“It was in 1918 and our soldiers were returning from the front. I was three and a half at that time. But I can still remember it so vividly as if I could see them right now. The train is approaching the station. Dad is holding me with his left hand, and he salutes with his right. We see a train overflowing with soldiers. The soldiers filled every space where they managed to hold onto something. What was interesting was that these soldiers were singing ‘Where Is My Home?’ But at that time this song was not yet our national anthem. This experience has become permanently etched in my soul.”
“When they were not able to get any information from me during the interrogation, they simply let me stand there. They had a dog to guard me. I like dogs a lot, and especially those German shepherds. But this was a horror. I did not know if they would come again or when, and so I just remained standing there. But after some time it became quite uncomfortable for me. I wanted to move my leg a little bit, to get better stability. But in that very moment the dog showed its teeth and started growling terribly. I realized that the dog was capable of jumping at me. That it had been trained for that.”
“My brother was working on some drawing until two o’clock at night and at four o’clock they stormed in there. All students had to run through a line of Germans who were beating them with iron sticks covered with rubber. Then there was a roll call. They had all foreigners step out of the line and they led them away. My former schoolmate Janko Ďuriška was among them. At the end they shot a group of leaders of the student residence halls. When my brother came home, his eyes were swollen, his eyes were actually completely closed. He was a horrible sight to look at. My mom had to hold his hand. ‘Mommy, please, stay with me!’ A nineteen-year-old boy! He was no coward, he was an athlete… It must have been horrible.”
Jaroslava Svobodová was born on April 2, 1915 in the family of Václav Smutný, an official in the state railway company. Immediately after the end of the First World War when Jaroslava was still a little girl, the family moved to Slovakia where her father was offered a good job. At first they settled in Český Brezov, where they witnessed the invasion of Hungarian Bolsheviks in 1919, and the family thus fled to Turčianský Svätý Martin. They soon moved to Lučenec, which became their permanent home. Apart from Slovaks there was also a community of Czechs who lived there alongside a Hungarian minority. Jaroslava attended an evangelical school, she joined the Girl Scouts and she was a member of the Sokol organization. When Fascism came to power and Slovakia separated from the Czechoslovak Republic, the family relocated to Bohemia, at first to Prague and later to Soběslav in southern Bohemia. Jaroslava was in love with Franti Wurmfeld who was deported to Terezín with his entire family due to their Jewish origin. Nearly all of them, including Franti, later perished in Nazi concentration camps. Jaroslava was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo for her contacts with Jews, and she spent a short time in the prison in Tábor. After the war she studied a teachers institute and she worked as a teacher at first in Slovakia and later in Bohemia as well. She has two sons and in 2015 she celebrated her 100th birthday.
