• Knihy

I walk with my head held high: the story of Milada Horáková's family

The famous words of Milada Horáková, written in her last letter to her loved ones, are the title of a book by the publicist Daniel Anýž dedicated to the extraordinary life of the family of the Czech lawyer and politician murdered by the communist regime in 1950. This readable and suspenseful book is published on the 70th anniversary of the communist murder of Milada Horáková. What shaped Milada Horáková? And where did she get the strength, courage and energy to survive Nazi imprisonment and not even submit to her Communist murderers? For the first time, the complete story of her entire family - the brave people who paid a cruel price for refusing to accept evil and unfreedom - has been published. This is true of Milada Horáková, her husband Bohuslav Horák and their daughter Jana Kánská, who had to do without her parents because of two totalitarian regimes. She found her real home as an adult woman in the USA. In extremely frank personal interviews, Jana Kánská confided to the author remarkable details that are still in front of her eyes more than 70 years later. For example, when she recalls the last meeting with her mother a few hours before her execution, which she and her aunt and uncle cried through while the condemned Milada gave them courage. Or when she recounts the fate of her family, whose members were systematically persecuted and punished by the communist regime. The book also includes the hitherto unpublished memoirs of Bohuslav Horák, who managed to dramatically escape arrest. During the First Republic he was a well-known journalist with his own, very popular radio programme. After emigrating to Germany and then to the USA, he worked for Moravec's group of former Czechoslovak agents. He repeatedly contacted the family in Prague, and several of the walker agents even had the task of taking Jana across the border several times. But why didn't they? How did the daughter of an executed politician live in communist Czechoslovakia? What was the reunion between father and daughter after eighteen years of separation like? And how does the still vital Jana Kánská, at the age of seventy-eight, remember her mother, her father, and the few years they lived together as a family? Daniel Anýž's book I Go With My Head Upright is a powerful testimony to the 20th century with an appeal to the present. The book is a reminder that evil cannot be ignored, that it must be pointed out. To defend what the couple Milada and Bohuslav Horák fought for against two totalitarianisms. Democracy and freedom.