For Dana Němcová
"If I'm going to my grave, then I might as well go worn-out," Dana Němcová used to say whenever she lit a cigarette. Her humor was as straightforward as she was, and she fulfilled that jocular "resolution" of hers sufficiently, in my opinion. In addition to a lot of joy, she also experienced moments that were quite cruel.
It has been written of her that the communists imprisoned her, but few detail how that was not all that happened. Her children were at home and the entire household was not just followed, but also constantly harassed by both the secret political police (State Security – the StB) and uniformed police. Her family and friends had the great good luck that their apartment in Ječná Street had become a center for dissidents and people from the underground before her imprisonment. She and her husband established a community of people from different corners of society, of different educational backgrounds – intellectuals, manual laborers, musicians, poets and boozers – despite the totalitarian regime.
If you have such an extended family, somebody will always care for the very young children. What was more painful for her, as she once told me, was that she herself could not be with her children, her family and her extended family, more than the mere fact that she wasn’t there to take care of them.
The communist regime did not just imprison Dana, it forbade her from being employed upon her release from prison in anything that might fulfill her. For that reason she became a cleaning lady or housekeeper. The post-1989 “justice” system dealt with this in an original way. Dana was awarded a monthly pension of about CZK 4,000 [EUR 170] at a time when even CZK 15,000 [EUR 630] would not have been enough. The people who had persecuted her and her family, the StB agents and highly-placed Bolsheviks in general, wallowed in the muck of their villas with pensions that were exponentially higher. Dana never complained about that, she bore such wrongdoing stoically. We, her friends and acquaintances, were the ones who were grousing about it.
Sometimes we even fought about it… although “fought” isn’t exactly the right word, because Dana did not really know how to fight. We explained our views to each other, in short. Once she offered me the opportunity to sign a petition against the death penalty where the reasoning involved various kinds of Christian wisdom, above all the idea that human beings do not have the right to take their fellow human beings’ lives because only God has that right. I refused to sign, explaining that Christian stereotypes are not my forté and that I am only against the death penalty because errors can happen and judicial murder can be the result. Otherwise I argued with my favorite Biblical saying, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Dana accepted differences of opinion and respected them, the most she did was to wave her hand and shrug her shoulders.
She was a psychologist, but that wasn’t essential. She would have been a psychologist even if she had never been educated as one, she knew how to negotiate with people like nobody else. That first became clear in her work with refugees at the Czech Helsinki Committee’s Counseling Center for Refugees (which later worked independently, apart from the committee). She worked for many long years there, from the first wave of refugees from Bosnia and then from Kosovo during the first half of the 1990s through the Chechen and Afghan wars to the people fleeing authoritarian regimes or war in Syria or African countries.
Migrants gradually arrived in our country from other Asian and African countries and the Czech state always treated them like a suspicious stepmother would (with the exception of the first Bosnian wave, when the refugees were treated normally). Dana was a good negotiator with people from the Interior Ministry, specifically the people in the Department for Refugees, where most of the staff were hardened Czech nationalist xenophobes, starting with their boss, Tomáš Haišman. Many refugees who were in really bad shape, especially psychologically, needed some kind of intercession on their behalf. Naturally, all who worked in the counseling center were selfless in helping these people, but it was exactly Dana who was a security and an anchor for all their work.
Every once in a while, the group would meet at the home of one of the people participating (taking turns) and they were mostly Christians, but my wife Vera and I used to go there too, which shows once again how Dana could bring people together and create bridges between diverse opinions. I got to know her better than I had before there. She was empathic, wise, kind, friendly and respected others, but she was also practical – she knew how to “get things done”.
I have known a few genuine angels in my life, disguised as human beings, all of them women, and Dana belonged among them and still inextricably does. I am 100 % for the angels, I have always loved them very much.
