My husband was fired after fifteen years because he refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. However, he continued to take photos.
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Arita Hucková was born on April 16, 1940 in Gleiwitz, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland) into a German family. She grew up with a brother who was eleven years older. The family lived in what was then Upper Silesia, which during the war belonged to Germany, after the war it belonged to Poland. Before the war, her mother was a women’s tailor and the owner of a tailor’s salon, where she employed 16 people. Her father was a leather buyer, he had to join the front during the war. Her mother and the children then went to Austria, where she felt safer. She returned home after the war, but the family lost all their possessions and was evicted from Poland because of their German nationality. Her mother and children fled to Ostrava to Petřkovice. There, their father returned from captivity and found work in the Ostrava mines. Arita attended Czech schools and graduated from medical school in 1957, field of activity laboratory technician. She then worked as a laboratory technician and continued her education. She studied biology at the Faculty of Science in Brno for four years. In 1962, she met the photographer and cameraman Miroslav Hucek, who worked for the magazine Mladý svět. She did not finish her studies and went with him to Prague, their daughter Barbara was born. Arita worked for a while at the General University Hospital on Karlovo náměstí as a laboratory assistant in hematology, but after the birth of her daughter she did not return to the hospital. She externally wrote small texts for Mladý svět and for illustrated children’s books. Their ground-floor apartment, which was located behind the Vinohrady Theatre, was open to friends from the radio, Mladý svět and also the theatre. Some emigrated after 1968, others signed Charter 77. Miroslav Hucek, then the head of the photography department, was fired from Mladý svět in 1975 because he refused to join the Communist Party. Both spouses remained working as freelancers, Arita worked as a tourist guide and an assistant to her husband, who in the 1980s was mainly engaged in advertising photography. They moved to Zbraslav, where they set up a studio in an old house. After the 1989 revolution, her husband returned fully to reportage photography and Arita joined Prague Castle as an assistant to the presidential adviser Eda Kriseová. After that, she was the director of the culture department in the Prague Castle Administration for several years. She organized important art exhibitions and events here. She retired in 1997 so that she and her husband could devote themselves to publishing and travelling. In 2013, she became a widow.
