Dictionary of Women Experts

Biography

Věra Hájková, née Duxová, was born in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia (today’s Czech Republic) in 1924, and died in the Czech Republic on 17 October 1998.

Originally trained as a children’s nurse, in the 1950s and 1960s, Věra Hájková was an outstanding editor of the widely read Czechoslovak women’s magazine Vlasta. There, she wrote extensively about topics concerning women, children, and families, like kindergartens, children’s homes, and marriages. Also, she opened up serious issues like alcoholism, sex education, sexual abuse and murders of children.

Family, and Social and Professional Background

Věra Hájková was born as the second child to a Jewish, middle-class family. Her parents owned the fabric store Látky Dux, where her mother, Ilona Duxová, worked. In 1939, when Věra was 14 years old, her father, a member of the Olomouc Sokol leadership, Josef Dux died, and the family moved from Olomouc to Prague. 

Věra wished to study medicine, but as the war came to Czechoslovakia, the universities were closed, and for a Jewish girl, even a gymnasium was inaccessible. But she saw these circumstances as “a war provisional arrangement” and, after finishing the municipal school, she decided to do anything connected to medicine and started with a course for a baby nurse. Part of this course was also practical training in nurseries, and Věra used to take babies home on weekends, babies their parents had “forgotten” to pick up. 

Through their mother’s sister, Věra and her brother became involved in the communist resistance. For two years, she copied and distributed leaflets, brochures, and books. In 1942, 18-year-old Věra and her mother were sent to the transport to the concentration camp Terezín. In Terezín, she met a medical doctor from a course for baby nurses and became a children’s nurse again. From Terezín, she was moved with her mother and brother to Auschwitz, where she continued in her work for communist resistance. Her next journey led her to the Christianstadt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen. She survived her internment, and then a death march from Christianstadt to Bergen-Belsen. In the Holocaust, she lost almost her entire extended family.

Soon after the war, she married a childhood friend. As her husband fought during WWII on the Western Front, in the 1950s, he lost his job, and Věra did as well.  However, in 1952, she got a new job in the women’s magazine Vlasta and worked there as an editor till 1969, when she decided to leave her position to avoid being fired. The reason was that she refused to withdraw the opinions she expressed in 1968, during the Prague Spring. Only a week before the occupation, she wrote in Vlasta about the communists in leading positions that “their dilettantism in professional and political matters caused the gap between the nation and the Communist Party to widen ever more deeply. […] Such people led our country to economic and political decline.” 

As a result of the Normalization, in 1970, Hájková was expelled from the Communist Party for her disagreement with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. After that, she could only work in manual jobs, such as a cleaner. However, she wrote under the pseudonyms of her friends, mainly medical doctors Ladislav Zeman and Jiří Dunovský. Also, she wrote her memoirs, That’s how life was, which were published in 1987 in a samizdat edition, Petlice, by Ludvík Vaculík. Originally intended as a letter for her children, Hájková’s short autobiography was republished after the Velvet Revolution in 1991. 

Local and national work, issues addressed in Vlasta, and connections with experts

In Vlasta, Věra Hájková systematically focused on institutionalized care for children. She criticized infant and children’s homes, where she believed children suffered emotionally, and advocated for family-based care through SOS Children’s Villages. She also addressed the issues of sex education, contraception, and abortion. She challenged the effectiveness of abortion commissions, which were unnecessary in two-thirds of cases because a positive decision was already clear in advance (i.e., when a woman already had several children, was over 40 years old, had health problems). At the same time, Hájková emphasized the psychological trauma that many women suffered from sitting before the commission due to the insensitive approach of its members. In her opinion, what was most needed was sex education and accessible contraception. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, she led the column Nurse Helena advises you, where Hájková used her experience as a pediatric nurse and gave readers various advice about (children’s) health issues. Also, she opened a serious case of child sexual abuse and murder. Hájková criticized the ineffectiveness of existing punishments for sex perpetrators, which were usually light in contrast to penalties for thefts of public property. Following a series of articles on alcoholism, she was approached by desperate wives of alcoholics, whom she tried to help through her contacts with the Ministries of Health and Social Affairs. She did not approve that children from alcoholic families – often siblings separated from each other – were sent to children’s homes, “while their drunkard fathers continued their destructive behavior without notice.”  Instead, she believed that state authorities should take consistent action against alcoholics. 

Another topic that she addressed was marriage. With demographer Jiří Prokopec, she collaborated on a survey called “Marriage and Me”, which was based on a questionnaire published in 1965 on the pages of Vlasta. Next to 8,000 completed questionnaires, Hájková also received more than 200 letters, which showed that the survey was helpful for couples, as the questions stirred up communication between them about their marriage. 

International connections

In 1967, Hájková visited Belgrade for a reportage, and this trip influenced her view of children’s homes. There she saw the Moshe Pijade Children’s Home, where groups of children of different ages lived in apartments with an “aunt” or “uncle,” as this principle of care was intended to simulate raising children in a family environment. In her own words, Hájková understood that it is impossible to create a family-like atmosphere in orphanages, which in Czechoslovakia most resembled barracks. She published the report on Vlasta’s pages and brought to the public the idea of more family-like children’s homes. At that time, Jiří Dunovský, a doctor from the Ministry of Health, invited Hermann Gmeiner, one of the founders of the first SOS children’s villages in Austria, to Prague. Gmeiner’s description of the SOS Children’s Villages concept strongly reminded Hájková of her experience in Belgrade. At this moment, thanks to the contribution of Hájková, the movement for innovative forms of foster care that was at the beginning of the Friends of the Children’s Villages Association was established. Unfortunately, the association was banned in the 1970s as a consequence of Normalization. But two SOS Children’s Villages were opened in Czechoslovakia, and Hájková, in particular, played a key role in changing the understanding of institutional care. Magazine Vlasta was also instrumental in finding “aunts” for the first village in Doubí.

Legacy

“I’ve had a really colorful life”, said Věra Hájková in a 1990 interview for the magazine Vlasta. Her work as a journalist was always linked to her efforts to improve the lives of children and women. She was not afraid to raise serious issues on the pages of Vlasta and to do so, she took advantage of the period of political relaxation in the 1960s. Although her work at Vlasta ended with the onset of Normalization in 1969, in the post-revolutionary period, many grateful readers remembered her work. After Hájková died in 1998, Vlasta wrote: “Nurse Helena left […] editor Věra Hájková, a wonderful woman who combined tremendous sensitivity and kindness with journalistic professionalism.”

Selected Publications

Věra Hájková – Duxová. ‘Takový to byl život’. In Svět bez lidských dimenzí: čtyři ženy vzpomínají, 45–118. Státní židovské muzeum v Praze, 1991.

Hájková, Věra. ‘Ohlas na Temné kouty’. Vlasta 20, no. 49 (1966): 11.

———. ‘Temné kouty’. Vlasta 20, no. 40 (1966): 4–5.

Věra Hájková a Anna Tučková. „Pranýř nebo pomoc?” Kulturní tvorba: týdeník ÚV KSČ pro politiku a kulturu 3, č. 24 (17. červen 1965).

Bibliography

Bělehradová, Andrea, Marie Láníková, and Kateřina Lišková. “‘Dark Corners’: Child Sex Murder, Forensic Expertise, and Protective Treatment in Socialist Czechoslovakia.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, no. 20 (2025): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraf011.