Eva Šteklová

* 1928

  • „The first year I walked around with a crate. I went around everyone, they all put their cups in the crate and asked for a coffee or for a tea. I went to a pub with the crate. That was all the way back to the Poweder Tower. There was this pub, ‘U Anděla’ or ‘U zlatého anděla’, I think it’s still there today. I bought everyone what they had asked for and brought it back. And that was my job. Then I learned to pack the goods, to make packages. There was one employee who washed the floors. It was parquet floors but I remember they always waxed it, scattered sawdust over it and then swept it clean. Back then it was both wholesale and retail trade. Wholesale was on the first floor. The second employee, Mr. Štrchal, would go to the post-office with me when someone ordered something in the wholesale store. He took a cart that he loaded up with packages and I went to the counter with all the paperwork. It was a Jewish company called Kohn & Neumann back then. Both of them had already been sent to a concentration camp and there was an administrator there, an authorized representative. German, his name was Schwab but he was a decent man. I can’t complain about him.”

  • “The coup d’état took place in February and the festival was right after the end of the school year in early July, I think. So it was all fine already. But I remember and will never forget how it started raining about half-way through our exercise. But we finished it in the rain anyway. There was a huge applause: ‘Do-over, do-over!’ Our chief, sister Provázníková, asked us: ‘Sisters, do want to do a do-over?’ – ‘Yes, yes!’ So we did the whole thing from the start again. That’s a memory I have to this day. Beautiful. But that was also the end of it. Back then I had already been placed in the instructors’ group but after that, when there was the parade I didn’t attend because I had to wear a beautiful national costume, but I know how the parade ended. And Sokol was abolished.” – “How did the parade end?” – “When people reached the grandstand, they turned their heads to the side. I don’t know if it was to the right or to the left. They turned their heads to the side and kept marching.” – “And what were the consequences?” – “The consequences were that Sokol was abolished because the adherents to Sokol were patriots and Masaryk followers. Everyone could join. We were nobodies after all. Father was a house painter, self-employed, nobody. But it was a patriotic organization, that I know, that I remember. And we had it inside of us too. Josef Suk, Fučík the composer – they composed songs for us. So I was done with it and it was really the end of it for me because the Spartakiad, that didn’t exist for me. That was something strange. Not that.”

  • “So that’s where we started with exercising. Then the Sokols started building a new Sokol gymnasium. A beautiful building down below Bohdalec by the Botič river. And for the opening, everyone from younger juniors to the team, women, everyone gathered at the summer exercise area in Bohdalec. My father played the helicon. He liked Sokol. He didn’t exercise himself but liked to play the helicon, in winter too, when there were masquerade balls at the ‘U Jaurisů’ pub. Dad played the viola. There was always a show. There was a stage there and we would go watch from the balcony with my mother. Dad wrote the marching music, both words and music, for the new Sokol gymnasium opening. I can sing it to this day. It was a simple, yet beautiful song.” – “Would you maybe want to sing it to us? At least a part of it?” – “I’ll sing it, yes, I can sing it to you. There’s a beautiful new Sokol gymnasium below Bohdalec, nothing compares to our brothers from Michle. They have strength in their arms and Czech resistance in their hearts, brother Pechman is their role model. Fearless, they guard their homeland. Stand guard, stand guard, stand guard, stand guard, stand guard is what our battalion calls.”

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    Praha, 12.06.2020

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The key is not to whine

Portrait picture of Eva Lipovská, Prague, 1948
Portrait picture of Eva Lipovská, Prague, 1948
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Eva Šteklová was born January 22, 1928 in Prague. Her parents Theodor and Metodějka Lipovský came from the Haná region but moved to Prague shortly before Eva’s birth to be better off economically. Both of them were cotters who helped farmers with harvesting and in winter they worked in the sugar factory in Kojetín. In Prague they lived in Michle in a small apartment with just one room and a kitchen, yet three more daughters were born there and the fifth one some years later. Father worked as a house painter, mother sewed at home and all the girls had to help out. One time they were late with their rent and got evicted from the apartment. The upbringing of the five girls was very strict. The whole family went to Sokol and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church; father, self-employed, was a member of the National Socialist Party. Eva was apprenticed as a textile saleswoman in the renowned shop Kohn & Neumann in Celetná street in Prague 1. She enthusiastically attended and exercised at two national Sokol festivals in Strahov in 1938 and 1948. During the May Prague Uprising her father fought at the barricades and her eldest sister attended to the wounded. After the war the witness left for a three-months temporary job in the newly resettled Sudetenland. Eva married her colleague Jaroslav Štekl, had two kids with him and worked at different positions in a textile shop her entire professional life. For a short period of time in 1968, her husband was the director of the House of Fashion in Prague, however as an independent he was removed from the position during the Normalization period and later worked as an economist. Both their children left to study and start a new life in the USA. Eva visited them several times. Daughter Eva became a professor of Slavonic Studies and has authored several professional publications.