As Christians we were supposed to have all the rights under the constitution, but they were not granted to us
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Karla Schwarzová, later Trojanová, was born on October 15, 1931 into the family of Jindřich Schwarz, an employee of a state bank, and Karolina Schorelová, a teacher of students with visual impairments. In her childhood she attended Catholic religious education and the Scout organization, later she converted to evangelicalism. During her high school years, she attended the YMCA, a Christian academic association, where she met her future husband, Jakub Trojan. In 1955, both she and her husband graduated from the Comenius Theological Faculty, and together with him she went to the West Bohemian village of Kdyně, where Jakub Trojan obtained a position as a pastor. Through her husband’s activities, she got to know a circle of evangelicals from the so-called New Orientation Association. Between 1967 and 1991 she worked in the ECCB congregation in Kostelec nad Labem, where she first served as a vicar and later as a parish priest (from 1970). In connection with her husband’s contact with Jan Palach and later his signing of Charter 77, she experienced persecution by the communist regime at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s (house searches, increased surveillance by the church secretaries). She is the mother of Blanka Zlatohlávková, a leading Czech neonatologist, and Pavel Trojan, former director of the Prague State Conservatory. In 1992 she retired and moved to Prague with her husband.
