Police pressure forced us to emigrate to Austria in 1981
Download image
Zuzana Richterová was born on 20 February 1948 in Brno. Her father was an agricultural engineer and a moderate member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, while her mother taught at the grammar school in Královo Pole. Her older sister Sylvie became a well-known writer, living in Italy since the early 1970s. At primary school Zuzana Richterová was a member of Pioneer and also of the then dogmatic organzsation Geographical Society “On the Roads of the Homeland”, where she first began to question communist ideology and the ways of educating youth. After graduating from grammar school, she was accepted to study sociology at the Faculty of Arts in Brno. There she was caught up in the August 1968 occupation and later in the normalisation. Just after the arrival of Soviet tanks, her father suggested that they go to Yugoslavia, where her mother was staying, and then emigrate together. However, because of a serious realtionship, she turned down this offer and stayed in Czechoslovakia. During their studies, she and her friend and psychology student Aleš Křehulka committed themselves against the new conditions. In the autumn of 1970, they both became involved in the distribution of illegal leaflets calling for a boycott of the local elections. The action was organized by their friend Jan Šabata, after whose arrest Zuzana Richterová and her boyfriend were taken to the Bohunice custody on 9 November 1970. She spent several months in detention and was released in May 1971. The trial took place in July 1972 in Brno and about fifty defendants stood trial. The prosecutor had asked for two years of unconditional imprisonment for Zuzana Richterová for sedition and subversion of the republic, but in the end she was given a suspended sentence of five years. Like her future husband, she was expelled from her studies. After getting married, the couple had two daughters, and she supported herself as a cleaner and social worker. In 1977, she and her husband signed Charter 77 and continued to participate in the activities of the Brno dissent by spreading samizdat, organizing apartment theatres and seminars and lectures for persecuted intellectuals. Because of her signing of Charter 77, Richter was again expelled from her studies, which she was allowed to resume after her five-year suspended sentence had expired. Police pressure, fears for the future of their children, and the impossibility of studying forced both spouses to decide to emigrate to Austria in 1981. In Vienna, Zuzana Richterová completed her studies in sociology and, like her husband Aleš, computer programming, which she did until her retirement in 2008. She was awarded as a participant in the anti-communist resistance.