Olga Handlová

* 1934

  • "That was quite funny, because two years before the war, the Germans occupied all the schools there, the grammar school and the girls' and boys' schools, because then girls and boys went separately. So we used to go to school once a week to a pub like this and we liked going there because we bought that disgusting coloured lemonade there. Today you would not drink it anymore, but we were happy there. You know, we could not learn much. They used to say rags, bones, German, right."

  • "I had a broken leg at the time, but I already had it in a cast, so on November 17 I got to the National Avenue and went with them to the Vyšehrad cemetery, where I stood by the monument to Karel Mácha. Then I did not go any further, because my leg hurt so much, I went home. I lived in Spořilov, it was close enough; I did not experience more cruelties anymore. But it was liberating for me."

  • "Dad was terribly persecuted and harassed, so he died at the age of fifty-four. He had a stroke for the first time when he was forty-seven. I was not allowed to study, it just was not easy. My mom died two years before the revolution, so I thought she was it was a shame she did not live to see it. We then sold the house in Rychnov and I bought an apartment in Prague in Spořilov. It was a four-room, quite a nice apartment, and I felt kind of at home in Prague, although I remember that Rychnov a lot and I would like to see it again, but I do not know if I can still walk that much."

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    Praha, 05.04.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:22:17
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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The communists broke down my dad, I hated them

Olga Handlová, 2nd half of 1930s
Olga Handlová, 2nd half of 1930s
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Olga Handlová was born on February 5, 1934. She grew up with her parents and two sisters in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, where they owned a picturesque house. Her father, Jaroslav Handl, was the head of surgery in Ústí nad Orlicí, but after the February coup in 1948, he did not hide his antipathy towards the new communist regime. Subsequently, he had to change workplaces many times, and after long months of physical and mental exhaustion, he died of a stroke. In 1952, Olga Handlová and her mother sold the house in Rychnov and moved to Spořilov in Prague. The witness wanted to study at AMU, she successfully passed the entrance exams, but was not accepted due to staffing reasons. After that, she changed a number of professions, for example, she worked as a food manager in the Kotva department store. Later, she married her classmate Ivo Včelák, who was one of the Holy Spirit children whose parents were executed during the Heydrich period for helping the paratroopers. During the November Revolution in 1989, she was on National Avenue, despite having a broken leg. In the 1990s, she ran unsuccessfully for the Parliament of the Czech Republic. In 2002, she met Václav Havel, who personally thanked her for her help during the floods in Moravia. In 2023, she lived in a retirement home in Prague.