Milada Horáková was one of the early victims of the Communist regime in Czech Republic. She was executed in 1950, two years after the Communist coup supported by Soviet Union.
Her grave can be seen in Vysehrad cemetery, which has a functional role similar to the National Pantheons in other countries.
From Wikipedia:
"Milada Horáková was born Milada Králová in Prague. She studied law at Charles University and graduated in 1926. She then worked at the Prague City Council. In the same year she graduated, she joined the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, which was a strong opponent of the Nazis, despite similarities of its name and that of Nazism, which is short for National Socialism or in German: Nationalsozialismus.[citation needed]
After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Horáková joined the underground resistance movement, but she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940. She was initially sentenced to death, but later the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the concentration camp Terezín and then to various prisons in Germany.[1]
After the liberation in May 1945, Horáková returned to Prague and rejoined her Social Democratic party. In 1946, she was elected a member of the Constituent National Assembly of Czechoslovakia, but resigned her seat after the Communist coup in February 1948. Friends urged her to leave Czechoslovakia, but she remained in the country and continued to be politically active.[2]
On 27 September 1949 she was arrested. She was eventually accused of being the leader of a supposed plot to overthrow the Communist regime.[3] The StB, the Czechoslovak secret police infamous for their brutal interrogation methods, tried to break up the group of the alleged plotters, and force them to confess to treason and conspiracy, using both physical and psychological torture.
The tombstone of Milada Horáková.
The trial of Horáková and twelve of her colleagues began on 31 May 1950. It was intended to be a show trial, like those in the Soviet Great Purges of the 1930s. It was broadcast on the radio and even supervised by Soviet advisors. The State's prosecutors were Dr. Josef Urválek and Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, among others.[2] The trial had a script that everyone involved was supposed to follow, but on several occasions both the prosecutors and the defendants managed to state their true feelings.[4] Horáková stood firm, and defended herself and her ideals, even though she knew that doing so could only worsen her conditions and the final result.
Milada Horáková was sentenced to death, along with three of her co-defendants, on 8 June 1950. Many prominent figures in the West, notably Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt, petitioned for her life, but the sentence was confirmed, and she was executed in Pankrác Prison on 27 June 1950 by particularly torturous intentionally slow[dubious – discuss][citation needed] strangulation, which according to historians[who?] took 15 minutes.[5] She was 48 years old.
In 2005, the original uncensored recording of the trial was found by the filmmaker Martin Vadas.
She is survived by one daughter, Jana (Yana)."
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