that's where I transferred, there were a lot of those classmates that he taught there. So not only did he go on these tours, but he kept track studying results of students. This region here in Vysočina at that time was very poor, yeah, there were no factories here, if people wanted to go to a factory from that Zahrádka, they'd have to come here to Humpolec. There was a cloth factory here, a big factory, but it was a three-hour walk. That was out of the question. So those people who had fields, they were farming their fields. They had some kind of livelihood there and the parish priest just, as he taught and knew his pupils and who was smart or whatever, he would go to these families and persuade the parents to put them in some kind of school. Not to leave them at home on that farm or to put them to some craft."
Jaroslava Davidová, née Vošická, was born on 4 February 1933 in Píšt‘ in Vysočina. During the Second World War she attended school in Dolní Kralovice. After the liberation, a burgher school was opened in Zahrádka, where she transferred. It was then that she first met Josef Toufar, who taught religion there. After completing her primary education, she was accepted to the pedagogical grammar school in Prague. In the summer before entering the school, Josef Toufar tutored her in Latin. While studying in Prague, she learned of Josef Toufar‘s arrest. After achieving her pedagogical education, Jaroslava Davidová began working as a teacher. Throughout her life, she preserved materials related to the person of Josef Toufar and the events behind his tragic death. In 2023 Jaroslava Davidová lived in Humpolec and collaborated with the deanery in the process of beatification of Father Josef Toufar.
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