Božena Skálová

* 1930

  • "Then he enrolled in the forestry school in Turnov and had to go for a year for practice. He had his practice in Budislav. There were two boys from Proseč - one, Luboš Jelínek, was in the octave and Vodehnal, who was, I think, in the seventh grade - they took it into their heads in their forty-eighth year that they would be great fighters, patriots, that they would go away and that they would come back in three months. So they persuaded our boy, and these three boys left in January 1949." "What was your brother's name?" "Antonin, as dad. That was a surprise. He was a mommy´s boy, so mom baked and brought him pies, he loved pies. She came to the game keeper´s cabin and the gamekeeper said, ¸He's not here. I don't know where he is.' By then they were gone. Dad was fired from his job, and then I was in trouble too."

  • "There was a table on the sidewalk in Dolní náměstí, where the pharmacy is now, and you go there to the pedagogical school, Pod Sluncem [Under the Sun]. There were papers on that table, and people signed there that they disagreed. There were trees on the hill, and little kids would sit on them and watch the soldiers ride by. It was horrible."

  • "They left in '66 or '77. He [the son] was in Prague, studying there, had a girlfriend. Her cousin ran away with the young man. First they were in Austria and from there they came to the States [the United States] to San Francisco. That's how they [the son and his girlfriend] got them too. They went on vacation to Yugoslavia and from Yugoslavia they got to Austria easily. They worked there for a year and a half. First they wrote down that they wanted to go to Canada. And my daughter-in-law - they got married in Austria, they had a wedding there - she had an aunt in Dallas, she was her mother's sister. She came to visit, because she came to America normally legally under the communists. So she came and talked to them. They lived in a guesthouse about twenty kilometers from Vienna. She visited them and said, "Cancel immediately and write down the United States. Canada is a beautiful, beautiful country, but it's hard to get a job there. In the States you have it all easier." So they cancelled it and that's how they stayed in Austria for a year and a half before they got on the waiting list or whatever I would call it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    v Litomyšli, 03.04.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 48:04
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Teacher whose brother and son went abroad

A reunion of the general school class probably after 60 years.
A reunion of the general school class probably after 60 years.
zdroj: Private archive

Božena Skálová, née Bartošová, was born on 1 July 1930 in Litomyšl as the fourth daughter of a total of five children. Until the third grade, she attended the municipal school, which was then occupied by the Germans, and the classes continued to move to different buildings. In the first grade she made friends with a Jewish girl, Eva Frey, whom she visited even during the time when the others shunned her out of fear. Eva survived the Nazi concentration camps and after the war she and the witness were reunited. After graduating from high school, Božena was unable to attend college due to the emigration of her brother Antonín Bartos to Germany and then to Australia. She wanted to study biochemistry and become a laboratory technician, but she was transferred to a midwifery course, which she did not complete. She married and had two children, a daughter Blanka and a son Petr. Around 1956, she passed the supplementary matriculation exam at the Litomyšl pedagogical school and became a teacher. In 1968 she lived in Litomyšl and signed a petition against the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Her son Petr emigrated to Austria in 1986 and later came to the USA. It had no consequences for her, because she retired at that time. In the autumn of 1989 she visited her son in San Francisco, so she experienced the revolutionary events in Czechoslovakia only remotely.