by Chris McMorrow  

Between 1948 and 1960, 234 politically motivated executions happened in Czechoslovakia. Among the victims were 233 men and one woman: Milada Horáková. Born in 1901 to a middle-class Prague family, her trademark defiance was apparent in her teenage years. Expelled from high school for expressing sympathy for an anti-war procession, she transfered to a different school. After Czechoslovakia declared independence from Austria-Hungary in 1918, she took advantage of new laws that made it legal for women to earn university degrees and obtained her PhD in law in 1926.

Following her graduation, she entered the Czechoslovak Nationalist Party and began what became her life's work: battling oppression and integrating her needs with others'. In 1927 she married fellow activist Bohuslav Horák and became director of the welfare department for the Prague City Council. She spent the next decade working with groups that supported youth and women's rights.
During World War II she was a member of the resistance and formed a network of women's resistance groups, using local organs of the Women's National Council as a base. In 1941 she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was sent to a number of concentration camps in Germany over the next four years.

Despite the horror of her incarceration, Horáková's spirit was unbroken ( her family name 'Horáková' translates to 'mountain' in English). She rejoined her party in 1945 to become a Member of Parliament, co-founded the Union of Political Prisoners and the Survivors of Victims of Nazism, and played a pivotal role in the Committee for Assistance of Refugees. The formation of the communist government in 1948 saw her removed from all public assignments, but she refused to leave the country despite obvious risks. She relinquished her parliamentary seat in protest of the violence, but remained involved with underground groups.  

 Aware of the tide of dissent, the regime sought to instill fresh fear in the public. A woman's execution would be suitably chilling, and Horáková and 12 other activists were arrested on charges of treason and conspiracy in September 1949. In the weeks leading up to the mock trial, the accused were subjected to tortuous interrogation and eventually confessed to the charges leveled against them.
Throughout the trial, Horáková alone argued with prosecutors, remaining calm and resolute as she defended her ideals. This had never happened before and never did again under the totalitarian regime. Milada Horáková was found guilty and executed on June 27, 1950.

Throughout her tumultuous life, Horáková struggled to balance her roles as politician, wife and mother.  In reference to her frequent separations from her daughter, days before her hanging she wrote in a letter, “I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good ... by seeing to it that life becomes better and that all children live well.” She was rehabilitated in 1968 and fully acquitted in 1990. One can only speculate what this heroic woman would think of the growing popularity of the communist party today.   

 * Presently there is a play about  Horáková's life PERZEKUCE at La Fabrika, Přístavní 22 beginning 19.3.2006

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