E.H.: “I have experienced two wars. Two terrible wars!”
Her great-grandson: “And how was it, when you were little?” E.H.: “Good.”
Great-grand son: “Really?”
E.H.: “Uh-huh.”
Great-grandson: “And you lived directly in Zvolen?”
E.H.: “In Zvolen.”
“There was no toilet, no washbasin. It was terrible. You couldn’t even get a piece of cloth there! Nothing! Terrible poverty. We would get a kilo of sugar once a month. We were buying bread – that black Russian bread – from a neighbour, together with milk, in order to have something for the baby. Those people were very kind to us, they were wonderful.”
“I also worked in the Comintern. I spoke Slovak and he spoke Czech. Each nationality had its own office. And they spoke for the radio. Both of us also did that. I still remember it: (speaking in Slovak) ´Listen, listen, you are listening to the Slovak National Broadcast Service for the freedom of Slovakia.´ We were broadcasting against Bratislava.”
Emilie Hošková, née Rovná, was born October 4, 1912 in Zvolen in Slovakia. Her father worked for the railways, her mother was a housewife. When she was fifteen or sixteen, she left the family and moved to Zlín to her cousin. She became a staunch communist. In the local communist group she met her husband-to-be Jaroslav Hošek (Jarin Hošek, who later became a communist journalist). Jaroslav went to fight in Spain, where he was wounded by a dum-dum bullet. Sometime in 1939, after he recovered, he returned to Czechoslovakia. Fearing Nazi interrogation and imprisonment as a consequence of Hošek’s activity in Spain and the communist conviction of both of them, they escaped to the USSR. This was done legally, as the Soviet embassy officially declared them as its employees. At first they lived in a dormitory, in a “rest house” in Sochi. They then moved to Ivanov, where they briefly worked in an international children’s school. While there they met the children of the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Jan Zika. The Hošeks later joined the Comintern and became broadcasters of the Czech and Slovak radio broadcast. Emilie gave birth to her daughter Jaroslava in Moscow in 1940. After the war they returned to Czechoslovakia. Jaroslav worked for the police and Emilie later began working in a library in Zlín.
