PhDr., CSc. Libuše Šilhánová

* 1929  †︎ 2016

  • “I think I shall finish my talk with the following nice moment that I remember. I was standing on Wenceslas Square on the corner by the Melantrich building, on the corner of Wenceslas Square and Jindřišská Street, sorry, it was actually Vodičkova Street. I was standing there and watching the crowd and listening. Suddenly, Václav Havel was standing just next to me. I said: ‘Václav, please, who organized all that? Who did it...?’ Because it was amazing. And he just pointed his finger to the sky: ‘I’m not able to explain it myself, either...’”

  • “That was a nice story. We have a summer cottage and it is built on rocks. When you look out from the bathroom and the toilet, there is an abyss down there. A narrow abyss. There are rock pillars and the cottage is built on them. It is in Kokořín. What happened was that one day we were sitting outside in front of the cottage and my husband came down from the garden and he said to me: ‘Libuše, they are here, they are here, go and take it away.’ I had a package full of things, mostly magazines that had been sent from Vienna. My friend, the Charter signatory Dáša Vaněčková who lived in Austria, knew that there was a pub called ‘U Grobiána’ below our cottage. It occurred to her that it would not be a bad idea to send the package to the pub and write my name Libuše Šilhánová on it. She did it and we received a message that there was a big parcel for us in the pub. My son went there to fetch it and I had it in my room downstairs. And now my husband came, saying: ‘Libuše, they are here, put it away.’ I quickly grabbed the package and I threw it to the abyss behind the toilet. It landed on a cesspool which is there and it nearly fell inside, but we were safe and all the things that needed to be hidden stayed there. The men came inside and they did not find anything, anything at all, and they left annoyed and upset. My son, poor little thing, then had to climb into the abyss for the parcel, but luckily it had not fallen into the worst matter.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    u pí Šilhánové doma, 30.04.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 58:09
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 24.11.2015

    (audio)
    duration: 17:30
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 3

    Praha, 26.02.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 01:12:34
    media recorded in project Soutěž Příběhy 20. století
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

One should not be indifferent to what is happening in the public space

Libuše Šilhánová
Libuše Šilhánová
photo: Pamět Národa - Archiv

PhDr. Libuše Šilhánová, née Beranová, was born April 10, 1929 in Vrdy near Čáslav in a family of a doctor and nurse. In 1933 the family moved to Žehušice and from 1946 they lived in Chomutov where Libuše completed grammar school in 1948. After graduation she moved to Prague to study at the university, at first at the Pedagogical Faculty and later she studied philosophy, history and sociology at the Faculty of Arts. In 1951 she met her husband Věněk Šilhán (1927-2009). Their children - a son (1952) and twin daughters (1953) - were born while they were still students and Libuše thus had to handle her studies and care of three children. In 1957 while her husband was on a study stay in Leningrad and he was only coming to visit the family for short periods of time she began working as a teacher in Poděbrady. After her husband’s return the family returned to Prague where Libuše worked as a teacher and in 1960 she became employed in the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences. Věněk Šilhán was contributing to the preparation of the Czechoslovak economic reform in the 1960s. After the Soviet occupation in 1968 the so-called Vysočany Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia elected him the deputy to Alexander Dubček. Both Libuše and Věněk lost their jobs during the subsequent normalization period and the political purges. Věněk Šilhán had to quit his work at the University of Economics, Libuše left the Institute of Sociology and they were earning their living by doing manual work. Due to health reasons she was allowed to start working for prof. Matějček two years later and she took part in research on so-called unwanted children. Libuše and Věněk Šilhán have been participating in protests against the communist regime since 1969. In 1977 they took part in drafting the declaration of Charter 77 which they both signed. Between January 1987 and January 1988 Libuše accepted the role of the spokesperson for Charter 77, together with Jan Litomiský and Josef Vohryzek. In 1988 she actively took part in establishing the Czech Helsinki Committee. During the 1970s and 1980s the family lived under police surveillance, experiencing house searches and sometimes even imprisonment. Libuše Šilhánová participated actively in the events of November 1989 and after the fall of the Communist regime she continued with her work for the Czechoslovak (later Czech) Helsinki Committee and in 2007-2008 she served as its chairwoman. In 1999-2009 she was the editor of the magazine Human Rights (Lidská Práva). The publishing house Portál published her autobiographic book Reflections on the Life (Ohlédnutí za životem) in 2005. Libuše Šilhánová passed away on October the 10th, 2016.