Gertruda Sekaninová-Čakrtová

Gertruda Sekaninová-Čakrtová, born Stiassny (21 May 1908, Budapest – 29 December 1986, Jihlava) was a Czech and Czechoslovak lawyer, politician and diplomat of Jewish origin, later also a dissident and signatory of the Charter 77. She is most renowned for being one of the four deputies of the National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic who voted against the agreement on the temporary stay of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Early years, before World War II She was born in 1908 in Budapest (then Austro-Hungarian Empire), as Gertruda Stiassny, to a wealthy Jewish family. She was the eldest of four children. Her parents, Richard and Alžběta Stiassny, moved to Hungary from Bohemia to manage family textile manufacture. Her father died when she was 12 years old.

In 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was selected for forced labor in Kurzbach (a branch of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp). After the suicide of her husband, Sekaninová-Čakrtová was removed from office and later worked at the Ministry of Education as head of the newly established legislative and administrative department.

Sekaninová-Čakrtová testified in the 1963 process with a co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke. As a former concentration camp inmate, she testified in the 1963 process with a co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke.

In the elections held in 1964, she returned to politics as a member of the National Assembly. She supported the draft bill excluding statute of limitations for war crimes committed during the World War II. During the Prague Spring, she supported the abolition of censorship.

From 1968 to 1969, she served as Vice-President of the Czechoslovak Union of Women.

In April 1968, she was awarded the Order of the Republic. and suggested their complete withdrawal from Czechoslovak territory (the other deputies were František Kriegel, František Vodsloň and Božena Fuková ). Because of these attitudes, she was, along with other rebelling members of the National Assembly, deprived of their mandate and expelled from the Communist Party. was involved in the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted

Sekaninová-Čakrtová spent her later years in Polná near Jihlava. She died in 1986 in Jihlava, due to injury. Shortly before her death, the StB noted: "Her attitudes towards real socialism remain hostile ...".