She retyped thousands of pages of literary, historical and political texts.
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Jana Pešková, née Smejkalová, was born in Uherské Hradiště on 5 September 1943. She had a half-brother from her father’s first marriage. Both parents were primary school teachers. Her father joined the Communist Party in 1948 and remained member until his death in the 1980s. Soon after the war, the family moved from South Moravia to Lhotka near Ostrava where Jana Pešková completed primary school and Matiční Grammar School. She witnessed 1950s’ Ostrava, a communist bastion where the regime did its best to support its elite proletarian force - miners and metallurgists - both financially and materially. In 1960, Jana Pešková joined the literary editorial staff of Czechoslovak Radio Ostrava, working with writer Jan Drozd among others. The members of the editorial team promoted new types of cultural programmes and content in literary and dramatic broadcasts during the 1960s’ thaw. She married astronomer Ivan Pešek from Prague in 1965. In the capital, she worked again at Czechoslovak Radio and met literary critic Jan Lopatka and journalist Jiří Lederer. At the radio station in Vinohradská Street, she experienced the August 1968 invasion and the onset of normalisation. Due to the changed working conditions and the return of former Stalinists to their posts, she left the radio in the autumn of 1969. She started working as a secretary at the Engineering Information Institute, at which she again met Jan Lopatka, who drew her into working on samizdat. From the early 1970s onwards, Jana Pešková retyped and organized the publication of various illegal publications, mainly in the Expedice range led by Ivan Havel. After the establishment of Charter 77, she took part in disseminating of Charter 77 and VONS documents. She usually typed at night and handed the texts over in secrecy. Based on arrangement with Charter signatories around Václav Havel, she did not sign the Charter 77 declaration in order not to attract the attention of the State Security and to be able to continue her work for samizdat publishers. She retyped thousands of pages of literary, historical and political texts. After 1989, she was employed in office jobs at the College for the Promotion of Science and Technology, the Centre for Theoretical Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, the Institute for the Protection of Personal Data and, in the final years before her retirement, at the Office of the Government. Jana Pešková received an award as a participant in the anti-communist resistance.