It was easier to leave for America than to return from there
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Alena Zikmundová was born on 20 March 1928 in Prague. Her father was a prominent Protestant theologian Josef Lukl Hromádka. In April 1939, after they learned that her father was in danger of being arrested, the family of four emigrated to the USA via Switzerland and France. While Hromádka lectured at the Presbyterian Seminary in Princeton, Alena graduated from the local high school and entered the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1945. However, she did not graduate, because two years later the family returned to Czechoslovakia. The left-oriented Hromádka was not one of the opponents of the communist regime and even after the February coup he was involved in official positions in the field of ecumenism or the peace movement. Alena decided to study Protestant theology in 1948, but did not graduate this time because of the birth of the first of her seven offspring. She and her husband, a physician, went to the northern Bohemian borderlands. In the 1960s she worked briefly in a kindergarten, but after 1968 she was no longer allowed to work with children. In the 1980s she worked in the Evangelical congregation in Vizovice and after the Velvet Revolution she finally graduated from the Evangelical Theological Faculty.
