Dana Němcová
Dana Němcová, née Valtrová, was born on January 14, 1934, in the town of Most in the north of Czechoslovakia. In 1953, she began to study psychology at Prague’s Charles University. This was also the place where she later met the psychologist, philosopher and famous catholic intellectual Jiří Němec. They got married on July 2, 1955, and had seven children together. After a short time of relative freedom in the second half of the 1960s, the armies of the Warsaw Pact came to occupy Czechoslovakia. Mr. and Mrs. Němcovi took their children, borrowed a Trabant from a family friend and left the country in the summer of 1968. They went to Austria to wait and see how the situation would develop. They feared that the regime might start arresting “elements hostile to the socialist ideology.” But it turned out that there was no reason to be afraid and they came back home. Then the normalization started. In the beginning of the 1970s, the married couple came closer to the underground community – the young musicians who resigned at a professional career. When the communist apparatus began to criminalize the members of the group “The Plastic People of the Universe” and other underground musicians and when a trial with them was held in 1976, it was the Němcovi spouses who stepped out in support of those arrested. They tried to gather support among famous personalities of Czech science and culture who were against the regime as well. Charter 77 was actually born from the support of The Plastic People of the Universe and Dana and Jiří were among the first people who started it and signed it. Their signatures under the Charter 77 had immediate consequences. Dana Němcová was summoned by the police to her first interrogation in Ruzyně on January 14, 1977, her birthday. What followed was dismissal from work (Jiří Němec suffered the same – since 1977 he worked as a night watch), house searches, other rounds of interrogations and constant bullying. In spite of all of this, Dana Němcová and some of the other signatories of the Charter 77 founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted only one year after signing the Charter. The purpose of the Committee was to document the cases of persecution and to report on them abroad. In 1979, Mrs. Němcová was arrested and spent half a year in custody. In October of the same year, she was conditionally sentenced for the subversion of the republic. Jiří Němec was arrested for a couple of months in 1980. He went into exile a few years later. In January 1989, when the week of Jan Palach started, Dana Němcová was arrested when she went to lay flowers to the St. Wenceslas Memorial as a speaker of the Charter 77. After the November 1989 Revolution, she became a deputy of the federal parliament for a short time, then she chaired the board of directors of the Committee of the Good Will of Olga Havlová and she worked in the Advisory center for refugees. In 1990, she won the award of the international peace movement “Pax Christi.” Eight years later she received the Presidential Medal of Merit and in 2000 she won the Austrian Central-European Award. In 2013, Dana Němcová received the Prize of the Memory of Nations.
