Her father was Stanislav Budín (née Bencion Bať), a prominent Communist writer who used the pen name Batya Bat.
[1] Due to their Jewish ancestry, her family fled to the United States not long after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939.
However, during the Prague Spring of 1968, she was very attracted to Alexander Dubček's reform program and helped supply inside information to the Western media.
She continued to support reform after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and was fired from her university post and expelled from the party in 1970.
[1] Like many prominent academics who supported the Prague Spring, Klímová found it all but impossible to have a livelihood for much of the Normalization era.
She eventually found work as a translator, but lost that job in 1977 after her father, who had also become disillusioned with Communism, signed Charter 77.