Jaroslava Háková

* 1922  †︎ 2017

  • “He came to us and introduced himself as a paratrooper who had been sent to us by Knotek. He had the handkerchief. My husband felt terribly about it. He didn’t trust him. He invented some excuse in order to go away for a moment, and he went to the three paratroopers and told them about him. He said: ´You know, I am thinking of reporting him to a police station.´ And they got very angry at him, saying that this Čurda was a great guy whom they knew from the training. They forbade him to report him, and my husband thus didn’t turn him in.”

  • “One had no idea, absolutely nothing. I admired them and at the same time I felt somewhat ashamed when I was with them. I didn’t speak to them much; I would always give them the food or ask them if they needed something, but I would never sit down with them together when they talked. I had other duties to attend to, too. Apart from this, I was taking care of Knotek’s boys.”

  • “My husband hated to talk about this, about all the time when he was imprisoned. He used to say: ´The worst moment was then they insisted that I tell them where the paratroopers were and everything about them. They threatened that if I told them, they would let me go, but if I did not, Studenec would follow the fate of Lidice.´ He said: ´That was the worst moment when I imagined that Studenec might be annihilated because of me.´”

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    Studenec, 07.12.2012

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„Doing all of this was natural to me.“

Jaroslava Háková
Jaroslava Háková

Jaroslava Háková was born in 1922 in Studenec and where she spent a happy childhood in the foothills of the Krkonoše Mountains. She enjoyed going to the elementary school and doing sports in the Sokol organization. When she was in the seventh grade, a new teacher, Václav Knotek, arrived in the village. The people in Studenec soon came to like the good-natured man. After completing her studies, Jaroslava married Miloslav Hák. His sister, Zdena, married the teacher Václav Knotek, and all were thus joined into one big family. They lived happily until the outbreak of the war. At the turn of October and November 1942, her husband Miloslav went to Nová Paka to visit his uncle. When he returned to Studenec, he brought with him three paratroopers from the group Antimony, who were dispatched from England, and received their address from Václav Knotek. In this uneasy time shortly after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Jiřina and Miloslav Hák agreed to provide shelter for the paratroopers in their own home. The paratroopers first stayed in the barn and later in the attic of their house. Jiřina was entrusted with obtaining food and other necessities for them. The situation became even more dangerous when the Nazi collaborator, Čurda, appeared in Studenec and claimed that he was a paratrooper in need of a hiding place. His conduct, however, seemed suspicious to Miloslav and he did not betray the three men. The group‘s hiding place was revealed in early 1943. Two members of Antimony committed suicide by biting into a cyanide capsule before they could be arrested, but the Gestapo managed to arrest the third man. Jaroslava‘s husband, Miloslav, was arrested by the Gestapo and then transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Fortunately, he was liberated by the American units at the end of the war, and in late May 1945, he was able to return to Studenec. Jaroslava and Miloslav tried to start a business after the war, but private enterprise came to an end in 1948. The communists conducted a house search and found a small quantity of hidden material, for which Miloslav was arrested and sentenced to half a year of imprisonment. After his return from prison, the family lived peacefully until Miloslav‘s death in 1990. Jaroslava Háková died in 2017.