Jarmila Hejtmanská

* 1943

  • "The secret police came, I remember it vividly. It was early in the morning, my uncle was sick, he had severe tonsillitis. I went downstairs because we lived upstairs. Suddenly there were about five or six strangers on the stairs, all men. They were banging on my uncle's door. He opened it and they took him right away. My mother came back from work in the afternoon, and they had already told her at the Public Security that they had taken my uncle away. We learned that it was for the scouting."

  • "Priests were interned there. There was a large field below the monastery and the priests grew grain and potatoes there. They went there every day to work, and we as children used to go up there during the holidays and pick strawberries for them, because they always had only dry bread and water for food. So, we used to pick fruit for them and bring it to them."

  • "Then he built us a beautiful nativity scene. He probably built it for himself, but he said it was for the children. Every year he added something new to that nativity scene. He did everything himself. He made the cottages, he made all the scenery for it. It's about three and a half metres long, there's about three hundred and fifty beautiful figures. He made everything except the figures himself. Always at Christmas, it was such a tradition, the whole Advent nobody was allowed in his room. He wrote on the door: 'No entry for Christ Child'. We weren't allowed in at all because he was preparing the nativity scene. And when he had built the whole thing, on Christmas Eve after dinner we went to the nativity scene for the first time, and we still keep it that way."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Hradec Králové, 30.09.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 50:32
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
  • 2

    Králíky, 14.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:22:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We were evicted from our villa in Pardubice to two rooms in the borderland

Jarmila Hejtmanská, 1960s
Jarmila Hejtmanská, 1960s
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Jarmila Hejtmanská was born on 30 August 1943 in Ždírec nad Doubravou. Her mother Soňa (1909-1988) had a daughter Miloslava from her first marriage, born in 1930. After her marriage to Vladimír Krupař they had a daughter Soňa in 1941, a son Vladimír in 1942 and after Jarmila another son Antonín in 1945. Her father Vladimír Krupař (1908-1962) was a soldier by profession. In 1947, the family moved to a military villa in Pardubice, from where, however, the father, as a demoted soldier, had to move out with the whole family in 1951. This is how they got to Králíky, where Jarmila‘s uncle Antonín Honzák, who was already living and who helped the family. Antonín Honzák (1912-1986) was a Renaissance man with wide interests including theatre, hiking, and nature. He was a natural role model for children and ended up in prison for scouting in the 1950s. Little Jarmila witnessed his arrest first hand. She went to high school in Králíky for eleven years, graduating in 1960. She aspired to be a teacher, but her further studies and those of many other classmates were prevented by an ambitious comrade teacher who monitored religious pupils. So Jarmila joined Tesla Králíky, where she worked all her life until her retirement in 1998. In 1950-1961, the monastery on the Mountain of the Holy Mother above Králíky was turned into an internment monastery, where the communist authorities concentrated the deported monks in April 1950 after the „K“ Action. Jarmila and her mother used to meet the imprisoned priests in the fields below the monastery and pick strawberries for them. In 1960 she took a training course and practised all her life. Since 1955 she has participated in all the Spartakiads, later the Sokol gatherings, and is currently rehearsing with the women for the 2024 Gathering. In 1964 she married Vladimír Hejtmanský, born in 1941, and they had three children in 1966, 1969 and 1974. With her husband, she built the Nativity scene in Králíky each year, which they inherited from their uncle Honzák and which they showed to the public. In 2022, she and her husband lived in Králíky.