Her mother was the first woman to work in mines in Czechoslovakia
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Eliane Juklová was born on 12 November 1936 in Vieux Moliéres-sur-Céze, France. Her grandparents, named Alscher, left Ostrava in 1925 to work in the mining region in the south of France. They had two children in Bohemia, including Eliane’s mother, Anna (born 1919), and three more children in France. Eliane was born when her mother was sixteen, so her grandmother Marie Alscherová took care of her and her children. Eliane was closest to uncle Gustav, who was two years older, and with whom she grew up. In the mining colony in the La Grande Combe area, people of various nationalities lived and worked in the nearby coal mines. When Eliane was two years old, her mother married the Czech miner Alois Macháček. He worked in a mine, and Anna was a driver for a mining company. In 1940, grandfather Alscher, the breadwinner for the whole family, died as a result of working in the mines. Her mother and another uncle supported the family through work. In 1942, her mother had a son, Josef-Mario-Claude, Eliane’s brother. Eliane started going to school. Her mother then went to Germany with her husband Alois to work. There the tracks of Eliane’s father ended. Anna was then a prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp, where she lived to be liberated. During the holidays of 1945, Eliane and her uncle Gustav experienced an unforgettable stay in Switzerland with the family of a factory worker. The Red Cross then accompanied them straight to Czechoslovakia, where the family returned after the war. In Ostrava, her mother was looking for the best-paying job to support her children and her sick mother. On 11 November 1945, she entered the black coal mines and became the first female miner in Czechoslovakia. Eliane struggled with the language at school, so at sixteen, she went to work in the glassworks in Harrachov. However, she soon returned to Ostrava and worked in the Vítkovice ironworks. There she met her future husband Jaroslav Jukl, born in 1937, and they married in 1956. They moved to Česká Třebová and had three children in 1956, 1960, and 1964. She worked at an armature factory in Česká Třebová and on the railway. Eliane Juklová died on April 11, 2023.
