Hájková Alena (Divišová)

Hájková-Divišová, Alena Alena Divišová (later Hájková), born in 1924, was the daughter of a laborer in Prague. After graduating school in 1939, she trained as a seamstress. In the sewing workshop, Alena befriended Charlotte Koestenbaum, a Zionist youth who planned to go to Palestine. The relationship between the two turned into a very close friendship. In the summer of 1941, Divišová joined a small group of Halutzim who were working on a farm near Vysoké Mýto. The friendship between an Aryan and Jews was absolutely forbidden at the time. Soon after the group returned to Prague, persecution of the Jews intensified. Divišová continued to help the group as a courier, transmitting important information or money to their relatives living elsewhere. The news about the terrible starvation in Theresienstadt motivated Divišová to continue helping Jews. She managed to enter the ghetto twice in order to bring food to Heinrich Lekner, one of the members of Hehalutz who had been deported to the ghetto in early 1942. When reprisals against the Jews increased following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Divišová’s Jewish friends needed to find hiding places, which she managed to find for them. Undoubtedly, Divišová’s most dangerous missions, as Moshe Lemberger (later Leshem) later testified, were her visits to the houses or hiding places of the members of Hehalutz, where Gestapo agents often waited to catch people as they arrived. At the end of 1942, things calmed down a little and those in hiding, equipped with false papers, took on new identities. Lemberger and Arnošt Kruh created forged documents and Divišová delivered the papers to Jews on the run. Divišová also obtained real identity cards by stealing them from workers’ clothes hanging in the cloakroom of her father’s factory. One of the people who received these documents was Bedrich Weiner. As a courier, Divišová initiated a connection with the Theresienstadt ghetto inmates who were sent to forced labor incoalmines in Kladno. During the war, Divišová associated with a communist underground group. Through this group she was involved with anti-fascist activity. Following the discovery of a few underground cells, the Gestapo arrested Divišová on March 28, 1944. Divišová was detained in the nefarious Pankrác prison in Prague and then the Small Fortress in Terezín; she was subsequently deported to Ravensbrück and from there to Altenburg. Alena succeeded in escaping from the death march in Zwickau and returned home in June 1945. On November 5, 1991, Yad Vashem recognized Alena Hájková-Divišová as Righteous Among the Nations.