“I’m a person with a positive attitude to life, and even though I’ve already had to overcome a few obstacles, I didn’t let it break me. I also owe it to my parents, who raised me from an early age in the fact that I can do everything with one hand and be equal to my peers,” says Rážová, whose disability has no clear cause. Doctors told her the cause was not genetic, but why she was born without a hand is unclear. The cause could be a virus or inappropriate drugs taken during pregnancy.
However, Rážová was able to do everything her peers did without her hand, and she even skied competitively. The only thing that bothered her was the prosthesis she had to wear. “I wore a prosthesis for about twenty years and it was terribly uncomfortable. There were certain influences in terms of development, and from an orthopedic point of view it was probably important for me, especially at that early age, not to bend, not to deviate. But the older I got, the more troublesome she became. Moreover, in some situations I thought that I was lying to those people,” she confided. She therefore decided to stop wearing the prosthesis and began to feel freer and more relaxed.
After all, the missing hand wasn’t what people on the street would notice her the most. It was more likely her famous father. “People always told me, ‘Grandpa takes good care of you.’ And we always with dad: ‘Not grandpa – dad!’ But we laughed it off every time and it was never anything that offended us because the age difference was just there. Dad was a generation older than most dads my age, but I never felt that.’
She felt it only at the age of nineteen, when her father died suddenly at the age of 77. “I wasn’t prepared for the fact that my father could leave overnight. It was even worse for me that my father was filming until the last day. He shot his last role in Savage Land the day before he died,” he describes.
“I took it as the end of the world. For me, a nineteen-year-old girl, it was my first encounter with death. The tears flowed for days and I remember thinking to myself that my body was doing nothing but crying. I didn’t even have swollen eyes anymore because I was really drowning in tears,” she says, adding that only after her father left did she realize how fixated she was on him.
Rudolf Hrušínský Jr., Vladimír Ráž and Otakar Brousek Jr. in The Savage Land (2001)
She entered law school at that time, but soon left it again. “I was terribly hurt and had no thoughts of any studies. And when I came to that university and saw the ambitious people there, I knew that I was completely different, that I didn’t fit in,” she explained, adding that she always enjoyed singing and speaking, so she started going to auditions and applying about working in radio.
They took her to a radio station in Pilsen, where she also met her first husband and thus fulfilled two big wishes at once. “I turned from a sad girl who lost her father too soon into a cheerful girl who is grateful for the beautiful nineteen years with her father, which she will draw on for the rest of her life,” says Rážová, who is now the mother of two healthy sons and shoots web series One Hand to show that there is nothing she can’t handle, helping people who for various reasons can only use one hand.
2024-02-20 23:01:00