I could not leave my mother alone in Czechoslovakia
Download image
Vladimír Hora was born on April 15, 1950 in Martin, Slovakia, to parents Kateřina and Tibor Hora. Both his parents were convinced communists and had Jewish roots, a large part of their families died in concentration camps during the Second World War. They met during the Second World War in Great Britain, where the mother went as early as 1937 and where the father served with the Czechoslovak troops. Vladimír Hora grew up in Žilina. In 1959, his father died suddenly. In 1963, his mother met two British communists. At their invitation, Vladimír Hora visited Great Britain in 1967 and 1968. The news of the Warsaw Pact invasion reached him in London. He participated in demonstrations in front of the Soviet embassy. He thought about emigrating, but eventually returned home. He graduated from the secondary technical school in Dubice and in 1969 joined the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University. In 1977, he joined the one-year basic military service and two years later married a Bulgarian student. He worked at Geoindustrie in Prague’s Černošice as a service worker. During normalization, he travelled to the West several times. Since 1980, he regularly traveled to the Netherlands on business. After 1989, he founded his own company. In 2023 he lived in Prague.
