The totalitarian regime was not only cruel, but it was also dull and silly
Stáhnout obrázek
Zora Dvořáková, nee Růžičková, was born on 15th December 1934 in Kladno where her father worked as an official at the YMCA. When the communists took over Kladno after February 1948, the family got into a very difficult situation. At the end of her studies at the grammar school, two hours before the graduation exam, Zora was told that her family would be evicted from their flat. After the graduation exam, she passed the entrance exams to the philosophical faculty but wasn‘t accepted because of the political background of her family. She was finally accepted on a fourth attempt. In the meantime she worked as a teacher. After her studies, she worked in the department for care of historical monuments. She participated on a whole range of exhibitions, including the memorial of Karel Čapek at Strž. In the early 60s she married a former political prisoner Vladimír Dvořák, sentenced for helping Petr Zenkl escape from the country. Her husband helped to establish the club of political prisoners K 231 in 1968. In the beginning of the normalisation period, they both lost their jobs. Zora took her employer to court and she won the trial. Thanks to the fact that she didn‘t have the label of a politically untrustworthy person, she was allowed to publish during the normalisation (mainly in the Melantrich publishers). After 1989, she became one of the leading scholars researching the life of Milada Horáková. She is active in the Confederation of political prisoners, in the club of Milada Horáková and in the Edvard Beneš association. She has published over 20 academic papers, mostly on history and the history of art.
