I cannot have anything in common with this regime
Eda Kriseová was born in 1940 in Prague and she grew up in the very center of the city where her mother had a sculptor‘s studio. During WWII they suffered from shortage of food and therefore they moved to the countryside. Eda faced problems with admission to a university after 1948 due to her personal-political profile. Only after certain time she was eventually accepted to study journalism. In the 1960s she worked in the Mladá Fronta daily and later in the Mladý Svět magazine. In 1968 she took part in a tour to Israel with a group of journalists and activists, and it was there where she learnt about the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. She was unable to get in touch with her husband and their little daughter at home. Eventually she managed to return home and she then began to collaborate with Ludvík Vaculík in the magazine Literární listy. However, the normalization regime banned its publication shortly after and Eda became forbidden from engaging in any kind of activity. She started writing fiction works for samizdat, she became part of the dissent community and she worked as a volunteer in a mental asylum. She was being under surveillance by the StB all that time and she regularly had to report for interrogations by the StB. During the Velvet Revolution she served as the spokesperson of Václav Havel and after his being elected the president she followed him to the Prague Castle. At first she worked there as an advisor for cultural affairs and later she was entrusted with dealing with petitions for pardons and complaints about injustice which the communist regime had caused to people during the past forty years. After the Velvet Revolution she was finally able to publish her books and to lecture all over the world.