"Yes, my grandfather was a Greek Catholic priest. I still vaguely remember him. Because first of all, from the photographs of when he baptized me - he baptized me at home, so I am a baptized Greek Catholic - and then I remember him from when he was interned, and my father and I used to visit him regularly. Later they released him, and he stayed at home where he also passed away. That was such a tragic situation when my father... my father was a very prominent and well-known person in Slovakia, and he was pressured to publicly renounce his faith. And he realized... like this: that if he renounced his faith, they would release my grandfather. And my father realized that if he renounced his faith, he would actually hurt his father, even kill him symbolically, and if he didn't renounce it, it would end badly too. So it was a trauma that ran through the family. He didn't renounce his faith. They did release my grandfather, but he died soon after."
"As far as the cultural environment is concerned, I think it was freer in Slovakia than in Prague or Bohemia. First of all, Vienna was close by, and the culture in Hungary was more open. There were opportunities, so we often travelled to concerts or events, films, to Budapest. That was close, and there was no problem. From Vienna, we listened to the news or got the Viennese television. So even from there, we had information from the other side of the Iron Curtain. And I think that's why the police didn't persecute people who had different ideas so much. On the other hand, there were only a few dissidents - but maybe that was also because the pressure on people to retreat to a closed community was not so strong."
"I wasn't afraid. After some experience in Prague, I understood that we were very protected, we were very protected by Václav's name. And by Free Europe, which reported everything very promptly. I realized that State Security could operate very differently in the countryside, where the dissidents were actually very isolated. But in Prague, it was not a matter of life and death. It's true that afterwards, at the last demonstration on the 17th, I was quite seriously injured, my kidneys were damaged, and I took some treatment in hospital."
"Those fights concerning Lucerna were fierce. Prosco stepped in, Provod's company, which had a fake deal with Chemapol to buy it for two hundred and fifty million. I mean, Junek wanted to pull Lucerna out of that property, just like they managed to pull the Harmony Hotel, which the Juneks still own. So there were some very complicated situations in Lucerna, and there was almost a fight between the security guards. My bodyguard led the Lucerna security, and Prosco and the Provods hired their own security. But in the end, ours was better. We were underground, calm. And I gathered the weapons, just in case something happened. And we had some fun in there because I explained to the security guards that there were different vents in Lucerna and that since we were closed in there, it would be good for them to find an exit. So they were crawling through all sorts of... we were simply having fun, there must have been some sort of activity. And since the restaurant was closed at that time–also because of occupancy and some impact on the tenants–the fridges were still full. We had plenty to eat, we had fun. And the opponent's security gave up."
"That was back in the late 1990s when David Černý installed the upside-down horse at Můstek, where it stayed for about three months, and then he had it somewhere in his storeroom. And I was also managing the Rokoko house at the time, and the passage towards the Lucerna passage was awfully empty. So I thought the horse would look good there, that it might attract people, but the owners didn't want to do it. So then we installed it in Lucerna, and I'm very happy about that because it's probably the most photographed object in Prague. And we agreed that it would stay there temporarily until monarchy comes to Bohemia."
She was born on 1 February 1951 in Bratislava. Her father’s parents were Eastern Slovak Ruthenians of the Greek Catholic faith, and her grandfather Hilarion Ilkovič was interned as a Greek Catholic priest under the Communist Action P (Operation against the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia - transl.). Her father, Dionýz Ilkovič, was a prominent Slovak physicist. Dagmar also studied mathematics and physics and defended her thesis in Kyiv in 1983. However, because of her contacts with the dissident Ivan Havel, she did not find a suitable job in Slovakia and left for Prague. From the mid-1980s, she lived with Ivan in Havel’s famous dissident apartment on Rašín’s Embankment, and in 1986 she married him. She participated in the production of the Samizdat Expedition edition, attended all anti-regime demonstrations, and was interrogated by State Security many times. On 17 November 1989, during the intervention on Národní třída, she suffered severe injuries, and after her hospital stay, she became involved in the activities of the Civic Forum Coordination Centre. During the 1990s, she devoted herself to the difficult struggle to retain the Havel family property, which was jointly restituted by Ivan and Václav Havel after the coup. The property disputes over the Lucerna Palace dragged on until 2016 when the Supreme Court ruled in her favour, and the entire Lucerna finally passed to her.
Helsinki Watch at the Havels at the time of the arrest of V. Havel, 1989 (from the very back Dagmar Havlová, Olga Havlová, Karel Schwarzenberg, Ivan Havel)
Helsinki Watch at the Havels at the time of the arrest of V. Havel, 1989 (from the very back Dagmar Havlová, Olga Havlová, Karel Schwarzenberg, Ivan Havel)
Opening of the exhibition Endangered Monuments of the Civic Forum Foundation, circa 1999 (from the left Radim Palouš, Dagmar Havlová, Prince Charles, Diana)
Opening of the exhibition Endangered Monuments of the Civic Forum Foundation, circa 1999 (from the left Radim Palouš, Dagmar Havlová, Prince Charles, Diana)
