Kytka @ Everything Czech

Apr 28, 2026

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On June 17, 1928, a three-year-old girl in a hand-sewn folk costume climbed the steps of a wooden platform in the town square of Žďár nad Sázavou and changed her life without knowing it.
 

Her name was Eva Neugebauerová. She had been born on May 20, 1925 in Prague, the daughter of Richard Neugebauer, a Czechoslovak army officer, and his wife Antonie. The family had settled in Žďár when Eva was two, after her father left active military service and the family purchased a steam sawmill on the edge of town. It was a comfortable, rooted life. They were home there, in that particular way that children know a place belongs to them.
 

The day of the president's visit, Eva's grandmother had sewn her a festive kroj in the style of the Kyjov region, and her mother dressed in one as well. Masaryk was touring Moravian towns that summer — more specifically, he was in Žďár for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of a new Sokol gymnasium, part of the broader celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia's independence. The square was full. There was noise and ceremony and the particular electricity of a crowd that has gathered to see someone beloved.
 

A schoolmaster named Jindra, who had brought his pupils from the Zámek Žďár school, spoke with Eva's mother and then asked the child if she would climb up to the podium and present the old gentleman with a bouquet of flowers. She did. An official near the president noticed her, lifted her up, and placed her in Masaryk's arms. He asked her name, and where her mother was. She searched the crowd and could not find her. In that moment, the shutter fell.

The photograph captured everything at once: the white-mustached president of a young republic holding a small girl who was trying to find her mother in a sea of faces. Eva later recalled peering through his spectacles, watching the corners of his broad white mustache lift into a smile. It should not have been the defining image of the First Republic. And yet it was.

 

The photographer's identity has never been definitively established. The name Antonín Horník has been suggested, but it may have been someone else entirely. Whoever pressed the shutter that morning had no idea what they had made.

Ten years later, the image found its second life.

 

The stamp was issued on March 7, 1938, timed to the 88th anniversary of Masaryk's birth, roughly six months after he died in September 1937. Graphic artist and engraver Bohumil Heinz used the photograph as his source, framing it with the words Masaryk had made famous: "Měj úctu k duši dítěte" — "Respect the soul of the child." The stamp was issued in three denominations — 50 hellers, 1 Kč, and 1.5 Kč — and sold with a surcharge benefiting charitable organizations caring for children.

 

The timing gave the image an almost unbearable weight. Masaryk was gone. Nazi Germany was pressing at the borders. The republic whose birth he had guided was in danger. And here was this stamp — a child in a folk costume, a father figure's arms, a phrase about the sanctity of childhood — asking the country to remember what it had been built to protect. The image became a symbol of the republic's foundational values: childhood innocence, democracy, and moral dignity at a moment when all three were under threat.

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Eva was thirteen and studying at the gymnasium in Pardubice when the stamp appeared. Letters arrived at her school and home in stacks — requests for her signature from across Czechoslovakia, and even from Australia and America. She became known simply as the girl from the stamp, a strange accidental celebrity whose private childhood had been absorbed into national iconography. During the Second World War, the image of Masaryk holding the child in the Kyjov kroj appeared on leaflets distributed by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in Britain.

 

Wartime came and complicated everything. She was in Pardubice during the worst of it, witnessed the bombings, and knew people who were executed during the Heydrichiáda — the wave of brutal reprisals that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. She survived. After the war she enrolled at the Institute of Modern Languages in Prague, hoping to become a teacher. Then the communists took power in February 1948, and a different kind of ending began.

 

The regime confiscated her family's sawmill and forced her parents into menial labor. Her family's association with the beloved democratic president, whose image had made Eva famous, was now a liability rather than a source of pride. She could not join the party. Without party membership, teaching became impossible.

 

In 1950, Eva fled with her husband Ladislav Haňka — an agricultural engineer — across the Šumava mountains into Bavaria. They spent time in Frankfurt, where they worked with a United Nations refugee assistance office, and on November 24, 1951, they arrived in New York aboard the USS General Hersey. Eva later recalled looking back and thinking of home — of the life that had seemed so full of promise before Hitler, before the communists, before the border crossing in the dark. They settled first near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in one of the established centers of Czech emigrant life, then eventually in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Eva taught languages at a high school and built a life in the only way exiles can: by choosing, over and over again, to keep going.

 

She and Ladislav raised two children, a son and a daughter, and she never stopped being connected to where she came from. She participated in events at the T. G. Masaryk Czech School in Chicago, stayed engaged with Czech life abroad, and after 1989 returned to Žďár nad Sázavou several times. On one early visit to Prague after the Velvet Revolution, she was received by President Václav Havel, who shook her hand and joked that he would not attempt to pick her up the way his predecessor had. The little girl from the stamp was by then well past sixty.
 

In 2000, Ladislav Haňka established a foundation in his wife's name at the grammar school in Žďár nad Sázavou. Every year, the school's top graduating student receives a scholarship and a commemorative silver coin from the Eva Haňková Foundation. The girl who once became a symbol of the republic has, in this quiet and generous way, continued giving something back to her hometown across decades and across an ocean — not as symbol, but as a person who chose to matter.
 

On May 20, 2025, Eva Haňková turned one hundred years old. Czech writer Markéta Pilátová published a book in her honor titled "The Girl on the Stamp," illustrated by Renata Fučíková.

 

The city of Žďár nad Sázavou awarded her its civic prize for a lifetime of spreading the good name of the town. She received it at her home in Kalamazoo, still sharp, still engaged, still interested in the world and worried, as she has said in recent interviews, about the direction it is heading.

 

There is something in this story that resists easy sentiment, and that is precisely why it endures. The photograph is beautiful, yes. But the life behind it is the real document — the sawmill lost to ideology, the border crossed in darkness, the languages taught in a foreign city, the scholarship checks sent home across the Atlantic every year.

 

The image captured one moment of hope. The woman lived all the rest of it: the rupture, the exile, the patience, the endurance.

 

Masaryk's arms held one small girl on a summer morning in 1928. What she carried forward from that moment — in memory, in survival, in the foundation that bears her name — turned out to be far heavier, and far more lasting, than any stamp.

For those who want to hear Eva Haňková speak for herself, the ČTK Connect channel on YouTube features an 18-minute video in which she recalls her famous encounter with Masaryk firsthand. The video was created in connection with the ČTK photographic exhibition "Prezidentské okamžiky" — Presidential Moments — and it is a remarkable thing to watch: a woman in her late nineties, clear-eyed and composed, reaching back nearly a century to the morning in a town square when a president picked her up and asked her where her mother was.
 

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv1kQ9ZpsP8
 

Until next time,
Kytka & Richard
 

Sources:

1. The Prague Post / Think Magazine. "History Leaves Its Stamp." www.think.cz/english/history/eva-neugebauerova-hankova

2. Radio Prague International. "The Girl on the Stamp with President Masaryk Turns 100." english.radio.cz/girl-stamp-president-masaryk-turns-100-8851603

3. Paměť národa / Memory of Nations. "Eva Haňková (1925)." www.pametnaroda.cz/en/hankova-eva-1925

4. Novinky.cz. "Masaryk ji vzal do náručí, dostala se na poštovní známku. Eva Haňková slaví sté narozeniny." www.novinky.cz/clanek/historie-masaryk-ji-vzal-do-naruci-dostala-se-na-postovni-znamku-eva-hankova-slavi-ste-narozeniny-40521858

5. Respekt. "Holčička ze známky" (The Little Girl from the Stamp). Issue 51, 2022. www.respekt.cz/tydenik/2022/51/holcicka-ze-znamky

6. Dotyk.cz. "Osud dívky v kroji ze slavné známky s Masarykem: Komunisté Evě připravili peklo." www.dotyk.cz/magazin/masaryk-znamka-eva-neugebauerova-hankova-30001112.html

7. Reporter Magazín. "Hrdinka ze známky: Masaryk ji držel v náručí, kvůli komunistům z Československa emigrovala." reportermagazin.cz/78228/hrdinka-ze-znamky-masaryk-ji-drzel-v-naruci-kvuli-komunistum-z-ceskoslovenska-emigrovala

8. Žďárský deník. "Známka s Masarykem obletěla svět." zdarsky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/znamka-s-masarykem-obletela-svet-20140625.html

9. Karel Černý. "Kdo je děvčátko z fotografie?" La Fortuna, ve spolupráci s městem Žďár nad Sázavou, 2000. Referenced via horsky.webnode.cz/rodopis-horskych/ruznosti-zajimavosti/devcatko-z-postovni-znamky