Anna Fodorová

* 1946

  • "When I was about 14 years old, I suddenly looked around. I wasn't comfortable with everything that was going on politically. I began to show strong anti-communist doubts. And we had terrible arguments at home. There were terrible arguments about politics, but I didn't have any arguments. I grew up here, I was a child. My parents were journalists, so they always had arguments. So then it always ended up with me crying... And they told me they couldn't argue with me because I was like a child. Or the arguments ended with my mother shouting at me, 'Show me a fairer regime!' What did I know, what was a fairer regime? I didn't know anything like that."

  • "My father was sick all his life. He had a chronic liver disease, so he got sick around that time, somehow shortly after [my mother's] arrest. I had to be looked after by some people, strangers. I don't know who they were. I have a vague recollection of being with some people in some room that I don't know. Maybe I was in bed with them. I don't know, and my father was lying in the hospital, and they were broadcasting the Slánský trial by amplifier. He was lying there and he heard them saying he was a spy for Tito. That's what he got from the radio. So he went and said he wanted to go to the police, that he wasn't and so on. I remember from when my mother was in prison. I didn't know what was going on with her. My father told me that he was working terribly hard, so he couldn't call us, or tell me anything, or visit me. It took fifteen months to arrest her."

  • "My parents did. I don't know if it was a mistake... My parents were Stalinists, and in 1948 Tito broke with Stalin because he wanted to build a different kind of socialism, and my parents actually emigrated to Bohemia. My father was very ill. My mother sent him to be treated because Yugoslavia was a completely broken country after the war. He would have died there, so somehow she sent him to Czechoslovakia through friends. And we went to visit him in 1948, and at that point Tito and Stalin parted ways. My father was very much on the fence. He didn't know what to do. They [my parents] decided to stay in Czechoslovakia. We just came to visit him and it was, I don't even know which, another emigration."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 09.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:58:28
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I was born to traumatized parents

Anna Fodorova, 1976
Anna Fodorova, 1976
zdroj: Labyrint publishing house

Anna Fodorova was born on 15 March 1946 in Belgrade to the writer and journalist Lenka Reiner and the doctor and writer of Yugoslav origin Theodor Balk. Both parents strongly identified with the communist ideology at a young age. Her mother, Lenka Reinerová, lived in Prague until 1939. She spent the period of the Nazi occupation in emigration. She lost all her relatives during the Holocaust. In 1948, her parents and two-year-old Anna moved from Yugoslavia to Prague. In the spring of 1952, her mother was arrested by State Security and spent the next fifteen months in pre-trial detention. Her father and Anna were deported to Pardubice, where Lenka worked as a glass and porcelain seller after her release. Later they were allowed to return to Prague. From 1956 they lived in Košíří, Prague. After graduating from high school, Anna studied at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague (VŠUP) under Professor Adolf Hoffmeister. In the summer of 1968 she stayed in Great Britain, where she was also experienced the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the five Warsaw Pact countries. Together with her partner, she decided to stay abroad and later legalised her stay in the West. In Prague, the normalization regime expelled Lenka Reiner from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and banned her from publishing. Anna studied film at the Royal College of Art in London. She made several animated films for children‘s television programmes. She lectured at Central St. Martin‘s College of Art. She has written several television scripts (for the BBC and Munich Television). In 2015 she published a novel The Training Patient (Czech: První terapie). In 2020 she published Lenka, a book about the last year of her mother‘s life, with Labyrint publishing house. She worked as a private therapist in London. With her husband Jan Mladovský, she raised her daughter Philippa. In 2022, she was still living in London, but regularly visited the Czech Republic.