"So then I applied, but it was mainly for Slovakia and I wanted to do children's work somewhere where I could learn. And there was a chief there, the chief of pediatrics was an assistant from Prof. Švejcar [MUDr. Jindřich Šabata], so I begged and it worked out for that placement that I got the South Bohemia one. So I reported there on June 15, 1950. On the twelfth of June I graduated and I reported there, the director was a prosector, so I had to do six months at the prosector's office first. And then I got to the children's ward to see the chief. He was still outside the main hospital, and then they made the children's ward there, and I was there and I went to the maternity ward. There was a big maternity ward. Remember, there wasn't actually a ward anywhere. There was a children's ward in Písek, in Tábor, and it started in Prachatice."
"I went to the first class when I was six years old, actually it was already six and a half, because I turned six in February and then I started first grade in September. So at 1927. The teacher was very young, Růžena Šlechtová, and she was quite good with us. I continued to visit her and then she persuaded my parents to put me in grammar school, It was not so usual. Then we went to the municipal school, from the fifth grade we went to the municipal school, it was separate again and it was also a girls' school. That was a four-year school and then eventually you went to one of those family schools. There weren't that many in those grammar schools. And she persuaded my parents to put me in the grammar school because I was quite good at learning, I had beautiful handwriting and things, and I loved reding. So I was always in the flat - my father told me this afterwards, when I was grown up, many, many years later, I was a doctor - he told me that they had to keep an eye on me to go to school in the afternoon - that especially when thre were afternoon classes, that I would get lost and read in the corner somewhere."
"My mother, when I was born, ran a salon, and as it used to be, if you ever read about Podolská, how she started, it used to be in flats. Because like ready-to-wear, that was kind of the lowest... ready-to-wear, that was, that was all being sewed. So grandmother, her mother, she ran our household for as long as I can remember, and my mother employed... she had three workers who commuted. Like from Beroun, Dobřichovice, and here on the south line. So I was always so looked after and it wasn't usual for us to be out on our own. We were always... I had a brother four years younger than me. So that's what I grew up in, I always wrote that I grew up around needles and cuttings."
Naděžda Řeháková, née Šafářová, was born on 25 February 1921 in Prague. Her mother Anna Šafářová came from a family of Prague tradesmen. She trained as a ladies‘ dressmaker and ran her own salon in Prague. Her father‘s family came from southern Bohemia, where his ancestors worked in the manor services as foresters. His father, Alois Šafář, had already grown up in Prague and studied at grammar school. In the fourth grade he was expelled for playing football, which was a forbidden pastime for students at that time. He then became a chemist´s merchant and went on to run a successful business. Her parents brought up their daughter and younger son Karel (b. 1925) in the spirit of the Masaryk Republic. The family was sporty, her father played football for Rapid Vinohrady and later worked as a coach. Every morning the children went swimming with their mother at the Smíchov swimming pool. The parents had one of the first canoes, with which they used to paddle down the Vltava River with their children in their free time. Naděžda Řeháková studied at the Reform Grammar School in Smíchov, later in Dejvice. After graduating in 1940, she got a job at the municipal office, thus avoiding total deployment in the Reich. In July 1945 she was one of the first students of the restored Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. She graduated on 12 June 1950. Her dream was to work with young children, and she fulfilled it. She was appointed to the south of Bohemia, where she became the first doctor of the newly established children‘s ward of the hospital in České Budějovice. She participated in the establishment of the children‘s ward of the hospital in Prachatice. Fate then took her to Central Bohemia, where she headed the Infant Institute in Kolín from 1955. Subsequently, she founded the Infant Institute in Strančice. After her retirement in 1982, she worked occasionally at the children‘s ward in Český Brod. In 2025 Naděžda Řeháková was living in Kouřim.
