Sun, water, air, and a clear conscience in my heart, that will be my God
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Anežka Borová, née Koudelová, was born on 9 June 1924 in Kutná Hora as the younger of two sisters. The Koudela family lived in a small settlement near Kutná Hora, which was called Velký Rybník (Big Pond), where her father worked as a dam keeper and also ran a pub with the help of the whole family. During the war the family hid two deserters from the Polish army for several months and helped escape over the borders. Anežka’s parents also divorced during the war, and the witness had to help her father with the pub, thus avoiding forced labour. After the Communist coup of 1948, her father lost his job, and so they moved to Prague. Anežka’s mother, remarried, lived in Malešov, where she got mixed up in the trial with the anti-Communist resistance fighter Josef Vaníček, and she ended up in prison for four years. Her husband Jan Dlouhý, a butcher, spent half a year in prison for buying cattle from farmers so that they wouldn’t have to give them to the local agricultural coop. The Dlouhýs lost their house and were bullied by the regime their whole life. Anežka Borová worked in Prague as a cook and a manager of company canteens and at the Restaurants & Canteens enterprise. The last seventeen years of her work life she was employed at the technical department of the Prague zoo. In 1978 she married the writer Josef Bor (1906-1979), of Jewish origin, whose original name was Josef Bondy. Her husband died a year after they married.
