"But when I was in the Police, at my grandma, the partisans used to come there regularly at night. They would knock on the windows and they wanted to, that was also so scary, we... we never knew, so grandpa said, 'So we don't know if it's the Germans who are trying us, if we give them something, if we supply them...' Because grandma always gave them something - bacon, bacon fat, there was always something somewhere. For example, I was there during the winter, I don't know where they were, in which forests, during the winter. There aren't even very many forests around, and when something knocks on your door at night and asks for bread, it had a terrible effect on me."
"I was in [Uherské] Hradiště for a year, first in the neonatal unit, then in the children's internal medicine unit, where I also experienced such interesting... They accepted about a hundred and thirty of us, civilian nurses. I thought: 'Why on earth are they calling so many of us? Are so many nurses missing here?' You know, there were order nurses, in Hradiště, they admitted us one day and at night they took all the 'order' away. We came to the ward and we didn't know where the laundry was, where the sterilizer was, where the medicines were, what was there... We came into a strange environment, there was no one to train us. For us, when we were on the ward, it wasn't even that much of a problem, but the nurses in the operating theatre, they're so... the doctor reaches out and they're supposed to know what to give. If he's sewing or cutting... They had to go and get the 'order nurses' so the civilian nurses could practice, because the surgeons were just throwing instruments at them: 'I didn't want that, I wanted that!' Because, you can imagine, when so many new people came in, there was nobody to introduce us to the environment at all, those were the hardest times."
"Now and then there were raids by Germans who came to check, and during that check they also came into Czech families - and we had Masaryk's picture. When the German came there, he warned my mother that she should hide it somewhere, that it was not appropriate to have it on display, we put the picture behind the cupboard so that it wouldn't be seen, so that we wouldn't irritate them when they came to inspect the whole house."
Stanislava Petrželková, née Svobodová, was born on 15 November 1934 in Holešov as the older of two children of Anna, née Tepličková, and Antonín Svoboda. His father, a trained chimney sweep, came from the village of Police near Valašské Meziříčí, where his parents had a farm and supported the partisans during the war. After the war he ran a car transport business in Zlín and worked as a taxi driver. Her mother came from Holešov, her parents ran a chimney trade. Stanislava spent part of her childhood in the district of Holešov called Židovna, where her grandmother owned a house. During the war years, together with the other residents, they experienced the daily persecution of their Jewish neighbours and helped them. She witnessed the destruction of the Holešov synagogue by the Nazis. They lived through the liberation in Kostelec, where they moved during the war. In the autumn of 1944, on her way home from school in Fryšták, she experienced an air raid on nearby Zlín. She graduated from the secondary medical school in Holešov, then completed a two-year extension course in Kyjov with a specialization in paediatric nursing, and as part of her employment she completed postgraduate studies for head nurses in Brno (100-hour courses in pedagogy and psychology). For most of her life she worked as a head nurse in the nursing institute in Luhačovice, which was famous for its innovative methods, which of course required lifelong education. In the sixties she formally joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but later left the party. In 1959 she married Antonín Petrželka, they raised their sons Dalibor (1961) and Antonín (1966). She retired in 1994. At the time of filming (2024) she lived in Luhačovice.
Photograph for the anniversary of ten years of the Infant Institute Luhačovice, Stanislava Petrželkova sitting in the bottom row, second from the left, fifth from the left the head of the Institute MUDr. Marie Damborská, CSc., 1964
Photograph for the anniversary of ten years of the Infant Institute Luhačovice, Stanislava Petrželkova sitting in the bottom row, second from the left, fifth from the left the head of the Institute MUDr. Marie Damborská, CSc., 1964
