Marie Kantorová

Marie Kantorová (Bartošková) was born in 1928 in the hamlet of Orsákovice near Soláň in Nový Hrozenkov, but she spent the major part of her childhood in the hamlet of Stodolisko under Velký Javorník, the highest mountain in the mountain range of the same name. It was a remote settlement which was very far from the nearest village. Before the war their cottage also served as a tourist lodge. Due to its location right on the border with Slovakia, which gained independence in March 1939, the house was also used by smugglers crossing the border. The Slovak National Uprising broke out at the end of August 1944 and many Czechs were coming to support it. Messengers familiar with the terrain were needed for these illegal border crossings. Marie, who was sixteen at that time, was also helping to guide persons over the border. She has led four partisans-to-be over the border. Her father, Josef Bartošek, cooperated with the partisans in all possible ways and he also took part in one raid in Tiesňava. There were many partisans and German border patrols up in the Javorníky Mountains, and Marie Kantorová witnessed more than one gunfight. During the war she studied at a school of agriculture in Velké Karlovice and then she attended a family school run by the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross in Holešovice. In the second year of her studies she took a course for lay teachers of religious education, and she was then teaching the subject in schools in the area of Třemešek near Oskava in northern Moravia, until religious education was abolished in 1954. After that she worked as a shop assistant. At present Marie Kantorová still lives in Třemešek with her husband Vilém Kantor, whom she already knew during the war, because he had also been cooperating with the 1st Czechoslovak brigade of Jan Žižka and he often stopped in the Bartošek family's house when crossing the border.

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