Alena Hájková

Alena Hájková (née Divišová; 11 October 1924 – 2 August 2012) was a Czech Communist resistance fighter and historian.

Resistance Alena Divišová was born in 1924 to a working class Prague family in Vršovice. At 14, she left school and went to train as a seamstress. It was in her job that she met a Jewish friend, through whom she was introduced to a Jewish circle of the leftist movement Hashomer Hatzair. In 1943, this group of Jewish and non-Jewish Communist friends formed the resistance group Přehledy. Among them, Hájková met Jany Lebovič from the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, with whom she fell in love. When the transports to Theresienstadt started in fall 1941, Hájková and her family helped the deportees with food and preparation for the transports. Later, the gentiles in the group helped the Jewish members to avoid transports by giving them false, non-Jewish identities. Among those who had gone to hiding was Lebovič. Hájková participated in helping Jewish friends and other resistance activities: in the first months of the Terezín ghetto, she visited a few times and smuggled food to her friends. Later, she actively organized papers for those who went into illegality.

Her granddaughter Anna Hájková is a historian at the University of Warwick.

Research Hájková's expertise was leftist and Communist resistance during the Second World War; she focused on individual people and wrote about Jewish Communist resistance fighters who were politically unpopular. Her books and articles are still in circulation, unlike most Czech scholarship from her time. In 1989, Hájková was reunited with her old Jewish friends from the resistance who had emigrated to Israel and the US. In 1991, she was awarded the title Righteous among the nations." In 1995, she coedited a critical edition of Julius Fučík's Notes from the Gallows. She cooperated with Miroslav Kárný on researching the Holocaust and resistance in the Protectorate, and contributed to the research of the Terezín Memorial, including their prisoner database.

Hájková continued researching until her 80s, and died in Prague in 2012. Her papers are stored at the Czech National Archive.

Publications