When I was leaving for Germany, it was for the first time that I wore trousers
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Eliška Šafaříková was born July 26, 1924 in Trhové Sviny in the district České Budějovice. Her father was a countryside building contractor and her mother was a housewife. Eliška at first lived with her parents in Trhové Sviny and then in nearby Jílovice. She attended the girls’ elementary school in Trhové Sviny and after completing the fifth grade she transferred to the eight-year Jirsík’s Czech State Grammar School in České Budějovice. She graduated from this school in 1943 and her father subsequently employed her in his office in the saw-mill in Trhové Sviny. Nevertheless, she was unable to avoid forced labour. Her friends from the grammar school who worked in České Budějovice went to work somewhere in Austria, but Eliška was sent together with other people from Trhové Sviny to Braunschweig in Germany. She did not work in a factory there, but she worked in an office of an old bachelor where she spent her time filling out charts and registering spare parts numbers. Every day she witnessed air raids and from the labour camp they often watched the city engulfed in fires. When the work could no longer be done due to the continuing air raids, the Germans moved the factories underground and they began to staff them mostly with Russian prisoners of war instead. Eliška was transported back home and sent to do forced labour in the factory JIKOV (South Bohemian Metalworks Velešín), where she worked as a telephone operator thanks to her fluent German. She worked there until the end of the war. After the war she attended a one-year course for secretaries in Prague-Smíchov. In February 1948 their steam saw-mill in Trhové Sviny, which had been established by her grandfather in 1900, became confiscated by the state, the family was evicted from their house and her father was sent to work in a saw-mill in Jindřichův Hradec and then in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions. Eliška Šafaříková was employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, and then as a courtroom recorder in the court in Prague 6. For more than twenty years she worked as a secretary in the company IPS (Engineering and Industrial Construction). She has three children and she lives in Úvaly u Prahy.