Dad was given a choice - either the Communist Party or the Church
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Libuše Havlíčková, the second of three daughters of Milada and František Karlíček, was born on 10 June 1932 in Karviná. Her father managed and owned the Land Institute (a branch of the Olomouc Mortgage Bank) in Karviná and her mother took care of the family. The idyllic childhood was interrupted by the events of 1938 and the Polish occupation of Těšín, which forced the family to move to Moravská Ostrava. Libuše Havlíčková’s memories of the Second World War and its end in Europe, the post-war developments in the then Czechoslovak Republic and the February 1948 coup are inextricably linked to Ostrava. As a Sokol member she participated in the XIth All-Sokol Meeting in 1948. After graduating from primary school, she continued her studies at the Real Grammar School, which she successfully graduated from in 1951. She then studied at the University of Chemical Technology in Prague, where she managed to defend her degree of Candidate of Science in 1960. In 1959 she married Václav Havlíček. In 1971 she passed the final state exam in French at the University of 17 November in Prague. She devoted her entire professional life to chemistry. At the time of filming in 2024 she lived in Pardubice.
