As a nation, we can only stand together when things turn tough
Stáhnout obrázek
Ladislava Braná, née Gottwaldová, was born on March 16, 1957, in Prague. Her grandparents owned a house with a printing press on Mariánské Square in Prague. During the German occupation, her grandparents were imprisoned in concentration camps, where her grandmother died of untreated gallbladder inflammation. After the war, the communists confiscated their house and closed the printing shop, but they were allowed to live there until 1977, when the family was evicted to the unfinished Lhotka housing estate. The witness recalls the arrival of the occupying troops in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, when the facade of their house on Mariánské Square was shot to pieces. Ladislava Braná graduated from secondary medical school and worked her entire life as a nurse in company clinics and hospitals. She read samizdat, banned books, and listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. She resisted pressure to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 1980, she married Antonín Braný, an anti-regime photographer and teacher at Silesian University in Opava, with whom she has one daughter. In 1989, they participated in demonstrations during Palach Week and those in November 1989. In 2024, she lived in Malešice, Prague.