"I just attended what I was interested in [at the University of Vienna]. Actually, I was completely free. They did have the scholarship. It was almost funny... The prize was given by the rector of the university, so the scholarship was with the rector. When I got there, I went to the rector's secretary and said, 'I'm so-and-so, the one who has been writing to you since 1984 that I cannot come, yet I'm here now.' They knew because I had written to them beforehand. She said, 'Yes, we've got the scholarship for you,' and she went to the wall and there was a hidden vault in the wall with wallpaper over it. She opened it and took out cash equal to the scholarship and gave it to me, and that was it."
"So, since I was not more than 14 years old, I was quite strongly involved in matters completely outside the school and related to the underground or alternative culture of the time, whether it was through my parents and their friends, or writers and others. Dad subscribed to Petlice from the beginning. Ludvík Vaculík came to our house almost every week or fortnight. And of course when the Charter started in early 1977, everything changed suddenly. It was a full sea change because all those people who had been more or less hidden away or somewhere out of sight started to become active. The Charter documents were disseminated, as were the VONS [Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted] documents, and, for my entire childhood - my early memory too - we listened to the radio. The Voice of America, every hight at nine o'clock: 'It's just three o'clock in the afternoon in Washington,' that was all through the 1980s."
"My parents both worked, as was common under the old regime, and so my elder brother was put in a nursery, poor thing, and then in kindergarten. They saw he wasn't doing very well, so when I was born they didn't put me in a nursery or kindergarten and found me a babysitter. So my childhood was like, I had parents, I had background in South Bohemia for the summer, and during the week I actually grew up with this nanny or babysitter, or 'auntie' as we called her. She was an elderly lady who also came from South or Southwest Bohemia near Horažďovice. She spoke that dialect and I spent whole days with her, morning to afternoon. My parents would pick me up in the afternoon and then I would be home again. That was before I went to school. She taught me how to write and read even before school, and she was such a warm-hearted lady, and I'm grateful to have grown up in such environment."
Filip Karfík was born in Prague on 6 April 1963 to Věra née Kronusová and Vladimír Karfík. Both parents had graduated in Czech studies. The witness has brother Jakub (*1959). He saw the invasion of Czechoslovakia by “friendly forces” in August 1968. He started school in Prague in September 1969. With the onset of normalisation, his father lost his job in Literární noviny, which was closed, and worked with Stavební geologie as a pumper. His mother was fired from the Faculty of Journalism and worked at the Pedagogical Research Institute. The family lived a cultural life. Writer Ludvík Vaculík brought volumes of the samizdat edition Petlice, and they were friends with artist and poet Jiří Kolář. In 1978, the witness went to the Budějovická Grammar School. They studied French and Latin in the humanities class, and he took up Sanskrit in the language school. He went to Daniel Kroupa’s apartment seminars, then to Petr Rezek. He graduated in 1982 and worked as a security guard at the Loreta in Hradčany. He translated, published in the samizdat magazine Kritický sborník and contributed to the publication of Jan Patočka’s writings. From 1985 he studied classical philology (Greek and Latin) at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 1988, after three years, he was granted a scholarship in Vienna. In November 1989 he became an active member of the strike committee of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. After the Velvet Revolution, he and wife Lenka studied in universities in Vienna, Paris, Munich, Geneva and Münster. He earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1996 at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and was appointed associate professor of philosophy in 2004. In 2002-2004 he was Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and in 2008-2010 he was Director of the Institute of Greek and Latin Studies. In 2009 he was appointed Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland. He has also lectured at the Universities of Lausanne and Bern and has read separate lectures at other universities in Europe, South Korea and the USA. Since 1992, he has been involved in the Oikoumené editing program and was a founding member of the publishing house of the same name, where he worked from 1996-2018. He translates philosophical literature from French, German, English, Latin and Ancient Greek. Filip Karfík lived in Prague in 2025.
