Olga Havlova
And now it's time for this week's edition of Czechs in History, and today Nick Carey looks at a recent figure in Czech history, the first wife of President Vaclav Havel, Olga Havlova, who died at the end of January 1996...
and a devoted wife, companion and advisor to President Vaclav Havel. A strong and individual character by all accounts, and incidentally a lover of alternative music, including Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.
Olga Havlova was born July 11th, 1933 in the working-class neighbourhood of Zizkov. Because her family was poor, she had a tough, but happy, childhood. From an early age she contributed to her family's meagre income with part-time jobs while she was at school. After she completed high school, she worked for the shoe manufacturing company Bata, and worked at various jobs over the next few years, including as an accountant, a shop saleswoman and a stores manager.
She met her future husband, Vaclav Havel, in 1956, and after eight years together, she married him in 1964. In 1961, she became an usherette in the Na Zabradli Theatre, where Havel also worked, and where some of his plays were performed.
After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries in 1968, she was always at Havel's side as an active member in the struggle against the oppressive nature of the period of normalisation at the beginning of the 1970s. She was one of the first signatories of Charter 77, and one of the founding members of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Oppressed in April 1979, which published information about unjust judicial procedures in Communist Czechoslovakia. Vaclav Havel was arrested in May 1979, and after a fairly weak show trial, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. I spoke to the director of the Olga Havlova Foundation, Milena Cerna, who first met Olga Havlova in 1966, and asked her how Olga coped with this situation:
During his time in prison, Vaclav Havel wrote many essays in the form of letters to his wife, which have since been published. Havel himself said later that Olga was his lifeline while in prison. These letters were heavily censored by the prison authorities, and for most part there is little emotion in them, but here is an excerpt where we see a little of the importance that Havel attached to writing to his wife:
"First, something about my letters to you: writing them is always the most important event of the week for me, and it's a small ceremony. First I discharge my weekend duties, then I wait for the moment that is relatively the quietest. I try, if possible, to attain a state of inner harmony, and then I seek out the quietest corner where I set up my writing camp, and once there I leave only in cases of direst need." Olga was not just an inspiration for Havel when he was in prison, she was also much more, as Milena Cerna told me:
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Olga Havlova was involved in Samizdat publishing, whereby she would physically type out copies of banned books for friends, and she was a member of the editorial board of the dissident magazine About the Theatre. She was involved in such dissident activities right up until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
After the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. He resigned in 1992 when parliament decided to split the country in two, and was then elected as the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993. I spoke to Ladislav Spacek, who has been President Havel's spokesman since 1992, and asked him how Olga Havlova adapted to the role of the Czech Republic's first First Lady:
In 1990, Olga Havlova founded the Committee of Goodwill, which was the first charity organisation in the Czech Republic, and tried to help other non-government organisations in their work. She added the Olga Havlova Foundation to this in 1992, and this charity works to help the disabled, the elderly and poor and orphaned children. As the Czech Republic's first First Lady, she put this position to good use in furthering her charity's cause:
All of those whom I spoke to about Olga Havlova praised her charity work and her immense generosity. Where did this come from?:
In 1994, Olga Havlova was diagnosed as having cancer. She underwent chemotherapy, and this seemed successful at first. At the beginning of December 1995, she was said to be in relatively good health, but her condition soon deteriorated. In late January, when it became inevitable that she was going to die, her husband took her home so that she could die surrounded by her loved ones. Olga Havlova passed away on January 27th, 1996. Ladislav Spacek commented on how she coped with her illness and how the Czech people reacted to news of her death:
