I was born in a labour camp
Františka Hocková was born on 30 January 1945 in Lübeck, where her parents were assigned to forced labour; her mother was a Pole and her father a Czech. She spent the second half of 1945 with her mother at a sanatorium in Sweden. Her complicated family circumstances meant that she spent most of her childhood in children‘s homes. She completed a secondary school for nurses but then worked in other fields. During the Prague Spring she briefly joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC).