Zora Urbanová

* 1927

  • “Mainly, I couldn’t at all come to terms with the fifties. That’s why I kept sitting at those trials with Slánský, that’s why I was under the influence of my aunt and Bruce Lockhart... Bruce Lockhart was a London commentator whom we listened to. And my aunt was strongly pro-Masaryk [Masaryk was the first Czechoslovak president - trans.]. Her husband had been a captain of the Castle Guard, and they had spent much time near Masaryk in Lány [the president’s summer residence - trans.]. So my aunt tried to lead me in a different direction. Then suddenly I was at the Social Faculty, which was not to my aunt’s liking. My opinions were such that I didn’t like what I saw at school. My aunt said that in that case I should leave the school, but I said if I didn’t stay, I wouldn’t have any job opportunities at all. My father was also unemployed, because they had banned him from practising law in 1948. Then I gave birth to my son, and I stayed with him at home for four years, and then I worked. I was given a break from ideology in 1968, because they threw me out of the Party. And so I gave up all efforts to build my career. I just didn’t build it.”

  • “I attended school in Norbertov with girls whose fathers were unemployed, they were poor, lived in awful conditions, the children even went to school without any underwear, and already back then I sensed it was pretty strange. We had a Swiss family living in our street, which started taking presents to the poor children at school. I started advancing the idea in our family, that I would do that as well. I have one strong memory - on St Nicholas Day, the children were given brooms festooned with sweets. I took one broom with sweets to school, to give it to one girl, because I knew for sure that she wouldn’t get any. But when I came to school with the broom, Tonička wasn’t there. Her father had committed suicide in the forest that day. He was an unemployed father of eight children, and he didn’t know what to do any more. That was my first strong impression that our society was strange.”

  • “Vanguard, that was a group of enthusiastic young people. They were ardent Communists, young Communists, perhaps naive Communists. But during the war, I guess the young generation of today should know, Communists weren’t traitor, collaborators, or dolts. Those were people who believed that the system that created the economic crisis and all those problems was not good, and they wanted to change it. And I sometimes can’t understand young people who don’t understand this. They think - you’re despicable because you sympathised with the Communists. However, I didn’t sympathise with the methods. But I did believe that society should be more just.”

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    Praha 6, 25.02.2017

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I believed that society should be more just, I didn’t believe in the methods of the Communists

Zora Kopacova (Urbanova) 1946
Zora Kopacova (Urbanova) 1946
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Zora Urbanová, née Kopáčová, was born on 25 January 1927 in Prague, into the family of the lawyer František Kopáč and Emilie Kopáčová, a teacher. She has a brother, Zdeněk, who is one year her junior. Although she grew up in a well-to-do family, she was confronted with the circumstances of her peers from poor families already as a child - which formed and deepened her social sensitivity. Through various friendships, such as with Stanislav Neumann, who cooperated with the Communist anti-Nazi group Předvoj (Vanguard), she became familiar with the Communist ideals, but she felt herself to be a social democrat. In the end, she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1948, following pressure by Communist functionaries, when she was in the third year of her studies at the Social Faculty of the University of Politics and Society. They claimed that she would not be allowed to graduate otherwise. She completed her studies in 1950 and married her classmate Luděk Urban. She could not come to terms with the show trials and methods of the Communists in the 1950s, and so she preferred to stay at home with her children until 1962. She was never an ardent Communist, unlike her husband, with whom she often quarrelled about politics. In the end they were both expelled from the Party in 1968. Zora Urbanová lost her chance for an associate professorship, but some time later she was allowed to continue lecturing on the history of economics at the University of Economics, where she remained until her retirement in 1989. Her husband was expelled from the Academy of Sciences after 1969, and his publication ban pushed him to publish academic articles under the names of his friends. Her brother Zdeněk was a film director.