I was an imperialist child who ate away other people’s bread
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Jitka Chytráčková was born on 17 July 1946 in Prague as the second child of Marie and Karel Náprstek. Her father served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Britain as a navigator during the World War II. In 1948, when the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, the family decided to emigrate to England. They made the illegal night journey across the western border with their almost two-year-old daughter Jitka and her older brother. The crossing was extremely risky and threatened to be betrayed by a crying baby. The parents therefore carried with them tranquilizers. In the end, however, it was little Jitka who endangered the whole group and the parents decided to leave with only their son. The daughter was then taken care of by her grandmother in Turnov. After her grandmother’s death, the witness grew up in her uncle’s family with her cousin, whom she thought of as a sister. Her parents tried to get her to England through the Red Cross, but the attempt failed. The witness remembers her adolescence in Czechoslovakia fondly, and could not imagine going to London to see her family. Various people, she says, kept a protective hand over her, and so, even with the cadre assessment that accompanied her, she graduated from the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport at Charles University. She did not see her parents until she was 22, when she first went to London to visit them. She returned to Czechoslovakia just one day before the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops. She was not allowed to attend her father’s funeral in 1987. She was active in sports all her life, and was also involved in sports at the scientific level and in her professional career. She married after graduation, and she and her husband raised a daughter and a son. Her brother, seven years older, still lives in Scotland, and they occasionally visit each other. At the time of recording in 2025, Jitka Chytráčková lived in Turnov.
