When my father was captured was the last time he saw me
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Vanda Tomášková was born in Radčice near Plzeň on 3 April 1943 to Božena Tomčíková and Josef Tomčík. Her father was a designer at Škoda in Plzeň and joined anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, specifically the Third Illegal Regional Leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in the Plzeň region. He was arrested in late 1943 and executed by guillotine in Dresden a year later. The witness’s mother at the Pilsen distilleries all her life. Vanda Tomášková spent her childhood in Radčice with her mother, elder sister and grandparents. They moved to Plzeň before she went to school. In the first grade, after a severe scarlatina, she was recovering at her uncle’s house in the Krušné Mountains. Following elementary school she completed medical school and worked as a children’s nurse at the hospital in Bory. She married Antonín Tomášek in 1962 and they moved to Hroznětín where her husband worked in the local meat plant and she as a kindergarten teacher. She witnessed the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 with her family during a holiday in Lipno. After 1968, she had to take compulsory courses in Marxism-Leninism but she never joined the Party. She and her husband raised three children. At the time of filming in 2025 she lived in Karlovy Vary.
