Zdenka Pokorna was hailed by the Czech Government on her 90th birthday as a “living conscience of the century”.

She embodied a spirit of public service and defiant resistance to political oppression that has meant much to Czechs in the turbulence of their 20th-century history. She challenged successively Habsburg, Nazi and Soviet communist domination of her homeland, suffering considerably as a result, and was forced into exile after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, continuing her anticommunist campaigning from her new home in Britain.

Although she never returned to live on Czech territory she enjoyed from afar the end of communist rule in 1989 and the opportunity to resume contact with her compatriots now living under democratic rule.

Pokorna also worked after 1989 to revive the memory of her hero, Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomas Masaryk. When she was a girl in Moravia — then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — before the First World War, Pokorna joined Sokol, a patriotic Czech organisation with an emphasis on moral improvement and education; famous too for its mass gymnastic displays. The organisation gained new vigour when Czechoslovakia was created after 1918, and Pokorna, enthusiastic local leader, met Masaryk who embodied Sokol’s high moral tone.

She trained as a schoolteacher and travelled widely in Europe, learning several languages and no doubt sensing in the 1930s that developments in Europe were not favourable to the nascent Czechoslovak state.

After the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the Nazi invasion of the Czech lands in 1939 Pokorna took on the hazardous work of guiding Czech men across the border near her Moravian home to exile abroard and the opportunity to fight Nazism as part of foreign forces. Some of those she guided became part of the Czech contingent in the RAF.

Eventually she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Poland. She was sent on one of the notorious “death marches” towards the end of the war as the Germans moved their captives westwards in the face of Red Army advance from the East. Finally liberated by the Americans in Löbeck, she helped to organise the repatriation of fellow prisoners before returning home, so emaciated that only her dog recognised her on her arrival.

She resumed work as head-mistress of a school in the Moravian town of Breclav, but once the Soviet-backed communists took control of Czechoslovakia in 1948 they were swift to purge the education system, and Pokorna was demoted and sent to a village school. From there she began once more to guide opponents of the regime to escape across the border, this time towards Austria and West Germany. When warned that she faced arrest she made her own escape and arrived in England, where she became a nurse.

She continued to campaign against the Communist Government in Prague from London, regularly attending demonstrations outside the Czechoslovak Embassy, and was a prominent member of the Czech exile community. After the revolution against communist rule in 1989 she was invited to that embassy as an honoured guest. And to her great satisfaction she was able to contribute a substantial amount towards the restoration of a statue of her beloved Masaryk outside the school where she had taught in Breclav. It was unveiled in 2000 by President Vaclav Havel, who had met Pokorna while on an official visit to London, a figure whose moral seriousness and indomitable spirit of resistance were very much in the Czech tradition with Zdenka Pokorna identified so closely.

Zdenka Pokorna, teacher and Czech patriot, was born on April 6, 1905. She died on March 3, 2007, aged 101