I worked hard all my life, there was no time for fear and worry during the war
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Jarmila Kuklová, née Remešová, was born on 2 November 1923 in the village of Nevšová, near Luhačovice, as the first of four children. Her parents, Adéla, née Raková, and Matouš Remeš, had a farm there. Daddy, a veterinary surgeon, worked in Litovel and mummy took care of her terminally ill brother in the hospital until Jarmilla was three years old. Jarmila was brought up by her great-grandmother Veronika, and after her death by her grandmother Matylda Raková. Her parents moved with her sisters to Litovel when she was seven. Before the war, her mother returned to Nevšová with her children, Jarmila went to her father in Litovel, where she lived through the war and she used to return to Nevšová. She witnessed the air battle over the White Carpathians in August 1944, and in January 1945 she saw a procession of Soviet prisoners of war passing through Litovel. Her father and a cousin, Alois Remeš, joined the resistance during the war, and at her father’s request, she secretly handed over the plan of the Bojkovice arms factory to an unknown woman. She trained as a seamstress and cook in Litovel, then graduated from a two-year tailoring and clothing school in Prostějov. In 1947 she married Bohumil Kukla, a railwayman and later a textile shop manager. They lived in Lipová u Jeseníku, where Jarmila Kuklová witnessed the aftermath of the deportation of German families. She raised two sons - Pavel (1948) and David (1955). Her husband was briefly imprisoned in the 1950s for criticism of the regime. She worked, among other things, at the apprenticeship school in Lipová as a catering manager or as a cutter in the clothing factories in Jeseník. Later she moved to Litovel, where she ran the canteen of the grammar school. In 2025 Jarmila Kuklová lived in Šternberk.
