I was free to go to church again
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Eva Gazdíková was born in Brumov-Bylnice on 8 February 1936. Her mother Aloisie Rusková ran a tailor‘s shop and her father Zdeněk worked as a cooper. The family lived modestly yet happily until the outbreak of the Second World War. It brought dramatic moments for some of its members. Eva‘s uncle Josef Rusek was a war veteran and hero. He left the country in 1939 and joined the Czechoslovak 11th Infantry Battalion. He fought at Tobruk and, after further training in England, at Dunkirk. He was decorated several times, including with the Czechoslovak War Cross. Eva‘s maternal aunt Karla married German Josef Frietschek who enlisted in the Wehrmacht soon after the outbreak of war. He came back home but was deported with other Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia. At age eight, Eva Gazdíková watched an air battle in the sky over the White Carpathians where American bombers clashed with German fighters. In 1953, she lost a large sum of money during the currency reform, and at the same time successfully obtained her high school diploma she needed to work as a teacher. Soon after, she started her first school job in Zašová in Wallachia where classes were taught in a former convent where the nuns who were later imprisoned by the regime in internment camps still lived. As a teacher, Eva Gazdíková was under strong pressure to renounce her Catholic faith and leave the Church. Not only did she not resign - she continued to secretly attend church services in the surrounding villages. Despite the persuading, she never became a member of the communist party. With husband František, they raised three children, Jana, Eva and Jiří. At the time of filming, the widowed Eva Gazdíková was living in a home for the elderly in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.
