Faith in freedom and patriotism brought her home twice
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Hana Palcová, née Škarpíšková, was born on 4 December 1946 in Prague- Bubeneč to a family of school teachers. When she only was six years old, her mother Zora died and her father Vladimír remarried. She studied at a secondary school focused on health services and, later, sociology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. In May 1968, she was invited to the United States for several weeks. There, at a university in Gainesville, she had the opportunity to share her experience of life in socialist Czechoslovakia by lecturing a group of political science students. Soon after her return home, she witnessed the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies. At the time she was working at a national arts agency called Pragokoncert, and later she worked as a curator for the Roma (then known as “Gypsy“) population. She came to know of the Charter 77, but her colleagues talked her out of signing it. Nonetheless, later, after losing her job and maintaining contact with the traveler Jiří Hanzelka, she would find herself under the purview of the communist State Security, and was subject to their investigations, during which she was threatened. She and her husband, Miloslav Palec, decided to emigrate. On Christmas 1979, Hana, along with their nine-year-old son, set out for Austria, where it wasn’t long before Miloslav met up with them. The found refuge with their Austrian friends that they had met before in Czechoslovakia. In June 1980, they went to the United States of America. From 1986 till 1996 the witness worked as a newscaster and editor in the Czechoslovak editorial office of the Voice of America radio station. In the 1990s, the family returned to their homeland.
