I met my husband Jiří Veltruský in Strasbourg

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Jarmila Veltruská was born on 22 June 1937 in the family of diplomat Adolf Jan Maria Felcman, who worked at the Czechoslovak embassy in London after the war. After 1948, he refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and remained in England with his family. Jarmila Veltruská graduated from high school in England and studied medieval theatre at university. She met her future husband, Jiří Veltruský, at a summer course at the Free European University in Strasbourg. In 1959, she moved to Paris, where she first helped her husband as a translator and interpreter from English. Veltruský worked for the international trade union movement, writing articles on the situation in Eastern Europe and Czechoslovakia for the Voice of America and French radio. They lived in New York in the 1960s for a while, then returned to Paris. Jarmila Veltruská is an internationally renowned expert on Czech medieval theatre.