Naděžda Maňhalová

* 1931

  • “And in fifty-five it was the last time, it was that Seferovič. We also hid a political prisoner who escaped from Opava and who flew in those two Dakotas. (Q: How did he get here?) His grandmother was from hereabouts from Včelákov, or she had relatives here. And he used to visit here with his grandma, and he was... he’d studied at the electrotechnical faculty and he took flying lessons. And then he worked as a navigator in planes. Well, and this Seferovič came along to us in April fifty-five. And Mirek used to go to the airport, my brother, to fly. And he used to go there, so he knew him from the airport. (Q: Here at Žďár near Skuteč?) Not here, there’s an airport on a hill in Skuteč. So that’s where they knew each other from, and all. He lived in Sudoměrská, my brother lived in Sudoměrská that is, he had his own flat there, my brother. And suddenly Mum called me, and we knew that he had been locked up. And Mum called me: ‘Naděnka, come back home.’ Well, so I went home from Pardubice, I was employed in Pardubice in Semtín. And there was a check-up in the train. I thought: ‘For God’s sake, they’re looking for someone again.’ Well, and I come home and Mum says: ‘Go upstairs.’ She took him in, our mum, here at this gate. She knew, he told her, like, that he had escaped. ‘Come in, come in. You’ll get something to eat. Come quickly.’ Well, that’s the way we were, our family.”

  • “And with the one, with Mařenka Hrdá, I went to the same class with her. And the headmaster, Gruber, came and said: ‘Mařenka Hrdá, take all your things and come with me.’ Well, Mařenka knew nothing about it, so she took her things, the teacher looked out of the window and said: ‘Come and have a look, Mařenka.’ Because they were there with the sidecar, you know, they chucked her in, and in the evening Mařenka was...”

  • “And one time I was taking the cards into the card index, and along came Dušek and I never met with him at all, I only knew him from the train station. And he called out: ‘Oh, hey, Naďa, how are you?’ Because they knew that I had been in prison or that I had got a suspended sentence. And I said: ‘Well, how am I, you know well enough.’ And and it’s not quite that I was afraid of him, but I kind of kept my distance. But I didn’t know [it] when I met him on the stairway at the insurance company in Pardubice. And he told me: ‘Well, and who is it who’s hurting you there, or who’s doing it, or how is it?’ And I kind of thought he was a youth unionist, or that he had those kind of tendencies. Because he didn’t behave in any way, and so I told him the names, and the idiot wrote them down and broadcast them on Free Europe.”

  • “They came for me one day in October in nineteen-fifty-one, I was going to the train and they were waiting for me in front of the insurance building in Pardubice. So off I went, I was there a month, it was rough there, I denied everything, I lost a tooth. And no I kept denying, and they said: ‘You know what? You’ll sit here in the corner.’ They brought Dušek into the interrogation room, head wrapped up, right, and said: ‘And you mustn’t say a word, you have to be quiet and you have to only hear it out.’ So I reckoned to myself, sure. And now Dušek, they asked him whether that Maňhalová, or Hofmanová, how did it happen, that he should repeat it, well, that I had told it to him at the insurance company and so on. And I thought, just you wait, you little bastard. So I said: ‘That ain’t true!’ And at that moment he recognised me. ‘Take him away, take him away.’ Because they were afraid I’d... and then they came up and gave a blow like this. (Q: A woman? A punch?) A punch. Look, it’s not that a piece of my tooth flew out, but my tooth cracked like this, that was such pain when the tooth split apart.”

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    Prosetín u Skutče, 26.01.2014

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That’s the way we were, we Hofmans

Naděžda Maňhalová
Naděžda Maňhalová
zdroj: M.Reichl

Naděžda Maňhalová, née Hofmanová, was born on 5 March 1931 in Prague-Vinohrady. Her grandfather from her mother‘s side started the granite quarries in Prosetín near Skuteč. After he died in 1938 the family moved there and took over the business. Shortly after the war began the witness‘s father joined the resistance. He participated in events such as preparations for a revolt against the Nazis in Prague. In 1942 he was arrested and sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp. He managed to survive the war, and after a death march in the spring of 1945 he returned home to his family Prosetín. During her father‘s absence the family hid one of his fellow resistance fighters. After the war Naděžda Maňhalová studied at a grammar school in Chrudim, where she was snitched on for making fun of a speech by the Communist functionary Zdeněk Nejedlý. She ended up with a suspended sentence. In 1951 in Pardubice she happened to meet a friend of hers from Prosetín, and during their conversation she unwittingly mentioned several facts and names that subsequently appeared in a broadcast of Radio Free Europe. In October of the same year she was arrested and then sentenced to five years of prison. After the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 she was released by amnesty. Two years later she was arrested for a third time when her whole family was locked up for hiding the political fugitive Miroslav Seferovič. Naděžda Maňhalová was sentenced to four years of prison. She was given a premature reprieve in 1957 for health reasons, as she had contracted typhus and hepatitis while in prison. After being released she spent a long time searching for a job, before she was finally accepted at a textile mill in Skuteč. Their property, which the Communists had confiscated from the Hofmans in the 1950s, was returned to them after 1989.