"In 1948, he was part of an elite that had to be destroyed. Financial, capitalist. People who started to make decisions didn't know what was going on, they caused damages, and they behaved badly towards foreign partners. When [Dad] wrote a decent letter, at the time he was doing international relations there, immediately everything went well and everybody was amazed. In short, there was destruction, from cutting down trees, and demolitions, to cadre changes. People who didn't know what was going on got into powerful positions and everything went downhill at a terrible speed."
"I was in the park with my pram, I had my second son already when a lady started talking about 'the Jewish woman' living with us. I didn't know who she was talking about. It was the first time I had ever encountered such labeling. In our home, people were always referred to by their names, not by whether they were Jewish, Czech, or German. And then I realized who she meant. I liked that lady very much. She had a terrible fate, she lost her son in the concentration camp, and her husband. They did experiments on her, they cut off the last phalanxes of her feet. And yet she was a wonderfully refined woman."
Jaroslava Svejkovská was born on 17 April 1958 in Prague into the family of JUDr. Jaroslav Lepar, a lawyer and financial expert. Her grandfather was the headmaster of the Jičín grammar school which bears his name - Lepař’s Grammar School. Jaroslava Svejkovská told Memory of Nations about her father, who lived from 1898 to 1974, was a director of the Union of Banks during the First Republic, and in his extensive, handwritten memoirs he writes about the birth of Czechoslovak banking, his friendship with important personalities and many historical events as he experienced them. Jaroslava graduated from secondary economics school and the faculty of law and then began to work at the State Bank. In the 1980s, she had a family and mostly took care of her children on maternity leave. Since the early 1990s, she worked as a lawyer at Komerční banka, where she dealt for instance with business loans. After almost 20 years, she changed her field and started selling real estate. As a patriot of Jičín, she served as the chairwoman of the Jičín n Prague association, for which she organized a programme of lectures.
