Milada Horáková

Milada Horáková (born Králová, 25 December 1901 – 27 June 1950) was a Czech politician and a member of the underground resistance movement against Nazi Germany and then against the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. She was focused on preserving democratic institutions and women's rights.

She was convicted by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on fabricated charges of conspiracy and treason and executed at Pankrác Prison in Prague in a judicial murder using a primitive variant of capital punishment by hanging with slow strangling; she was strangled for more than 13 minutes. She was cremated but her remains were never found.

Her conviction was annulled in 1968. She underwent political rehabilitation in the 1990s and posthumously received the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1st Class) and Order of the White Double Cross (1st Class). In September 2008, Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, the sole surviving member of the team that led to the execution of Horáková, was sentenced to prison.

Early life Horáková was born Milada Králová in Prague. At the age of 17, in the last year of the World War I, she was expelled from school for participating in an anti-war demonstration. She completed her secondary education in the newly formed Czechoslovakia and studied law at Charles University, graduating in 1926. Her early political life was influenced by senator Františka Plamínková, the Women's National Council founder.

Horáková married her husband Bohuslav Horák in 1927. Their daughter, Jana, was born in 1933.

From 1927 to 1940, she was employed in the social welfare department of the Prague city authority. In addition to focusing on social justice issues, Horáková became a prominent campaigner for the equal status of women. She was also active in the Czechoslovak Red Cross. In 1929, she joined the Czech National Social Party which, despite the similarity in names, was a strong opponent of Nazism.

Wartime resistance During the Occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945), Horáková was active in the underground resistance movement. Together with her husband, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo in 1940, in her case because of her pre-war political activity. She was sent to the ghetto at Terezín and then to various prisons in Germany.

In the summer of 1944, Horáková was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment in Bavaria. She was released in April 1945 by advancing United States forces near the end of World War II. Shortly after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, she resigned from the parliament in protest. Unlike many of her political associates, Horáková chose not to leave Czechoslovakia for the West, and continued to be politically active in Prague. On 27 September 1949, she was arrested and accused of being the leader of an alleged plot to overthrow the Communist regime. The trial proceedings were carefully orchestrated with confessions of guilt secured from the accused.

A recording of the event, discovered in 2005, revealed Horáková's courageous defence of her political ideals. Invoking the values of Czechoslovakia's democratic presidents, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, she declared that "no-one in this country should be put to death or be imprisoned for their beliefs."

Milada Horáková was sentenced to death on 8 June 1950, along with three co-defendants (Jan Buchal, Oldřich Pecl, and Záviš Kalandra). Many prominent figures in the West, notably scientist Albert Einstein, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, French President Vincent Auriol and former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, petitioned for her life, but the sentences were confirmed. Horáková was hanged in Prague's Pankrác Prison on 27 June 1950 at the age of 48. In the Czech Republic, "Commemoration Day for the Victims of the Communist Regime" was declared for 27 June, the day of her execution.

On 11 September 2008, aged 86, Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, the sole surviving member of the prosecution in the Horáková trial, was sentenced to six years in prison for assisting in the judicial murder of Milada Horáková. Brožová-Polednová was released from detention in December 2010, due to her age and health, and died on 15 January 2015.

In January 2020, Horáková was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Double Cross (1st Class) by Slovak president Zuzana Čaputová. The award was accepted by Erika Mačáková, member of Milada Horáková's Club.

Family Milada Horáková's husband, Bohuslav Horák, avoided arrest in 1949, escaping to West Germany and later settling in the United States. Their daughter, Jana, aged 16 at the time of her mother's execution, and subsequently raised by her aunt, was not able to join her father in the United States until 1968, where she proceeded to have a family with three grandchildren.

Biographical film Milada, a Czech-American feature film about the life of Milada Horáková, was released in November 2017. The role of Horáková is played by Ayelet Zurer. The English-language production is directed by the Czech-born film-maker, David Mrnka, who also was one of the writers of the screenplay.