Between two nations
Stáhnout obrázek
Annemarie Tempírová was born on 7 November 1941 in Šumperk as the older of two children to her parents Erich and Anna Heinisch. She came from an ethnically mixed marriage of a German and a Czech. During the Second World War her father enlisted in the German army. As a test pilot he got to Hanover airport, where prototypes of fighter planes were tested. After sabotage by British prisoners, he died in a plane crash on 22 May 1944. Several members of the Czech part of the family joined the anti-Nazi resistance and the uncle of the witness Miloslav Urban had to hide from the Gestapo for several months. In 1946, his father‘s family was included in the deportation. The Heinisch family eventually almost all reunited in Urberach in Hesse, Federal Republic of Germany. Annemarie Tempírová was not reunited with them until 18 years later, when she was granted permission to travel to the West in 1964. After studying at an eleven-year school (today‘s grammar school) in Šumperk, Annemarie Tempírová worked as a kindergarten teacher. In 1960 she married Jan Tempír. The couple had a son Luděk in 1961 and a daughter Jana four years later. In 1980 Annemarie Tempírová became the headmaster of the kindergarten in Kolšov. She did not sympathize with the communist regime, but she did not have any significant problems either. Despite her position as headmistress, she never joined the Communist Party. She welcomed the Velvet Revolution with enthusiasm, attended most of the revolutionary meetings in Zábřeh as a spectator, and was one of the founding members of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in 1991, but did not have herself written on the list of candidates. At the time of the interview in 2024, she was living in Zábřeh.
