Irena Sedlecká

Who is Irena Sedlecká?

Irena Sedlecká is a Czech sculptor and Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. After training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, she was awarded the Lenin Prize for sculpture before fleeing the communist regime in 1967. She had visited Chile where a sympathetic socialist government led by Salvador Allende was in power.

She escaped from Prague in 1967 with her doctor husband and her three children. They traveled in an old battered car to Yugoslavia, on the pretence of a camping holiday. They only had passports for themselves; the children were not included on them. Through a fortunate coincidence, an Italian couple, who were traveling alone but had three of their children included on their passports, took pity on the couple's predicament, and offered to follow them through the border to Italy, bringing the three children in as their own. Reunited with the children, they traveled through Italy and crossed into France. Sedlecká spent months in Paris alone with the children, staying with very generous friends, while her husband journeyed on alone to Britain to attempt to make entry arrangements for them all. They were finally granted the necessary visas to enable them to settle in Britain.