I was born to traumatized parents
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Anna Fodorova was born on 15 March 1946 in Belgrade to the writer and journalist Lenka Reiner and the doctor and writer of Yugoslav origin Theodor Balk. Both parents strongly identified with the communist ideology at a young age. Her mother, Lenka Reinerová, lived in Prague until 1939. She spent the period of the Nazi occupation in emigration. She lost all her relatives during the Holocaust. In 1948, her parents and two-year-old Anna moved from Yugoslavia to Prague. In the spring of 1952, her mother was arrested by State Security and spent the next fifteen months in pre-trial detention. Her father and Anna were deported to Pardubice, where Lenka worked as a glass and porcelain seller after her release. Later they were allowed to return to Prague. From 1956 they lived in Košíří, Prague. After graduating from high school, Anna studied at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague (VŠUP) under Professor Adolf Hoffmeister. In the summer of 1968 she stayed in Great Britain, where she was also experienced the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the five Warsaw Pact countries. Together with her partner, she decided to stay abroad and later legalised her stay in the West. In Prague, the normalization regime expelled Lenka Reiner from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and banned her from publishing. Anna studied film at the Royal College of Art in London. She made several animated films for children’s television programmes. She lectured at Central St. Martin’s College of Art. She has written several television scripts (for the BBC and Munich Television). In 2015 she published a novel The Training Patient (Czech: První terapie). In 2020 she published Lenka, a book about the last year of her mother’s life, with Labyrint publishing house. She worked as a private therapist in London. With her husband Jan Mladovský, she raised her daughter Philippa. In 2022, she was still living in London, but regularly visited the Czech Republic.
