She and her factory owner husband decided to flee to Austria within an hour in 1949
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Zdena Kolářová was born in Lomnice nad Lužnicí on 12 June 1923. Her father Jan Karaus fought near Zborov, was captured by the Bolsheviks and sentenced to hanging. He escaped and walked alone through the entire Russia for four years to Vladivostok from where he reached Europe. He arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1921 and worked as a warehouse manager in České Velenice. The witness’s mother was a housewife and the parents had two daughters. When České Velenice was annexed to the Reich, the family moved to Tábor where the father was executed during the Heydrichiad. Ms Kolářová finished grammar school in České Budějovice. She married wealthy South Bohemian furniture maker Ladislav Kolář after the war. They lived in the Kolář family residence in Velešín. In 1949, her husband was tipped off about a pending arrest. Within an hour, the couple decided to flee to Austria via Šumava. They left all their possessions in Czechoslovakia and started over as poor refugees in a camp in Vienna, then in Linz and Innsbruck where Mrs Kolářová got a job as a translator for the commander of the French occupation zone thanks to her knowledge of French. They left for the UK in 1951 and adopted two Czech children, two-year-old Vladimír and one-year-old Jiří, orphans left after émigrés (their father was shot crossing the border and their mother died in a London hospital). Mrs Kolářová worked for the Association of Czechoslovak Émigrées, then for the Czechoslovak office of the BBC from 1958 to 1985. In 1975, thanks to the support of the BBC management, she came to Czechoslovakia to deposit an urn with her husband’s ashes, who died in 1974. Zdena Kolářová lived with poet and journalist Ivan Jelínek until 2002. She died in the UK on 1 May 2019.