Eliška Michalská

* 1932

  • “A man came there; he was a bit short. He spoke perfect Czech. Dad had returned from the forest at about six in the morning. He was sleeping just in his underwear and shirt. He had only taken off his trousers and he went to bed. This Gestapo man came in, he threw away dad’s blanket and commented: ‘Obviously, he didn’t even have time to undress properly.’ Dad was completely shocked because he was just woken from his sleep. Dad reached for something on the bedside table and the Gestapo man brutally hit him with his gun over his hand. This made me angry and I yelled at the Gestapo man that Dad was a human being just like anybody else, and what did he think he was doing? I was so audacious that I even told him that what he did might come back to him. Mum rushed over to me and she held her hand over my mouth to make me quiet and not make the situation even worse. But it made me so mad that this man was beating Dad, and so I didn’t care what I said. The guy looked at me in disbelief, but nothing else happened. However, they allegedly treated Dad terribly because of that. They escorted him to Horní Bečva in the Moravian Walachia region, and one independent trader who lived there later told me what had happened. He told me about how they had brought them in there and what they had done to them there. I only learnt about it when I was older. It had to be terrible.”

  • “In order to be able to support the partisans… Dad had a good friend and we were going for walks with his children. We had backpacks with bread and things like that. We would leave the things in the gamekeeper’s lodge and Dad would then stuff our backpacks with something else so that it would not look suspicious. We were carrying food to the lodge, but we didn’t know about it. I realized it only later when I grew older. I thought that something was happening.”

  • “I was supposed to get off in Prostřední Bečva and go over to the Kubáň family and tell them some message. I was regularly going there with a certain driver who already knew me and who always stopped for me in Prostřední Bečva. But that day, there was some other driver and he didn’t stop and I thus ended up in Rožnov. I didn’t know what to do and Dad didn’t know that they had not received the message. I returned home very late by some other bus. I explained everything to my Dad and I confessed that I had not delivered the message. I was a girl of five, six, or seven years (twelve years – auth.’s note). He told me that I should not worry, that he would take care of it. I still don’t know if the thing turned out well, because I screwed it up.”

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    Nový Jičín, 15.10.2015

    (audio)
    duration: 02:17:59
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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A courageous secretary

Eliška Michalská - 1967
Eliška Michalská - 1967
photo: archiv pamětníka

Eliška Michalská, née Rosková, was born March 8, 1932 in Prostřední Bečva. When she was four years old, her father Eduard Roska became a secretary in Horní Bečva and the family moved there to an apartment provided by the village’s administration office. Her father was an important and very active member of a resistance group in Horní Bečva during Second World War. Among other, he was guiding people over the border and supporting partisans. Twelve-year-old Eliška was helping him. She was accompanying him when he was delivering supplies to the partisans and she was also delivering messages between the members of the resistance group. However, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on November 5, 1944 and on January 9, 1945 he was shot to death in the Kounic Student Residence Hall in Brno. Shortly after the liberation, a new chairman of the village administration committee had Eliška’s mother and her two daughters evicted from the apartment. Eliška’s mother was desperate as she had no news of her husband at that time and she did not know whether he was alive or dead. She suffered from serious health problems and she was not receiving any widow’s allowance; this was granted to her only several years after the war. The family eventually moved to Nový Jičín, where Eliška married Zdeněk Michalský in 1953. He had spent several months in a communist prison before they married, because he had not reported to the authorities the intentions of his friend Miroslav Nový who was planning to escape the country. Eliška Michalská still lives in Nový Jičín.