Eva Orthofer

* 1952

  • "And then it was so terribly moving. We came to Otrokovice, but we went all the way to Zlín by train. But from Otrokovice onwards, there were lines of people all along the line, waving to us, and so we were already behind the windows. We could even open the windows, we were waving. Well, that was amazing. I haven't had such an emotional experience since then. So in those like really intense emotions where we were all crying, all of us, even the professors and everybody, even the train driver. We were all so happy that we made it to Zlín. Well, my parents were already there, and Ladík [Vladislav Wicherek], my boyfriend, was already there, so I jumped around his neck at the first moment, and my mother was like, 'Well, who am I?' So, like, it was a great welcome and to come back home- but I say it's an experience of a lifetime."

  • "Well, we were terrified, that goes without saying. So we quickly unfastened each other's earrings, chains, rings - and where do we hide them? Then somebody said, 'Kids, do you have pads?' 'We do.' So they hurriedly handed out the pads, and we put it in the pads and the panties. And we sat down, and now we were, I remember, we were actually shaking. Like, we were really freaked out. And then the Russians came in, and they were like, 'Mute, mute.' And you could see they were furious that we didn't have, like, a watch. When we had hands behind our backs or in our pockets, we had to show that we didn't have rings, so they were furious. But fortunately, there was a commander who was already going after them, he was already like hurrying them up. I guess it was too much that out of the whole train, that they would steal, maybe somebody had already reported it... So we didn't get hurt, nobody got hurt. But just the way they stomped around and into every compartment and yelled in there... Well, then they jumped out, and the train started moving again."

  • "She poured half of the dough into the cake tin, put in a roll with money and used a pin to mark in which half of the cake she put the money. She poured in the other half of the dough, baked the marble cake, pulled out the pin so it wouldn't be noticeable, and didn't sugar that half of the marble cake, she sugared the other half. And I said, 'Grandma, why are you doing that?'-well, if they happen to see it in the bag, and if they happen to want to take it, I'll cut it and say, 'Boys, I'll give you the sugared one and I'll cut from the sugared part,' and that way they'll know: she's cutting the cake, so there can't be anything in there, because they've already done that, they might find out. People used to put money in tins, and I don't know what, in compotes and bags of cocoa - and then they'd empty it and find it..."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Zlín, 03.08.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:37:50
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Stay out of it, don‘t go anywhere. You know what happened to Grandpa!

Eva Orthofer, then still Klinkovská, graduation photo, early 70s
Eva Orthofer, then still Klinkovská, graduation photo, early 70s
zdroj: witness archive

Eva Orthofer, née Klinkovská, was born on 20 April 1952 in Zlín (then renamed Gottwaldov) in the family of Ludmila and Ljuboš Klinkovský, as the granddaughter of the shot anti-Nazi and anti-communist resistance fighter Štěpán Hovorka (6 March 1898 - 1 December 1949). She and her parents lived first on Smetana Street on the waterfront and later, together with her Viennese grandmother Eugenia Hovorková and her aunt Marie and her family, in a villa on Cigánova Street (today Na Výsluní Street). Because of Štěpán Hovorka‘s anti-communist activities (he worked closely with the courier Štěpán Gavenda), the whole family was persecuted. His parents, grandmother, aunt and uncle lost their jobs, and until the liberation in the 1960s, they held working-class positions. Her mother, Ludmila, left her office job and joined a drilling company, while her father, Ljuboš, previously a project architect, became a worker in the tanneries in Otrokovice. She graduated from the secondary general education school (former grammar school) in the Lesní čtvrť district but did not get into the pedagogical college because of her poor grades. She graduated from the cosmetic extension course and later worked at the newly established secondary vocational cosmetic school in Vizovice. In 1983, she moved to Slovakia to join her first husband, and while working, she completed a bachelor‘s degree in pedagogy. After 1989, she settled for a while in Austria, where she married for the second time. In 2004, she received an in memoriam award in Prague for Štěpán Hovorka, a participant in the anti-communist resistance. At the time of the filming (2023), she was living in the family villa in Zlín, where, from March of the same year, the Last Address project plaque commemorates the fate of Štěpán Hovorka.