Staša Fleischmannová

24 September 1919, Prague – 30 January 2020, Prague

Staša Fleischmannová, née Jílovská, was surrounded by artists from her childhood. She was a granddaughter of Julius Grégr, an important 19^th-century politician, and her parents were important figures of Czech public life in the 1920s and 1930. Her father Rudolf Jílovský was a singer in the anti-Habsburg cabaret Červená sedma and in the interwar years he earned for a living as an actor and later an editor in a publishing company, while her mother Staša Jílovská was a well-known journalist. Friends of the family included Ferdinand Peroutka, Milena Jesenská, Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich, etc. Staša and her twin sister Olga began attending premieres in the Liberated Theatre as children, which fundamentally influenced their political and aesthetic tastes. Later, the two sisters studied at the State Graphics School under Jaromír Funke and opened their own photo studio Fotoateliér OKO in the Topič House in Národní třída in Prague when they were only nineteen. Their first customer was allegedly Karel Čapek and their other customers included, for example, Julius Fučík, André Breton and Boris Pasternak. Bedřich Stern, Staša’s first husband, died in the early 1940s in Auschwitz, where he was sent because of his activities in the resistance. Fleischmannová’s father Rudolf also joined the resistance during the war and his daughters’ photo studio became a secret gathering place of the Parsifal group. The sisters took photographs of resistance fighters and made copies of classified documents. Staša married her second husband Ivo Fleischmann, a Czech poet, diplomat and Francophone novelist, in 1946. The newlyweds moved to France, where Ivo Fleischmann was a cultural attaché with the Czechoslovak embassy. Fotoateliér OKO was closed by the communists in 1949. In the early 1950s, the Fleischmann couple returned to Prague. They finally chose exile in France in the late 1960s, when Ivo Fleischmann was dismissed from his office. Staša Fleischmannová did not return to Prague until 1989, when she was 70. She lived in a home for war veterans in Prague-Střešovice, where she died several months after her 100^th birthday.