“I had two immense moments: one was during the audience [with the pope]. The Holy Father spoke to us in Czech and Slovak, there were hundreds of thousands of people there, including Czechoslovak expats. When it ended, we went outside, everyone was crying, they hugged us and said: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be free too within the year.’ And it came to pass even sooner than that.
The second moment: we had a blind girl in our group, about 18 years old. On our way back, she looked completely transformed, radiant. We said it did her well. She told us how when the Holy Father finishes his audience speech, he comes down and walks among the faithful, blessing them, or giving out things. And when he approaches, people kneel. Because she was blind, she didn’t kneel. He understood why, blessed her, and gave her rosary beads. What she had experienced was reflected within her, you could read it in her face, it was utterly magnificent.”
“We went to the elections, those were our first elections in fact. We were quite a big group of friends from the Faculty of Law. We voted [in the polling station] in the Medical Faculty. We were really gearing up to go into the booth. We kept assuring each other we would. We didn’t want to avoid the vote, we considered it an honour that we had matured to that age. We went grouped up like that, and when we came there, there were several people from the faculty watching the polls. One of them walked up to us before we entered the room and told us he was warning us – they probably guessed why we were grouped up like that – that if we go through with it, it would have adverse consequences for us. We didn’t show any greater bravery than that, so we cast our votes, we didn’t go into the booth. I didn’t vote in the elections after that, we had the ballots at home, but I remember that first election.”
“I remember the first time I saw my father, I was five years old then, when my mother first took me to visit him. The visits occurred twice a year and took place near Ostrov nad Ohří. It was a special thing for me as a child. We travelled to Prague by train, then to Karlovy Vary, and then by bus. There were a lot of political prisoners from Brno, so the train was full of those families. It was an adventurous journey full of anticipation, because we never knew if any of the prisoners would happen to be ill or in the cooler and thus unable to meet the visitors. They had a wooden house on the hill above Ostrov. Lorries would drive up, political prisoners in gym suits standing in the open trailers, wrapped with rope. We all searched with our eyes to see if we would find our own one there, if we would meet him.”
Dagmar Lastovecká was born in Brno on 24 June 1951. Her father, the lawyer Zdeněk Kessler, was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1953 for high treason and espionage. He served his sentence in the Jáchymov uranium mines. He was released by amnesty in 1960. Dagmar Lastovecká attended the grammar school in Matyáš Lerch Street and then enrolled in the newly opened Faculty of Law in Brno in 1969. She met her future husband, Evžen Lastovecký, there. They married at the end of their studies, and they welcomed a son, Richard, in 1973 and a daughter, Nora, in 1975. Dagmar Lastovecká worked at the Czechoslovak State Bank and at Drupos, a union of housing cooperatives. In the first half of the 1980s, her husband fell ill with cancer and died. In 1989 she was elected as a non-party candidate to Drupos’ workers’ council. On 28 October 1989 she took part in a silent protest against the Communist regime in the streets of Brno; on 12 November that year, she had the opportunity to join a group of Catholics who travelled to the Vatican to witness the canonisation of Agnes of Bohemia. After the events of 17 November 1989, she was one of the founding members of the Civic Forum both in Drupos and in her city district. She was in the local polling committee for the 1990 elections and later sat in the Brno committee for minor privatisation. In 1991 she joined the newly established Civic Democratic Party (CDC) and served as a deputy to the Federal Assembly for several months in 1992, before the division of Czechoslovakia. In 1994 she ran for the Brno City Council on the CDC ticket and was elected Mayor. Four years later, she successfully ran for the office of Senator. In 2003 she was appointed a Judge of the Constitutional Court, where she remained until 2013.
Her father Zdeněk Kessler as Chairman of the Constitutional Court. Dagmar Lastovecká in her office at the Brno City Hall. Dagmar Lastovecká with Queen Elizabeth II. Dagmar Lastovecká with Václav Havel
Her father Zdeněk Kessler as Chairman of the Constitutional Court. Dagmar Lastovecká in her office at the Brno City Hall. Dagmar Lastovecká with Queen Elizabeth II. Dagmar Lastovecká with Václav Havel
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