Now watch testimonies of two Czech Prague residents concerning this house.
Miloš Hájek was born in May 1921 in Dětenice. From his youth he was interested in politics. He sympathized with the left. During the Second World War, together with his later wife Alena Hájková, he joined the Communist resistance and other anti-Nazi groups, including the Zionist underground movement. He helped to obtain hiding places and false identity documents.
He was arrested by the Gestapo in August 1944 and sentenced to death in March 1945. The end of the war averted his execution. After the war, Hájek became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), but soon broke with the party leadership. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from his job. He signed the Charter 77 manifesto on human rights in 1977 and became a spokesman for the Charter 77 movement in 1988. In 1995, he was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations award by the Yad Vashem memorial, which is given to people who risked their lives during World War II to save people who were identified as Jews by the laws in force at the time. He died in 2016 in Prague.
The interview was recorded on October 10, 1995 in Prague.
Alena Hájková, PhDr., author of works on anti-fascist resistance, participant in the domestic anti-Nazi resistance, holder of the title Righteous Among the Nations, was born on 11 October 1924 in Prague.
In 1939, she began to train as a ladies' dressmaker, but then took a job with the German jewellery firm Felix Just, which also employed many Jews who were already persecuted at that time. Hájková began to help her Jewish friends who had been affected, and established cooperation with the leftist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair. She used Just's contract to use labor in the Terezin ghetto to broker aid to ghetto prisoners.
In 1943, she co-founded the resistance group Přehledy. In March 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Ravensbrück and Buchenwald concentration camps until the end of the war. After the end of the Second World War, she married a friend from the resistance, Miloš Hájek, and began studying history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and then worked in this field. She died on 2 August 2012 in Prague.
The interview was recorded on 25 June 1997.
Why did these two people decide to help the Jews?