Sylva Šimsová: Escaping to freedom all I thought about was survival – the fear came later

Sylva Šimsová was 18 when her father, a Social Democrat politician, told
her the family had to escape from Czechoslovakia. It was 1949, a year after
the Communists had taken power. The young Sylva insisted that her fiancé,
whom she had met through her beloved scouts only six months earlier, come
with them. Remarkably, almost 70 years later she and her husband – a
composer and broadcaster who goes by the name Karel Janovický – are
still together.