Lenka Reinerová (1916–2008)

Lenka Reinerová was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Prague. The family spoke German and Lenka attended Prague's German-language high school. In 1936, she went to work as a journalist for the German-Communist émigré newspaper Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. There was a considerable population in Prague of Germans who had fled the rise of Nazism in their country. Reinerová became part of the Prague Circle that included Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Brod, and Franz Kafka. Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 brought an end to this thriving literary scene. Jews, socialists, and democrats had to seek refuge in other countries. Reinerová went to France, where she was interned after World War II began. She later managed to get passage to Casablanca and then to Mexico, where she spent the remainder of the war. In 1945, with her husband Theodor Balk, a Serbian writer, Reinerová moved to his home city of Belgrade; then back to Prague in 1948, just as the Communists were seizing control. There she discovered she was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. She was swept up in one of the Stalinist purges and spent 15 months in prison, being released on Stalin's death in 1953. She served as editor-in-chief of the magazine Im Herzen Europas and some of her work was published in neighboring East Germany. However, after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she was not allowed to publish and worked instead as a translator. It was only after the fall of the Communist régime in 1990 that Reinerová able to write and publish freely. Her novels, stories and essays, many of which are strongly autobiographical, are widely read both in Germany and the Czech Republic. Lenka Reinerová received many cultural and literary prizes in Germany and the Czech Republic, including the Czech Order of Merit (2001) and the Goethe Medal (2003).