I’ve had to keep my mouth shut for most of my life
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Hana Hewanická, née Kahlová, was born on March 21, 1943 in Dresden as the first of two children of Rosemarie Kahl and Hynek Varmuž. Her father was Czech, her mother German, and they met in a spa house in Dresden, where they worked as a barber and a pedicurist. They had to apply for permission to marry, it took place on December 16, 1943, after Hana’s birth. She then took her father’s surname - Varmuzová. The family spent the bombing of Dresden in 1945 with her mother’s family in Colmnitz. However, her mother’s eldest sister Frieda and her family perished in Dresden. In 1946, at the time of the ongoing expulsion of the Germans, father decided to return to his native Olomouc. From an early age, Hana experienced a distance from her surroundings because of her origins. She was not allowed to visit her mother’s family until 1953, when she discovered that she still had a half-brother, Günter. She trained at the Textile Trade Apprenticeship School based in Prostějov, then worked in a clothing shop in Olomouc and then in the inventory group of the same company. Between 1964 and 1967 she graduated from the evening school of economics. In 1966 she met her future husband Karel Hewanický, a violinist of the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, whose father had to be deported as a German after the war. They married in 1967 and a year later went to Stavanger, Norway, where her husband got a musical engagement. In 1970 their son Karel was born. In 1974 they had to return to Czechoslovakia, the husband had an old mother there who could not cope with their emigration. Until 1989 they were followed and persecuted by the State Security, the regime treated them as undesirables. In 2025, both spouses were still living in Velká Bystřice, where they settled after their return from Norway.
