Ivana Reichlová

* 1955

  • “We were going home from the theatre; we lived quite close at the time. We were standing behind the barricade and we couldn’t cross the Národní třída. We had to walk via the Perštýn street into the Karolína Světlá street. Over the white helmets of the beating commando, we could see a sea of lit candles. We wouldn’t have made it anymore. But walking down Karolíny Světlé, which re-enters Národní třída, was equally impossible, because there were police wagons along with the policemen blocking off the street. And we could see that the demonstrators had already been surrounded.”

  • “Quite abruptly, I came to realise many things. Firstly, because me and my husband discussed them, but secondly because I had an almost unlimited access to books where I got my facts from. Finally, I was able to satisfy this incredible lust for knowledge and facts regarding the actual state of things. And it was only up to me to look at the times we were living in and make sense of the current development.”

  • “Judging by my grandmother’s life in the midst of her loved ones, she didn’t seem to bear any grudge after the war. On the other end, when they did mention the war, it must have been tough. People were really poor, and my mom used to say that it was really bad when they were growing up, they were starving, and grandmother and grandfather showed great perseverance in the struggle to survive the war. Grandma had many siblings, but because she married a Czech man, she was allowed to stay in Cvikov where they were living at the time. Her siblings were forced to leave though in the postwar expulsion. It wasn’t a death march like the one from Brno to Germany, but it was very sad. They were only allowed to take a fragment of their possessions and some stretches of the journey must have been particularly bad as people didn’t treat them nicely.”

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    Praha, 21.06.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:43:36
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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It is important to always have a future

Ivana Reichlová around 2007. Photo probably by Oldřich Škácha.
Ivana Reichlová around 2007. Photo probably by Oldřich Škácha.
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Ivana Reichlová, born on March 1, 1955, grew up in Cvikov in former Sudetenland in the north of the country. Her German grandmother was spared the post-war expulsion thanks to her marriage to a Czech man. The witness describes her childhood in the mountainous region as isolated, but happy. She first started to be interested in politics following the Warsaw Troops invasion on August 21, 1968, when her worldview started to diverge from that of her parents‘. After graduation from the grammar school in Česká Lípa, she trained as radiology assistant and started to work at the General University Hospital in Karlovo square in Prague. Her first marriage, in which her daughter Barbora was born, was not happy and she got a divorce. As a single mother, she struggled to make ends meet, worked at a library, and cared for her daughter. Later, she started working as assistant director and stage manager in Ypsilon Studio theatre, where she met her second husband Jiří Reichl. During the Velvet Revolution, she witnessed the Civic Forum meetings at the Ypsilon Studio. After her second daughter Anna was born, she worked at the Czech Bar Association. Between 2006–2011, she was working at Václav Havel’s Presidential Office. In 2022, she was living in Prague.