I was born an enemy of the state
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Daniel Kumermann was born on August 15, 1951 in Prague, but spent his childhood until the end of 1968 in the city of Roztoky near Prague. His family was strongly anti-communist, his mother Františka was a Viennese Czech and father Jaroslav was of relatively wealthy Jewish origin. Daniel spent his summer vacations with his grandmother in Vienna, where the family was allowed to travel even during the totalitarian regime, until the borders were closed after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. When the scouting movement was briefly revived in March 1968, he immediately signed up, as he was always attracted towards the Scout ideology, and remained a member even after it was banned again, in an underground form. Daniel spent the invasion in August 1968 in the streets of Prague handing out leaflets until Russian soldiers took him to the General Headquarters in Prague-Dejvice. In 1969, he graduated from the secondary school of general education, originally in Velvarská and then renamed Leninova Street in Prague 6. Thanks to the temporary weakening of control mechanisms, he managed to join the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in the same year, from where, after two semesters of study, he transferred to the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, major English-Philosophy, from which he graduated in 1976. During his studies, he discovered his Jewish origin and, despite the death of his father in 1975, he continued to lean towards Judaism until he formally converted in 1984. In 1977, he signed Charter 77 and embarked on the path of Czechoslovak anti-regime dissent. As he did not form direct part of the very closest core of the dissident movement, he was approached in the fall of 1982 to become a conspiratorial messenger in smuggling documents out of the West and back, in his case specifically to London. In 1983, contrary to the original plan, in which he was only supposed to play the role of a so-called dead box, he began to code the documents and learned the nicknames of a number of dissident personalities. Despite the danger this role entailed, he was never caught by State Security and smuggled documents until the Velvet Revolution. He spent this time in the Laterna Magica theater and was present both in the revolutionary movement itself and in the later diversification of opinions of the Civic Forum. In December 1989, he was active in the revival of Scouting, from which he slowly disappeared due to differences of opinion around March 1990. In 1991, he began his journalistic career, first at Lidové noviny, from where he briefly moved to Svobodné slovo in 1995, and finally anchored in the foreign editorial department of Právo. He remained there until 1999, when he accepted the offer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to became the ambassador of the Czech Republic in Israel. Now retired, he continues to pursue his great passion for collecting gum wrappers and the comic literary genre.
