“Then this Doležal came, because we had a car, which had been left to us by my dad. And women didn’t have driver’s licenses back then. So Mum put out a notice that she’d sell the car, and this Doležal came. He had a café somewhere in Spořilov, or something of the kind, and he was in a secure financial position. A handsome chap he was, Mum was young, so no need to say more. Time passed, it was already some time after my dad’s death. One thing led to another, and he said that he just happened to be getting divorced and that he didn’t have a place to live, and Mum offered him one of our rooms, which was at the back of the house and which wasn’t being used. So he moved in with us, and it was all done bar the handshake.”
“My mum would send us to get flour from Vlašim, we had an aunt there, and they occasionally had the opportunity of going to the mill. So Mum sent me. I got off at the Vršovice train station. Auntie didn’t know any better than to wrap up a loaf of bread in paper. The loaf was this big, and she wrapped it up and tied it with a string. Of course, I got off the train and the first SS man [I met] came up, tapped me on the shoulder and asked what I was carrying. I answered him somehow, and I was really angry at him, because I reckoned: I’ve got a loaf of bread here, and he’ll take it from me. But he didn’t take it, he let me keep it.”
“We had a cyclostyle in the attic, we had a radio transmitter there, and some other things. We had it rigged up nice and proper, so when the Germans came, they drove around our house in Kačerov and tried to locate it. If they had found it, they’d have shot us all. Mum denied the whole thing, of course, and there were people from the group who helped, who quickly took it all away when we saw the Gestapo were after it. So they quickly destroyed it all. We children attended school, and Mum always folded the leaflets from the printer and stuffed them into our satchels, and we distributed them. On my way to school I put the leaflets in the letter boxes of people that we knew were okay, who wouldn’t rat us out. That’s how we distributed things.”
“Mum was a hothead. She just was. She dived head-first into everything. She didn’t think twice about the fact that she had two children here. She just got the notion that she’d go visit him, so she did. She couldn’t speak a word of German, nor could she write any German, but she took another lady with her. That was Mrs Hladíková, she was the manager of Liberated Household after the war, and she knew perfect German, so they went together. Mr Hladík, her husband, was locked up together with Dad. So they went together, and they got want they demanded. I don’t know if Mrs Hladíková smoothed the way through in German, or how it all happened, but they gave them permission to visit. Of course, the women took medicine and all kinds of things, whatever they could, they took with them. Well, and Mum managed to get there thanks to Mrs Hladíková.”
Hana Mandíková, née Tatoušková, was born on 24 April 1931 in Prague 4. Her father František Tatoušek was the deputy to Prague’s mayor Baxa, and he died in 1935, when Hana was just three and a half years old. She lived in a villa in Prague-Kačerov with her mother Julie, née Tomanová, and her sister Milena, who was four years her elder. After her father’s death, the family took in Václav Doležal as a tenant. During World War II Hana witnessed Doležal’s resistance activities - he helped publish the anti-Nazi magazine V Boj (The Fight). At the time she herself joined in and helped distribute leaflets, which were copied out on a cyclostyle in the attic of their house. Václav Doležal and several other people were arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. However, he survived until the end of the war in Ebrach Prison near Bamberg, and he returned home happily under dramatic circumstances. After the war the Tatoušeks moved to Karlovy Vary with Václav Doležal. In 1950 Hana married for the first time, and after moving back to Prague she worked at a pharmaceutical research institute. After her divorce and second marriage to Mr Mandík, she moved to Velké Popovice in 1977, where she and her husband built a house. At the time she worked at the local brewery. After her husband died, she became a passionate motorcyclist. She started riding a Babeta motorbike at the age of 60, before moving on to her beloved Škoda Favorit, which she rode until 2014. She has a daughter Hana and a son Pavel from her first marriage - the latter died in a tragic accident. She now (2015) lives in a care home in Prague-Ďáblice.
