Once the Communist Party grabbed the reins of power in 1948, Horáková was forced to resign her seat in the national assembly. Nevertheless she refused to be silenced. An outspoken advocate for freedom and democracy, she remained a thorn in the side of the leadership. On 27 September 1949 she was arrested by the secret police once again, only this time it was the Communist StB (State Security) rather than the Gestapo. Along with a dozen other friends and associates she was subjected to the first of the communist regime’s show trials, facing the charge of being part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the new government. She was offered clemency if she signed a confession of guilt, but she refused. During the public trial, while the other accused read out confessions that had been prepared for them by the prosecution, Milada Horáková refused to admit any guilt and spoke out for the truth. She, along with three others, was condemned to death.
Is that enough? The measurement of heroism is so difficult that sometimes we find ourselves gainsaying it. Even Milada Horáková herself wondered about what she had done, writing in the very last letter from prison to her daughter:
one day, when you grow up, you will wonder why your mother, who loved you and treasured you, managed her life so strangely. Perhaps then you will find the right answer to this question, perhaps a better one than I myself could give you today.
It was after she wrote that letter that they took her out and hanged her from a hook in the ceiling. There was no drop. According to the official report, Milada Horáková took fifteen minutes to die, by strangulation, hanging on the end of the rope.
Is that enough?
It’s not a competition, is it? But by any standards Milada Horáková must rate as one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century.
16
Lenka’s mother opened a drawer in the table and took out a photograph, a snapshot of a young couple sitting on a rock. The pair were wearing hiking boots. The woman – a version of herself, an earlier, happy, clear, vivid version (a version, too, of Lenka) – was laughing at the camera, but the man was doing nothing more than smile, a little ironically, as though he already knew there was little to be amused by.
‘There we are, in our Marxist-Leninist dawn,’ the woman said. ‘Weren’t we beautiful? We saw the future as something wonderful to imagine. Certainly not this.’
‘This’ meant the narrow, two-room apartment with thin walls and grey plaster, and the sensation of being in some kind of concrete storage tank. ‘This’ meant Horáková dead. ‘This’ meant Soviet troops on Czech soil and a summons from Moscow to the Czech leadership to attend an emergency meeting at a railway junction on the border of the Soviet Union. ‘This’ meant her whole world. She replaced the photo with care.
‘So what happened?’ Sam dared to ask.
The woman drew on her cigarette, considering him through the smoke. ‘Do you know about Slánský?’
The name sounded like a cymbal struck. Of course he knew about Slánský. He knew about Horáková; he knew about Slánský. Slánský was a Party hack, the kind of man to dismiss bourgeois freedoms with a derisive sweep of the hand, the architect of the communist coup of 1948 and, thereby, the man who became the right hand of the Party leader, Klement Gottwald.
‘The Party was like a monster,’ the woman said. ‘First it consumed its enemies – Horáková and her kind – and then it turned on its own members. What was the name of the Greek god who devoured his own children?’
‘Cronus.’
‘That’s right. So, like Cronus, the Party devoured its own children, Slánský, Clementis and the others. How many in all? Fifteen, sixteen? Espionage on behalf of Western capitalist powers, counter-revolution, all kinds of trumped-up charges. What do they call it? Show trial. Like something you might put on in the theatre. That’s what it was, the theatre of the absurd.’
She nodded in Lenka’s direction. ‘She was only a baby. She remembers nothing about it. Have you heard of Margolius? Rudolf Margolius?’
Was she testing him, seeing how much he knew and therefore how much he was worth? ‘He was a Czech trade representative,’ Sam said, ‘dealing with Western countries.’
The woman nodded, drawing on her cigarette as though sucking in courage. ‘Well, Rudolf Margolius worked with my husband. They were part of the Czechoslovak delegation in London, trying to set up trade deals that would benefit the country. Trying to earn hard currency for the country, that’s what they were doing. The ministry of foreign trade. And that was why they were arrested, along with Slánský and the rest. They’d been abroad, so they must be guilty.’
She talked some more, eager to explain to someone who would listen. Her husband was a clever man, too clever for his own good. If you were stupid then you got on. You did what you were told and nothing more. Don’t show any initiative, don’t show any imagination, above all, don’t show any intelligence. That was the way to progress. It’s not much different now. ‘He negotiated with Harold Wilson,’ she added. ‘Do you know Mr Harold Wilson?’
Sam tried a smile. ‘Not personally. He’s a little above my grade.’
The woman didn’t smile back. Instead she made a face, as though she had eaten something distasteful. ‘My husband didn’t say much about his work but he told me about this man, Wilson. So when my husband was in prison, I wrote to Wilson for some kind of help. It seems futile, doesn’t it? But what else could I do? I was helpless, powerless, just an irrelevance as far as the Party was concerned. My husband was on trial for his life but I could go fuck.’
‘Maminka!’
She waved Lenka’s protest away. ‘I thought, maybe this Wilson can help. Does that sound crazy? But I was crazy. I wasn’t allowed even to visit my husband in prison. Just one letter a month, and nothing in it about what was happening to him. So I thought about what Lukáš had told me about his visits to London and I got this Wilson’s title exact so that the letter would reach the correct person: President of the Board of Trade, that was it.’ She said the title in some kind of English and looked at Sam for approval, to see if she had got it right.
He nodded.
‘I wrote the letter myself and had a friend translate it into English. I begged this Wilson for help, asked him to write and explain to the judge that my husband was an honourable man who never did anything other than try to get the very best for his country in the negotiations. And surely, being a fellow socialist, this Wilson would be able to confirm that this was so. Wilson is a socialist, isn’t he?’
‘Of a kind.’
‘So, a kind of socialist. A bourgeois, Western socialist. I got someone to smuggle the letter out of the country because you couldn’t just put something like that in the post.’
‘And what happened?’
She gave a wry smile, as though disappointment was only to be expected. ‘Nothing happened. I never heard from him.’
Sam felt a moment of shame. ‘Wilson should have replied. Something. Anything.’
‘But he didn’t. And now he is your prime minister.’ She got up and went over to the cooker to check the food in the oven, talking all the time. Perhaps it was a sign of the liberalisation in the country that she felt she could tell the story. ‘They were Jews, you know that? Most of them were Jews.’ The Czech word židi rang round the room. ‘My husband’s parents were Jews but he was an atheist, a communist, a good communist. But they treated him like a traitor and a Jew.’
‘Mother, please,’ said Lenka. ‘This was meant to be a happy occasion. Sunday lunch. A family thing.’
‘We have no family,’ her mother snapped. ‘Two people isn’t a family, it’s just survivors clinging to the wreckage.’ The oven door slammed shut. Sam tried to step around the obstacle that lay in the path of further discourse. ‘Weren’t they all’ – he struggled for the correct word – ‘made good in 1963?’ That was all he could manage: exonerated, absolved, acquitted, exculpated. All words beyond Sam’s vocabulary in Czech.