My uncle was hiding in cellar for several years
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Soňa Jelínková, née Straková, was born on December 25, 1928 in Loštice. In her life she often witnessed, how the totalitarian regimes destroy human lives. Such as her father´s, Oldřich Straka, for connection to resistance by the Nazis, her uncle´s, a war resistance, Jaroslav Knápek, by the communists. Her uncle managed to escape from prison and was hiding for several years in his own house cellar in the settlement Drozdovská Pila, before he reported himself to authorities. During the WW2 the witness with her own eyes watched transports of the Jews from Loštice, crackdown on guerrillas in Drozdovská Pila and as a domestic helper witnessed sheltering of escaped Soviet prisoners of war in the village of Háj u Třeštiny. After war she studied the newly opened Commerce Academy in Šumperk. In 1949 she began working at the forestry in Hoštejn and then as a wage accountant and a cashier in the State Forestry in Zábřeh. Then she worked in the Investment Bank in Šumperk and then in the State Bank of Czechoslovakia, where she was in charge of investments and operations of individual agricultural cooperatives and later also operations of regional giants - n. p. Rudné doly Jeseník and Severomoravské dřevařské závody n. p. Šumperk. In 2016 she lived in Zábřeh.