"As a man who is not worthy of teaching Czech children, as an enemy of the Reich. He was employed as an auxiliary worker in Polná in a dairy. A conglomerate was then established in that dairy and it had a director in Přibyslav. He was German, of course, and when he found out that Václav Kouklík, who was a prisoner, was among the employees, he immediately made him available for work in the Reich. So Dad went to Merseburg, where he was producing brown coal gasoline. There he worked on some tower. Fortunately, his cousin Ing. Václav Nápravník, who was the director of the Wire and Screw Works in Vamberk, somehow got dad back from the Reich in exchange for some thief, who stole from his coworkers. The Germans did not like that. So dad got to Vamberk some two years before the end of the war."
"Mom was just wonderful, all her life. She managed it all on her own during the war. Not only did she have the two of us, me and my brother, but then an uncle in Ostroměř died and we had his son with us for a year. And Mom had to do it all. Imagine that. I remember: I had a stroller with a doll and some girl liked it, so it somehow we exchanged it for two ducks. One of them was sent to the Reich. – “You mean to your father ..."- "Yes, to dad. My brother and I always went to a farm near Polná, in Dobroutov, once every fortnight, and they gave us a large loaf of bread for Dad. My mom wrapped it in a white tablecloth. She had it ready. She sewed it up and sewed the address on there: Herr Wenzel Kouklik and sent it to the Reich. Dad carefully took it off again and sent all the packages and addresses back. My brother and I walked through the woods so that we wouldn't meet a German patrol on the road.”
"Hello. So where to begin? I was lucky to spend my youth with wonderful parents, with people of character and, of course, great patriots. Let's start with my mom, for example. Mom was a teacher. She met my father in Herálec, where they both taught as singles, so they got married and moved to Polná. There, they both received teaching positions at a boys' school. Gradually, two children were born, a daughter Vlasta and a son Ivo. Unfortunately, any family idyll ended as I remember my mother sitting in front of the radio and crying. They were reporting that we had been occupied by the Germans on March 15. I remember the arrival of the Germans, too, because the weather was incredibly bad. Ice needles blown by the wind when I went to school, it was just like a predestination of those subsequent years. "
Vlasta Šnelková was born as Vlasta Kouklíková on May 28, 1930 in Polná na Vysočině. Her father, Václav Kouklík had a past as a legionnaire in Russia and was an aide and friend of General Vojtěch Luža. In Polná he became the principal of the school, and both he and his wife Vlasta worked as teachers there. During the German occupation, his father became involved in the resistance organization Defense of the Nation. In 1940, he was arrested with a group of resistance fighters from what was then Německý Brod. He faced interrogations but was eventually released from prison in May 1942. He was no longer allowed to teach, he became an auxiliary worker. Soon after, the authorities assigned him to work in the Reich in Totaleinsatz. In 1943 he managed to get a job in Vamberk in eastern Bohemia. In May 1945, he served as commander of the insurgents in Polná. He was allowed to teach again for several years, but with the advent of the Communists in 1948, as a National Socialist and a member of Sokol, he began to be transferred from one place to another. Vlasta graduated from a business academy and in 1947 moved from Polná to Prague. Until 1986, when she retired, she worked in Prague in foreign trade in an accounting firm, worked in Syria and for four years also in Cuba, in Havana. In 2019, the narrative book Polensko, fragments from history and the present, was published, compiled by Jan Prchal, which captures the story of the witness‘s father, Václav Kouklík. The witness remembers her parents with love and admiration, mainly for their high moral credit.
