Another nation was dying for us, and we should not be able to give our lives for our homeland?
Stáhnout obrázek
Venuše Štefková, née Madejová, was born on July 29, 1927 in Doubrava in the Těšín region. In January 1939 she and her family had to leave their home due to the Polish occupation of the area and they moved to Morávka in the Beskydy Mountains. The family was helping partisans from autumn 1944. Their resistance activity became revealed in December and Germans began with mass arrests. On December 14, 1944, a court martial was held in the local pub. Twenty-four people were sentenced to death. Venuše was a minor, and she was thus sentenced to imprisonment in a facility for young delinquents, and her mother to four years in prison. Venuše was interned in prisons in Ostrava, Brno-Cejl and in Vienna. The prison became liberated at the end of April 1945, but she was not able to reach home until June. She worked in the kindergarten in Morávka and later in the after-school care centre.
