“My heroism was that I worked in health care.”
Hana Mejdrová was born July 7th, 1918 in Prague to a Czech-Jewish family. She graduated from a girls lyceum, and before the war, she studied three semesters of medicine. She was influenced by leftist, cultural avant-garde, and was involved in youth antifascist activities. Thanks to her international contacts, she succeeded in emigrating through Poland to Great Britain shortly before the outbreak of war. There, she had refugee status. After the opening-up of the British labor market, in conjunction with wartime, she worked in forestry in Wales. In the year 1941, she signed up as a nurse in a pavilion set up by the Czech Red Cross, located in the London’s Hammersmith Hospital, for soldiers and emigrants from Czechoslovakia. In Britain, she married a member of the Czechoslovak army. After the war, she returned to Czechoslovakia but did not continue studying medicine. Instead, an interest in history brought her to study the subject, and she dedicated herself to it professionally. In her research, she focused primarily on the history of leftist movements in the first half of the 20th century.
