Prague, June 7 (CTK) – Social Democrat Tomas Kosta, an aide to three Czech prime ministers as well as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, died at the age of 91 last night, daily Pravo writes yesterday.
Kosta was an architect of the apology to the German anti-fascists who were transferred in the aftermath of World War Two along with the rest of the German population from Czechoslovakia, the Czech government made ten years ago, Pravo writes.
Kosta was born in a Prague Jewish family in 1925. In June 1942, along with his family, he was deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto, from where he was sent to Auschwitz in October 1944 and in November 1944 to Meuselwitz, a part of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
He made two failed attempts to escape, but still he survived the Holocaust, Pravo writes.
After the war, Kosta entered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC), but he distanced himself from its ideology in the 1950s. His mother and father were arrested over what the Communist regime called subversion and espionage, it adds.
Kosta worked as an excavator operator and cook.
In 1968, he joined the Prague Spring reform movement and became director of the Svoboda publishers. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Kosta defected to Switzerland and then settled down in Germany, where he headed a publishing house, Pravo writes.
Along with German writers Heinrich Boell and Guenter Grass, he established the political and literary quarterly L, an outlet for eastern European dissidents.
After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, Kosta returned to Czechoslovakia, it adds.
He was the publisher of the Zemske noviny and Express papers. Then he worked as an aide to three Social Democrat prime ministers, Vladimir Spidla, Stanislav Gross and Jiri Paroubek, Pravo writes.
In the 1990s, he strongly contributed to the Czech-German reconciliation. Though a member of the German SPD, he was also an aide to Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, later leader of the conservative TOP 09, it adds.
Kosta received German state decorations and the For Merits medal, bestowed on him by former president Vaclav Havel in 2002.
“I was greatly impressed by him as he was one of the figures who masterminded the victorious campaign of Willy Brandt [in 1969],” Spidla (2002-2004) is quoted as saying.
