Teacher whose brother and son went abroad
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.