She was locked up a second time right after giving birth in November 1958.
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Eva Knihová, née Stránská, was born in Prague on 23 February 1933. Her father Josef Stránský was a trained butcher and spent seven years running a business in Tsarist Russia. He returned to Czechoslovakia during the Russian civil war. He later owned butcher shops in Prague’s Lesser Town, Říčany and finally Benešov. Her mother ran a small shop. The witness had a sister. Eva Knihová grew up in Benešov, where she witnessed the deportation of Czech families and Jews during the war, as well as the liberation of the town by the Red Army. She began enrolled in high school after the war but did not finish and worked at a health insurance company office. She transferred to a motorcycle factory in 1951 and suffered a serious injury. At that time, she was approached by a former insurance company co-worker Josef Kubec asking her to provide weapons for an emerging resistance group. Eva knew about a pistol hidden in the home of her brother-in-law Václav Švajgl who had been active in a similar group in the Benešov region and left the country running from the State Security. She only brought ammunition to Kubec. After a few days, the State Security arrested her at home on 30 April 1952. Knihová spent 10 months in detention in Benešov, five of them in solitary confinement. She was interrogated without physical violence. A public trial was held at the District Office building in Benešov on 11 February 1953, sentencing Eva Knihová to two years in prison and five years’ loss of civil rights. She began serving her sentence in Pankrác Prison as a cook’s helper. This is where President Antonín Zápotocký’s amnesty caught her and she was released on 4 May 1953. Back home, she worked in a restaurant and got married. In 1956, a guest reported her for slandering the regime in connection with the developments in Hungary. She was initially sentenced to three months’ conditionally for public outrage, but the state attorney appealed and the Regional Court sent her to prison. By then, she was pregnant for the second time and so did not enter prison until after giving birth in November 1958. She was released on 20 February 1959. Until retirement, Eva Knihová worked in restaurants and leisure facilities. After the collapse of communism, she was honoured as a participant in the anti-communist resistance. Eva Knihová passed away on 12 May 2025.
