Eva Vaňková

* 1930

  • "Our political debates were very unpleasant; at first, dad would try, in a very friendly way, to explain the dialectical materialism to me, and how important and fair a concept it is. I disagreed, so we would argue, and it was ugly. Then, when I fled, it must have been a big blow for dad, personally and politically as well, of course. When I learned about the trial, I lived with the notion that maybe I had caused it all - dad being a member of the group - for a long time. Now, years later, I understand that it had nothing to do with that, because by then, the trial must have been prepared and the people chosen - and not because an eighteen-year old girl left the country for a boy - but because they needed a big trial."

  • "All in all, thinking about other refugees I talked to who crossed the borders with rifles in their hands and dogs chasing them, the way that I fled was luxury. Later, I was lucky again because I got to a refugee camp in Nuremberg, and I had been there for about three months when Radio Free Europe started recruiting people. They were looking for employees; a group of young Czech people came there and started interviewing us, young university students at the time, and they hired a big group of us. They took us to Munich right away and gave us decent accommodation. Then they determined who would do what; I couldn't do much, really, so they made me the announcer for what they called the 'continued'.

  • "Running away as an entire family and leaving dad was totally impossible at the time. I had an opportunity to go abroad, so in January 51, I left home. My father was the Czechoslovak Republic's Ambassador to East Germany at the time. The Berlin Wall was not there yet, and I was very lucky to go to visit dad in Berlin for Christmas. I packed a little suitcase, stole some money from dad's purse, took a cab, and went over to Germany's west zone."

  • "At the time, we would have lived like the gilded youth, rather than go to Komsomol. That was foreign to us. We tried to live the life of normal young people between 1945 and 48. The political situation kept deteriorating all the time. We were also quite philosophical at the time. We were sixteen years old, we knew everything and discussed everything. We decided to live as allies to America, to be Anglophiles. We had our minds set on this and Soviet Union and leftists didn't fit with our vision at all. We wore US flags on our coats, which must have made our dad really 'happy'."

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I wanted to let it be known that not everybody in our family was a communist

Vankova orez.jpg (historic)
Eva Vaňková
zdroj: foto A. Jelínková

Eva Vaňková, née Fischlová, was born the first of two daughters to a Czech-Jewish family in 1930. Her father Otto Fischl was of Jewish origins, and her mother was catholic. The father was a lawyer and the mother was a housewife. In 1939, the father had to quit his business for racial reasons and the family was considered to be racially mixed. The father and both daughters escaped deportation to the Terezín ghetto thanks to a doctor who confirmed the father to be incapable of transport. The father had been in touch with artistic - primarily left-wing avant-garde - circles before the war, and after the war he joined the Communist Party and embarked on a political and diplomatic career. Eva Vaňková and her younger sister Helena (married Kosková) were, by contrast, strongly anti-communist in their views. The father was the ambassador to the GDR between 1949 and 1951. Eva Vaňková emigrated to the West via Berlin when on a trip to meet her father in East Germany. Her father was arrested in June 1951, prosecuted as part of the Rudolf Slánský trial, and executed in December 1952. In exile, Eva Vaňková worked with Radio Free Europe, lived in Germany and Switzerland, and relocated to the US with her husband in 1957; she still lives in the US.