Karla Trojanová

* 1931

  • "My husband had to figure out what had happened, taking your own life is not just like that... He wondered if it was suicide... Then he decided that it wasn't, he knew he was worried that the nation was sinking in the middle of all the protests and giving up on everything that had happened before and the hopes that the nation used to have... He knew it was definitely self-sacrifice (...) I agree with that, but if he had come to me and asked if he should do it, I would try to talk him out of it, it's on the edge." - "Was his act worth it?" - "I think it was. Because the biblical saying that though he died, he still speaks, is definitely valid in this case. That he was one of those who had something to say, and it showed during the Palach days, the student youth referred to him and the act spoke..."

  • "When I came back from Denmark a year before that, Mr Burian, who was probably a political worker, was working there [in the engineering plants in Kdyně] and he also organized all kinds of lectures for the workers. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went to visit the farmers’ cooperative and told me to tell something to the women in the chicken house. I asked what I was supposed to say. And he told me to talk about what I was reading at the moment. I was just reading something about ancient cultures, so I told them about that and they listened politely and then I learned from them what problems they had with the hens, that they just had a cold... And so Mr. Burian said that I could tell the workers something about Denmark and if I learned something about Danish workers... I told him that we had even brought a book where there were some percentages and what their working conditions and benefits were... and he said, that's great, bring that and tell them about it... And so I told them and it turned out that the Danish workers had much better conditions than ours and of course the workers talked about it and somebody heard it and it seemed to them that I was causing trouble in the engineering plants in Kdyně. When I moved out, they sent not a particularly positive message with me..."

  • "The members of the congregation were mostly workers, some had a small field, but mostly they lived in a house in the village or even in the small town [Kdyně] and went to work... they were very simple people. And loyal too. They were social democrats or communists. They said that the party gave them job security, that there would be no more lockouts, and the church, on the other hand, helped them spiritually. And later, when the conflict became more visible and they started to write in the newspapers that the church was something evil, something that didn't belong in the socialist world and would die eventually, they didn't understand it at all... They had a picture of Lenin and Stalin at home and a quote from the Bible on the wall next to it. For them, it was two sides of the same coin."

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    Praha, 09.11.2022

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    Praha, 23.11.2022

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    Praha, 23.01.2023

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As Christians we were supposed to have all the rights under the constitution, but they were not granted to us

A photo on the graduation board, April 1950
A photo on the graduation board, April 1950
zdroj: Contemporary witness's archive

Karla Schwarzová, later Trojanová, was born on October 15, 1931 into the family of Jindřich Schwarz, an employee of a state bank, and Karolina Schorelová, a teacher of students with visual impairments. In her childhood she attended Catholic religious education and the Scout organization, later she converted to evangelicalism. During her high school years, she attended the YMCA, a Christian academic association, where she met her future husband, Jakub Trojan. In 1955, both she and her husband graduated from the Comenius Theological Faculty, and together with him she went to the West Bohemian village of Kdyně, where Jakub Trojan obtained a position as a pastor. Through her husband‘s activities, she got to know a circle of evangelicals from the so-called New Orientation Association. Between 1967 and 1991 she worked in the ECCB congregation in Kostelec nad Labem, where she first served as a vicar and later as a parish priest (from 1970). In connection with her husband‘s contact with Jan Palach and later his signing of Charter 77, she experienced persecution by the communist regime at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s (house searches, increased surveillance by the church secretaries). She is the mother of Blanka Zlatohlávková, a leading Czech neonatologist, and Pavel Trojan, former director of the Prague State Conservatory. In 1992 she retired and moved to Prague with her husband.