Enemy of the people? Why the trial of Milada Horáková must never be forgotten

Seventy years ago, the world watched in horror as Milada Horáková – a fearless campaigner for liberty – was subjected to what may have been the most grotesque show trial of the communist era. The Czech Republic is still coming to terms with what happened. So is her daughter. By Richard Askwith

Sunday 31 May 2020 14:32 BST
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Horáková gives the closing speech at her trial in 1950
Horáková gives the closing speech at her trial in 1950

When Jana Horáková-Kanský was 15, she returned from school one day to find neither of her parents at home. Her mother had been arrested that morning at work. Now the secret police had come for her father – unaware that, while Maruška, the young housekeeper, flirted to distract them, he was escaping through the back garden.

The scene was Prague, September 1949. A communist regime had been established in Czechoslovakia in a coup 18 months earlier. Jana’s parents’ crime was to oppose it.

It was not the first time Bohuslav Horák and Milada Horáková had suffered for their democratic beliefs. A decade earlier, both had come close to death in Nazi concentration camps. But that had been easier to understand: both had worked for Úvod, the Czech resistance group. These new accusations, of conspiring to overthrow the regime by violence, were baseless.

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