You have four children so they won´t put you in prison, I have tried this many times myself
Jana Dědečková, née Kučerová, was born on June 28th, 1951, in Ostrava Vítkovice. She comes from five children, her three older sisters are from her mother´s first marriage. Her mother Anna was a worker, her father Miloslav came from Prague where he taught maths at a secondary school. He could not do his job though; according to Jana he had been sentenced for political reasons and later he worked in mines in Ostrava. In 1955, being unable to cope any longer, he committed suicide. Her mother had to take care of all the children on her own. Jana was not accepted to the secondary school and at the age of 15 she started working in the labs of a factory producing coke fuel. In 1968, at the age of 17, she got pregnant and married. She lost the prematurely born twins and her other children were born in 1969 and 1975. She worked as an electrician, and completed her apprenticeship. The Russian occupation made her interested in politics, so she started opposing the regime. In 1979 both her mother and the father of her children died. Then she moved to Semily and worked as an electrician. There she met her second husband Milan and had two other children with him. At the end of the 1980s, she met people from Charter 77, namely Václav Benda. She and her husband were monitoring legal cases with the politically persecuted. They took part in anti-regime actions and on October 28, 1989, while attending one of them, the couple were arrested and transported to an interrogation in Mělník. They were released at midnight. Jana stayed politically active in Semily. In the early days of the velvet revolution, she initiated demonstrations and continued to bring printed materials from Prague. While the Civic Forum (Občanské forum) was being divided, she was present at the founding of the Civic Democratic Party organization (ODS) in Vítkovice in the Krkonoše Mountains. In 1991 she started running a private guest house with her husband there. In 2000, she was elected as a nominee by the Civic Democratic Party to the Czech Television Council. She supported the removal of the Czech TV general director Dušan Chmelíček and his replacement by Jiří Hodač at the end of this year. These events which became known as the Czech TV crisis continued with a strike by Czech TV employees and mass public demonstrations motivated by the fear of losing the independent public media. Jana Dědečková and all members of the Czech Television Council were removed from office at the beginning of 2001. Until 2004 she lived with her husband in Vítkovice in the Krkonoše Mountains. After selling the guest house, the couple moved to Příbram where they ran a photo atelier and photo lab till 2013. In the time of recording this interview, Jana Dědečková is retired and mainly takes care of her grandchildren. Until 2018, she ran the website Virtually.cz.