My father joined the partisans. My mother made up a story that he went to collect wood and disappeared
Natalija Kolářová was born on 27 October 1940 in Ljubljana to a Slovenian mother and Czech father. She spent the first five years of her life in Kranj, Slovenia, where both parents worked in the textile industry. Her father, Jan Tomášek, left in 1944 to fight in the mountains with the Yugoslavian partisans against the German occupiers. After the war, he heard the call for the return of compatriots to Czechoslovakia to the borderlands, from where the German population had to leave. The family settled first in Rýmařov, later her father got a job in a textile factory in Hejnice, where he taught at a night school as an expert in the textile industry. When she was 12 years old, she moved with her younger brother and grandparents to her father in Hejnice, while her mother started a new family in Rýmařov. She completed an eleven-year school in Frýdlant, and worked all her life as an accountant at the National Committee in Raspenava. She started a family. She was able to go to Slovenia to visit her relatives only after the Velvet Revolution. In 2022 she lived in Hejnice.