The rope walkers of emigration

A woman who was the head of a large emigration organization in Prague found that she was a nuisance to many in emigration.

"You see, my refugees here, namely the ones I helped to get here, made sure that I could not work and perhaps threaten their positions of power," she confided to her nephew Miloš.

She compared the experience of life in exile to the feats of rope climbers. Thanks to her perseverance and her British colleagues, Schmolková was given an office in Bloomsbury House, which became a meeting place for Czechoslovak diaspora and social workers. She lived as a lodger with the well-known suffragette Mary Sheepshanks, a fellow member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, a pacifist movement.

Family archive.