Our family was forced to emigrate before Charter 77
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Noemi Prečanová was born on May 21, 1958 in Levoč, Slovakia, but grew up in Prague, where she went to school and then to high school for two years. After 1968, her father, the well-known historian Vilém Prečan, fell out of favour with the regime, was thrown out of his job and supported his family on the salary of a worker and later a cloakroom attendant in a wine bar. Eventually, in 1976, he decided to emigrate to the West to what was then West Germany. Prečan’s family was the first to be forced to emigrate by the regime during the normalisation period, i.e. already a year before Charter 77 and the later “Asanace” action. Noemi Prečanová studied sociology in Frankfurt. Thanks to her father’s activities, she became personally acquainted with many representatives of the Czechoslovak exile, and she also regularly went to meetings in Franken. At the beginning of the 1980s she met the writer Lubomír Martínek and moved to Paris to join him. She made her living as a translator and interpreter, collaborating with Tigrid’s Svědectví, Lettre Internationale A. J. Liehm and the Czech BBC in London. She settled in Paris and has one son.
