Jana Honsová

* 1918

  • “In our radio receivers that they took with them, they didn’t find them. I don’t remember whether you had to have short or long waves for being able to listen to Moscow. So they weren’t able to prove that we were listening to Moscow. For Moscow, it would have been the death sentence.”

  • “So I didn’t send my congratulations right away. But anyway I’m with you in my thoughts all the time during the holidays. We got a ration of margarine, salami, jam, a kind of a dark cake and potato salad. These ingredients were used for the Christmas dinner. We cleaned up our cell and put a fresh cloth on the table. It was actually a bed sheet. We also managed to get some needles and a candle and the illusion of Christmas was complete.”

  • “They were celebrating New Year’s Eve. It was on the first day of January. We were up till midnight, doing silly stuff, dancing and laughing. At midnight, we opened the window and sang, let the Lord love us. From Novosvětská. That was the Lord’s Prayer in Pankrác. We wished a happy new year to everybody, prayed and went to bed. In my thoughts I was with you and Januška. I asked the Lord to let me come back to you home this year.”

  • “The Germans invaded us on March 15, 1939, and they created the Protectorate. At that time, I didn’t have a job. Some German inspector called Teirle invited me for an interview. I think that he was from the Sudetenland and he wanted me to teach Czech school kids German. I passed the school-leaving exam from German so I spoke German very well. But I refused and told him that I would not teach Czech children German.”

  • “Love was flourishing there as well. The windows of our prison cells were directed towards the yard and across the yard there was a section of the prison with Czech inmates. These prisoners were mostly thieves and robbers and they were called ‘lupínci’. On their way to the garden where they worked, they would pass the windows of our cells and pass the workshop where we worked. In the garden, they grew vegetables and all sorts of things. From our cell windows, we could see the lupínci. And that’s where people fell in love. In the evening, they would write letters on the windows when they locked us up on our cells. So they got to know each other in this way. One of the girls was getting fresh vegetables from her boy friend. He would steal a carrot or a cabbage and give it to her. Since she knew that I was pregnant she would give me a carrot every now and then, so that I had some supply of vitamins.”

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    České Budějovice, 05.08.2010

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You still see people around you who love you. That’s what I call true luck.

Jana Honsová
Jana Honsová
photo: archiv Jany Honsové

Jana Honsová, née Švecová, was born on July 22, 1918, in Volyně in the south of Bohemia. Her father – a legionnaire from WWI – volunteered for service with the railways in Slovakia and thus the whole family travelled to the eastern part of the newly created state. Jana Švecová spent her first school year in Vyšná Radvaň and that’s also where she witnessed the clashes with the troops of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Later, the family moved to České Budějovice, where little Jana attended elementary school and subsequently a school for future teachers. She started teaching before the outbreak of WWII but since she refused to teach Czech kids German, she and her husband were assigned to forced labor in the Leichtbau factory. On March 8, 1944, she, her husband and other colleagues from the factory were arrested and taken to prison in České Budějovice. At that time she had been already pregnant for three months. In May 1944, she was taken to the Pankrác prison and on August 27, 1944, she gave birth to her child in the Pankrác prison. In prison, she worked as a “gonkařka” – basically being responsible for cleaning up the prison corridors. She continued to do this work even after the birth of her child and after she was transferred to Řepy. In February 1945, she was taken back to Prague and presented with her sentence before court – for having listened to foreign broadcasting and for her hostility towards the Reich (the refusal to teach Czech kids German) she was sentenced to one year in prison. She was given away by one of her former students, Jaroslav P., who was being held imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and who apparently under pressure chose to collaborate with the Gestapo as an informer. As Jana Honsová had already spent a year in prison at that point, she was released after the trial on February 10/11, 1945. Her husband and father-in-law fared worse than her. They were sentenced to three years in prison and were supposed to be taken to the prison in Aichach. However, because of the allied bombardment of Germany, they were taken to Theresienstadt. Both of them lived to see the end of the war. Nevertheless, her father-in-law contracted typhoid fever in Theresienstadt and died shortly after his release. After the war, Jana Honsová worked as a teacher in Sedlec and in České Budějovice. In 2010, Jana Honsová lived in České Budějovice.