Children from mixed families also had a hard time during the war.
Stáhnout obrázek
Jana Žabová, née Holzerová, was born in Prague on 7 July 1936 but lived all her life in Benešov where her parents owned a shop. Her father was Jewish but her mother was not, so her parents formally divorced during the war to protect Jana and her younger brother Jiří from Nazi persecution. From 1944, the children hid with friends in Hatě near Pelhřimov, witnessing the village of Leskovice being burned down in May 1945. Many of their relatives did not make it back from concentration camps. The witness studied architecture in Prague and got married in her final year; she has two sons. Her husband served in the military with the auxiliary technical battalions. She taught at a high school in Benešov, and at a local vocational school after her maternity leave. She recalls the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. As a teacher, she resisted pressure to join the communist party until the Velvet Revolution. She remembers November 1989 and the collapse of the regime. Post-1989, she worked in railway construction and briefly at the municipal construction department in Benešov. She reclaimed the house in Benešov in which her parents had a shop in the restitution procedure. She was living in Benešov in 2023.
