I feel I didn’t waste my life
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Eva Borková was born on 4 December 1938 in Prague into a Czech Evangelical family. She grew up in Chodov near Prague, where she witnessed the bloody events of the May Uprising and the fighting retreat of the Germans. In 1948 the family moved to Prague-Letňany. Her parents wanted to raise in the Christian spirit, and they regularly attended Sunday services at church. That did not go unnoticed by the Communist regime, and the family came under increasing pressure. So when her mother’s native cottage became available, her parents decided to leave Prague and move to the greater peace of the distant rural countryside of Vsetín District - to the village of Růžďka. After completing secondary school, Eva Borková joined her parents and found a job at the Culture Department of the House of Enlightenment in Vsetín. In the summer she would help out at Pioneer camps. This predestined her to her future profession. She became one of the first professional foster carers in Czechoslovakia, and she devoted her life to the care and education of children without families in an SOS children’s village in Karlovy Vary. She witnessed the oppressive atmosphere of the normalisation there, when the children’s village fell under direct supervision of the state and was threatened to be dissolved on several occasions. Over the course of thirty years, she cared for and raised nineteen children in the SOS children’s village. Her worked was acknowledged in 1999 by a Medal of Merit, 2nd Class. Eva Borková lives in Karlovy Vary.
