Anna Kofferová

* 1945

  • "The Prague Spring was a hope that this would change. So we put our hopes into it that we would live in a freer country. Then there was the invasion. I have to say we thought about emigrating, but I felt it was such a betrayal to leave. There was still some hope that things could be changed. My husband said, 'Don't be stupid.' He was right. We ended up leaving, we left already at the end of August."

  • "Before we left, we had a little room in the attic in Nusle, we were happy to be able to live somewhere, and we burned papers from KAN [Club of Committed Non-Partisans] there. We had to open the dormer. I remember, to make sure nobody got their hands on it, the list of KAN members, so we burned it. The smoke was coming out of the dormer and we were like, 'Is the police coming?'

  • "I lived through the invasion in Russia. I felt the incredible misinformation that prevailed there. Everybody was saying to us, 'What are you doing there? They were already so exposed to the misinformation... We were out in the woods somewhere for mushrooms at four in the morning and there I heard from Free Europe that there was an invasion. The Russians, these young doctors, were saying: 'Tanks in Prague? We have that here all the time. They sympathised with us, but they didn't take it as tragically as we did. We took the first plane back on August twenty-fifth. So I've seen it here."

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    Praha, 21.02.2023

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I lived through the invasion in Russia

Anna Kofferová in 1965
Anna Kofferová in 1965
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Anna Kofferova, née Gutmann, was born on 24 November 1945 in London. Her parents, Amalie and Arnošt Gutmann, left for Great Britain in March 1939, and as Jews they avoided the tragic fate that would probably have awaited them in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A large part of their families did not survive the Second World War. After graduating from twelve years of school in 1963, the witness applied to the Faculty of Science at Charles University. In 1964 she married Peter Koffer. Together, during the Prague Spring, they joined the Club of Committed Non-Partisans (KAN). In 1968, she successfully completed her studies in biochemistry. After a chance invitation from a Russian colleague, she and her husband lived through the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops in the Soviet Union. After returning to Czechoslovakia, they decided to emigrate. They left for West Germany on 31 August 1968 and after a fortnight travelled to the UK. They settled in London. They were convicted in absentia in Czechoslovakia in 1972 for the crime of leaving the republic and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. In 1981 they renounced their Czechoslovak citizenship, which enabled them to visit Czechoslovakia regularly. In 1987, the witness divorced Petr Koffer. In 1990 she regained her Czechoslovak citizenship. Since 2021 she has lived in Wales, where her two sons also live.