Dana Němcová
Czech dissident persecuted by the Communist government
DANA NEMCOVA, who has died aged 89, was a prominent anticommunist Czech dissident, one of the signatories of the Charter 77 document and a close associate of the playwright, later president, Václav Havel.
She was one of the leading opponents of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime in the so-called “normalisation period” which followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the country’s rulers adopted a policy of “reluctant terror”, consisting, in theory at least, of the minimum amount of repression necessary to satisfy their Soviet patrons and prevent a return to Dubček-style reformism.
“The most tragic thing was that, unlike in the 1950s, when at least some people believed in communism as mankind’s good fortune, we were living in a period when people just adapted to pressure, fear and an instinct for selfpreservation,” Dana recalled. “The 1950s were destructive. It was simply a massacre, when the elite of the nation were wiped out. In the 1970s a less conformist person could expect a year in prison... However, it was a period of enormous demoralisation.”
Like other dissidents, Dana Němcová braved persecution. A mother of seven and a psychologist by profession, in 1979 she spent six months in detention and received a two-year suspended sentence for subversion. She was banned from practising as a psychologist and found work as a cleaner and caretaker.
She was born Dana Valtrová on January 14 1934 in Most, north Bohemia, where her parents were school teachers. In 1948, their region, as part of the Sudetenland, was annexed by Nazi Germany and the family fled to north-east Bohemia. During the occupation, as Dana’s father was a “person of interest” to the Gestapo, they faced constant harassment.
After leaving school, Dana taught in a junior school for a year then moved to Prague, where she studied clinical and child psychology at Charles University and met her future husband, Jiří Němec, a fellow student and Catholic scholar. They married in 1955 and had seven children in rapid succession.
After the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, they left for Austria and considered emigrating for good. But Jiri persuaded Dana that they had a moral duty to contribute to the resistance in their homeland and the Němec’s flat became a centre of the Prague underground as well as a “contact point” for people from the country wanting information on dissident activities.
As a result their flat was frequently raided by the secret police, but as Dana recalled: “We created a world within a world... We enjoyed lots of good times that compensated for the pressure and kept us going when it came to resisting.”
Dana Němcová came to the forefront of the dissident movement through her involvement in the signing of the Charter 77 human rights manifesto in 1977. When both she and her husband were imprisoned in 1979, their older children looked after the younger ones.
But by 1983 it had all got too much for Jiri, who yielded to pressure by the authorities to emigrate and moved to Austria. He wanted Dana to go with him but she decided to stay in Prague with the children. The marriage ended in divorce.
As communism began to crumble in the late 1980s Dana Němcová became one of the leading spokesmen for the Charter 77 group and in 1989 was detained after a demonstration.
After the “velvet revolution” she served briefly in the new democratic federal assembly, but left politics in 1992. Instead she set up an advice centre for refugees, playing a leading role in helping Bosnian refugees who fled the Bosnian war in the early 1990s to become part of Czech society.
Dana Němcová is survived by three daughters and two sons. A daughter and a son predeceased her.
Dana Němcová, born January 14 1934, died April 11 2023