When I was six years old, the Nazis killed my parents in Mauthausen
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Božena Tomšová, née Hrnčiříková, was born on 26 May 1936 in Prague into the family of a successful coffee roaster. In 1942, her parents, Rostislav and Božena Hrnčiříková, were arrested by the Gestapo for hiding paratroopers and subsequently executed in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Božena herself was interned as a six-year-old child, first in the children’s home in Jenerálka and later in the camp in Svatobořice near Kyjov. The end of the Second World War found her in the camp in Planá nad Lužnicí, where the German occupying power evacuated children before the approaching front. After the war, she found a longer-term refuge as an orphan with the nuns in the convent in Vinohrady and later she followed her sister to Jablonec nad Nisou, where she completed her education. In the following years she worked as a teacher in a kindergarten, a cook or a draughtsman in the Tesla factory in Jablonec. At the time of recording (2025), Božena Tomšová lived in Jablonec nad Nisou.