For Czech people living in the Habsburg Empire in the 19th century there were two main goals: political autonomy for the Czech parts of the Empire, and the adoption of the Czech language.

These goals are somewhat obscure today so a short explanation is in order. The official, as well as the everyday language spoken by educated Czech people and Czech entrepreneurs inside the two Czech provinces called Böhmen ( Bohemia ) and Mähren (Moravia), was German. Germanization started short after the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and culminated during the first half of the 19th century. A huge portion of the intellectual elite consisted of a large group of ethnic Germans who had been living in Czech provinces since the 13th century. The nationalist sentiments that swept through Europe in the eighteen-hundreds awaked the Czech people to the discovery and admiration of their Slavic past.

While struggling to achieve these goals, the Czechs became more politically conscious. At the same time they discovered that many different political and cultural steps had to be taken along the road in order to achieve the main goals.

The deeds and organizational skills of women such as Magdalena Dorotea Rettigová and Anna Náprstková, active during the 1820’s, contributed to a climate that worked towards the nationalist goals.

Magdalena Dorotea Rettigová (1786 - 1845) was a practical woman who encouraged young girls to become educated and go into businesses as a means of strengthening Czech patriotism. Only by being educated and having knowledge of Czech history, could such girls, through their future roles as mothers, eventually instill in their children pride and compassion for the Czech people. She promoted this vision indefatigably in her own private school, where girls, mainly from poor backgrounds, could obtain free education. Apart from practical instruction of cooking and household work, knowledge expected of girls at this time, they were also taught the Czech language and urged to read books written by Czech writers. Rettigova herself wrote novels for women and contributed short articles to magazines. A foundation for poor girls in the small town of Litomyšl was established by her and continued its task well to the end of the 19th century. Magadalena Dorotea Rettigová is today mainly known for her legendary cookery book; "A Household Cookery Book or a Treatise on Meat and Fasting Dishes for Bohemian and Moravian Lasses”. This popular book remained for a long time the only cookery book written in the Czech language and is still in print today, thus it has become one of the historical treasures of the Czech people. Historically, Rettigová is described as the First Czech Feminist but it should not be forgotten that her view of emancipation was conservative and tradition bound when compared with later generations of women striving for the same goals.

Around 1820, the salon meetings in the Madame Staël spirit, in well-to-do homes became increasingly popular with Czech intellectuals. Many women took part in these gatherings where debates, concerts and theater plays were given. One of these salons inspired the creation of the first public school for girls. It was called Budec and was set up by Antonie Reissová (1817-1852) (Czech pseudonym Bohuslava Rajská) a teacher by profession. Though the original plans for Budec were somewhat grandiose - the complex of buildings was to include a hospital and shops, the school began its activities in 1844 in a three-flat-apartment building situated in the center of Prague . Some thirty to thirty-five girls between the ages of five to eighteen were given education a few hours every evening. The quality of the teaching was high but financial difficulties forced the school to close down already in 1848.

Shortly after the failed uprising in Prague in 1848 (this was a revolutionary year throughout Europe ) the Czech patriotic women met in order to beg clemency for the imprisoned Czech men. At these meetings the newly established Ladies Society for Women’s Education, inspired by the Budec achievements, founded a new girls’ school under the leadership of Svatava Amerlingová (1812-1887). Although in the beginning, the teaching language used was Czech, repression by the authorities led to its abandonment and eventually bilingual education was offered.

Around the same time the founding of the Slavic Women's Society was proposed by Honorata Wišniowská-Zapová (1812-1856), a Polish woman married to the Czech writer Karel Zap. The aim of this society would be the education of girls in the spirit of Czech nationalism. The Society started its educational program in 1855 but was forced to close down soon after because of the death of Wišniowská-Zapová.

Anna Náprstková (1788 -1873) ,a business woman who ran a brewery / distillery and an adjoining inn, the ”U Halánků”, sheltered a growing nationalist movement especially after the revolution year of 1848. Both her sons, Ferdinand and Vojtěch, being outspoken nationalists, were often investigated by police. The younger son, Vojtěch left home in secret for the United States of America where he finished his law studies. When he returned to Prague , after ten years abroad, his public speeches and presentations about activities established by American women created a wave of admiration and raised the conciseness of many who heard him. Around 1864 he organised an exhibition of American sewing machines (until then unknown in Prague ) together with demonstrations on how to use them. The exhibition was much visited by women.

The American Ladies’ Club or American Club of Bohemian Women (as the Czech name put it “Americký klub dám”) founded by philanthropist Vojtěch Náprstek (1826-1894) which was established 1865 held its first meetings on the premises ”U Halánků”.
The club offered lectures, not only on questions of women’s emancipation, but also about other subjects such as astronomy, medicine, biology, philosophy, literature, history and so on thus contributing to strengthen women’s will for emancipation. The free lectures were given to ladies on Sunday mornings; men were allowed to listen to them from the lobby. During the twenty years of these activities almost 27 000 listeners were registered. The members of the American Ladies’ Club could also use Náprstek´s library which contained, besides Czech books, books written in foreign languages. All these activities brought Vojtěch Náprstek the nickname “the women’s advocate”.
The American Ladies’ Club inspired the creation of similar clubs in provincial towns too. Although the importance of the club gradually diminished towards the end of century, it continued its activities long into the 20th century.

The second half of the 19th century, as it concerned women in the Czech national revival movement, belonged to the writers.

Božena Němcová (1820 -1862) was one of the few writers at this time who satisfied the spiritual needs of the Czechs. In her most well-known novel “The Grandmother” (“Babička”), Němcová describes the life of a village in the pre-natal period of modern Czech society. The main character of the novel is the writer’s grandmother, whose aims in life and whose moral values were well defined and taken to heart by the village inhabitants. Through her writing, Božena Němcová provided “fairy tales” to a young Czech urban society searching for new values - tales that indicated the values that they should be true to. Her influence may still be felt today as she is known as “Our lady Božena Němcová” by modern poets.

In her novel The First Bohemian Woman (“První Češka”), Karolina Světlá (1830 -1899) described the prejudices held by the large part of Czech society that was not yet in a patriotic frame of mind and who was against the efforts to awaken the spirits of Czechs to a more nationalist way of thinking. Světlá, though mainly a poet and writer, was also throughout her active life in the forefront of the intellectual movement in favour of Czech women. In 1870 she was one of the founders of the Czech Women’s Production Association (Ženský výrobní spolek český), which, with the help of donations made by more than two thousands women members and augmented by various grants, supported the Society for the Industrial and Commercial Education of Bohemian Girls founded in 1871. The Society ran practical education aimed at spreading knowledge about home industries run by women. After receiving generous grants from the Bohemian Medical Association, the Society founded the first school of nursing in the Habsburg Empire. Another association, Vesna with goals similar to the Czech Women’s Production Association was established in Mähren soon afterwards.

Eliška Krásnohorská (1847 -1926) is another woman for whom the Czech revival and emancipation of women were important. Writer, poet, journalist, translator and a friend of many cultural giants in Bohemia at that time, she chided the composer Bedřich Smetana for his faulty use of the Czech language offering him at the same time her own work at librettos for his operas. She subsequently wrote librettos for “Kiss” (Hubička), “The Devil´s Wall” (Čertova stena) and “Secret” (Tajemství), which today are beloved treasures of Czech culture.

Eliška Krásnohorská supported and participated actively in the Czech Women’s Production Association and the American Ladies Club. She edited Women’s Letters (Ženské listy) a monthly women’s journal which was affiliated to the Czech Women’s Production Association. This was a radical magazine and dealt with education offered by schools run by Associations. It also printed articles on the situation of women in society. In her booklet, The Women Question, published in 1870, Eliška Krásnohorská put forward the ideas of equal opportunities for women in education, as well as professional and economic life.

Despite opposition ("God will punish you for this sin against his eternal law. If we continue corrupting Czech girls, you will be doomed," wrote one of her opponents), she successfully propagated for the creation of the first high school for Czech girls which would enable them to continue with university studies. Her petition, signed by 4,810 people, was handed over to the Reichrat (the Habsburg Empire’s Parliament in Vienna ) on March 1890 and the Minerva High School for Girls opened in September 1890 with 51 students. Though the education was excellent, the final exam had to be taken at the nearby boy’s high school until 1907. For some years, young women educated at Minerva were not allowed to register for studies at the Habsburg Universities. They could attend the lectures as guests, but were not allowed to sit the exams and subsequently could not obtain a university degree. The only European exception was the University of Zurich . The first Czech lady physician Bohuslava Kecková took her exams there but was not accepted as a member of the medical society when she returned home. It was not until 1897 that women were permitted to attend university in a normal way, first at the faculty of art and a few years later at the faculty of medicine. The first female Czech-educated physician, Anna Honzáková (1875 -1940) obtained permission to sit her university exams in 1900 after already attending lectures for five years. Anna Honzáková graduated on the 17th of March 1902 closely watched by proud and cheerful Czech women.

During 1990 a split within the vast group of actively engaged women began. The older and more conservative women propagated mainly for education and participation in cultural and enlightening events for women. This group of women expressed their views and debated in magazines such as Women’s Letters and Women’s Horizon.
Although the question of women’s suffrage, raised by Vojtěch Náprstek in a speech at the Prague Council in May 1887, was immediately rejected, it continued to draw attention from radical segments of society. The Social Democratic party integrated women’s right to vote into its program of 1897. Also, the first Congress of Czech Women, held in May 1897, appreciative of the good work carried out by the American Ladies’ Club, wanted to bring the women’s suffrage issue to the forefront of the debate.

In 1903, the Czech Women´s club (Ženský klubu český), was established by those women who were politically active. Besides lectures, very often delivered by newly graduated Czech women, the Women’s Club also spread information about women’s questions outside the capital. The woman behind the Czech Women´s Club, Františka Plamínková (1875 – 1942), was a former teacher of mathematics and physics. She was also a reporter during the Balkan war of 1912. Františka Plamínková, with the help of the Committee for Women´s Suffrage (Výbor pro volební právo žen) which started its activities around 1905, took part in the struggle for the vote for women.
The members of this committee discovered that while women were banned from voting, the law did not expressly ban them from being elected. On the basis of this discovery the writer Božena Vítková-Kunětická, was, in 1912, elected as the first female deputy of the Diet of the Czech Kingdom . Though this was viewed as a great success by Czech women, Vítková-Kunětická was never allowed to take her seat in the assembly. Count Thun, the Governor of the Czech provinces forbade her to do so on the grounds that the election laws were unclear.

As in other countries involved in the First World War, women’s capacity for intellectual as well as physical work was proved when they replaced those men who left to fight. Because of the turmoil of war these abilities were never confirmed in law or in everyday life.

In 1938, the Munich Pact signed by France , Great Britain , Italy and Germany gave a vital one third of Czechoslovakia , inhabited mostly by German-speaking Czechs, to Hitler’s Third Reich.

At this time Františka Plamínková wrote an open letter to Adolf Hitler in which she used an often quoted phrase, “…with unshaken belief that despite military supremacy the “truth prevails” …..”
(“Truth Prevails” has been the motto of the state of Czechoslovakia from its creation in 1918).

On the 15th of March 1939 , the rest of what remained of the Czech parts of Czechoslovakia was incorporated into the Protectorate of Böhmen und Märhren by the occupying German forces. Františka Plamínková was imprisoned immediately after the occupation. However, international outcry forced the Germans to release her this time.
The first resistance against the occupation was carried out by officers from the disbanded Czech army and the members of the gymnastic movement Sokol, many of whom were women.
In May 1942, Reichsprotecter Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by Czech commandos sent from Great Britain . During the process of hunting down the hidden parachutes, 1,331 Czechs, among them more than 200 women, were caught and executed.
It is appropriate to name at least a few of these women if only to commemorate their memories: Liboslava Fafková (1921-1942), Milada Frantová (1906-1942), Taťána Hladěnová (1920-1942), Věra Junková (1917-1942), Marie Moravcová (1898-1942) and Jindriška Nováková (1928-1942).

Among the killed was also Františka Plamínková who was rearrested and executed by Nazi firing squad in Prague-Kobylisy on 30th of June 1942.
Many others were condemned to a life of misery and horror in concentration camps and Nazi prisons. Milada Horáková was one of these unfortunates as was Milena Jesenská who died in Ravensbrück in 1944.

After the communist takeover on 28th of February 1948 all women’s organization were forbidden or, if suitable, were incorporated into the communist dominated Czechoslovakian Women’s Association (Československý svaz žen). At the same time, all properties owned by women’s organizations were confiscated through the process of nationalisation.
Women’s questions were now considered to be solved by a superior Marxist doctrine that made all people, including the two genders, equal.

I feel it appropriate that the last words in this resume should go to two women I mentioned previously in this article.

Františka Zemínková together with Milada Horáková were arrested by the communist authorities in 1949 and put on trial in 1950. They were unjustly charged with high treason and espionage in one of the so called “communist trials”, with which the Czechoslovak authorities indulged themselves during the 1950’s. Františka Zemínková was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. She was released from prison by presidential amnesty in 1960 only to die shortly afterwards.

Milada Horáková was sentenced to death and hanged immediately after the trial in June 1950.

Emilie Pavlina (in some biographies she is called Emilie Vênceslava) was born on 26th of February 1878 into a wealthy and patriotic family of Kittls. She was one of five children and her father Emanuel,whose properties included many houses in Prague, two breweries, building land and even silver and antimony mines, was a patron of the arts. He supported many Czech artists financially and promoted Czech culture under the rule of the Habsburg monarchy. Emilie’s mother, a promising singer, gave up her artistic career when she married.

Emelie Pavlina was a gifted child and was encouraged by her father. She began her artistic studies by learning to play the violin and acting, but on becoming a teenager, she started study music and singing with the Loewe-Destinn family. The fondness for her teacher, Marie Loewe-Destinn, led her to choose the name Emma Destinn ( in Czech Ema Destinnova) as her pseudonym, under which she became a celebrated star of opera.

Her first entry into the world of music was, however, unexpectedly difficult. Emma was not accepted at the Prague National Theatre as a singer. She then tried to start her singing career in Germany but even there she was rejected by both the Dresden Semper Opera and the Berlin Theater des Westens when trying to obtain a role.
Her first public appearance was at the Berlin Hofoper in June 1898, where she gave a stunning performance as Santuza in “Cavalleria Rusticana”.

Although it was in Berlin that her career as a soprano singer started, her first artistic effort was as a playwright when three of her own dramas were performed in Prague theaters in 1896. She was also a poetess.

Nevertheless, due to her success in Berlin and later her performance in Bayreuth, the world of opera opened for her and she was offered role after role throughout the musical metropolises of the world. She gave more then seven hundred appearances at the Berlin Hofoper and sang with Enrico Carusso in Puccini´s “Madame Butterfly” at Covent Garden. This was a tremendous success which gave her the opportunity to sing there with Caruso again in “Aida”, “Don Giovanni”, “Cavaleria Rusticana” and “Tosca”.
Then came eight full seasons at the Metropolitan Opera where she interpreted twenty roles. Her biggest acclaim, however, came when singing in the world premier of Pucini´s “La Funciulla del West”.

And then, unfortunately, in 1914, the world erupted into the Great War. Emma Destinn left New York for home in 1916 carrying with her secret messages from Czech patriotic groups. When crossing the border into the Czech area of the Habsburg kingdom, she was searched thoroughly and the confidential documents hidden in her clothes were discovered. Her passport was confiscated immediately, but as a famous artist loved by the whole word and also by the German Kaiser, she was spared harsher treatment. She was offered amnesty and the return of her passport by the Habsburg authorities in exchange for a series of concerts to be given for the Austrian army. However, as Czech patriot she turned the offer down. Emma Destinn was confined to her manor house in Straz nad Nezarkou in south Bohemia, unaware that her international singing career was over.

Shortly before the creation of the Republic of Czechoslovia on 28th of October 1918, at the end of the war, the patriot Emma Destinn was permitted to sing at the National Theater in Prague. She also went on tour to other Czech cities where she was acclaimed by an enthusiastic public.

As the world of opera changed in the post-war years, Emma Destinn found that her attraction had diminished. She made a concert tour of Scandinavia and then another in Czechoslovakia.

Though she previously had many admirers she remained unmarried throughout her whole singing career, telling everyone that the life of an international opera star was incompatible with love and marriage. When she retired from the stage, however, she married a Czech flying officer with whom she managed her manor house and estate as well as a distillery, brewery, and mill. Emma Destinn died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 52 when visiting her doctor in a nearby town in South Bohemia.

Milena Jesenska was born in Prague a few years before the end of nineteenth century. Her father was a professor at Charles University and a successful dentist. Her mother, Milena Hejzlarova, a beautiful, though frail woman gave birth to another child, a boy, when Milena was four years old. The child died shortly after it was born.
Milena`s mother’s health gradually declined and she spent the last years of her life ill with pernicious anemia. She was at first forced to sit in a wheelchair and later when she became bedridden she was cared for by young Milena.

When her mother died, Milena was thirteen years old. She was left alone with her self-obsessed father and it was not easy for her to grow up under his strict influence. Although she liked their long walks through the Prague countryside, she detested when she was forced to help her father with wounded soldiers sent from the field hospitals to professor Jesensky´s dental surgery. Her memories of these times were etched with incidents of spanking by her dominant father.

At fifteen, Milena was a mature young woman trying to free herself from the influence of her father. She attended one of the first secondary school’s in Czechoslovakia, the “ Minerva School for Girls”, founded by a group of patriots. “The Minervans”, as the emancipated girl students were called, could later be found in the midstream of Czech cultural and political life. Milena’s personality at this time alternated between a rebellion against conventions, which she tried to deal with through aggressive arrogance, and a wild urge to live. At the same time she was a passionate reader of novels by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hamsun, Meredith, and Thomas Mann amongst others, which formed a sense of values within her.

Milena’s first long love was Ernst Polak who worked in a Prague bank. Ernst’s main interest was to spend free time in the Café Arco together with German writers and artist who lived in Prague. Thus Ernst Polak introduced Milena to the world of Franz Werfell, Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Kafka. This love affair was unacceptable to her father who, as a Czech patriot, found her involvement to be disgraceful.

Together with a doctor friend of his, he had Milena committed to a mental home for nine months trying, in this way, to keep Milena away from Ernst. This did not work however, the resourceful Milena obtained a key to the garden gate from a well-meaning nurse, and was able to meet her lover at will.

Milena and Ernst married soon after her release from Veleslavins mental home in March 1918. The married couple moved to Vienna. Milena’s father immediately withdrew all his financial support and broke off all relations with her.

The marriage was not a happy one. Ernst soon lost interest in his wife, indulged himself more and more into Café Herrenhof’s artistic and intellectual life and found himself mistresses. Milena, an outsider in a new environment, soon felt alone. And she had to start making her own living. She started to give Czech lessons for German-speaking industrialist whose properties were situated in newly-created Czechoslovakia. On top of that, when she was especially short of money, she went to a railroad station to work as a porter. Then she started to write short articles from Vienna’s varied world of culture and politics and translated from German to Czech. Her first articles appeared in the Prague newspaper, “Tribuna”.

In 1920, Milena read Kafka´s first stories and decide to translate them into Czech.
This led to an exchange of letters and a visit by Milena to the town of Merano, where Kafka was taking a cure for his tuberculosis. It was there that she and Franz Kafka fell in love. They met again for four days in Vienna and once more in Gmünd. It was a passionate love coloured by a touch of tragedy. Franz Kafka was deeply afraid of his own sentiments and feelings, and Milena was not capable of leaving Ernst Polak. This tragedy can be followed in “Letters to Milena”, a collection of Kafka’s letters, published many years later. Milena’s letters to him have disappeared without trace. They may have been burned by Franz Kafka. Nevertheless, they are now lost in the whirl wind of history.
The love affair ended, at Kafka´s request, because Milena´s vitality and hunger for his love weighed on him. They stayed close however; Milena wrote to him occasionally and visited him a few times at his parent’s house in Prague, where the ailing Kafka took refuge.

Franz Kafka, the author of Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Castle and The Trial died in July 1924. The world didn’t take much notice of his death with the exception of Milena´s today-famous obituary published on July 6 in “Narodni Listy”.
It begins: “The day before yesterday, Franz Kafka, a German writer living in Prague, died at the Kierling sanatorium in Klosterneuburg near Vienna. Few people knew him here in Prague, for he was a recluse, a wise man who was afraid of life.”
And a few lines down in the obituary Milena caught the essence of Kafka’s life and creativity in these fine words:
“He wrote the most important books in recent German literature. They embody in untendentious form the battle of the generations of our time. They are genuinely naked and therefore seem naturalistic even when they speak in symbols. They have the dry irony and second sight of a man, who saw the world so clearly that he could not bear it and had to die, for he was unwilling to make concessions, to take refuge, as others do, in intellectual delusions, however noble.”

It was at this time that Milena left Ernst Polak for Count Schaffgotsch and shortly afterwards, they together left Vienna for Dresden. Count Shaffgotsch was one of the Austrian soldiers who fought at the Eastern front. He had been a prisoner of war in Russia and when the revolution passed, he stayed for a while in the vastness of Russia. When he returned home he was a great admirer of Communism as was Milena. It was this mutual admiration that brought him and Milena together. After endless café discussions, what could be more powerful than straightforward ideology?

In 1925, they both moved to Alice Gerstl’s, a friend of Milena’s who lived with her husband, Otto Rühles, in a small village outside Dresden. Otto Rühle’s was a former member of the Reichstag for a Social Democratic party and was a founder of the German Communist party. He left the party soon after it was founded however, but remained a Marxist as long as he lived. It was here, in the company of her hostesses and their friends, that Milena probably acquired her fondness for, and at the same time her scepticism of, the Communist ideology.

Her contributions to the Czech newspapers grew, not only in “Tribuna” but also “Narodni Listy”, the conservative Prague newspaper where Milena edited the Woman’s Page. This became more and more her arena.

She moved back to Prague in order to be able to work more effectively. She was able to enjoy once again Prague society, and spent long, joyful hours at Metro Café, Národní kavárna or The Slavia. A collection of her articles was published in 1926 under the name, “The Way to Simplicity”. Count Shaffgotsch was unhappy though, he knew no Czech language, and without friends of his own or any sort of work, he slowly faded away.

In the summer of 1926, at an outing, organised by the Creative Artist´s Association (called “Mánes” in Czech), Milena met an architect, Jaromír Krejcár. They married in 1927 and their first and only child, Jana, was born 1928. Milena´s maternity was a protracted period of pain and sickness which, in the end, led to her hospitalization. The doctors who assisted her eventually gave her up for lost. She did not die, however, although she became addicted to morphine which she was given to control the pain. Her left knee was affected by multiple metastases from septicaemia. She finally lost all flexibility in it after years of struggling.

It was another Milena who re-entered life after more than a year of convalescence.
She left the bourgeois “Narodni Listy” and took over the woman’s pages of the liberal “Lidove Noviny”. However, the articles she now wrote had lost the edge of her previously published ones. In 1931, she officially joined the Communist Party and started to write for the party newspaper “Tvorba”. To begin with, she was an ardent party member, convinced of the party monopoly on the truth and participated in demonstrations and meetings. But to feed her morphine addiction required money of course and to deal with this permanent shortage, she started to contribute to the Social Democractic newspaper “Pravo Lidu”, under various pseudonyms. She tried to be cured from her drug addiction several times but without success. Even though Milena´s home life became increasingly unhappy she and her husband started to talk about moving to the Soviet Union in 1934. Their child Jana would soon be of school age and the Prague schools seemed to them to be too bourgeois and corrupt. In the end it was only her husband, Jaromir, the admirer of Le Corbusier, who, after receiving an invitation, went to Moscow. He was carried away by the dream of unlimited possibilities to build modern cities for the working heroes. After two years he came back, divorced Milena and remarried with his Russian love Riva whom he brought back with him. He also appeared to be totally disappointed with the stern Communist style of life. It was around this time that Milena was expelled from the Communist Party which she increasingly started to regard as lifeless, mechanical and even inhuman.

She started to write for the liberal democratic “Pritomnost” (The Present) in 1937 and threw off all traces of her Communist past. Her campaign against all threats to freedom, whether from the left or the right, brought her into conflict with left wings intellectuals. At last she successfully underwent a detoxification treatment and by that gained renewed strength and stability. Milena became a political journalist, reporting about growing tensions between the Sudet Germans and the Czechs, two Czech mobilizations and the situation of the Jews in the Sudeten land. Her skill in German enabled her to talk with all sides involved in the conflict on an equal footing. Nevertheless, always the patriot, she hoped that the Czech army and people would be able to resist Hitler.

After the Munich Agreement and even more so after the occupation of the rest of former Czech part of Czechoslovakia by Nazis, fugitives from repression, Jews and German and Czech intellectuals, found refuge at the home of Milena. Although Czech officers and fliers hid there before being driven by car across the occupied territory to the vicinity of the Polish border by a young German, count Joachim von Zedtwitz. Some of these refuges tried to save their lives; others wanted to join the French army in the war they were convinced was soon coming. Thus Milena became step by step involved in the resistance movement. And she continued to write articles filled with Czech patriotism for the growing underground press. One day Milena was arrested, sent to Dresden for trial, and then sent from there directly to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Here she met Margarete Buber-Neumann a widow of a German communist leader executed by Stalin. Margarete Buber-Neumann spent some time in Gulag camps before being handed to the Gestapo, together with fellow German Communists shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was signed in August 1939. Milena and Margarete became close friends and this helped them to fight off the hate from imprisoned Communist comrades who saw them as renegades and traitors.

Three weeks before D-day, on May 17, 1945, Milena Jesenska died after a long kidney illness.

Her body was cremated and the ashes spread on the lake near the entrance to the concentration camp.

Marie Cerminova was born on 21st of September 1902 in Prague. It seems that she was keen not to let us to know about her upbringing and early life. So we know little or nothing of what she was like as a girl; which schools she was educated at; who her parents were and where they all lived when Marie was young. We know she lived with her sister during the early years of her life, but we know nothing of other brothers and sisters.

When she was seventeen years old she started to study at Prague’s School of Crafts and Design. Then, in 1922 she entered the world of art. That was the year her studies ended and she met her artistic soul-mate, Jiri Styrsky, while on holiday on the island of Korcula in Yugoslavia. Together, they were soon accepted as members of an influential group called “Devetsil” (“Nine Forces”), formed in 1920 by avant-gardes architects, painters, sculptors, collagist, film makers, designers and writers in the newly created Czech Republic. Her first exhibition was held at the Second exhibition of Devetsil in November-December 1923. Her seven works, painted in 1922-23 were shown there under her pseudonym of TOYEN.

There are many explanations for the origin of this name. It may have been from Citoyen without the first two letters. Or it could have been a play with a few of the letters of the alphabet written down on a coffeehouse napkin by poet Jaroslav Seifert and rearranged shortly before her first exhibition, where she did not want to be exhibited under her own name. Nevertheless, the genderless name of Toyen was born and the name Marie Cerminova slowly disappeared into the unknown.

Toyen’s first trip of to the painter’s heaven, France, was undertaken at the end of 1924. She spent most of the time on the Cote d´Azur, where she probably formed her view of the country she would in the future be so much part off. Toyen’s creativity started to take her in many different directions. She liked designing dust jackets for Czech books together with Styrsky, but also experimented with different styles of painting such as primitivism which was soon to be replaced by a lyrical-abstractive way of expression. Later on, she and Styrsky started to call their Expressionism for Artificialism. Toyens first exhibition in France was as early as in December 1925 at an exhibition called L´Art d´aujourd´hui.
Toyen and Styrsky continued with painting, poetry, design and artistic proclamations until they met Andre Breton and Paul Eluard when these two giants of Surrealism visited the Czech Republic. Later, during their visits to Paris, Toyen and Styrsky were influenced by Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Claude Cahun. When the first surrealist group outside France was founded in Prague in 1934, Toyen and Styrsky were the initiators.

Toyen´s first exhibition with the Surrealists was at Galerie Aux Quatre Chemins in Paris in December 1935. Thus Toyen entered the European forum of Surrealistic Art. Her exhibitions were numerous, challenging and, if one looks at her pictures, breathtaking. She exhibited in London and Prague in 1936; Prague, Tokyo and then Prague again in 1937; Paris, Prague, Amsterdam in 1938 and New York in 1939. At the second Prague Surrealist Exhibition in 1938, Toyen presented all her latest paintings. These were difficult years, characterised by one of the participants as “one of the last manifestations of free spirit in art”. Exhibitions and the creative process of art gave the participants a final opportunity to criticize both Fascism and Stalinism at the same time. The conflict between avant-garde art production and the official ideology of the two totalitarian systems was exposed by l´enfant terrible of the Czech, modernist avant-gard, Karel Teige, who pointed out the similarities between the Fascist criticism of enartade kunst and the Stalinist criticism of wicked formalism. It was at this time the left wing artists in the surrealist movement tried to dismantle the Surrealist group of Czech artist when pressured to do so by the Czech Communist Party.

When the Czech Republic and its capital Prague were occupied by the Nazis on 15th of March 1939, Toyen responded with twelve pictures called Les Spectre du Désert.

The Second World War was a time of strife in occupied Prague. Toyen’s lifelong friend, creative inspiration and partner, Jindrich Styrsky, died in Mars 1942. At about this time she decided to hide a young poet, Jindrich Heisler, in her one room flat. Jindrich had decided not to turn himself in to the Germans who were rounding up non-Arians for transportation east. Jindrich Heisler lived in Toyen´s bathroom for the entire war thus saving his life. Then Toyen turned forty, a fact that gave birth to the “Life starts at Forty” booklet produced as a samizdat by her Surrealist friends.

After the liberation, a month-long exhibition of Toyen’s works, produced during the previous five years, was held in Prague. The most famous of these paintings are Shooting Range and Go and hide you, war.

In 1947, due to rising political tension in the Czech Republic, Toyen decided to emigrate to France together with Jindrich Heisler. Both immediately became members of the Parisian Surrealist group which perhaps Toyen thought would help them adapt to a new life. Sadly though, life outside her beloved Prague was difficult for Toyen.

Some of her closest friends among the Surrealists chose to support Stalin’s Communism and Toyen subsequently terminated the friendship with them. On the other hand, the firm friendship she enjoyed with Benjamin Péret and André Breton gave her support. At the very beginning of 1953 Jindrich Heisle died at the age of 39 thus leaving Toyen alone once again. Toyen now moved into the Hôtel de la Paix situated at Ile de Saint Louis for the next twenty years. Most of her contacts with the outside word were with Surrealists.

In a photograph from the surrealist meeting at the café at Place Blanche, one can see the concentrated, dark-eyed Toyen sitting in the same row as Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, André Breton, and Benjamin Péret.

Her first personal exhibition, where she exhibited her work from the fifties, was at the surrealist Galerii à l´Etoile Scellée in May 1955. She was, however, also continuously involved in many others exhibitions to which she contributed new paintings or drawings. On the other hand, her work was seldom exhibited in her native country of Czechoslovakia during the forty long years of the Communist regime.

Shortly after the death of André Breton, Toyen moved from the Hôtel de la Paix into his old atelier at rue Fontaine. When the Paris surrealist group dissolved itself in 1969, Toyen went into seclusion, keeping contact with only a few close friends. At the end of her life Toyen turned her energy into making collages instead of paintings.

Toyen died in November 1980. She is buried at the Batignolles cementery in Paris where Jindrich Hessler, André Breton and Benjamin Péret are also buried.

Milada Kralova (her maiden name), was born on Christmas Eve 1901. She was the second child of a middle-class Prague family. Her father was a middle manager in a pencil factory and an ardent Czech patriot. Her mother devoted her life to her family which consisted of Milada’s older sister Marta and a younger brother, Jiri. At the beginning of the First World War, her sister and brother died almost simultaneously thus leaving the family in deep grief.

When Milada started her studies at Upper Secondary school, her mother gave birth to yet another child, Vera. When her mother died, the role of bringing up little Vera fell to Milada. Nevertheless, this did not altogether stop young Milada taking part in the turbulent events that occurred at the end of the war.

Because of her active participation in demonstrations against the war, where she threw roses over the wall into a soldiers’ camp, she was expelled from school. She restarted her studies at another school where she took her exams after Czechoslovakia was created in October 1918.

The new republic gave women equal opportunities to study any subject and to take any degree at university, something that was not possible during the Habsburgs’ reign, a period when women could only visit lectures in medicine and philosophy. Milada subsequently choose to study law at Charles University in Prague, though her first choice, which was not at all approved of by her father, was medicine. The years of studies were also the years in which she took part in cultural and political events in the newly created republic. One of her first engagements was with the Women´s National Council. She also met her first love at this time, Bohuslav, who was studying agricultural management. She took her Ph.D. in 1926. In the same year she also applied for membership of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party.

She married Bohuslav Horak and started her own carrier as a lawyer with the Prague City Council. There, her main task was to deal with social issues such as public housing and unemployment but she was also concerned with the welfare of unmarried and divorced mothers. At the same time, she was in close cooperation with the founder and chairman of the Woman’s National Council, Frantiska Plaminkova. This gave her the opportunity to travel outside the republic and to gain knowledge about how gender questions were deal with in other countries. These activities led to further engagements when new Czech legislation concerning gender issues was discussed and put forward. She was also able to promote her ideas through public speaking and participation at conferences in various parts of the republic.

At the end of 1933 she gave birth of a daughter, Jana.

After the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Milada Horakova, with the help of the Woman’s National Council together with Marie Provaznikova, the Chairwoman of Sokol, organised humanitarian help for the tens of thousands of Czech and German refugee families from the Sudetenland through the Committee for the Assistance of Refugees.

When Nazi Germany, through the creation of the Böhmen und Mähren protectorate, annexed the rest of Czech territory in March 1939, Milada Horakova joined the Resistance movement. Through the network of the Woman’s National Council, she gathered valuable information and secured safe houses for the members of the underground Resistance. She was also a co-writer of the Charter of Czech Resistance, a document which outlined the goals for free Czechoslovakia and the aim of the Resistance movement.

Together with her husband, Milada Horakova was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1940. Despite two long years of torture and interrogation inside Gestapos prisons in Prague Milada Horakova did not give in. From 1942, Milada Horakova was imprisoned at Little Fortress inside the concentration camp in Theresienstadt awaiting the verdict.
In 1944, the Gestapo passed the death sentence on Milada, but the court in Dresden changed the sentence to 8 years detention. Her husband was sentenced by the same court to 5 years. It was in Aichach, near Munich that she served her prison sentence, and here she was liberated by American troops at the end of the war.

On returning to the liberated republic of Czechoslovakia, Milada Horakova reentered public life, becoming a leading politician within in the Czechoslovak National Socialist party. She was a member of the temporary Czech Parliament, chairman of the Women’s National Council and co-founder of the Union of Political Prisoners and Survivors of Victims of Nazism. In the parliamentary election of 1946, she defended her seat, thus becoming one of the 55 MP’s of the Czechoslovak National Socialist party. This same year she was awarded two medals by President Benes, in commemoration of her anti-Nazi activities during the war.

Many of her political stand-offs led her into clashes and confrontations with the Czech Communist party. These started immediately after the war as a result of her public critique of the Communist-dominated People's Courts, which in some cases deliberately sentenced citizens accused of collaboration with Nazis. There were also the Communist party’s indefatigable attempts to infiltrate all other political parties and organizations. As an upright democrat, Milada Horakova tried to prevent these undermining activities at the Women’s National Council and inside the Czechoslovak National Socialist party.

Then, in the month of February 1948, after the resignation of the coalition government, the Communist party, together with pro-communist members from other political parties, formed a new Communist government. On the streets of Prague the armed People’s Militia marched in support of communists. The communist created a “people’s democracy” regime and started nationalizing all private property. The non-communist politicians, as well as intellectuals and other opponents to Communism were in many cases forced out of their jobs and positions in society. Many of them tried to leave the republic.

Milada Horakova was removed from all her public assignments, but despite advice to emigrate, she would not leave the republic. “My place is at home” was the answer she gave to those who urge her to leave. As a faithful democrat, she felt oblige to fight the upcoming dictatorship. Somehow, naively, she thought that the communists would, in due time, be forced from power by the same forces that defeated the Nazis. On the 10th of March 1948, the popular foreign minister, Jan Masaryk mysteriously died on the pavement bellow the bathroom window of his flat. Milada Horakova left her parliamentary seat on the same day with the words “From now on I will wander a straight path.”

A small group of dedicated people began to organize themselves into a movement of resistance against the communist regime. An informal group, centred on the former Czechoslovak National Socialist party MP´s Milada Horakova and Josef Nestaval, was formed. The group tried to keep contact with former émigré ministers from the Czechoslovak National Socialist party. And of course there were the same tasks to be done as under the Nazi occupation: safe houses and escape routes out of Czechoslovakia for the persecuted.

In 1949 the round-ups by the secret police, the StB, of those opposed to the communist regime began and the first harsh prison sentences were passed and executions began.

Milada Horakova was arrested on the 27th of September 1949. Even her husband Bohumil was placed under house arrest for a short while, together with their daughter, but he was lucky enough to escape through a window and backyard trying in vain to warn his wife.

It was not yet clear what she should or could be tried for. The thirteen people arrested together with Milada Horakova were politically active in three different parties. The scenario of the trial was rewritten several times under the supervision of two Soviet political-trial experts, Lichacov and Makarov, who worked closely with the StB. Finally, the trial was presented as the case against “Milada Horakova and company”.

The interrogations of detainees were inhuman. Needless to say, all those accused agreed entirely to confess to the fabricated crimes. As witnessed years later by one of the survivor of the trial, Frantisek Preucil, it was not possible to withstand the interrogation methods: “After seven months in Ruzyne prison I was willing to put my signature to any document, even one stating that I murder my own grandmother.” Preucil also described his confrontation at the trial with Milada Horakova: “Her eyes! Her look wasn’t any more her look. It wasn’t her anymore standing in front of me.”

The trial of “Milada Horakova and company” started at 31st of May 1950. During the last months of their detention, all the accused had to memorize and follow carefully the written script of the StB. This included both the questions they would be asked by the prosecutors as well as the answers they were ordered to give.
The media, dominated by the Communist Party, described the accused: … “as the traitors of the republic… as the criminals who joined against the people of the republic in order to thrust a dagger in their back …..as the rats plotting from sewers against the working class …. as professional agents of the American, English or French imperialists ….. as the gauleiters and little Hitlers”.

People of Czechoslovakia, from factories, shops, offices, universities and military service bases responded with more than 6,000 resolutions, which were delivered to the court during the final days of the trial, demanding the highest possible sentence: the death sentence for all the accused.

The verdicts came on the 8th of June 1950. The accused were convicted on charges of high treason and espionage. The verdicts were four death sentences, four life imprisonments and five sentences ranging from 15 to 28 years. One of the four death sentences was passed on Milada Horakova.

There were protests from abroad against this harsh injustice by prominent persons like Albert Einstein. Although Milada Horakova’s ageing father, together with her daughter, Jana begged the president, Klement Gottwald for clemency all efforts were in vain.

Three days before her execution, Milada Horakova started to write her last letters to her family and friends - eleven letters, in total eighteen pages. They are the writings of an unbroken woman; a woman full of spirit, a woman trying to give those nearest to her some love and hope for the future even though she herself would be absent.

The evening before her execution she was allowed a fifteen-minute long visit from her daughter together with Milada´s younger sister Vera and her husband.

Milada Horakova was hanged on the morning of the 27th of June 1950.

P.S.

Between 1948 and 1960, 234 politically motivated executions were carried out in communist Czechoslovakia. 233 men and 1 woman, Milada Horakova. The letters Milada Horakova wrote during her last three days in life were never delivered to the addressees. They were eventually published in a small booklet in Prague in 1990. Milada Horakova expressed a wish to be buried at the family grave alongside her mother. Her ashes were, however, put into an unidentified, common-grave in the Prague-Strasnice graveyard some years after the execution.

Bohumil Horak escaped from Czechoslovakia in December 1949. He followed the trial against his wife from the Valka refuge camp situated near Nuremburg in West Germany. In 1951, Bohumil Horak moved to the United States of America. Bohumil Horak died on the 13th October 1976.

Jana Horakova, Milada Horakova’s daughter, stayed with the family of Milada’s sister Vera and her husband until 1968. She was allowed to leave Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring when she moved to the United States of America to be with her father.

Milada Horakova was finally rehabilitated in 1968 and fully acquitted in 1990. Today, monuments have been raised to her memory and many streets and avenues bear the name of Milada Horakova in cities and towns throughout the Czech Republic.

The Czechoslovak National Socialist Party was established 1897. The ranks of the party included industrial and farm workers as well as shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs. A large proportion of railway workers and state employees were also members. It also had a good following among teachers and the intelligentsia. The Czechoslovak National Socialist Party was the only party seriously competing with Social Democrats for workers’ votes. The policy of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party was to promote the interest of the lower-income groups. After 1918, the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party became the main supporter of Edward Benes, first as Foreign Minister and later when he became President 1935.