Alena Zikmundová

* 1928

  • "I think it helped me in a way that I was married and had children. Because I had five children in the 50s. [Born in] 1951, 53, 55, 57, 59. (It helped you because...) Because I wasn't working. So it didn't affect me so much. Of course, as far as it concerned ... Eva and I never ate meat, for example, because I didn't have time to stand in queues and Vojta had it in the factory canteen, the kids didn't need it. Obviously, one had to be very frugal compared to the way one lived there [in the USA]."

  • "It wasn't until April, 16 April, that was the Sunday when a lady who used to go [to the church] and her husband was a policeman, came to my grandmother in the church. They were completely taking over the whole [police] station at that time and they gave him a list of cards of the ones to arrest. And he saw that one of them was my dad. So he put it at the bottom and he told his wife to warn the family that it looked like this and that it would be a good idea for him to leave as soon as possible. So that was on Sunday. All of a sudden all these friends of ours - or dad's - got acting, and since there had to be a document or a confirmation from the Gestapo that they were letting us go - that was a tough proposition, because Dad hadn't been able to go through Germany since the Spanish War - but again there was a man at the French Embassy who told us at that time... or offered to try to get that signature. That he had done something for the Germans and that maybe they could do something for him. And so it really happened. On Tuesday we got confirmation from the Gestapo that we could leave."

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    Vizovice, 02.09.2022

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    délka: 01:34:29
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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It was easier to leave for America than to return from there

Alena Zikmundová with her children, 1950s
Alena Zikmundová with her children, 1950s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Alena Zikmundová was born on 20 March 1928 in Prague. Her father was a prominent Protestant theologian Josef Lukl Hromádka. In April 1939, after they learned that her father was in danger of being arrested, the family of four emigrated to the USA via Switzerland and France. While Hromádka lectured at the Presbyterian Seminary in Princeton, Alena graduated from the local high school and entered the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1945. However, she did not graduate, because two years later the family returned to Czechoslovakia. The left-oriented Hromádka was not one of the opponents of the communist regime and even after the February coup he was involved in official positions in the field of ecumenism or the peace movement. Alena decided to study Protestant theology in 1948, but did not graduate this time because of the birth of the first of her seven offspring. She and her husband, a physician, went to the northern Bohemian borderlands. In the 1960s she worked briefly in a kindergarten, but after 1968 she was no longer allowed to work with children. In the 1980s she worked in the Evangelical congregation in Vizovice and after the Velvet Revolution she finally graduated from the Evangelical Theological Faculty.