Věra's mother was Otylie, Franz Kafka's sister. But the family never knew what a famous writer Franz would become many years after his death.
Věra Saudková was born in 1921 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, into a family of intellectuals, a "mixed marriage" according to the Nazi laws. Věra survived the war while watching the entire Jewish part of the family disappear: first into the Terezin ghetto, and then into the unknown. She still feels much affected by the Holocaust.