I couldn’t visit my homeland of Yugoslavia until 1968
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Marta Nedvědová was born on 13 May 1929 into the mixed Czech-Serbian family of Ladislav Nedvěd and Berta Nedvědová, née Pejić in Belgrade, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians. She had an older sister, Milada, and a younger one, Lída. Her father Ladislav had come to Belgrade in 1924 when he was sent to work at a branch of the Czech Credit Bank. At the age of thirteen, Marta Nedvědová witnessed when war came to Yugoslavia in April 1941 and Nazi bombs started raining down on Belgrade. The shells hit the street where she lived as well. Several weeks later the Gestapo arrested Ladislav Nedvěd because he had been helping people get from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Yugoslavia together with the Czechoslovak-Yugoslavian League. He was interned in a civilian prison in Austria and released after a year, but only with permission to stay in the Protectorate. Marta, her mother, sisters, and grandmother all moved to the Protectorate to join the father in 1942. They all survived the war without injury. Marta Nedvědová graduated from the state conservatoire in Prague and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. She taught music, and from 1961 she also lectured at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. In 1979 she completed a doctorate in natural sciences. She participated in the collective publications of her department and in scientific research activities at the laboratory. She has been religious her whole life and never joined the Communist Party.
