Prague, Nov 17 (CTK) – The Czech resistance fighters against the Communist rule Ludmila Vachalova, Jitka Malikova, Anton Tomik and Rudolf Dobias as well as Holocaust survivor Jiri Brady received the National Memory Awards from the Post Bellum group on Thursday.
Three of the laureates received it personally. Dobias could not come, citing health problems, and Brady lives in Canada.
In 1954, the StB Communist secret service detained Vachalova when she was 18 because she spread the news from her brother about the conditions in a forced labour camp. She spent six years in the prison.
Malikova, a medicine student, was hiding persecuted priests and helped them flee abroad. She was detained in 1953 and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
She was only amnestied in 1960.
Tomik, detained in 1951 and sentenced for treason to 15 years in prison, was able to flee, along with other prisoners, from a forced labour camp. He was caught and shot by the Communist police.
Along with his friends, Dobias released anti-Communist leaflets. When he was 19, he was arrested and then spent seven years in forced labour camps.
Brady’s parents were detained by the Nazi regime over their Jewish origin and they perished in a concentration camp.
Along with his junior sister, Brady was sent to the Terezin concentration camp in 1942 and then to Auschwitz.
At the end of the war, Brady managed to flee from a death march, but his sisters was killed in a gas chamber.
Post Bellum registers and archives the memories of witnesses of important historical events and eras “who have proved that honour, freedom and human dignity are not empty words.” Based on the material, it stages exhibitions and cooperates with various media in the production of documentaries.
Post Bellum stores the stories of witnesses in a publicly accessible Internet collection Memory of the Nation it founded in 2001. The collection now contains almost 5500 stories by people from many European countries.
