Keeping History Alive

Stránský honors comrades in arms
Former prisoner keeps friends' memories alive at communist-era grave

It has been 48 years since someone last heaved an anonymous body into one of the 5-by-2-meter ditches on the outskirts of the Dáblice cemetery, but the convex partitions between the mass graves still remain visible.

Walled off from the rest of the graveyard by a row of rosebushes and hedges, a neat grid of headstones now covers the mossy patch of earth that once served as a dumping ground for 207 tortured and executed political prisoners.

On the 18-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, 84-year-old Stanislav Stránský saunters through the abandoned burial ground, picking up overturned flowerpots and adjusting the flickering candles near the headstones.

“When I first came here in 1989, this place was a bush,” he says, motioning to the dense thicket behind the cemetery wall. “There was nothing here, just holes in the ground where our friends were deplorably deposited.”

Stránský himself is no stranger to the Orwellian treachery of Stalinist-era prisons. For 10 years, he braved brutal beatings, interrogations and backbreaking work in forced labor camps. To this day, he calls himself a MUKL, an acronym for “man designated for liquidation” and a term political prisoners in the 1950s used to describe themselves.

Since 1990, he has been chairman of the Association of Former Political Prisoners (SBPV) and the chief force behind the rehabilitation of the Dáblice burial ground for the victims of the 1950s Czechoslovak communist regime.

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A narrow path separates the mass graves from another haunting memorial: The meadow here is also dotted with flower pots, and the dates of birth and death on the minute, white headstones are often just days apart. They mark the graves of 37 children born in 1950s communist prisons.

“Not all of these children are the babies of political prisoners, but that doesn’t matter,” Stránský says. “We took them under our wing because they were born behind bars — in captivity.”

Preserving the past

Although mass graves first came to his attention nearly 40 years ago, Stránský wasn’t able to begin mending the burying ground until after the fall of communism.

“We had to tear through the brambles to get here,” he says. “Some of the victims’ relatives that heard about this place had placed makeshift crosses from rags and twigs in the ground.”

Even after the Iron Curtain fell, Stránský struggled to obtain the permits and funds to rehabilitate the area.
“After 1989, the government was still full of Bolsheviks, so I went through a lot of trouble to prove to public officials that doing this made sense — that it was something worth preserving for future generations,” he says. “The [cemetery keeper] wanted to bulldoze the place.”

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Extraordinary circumstances

Stránský describes himself as an ordinary person.

“I’ve always done simple, honest work to make a living, which is the greatest capital a person can have,” he says.

Born in Bratislava and “christened by the Morava River,” he was forced to move to Prague with his Czech father in 1938, when a fear of Hitler caused Slovaks to distance themselves from their “Czech brothers.”

They certainly did 'distance' themselves.

At 15, Stránský attended an International Students’ Day protest against Nazi occupation that left Jan Opletal, a medical student, dead.

“We were flipping over cars and trams to barricade ourselves so the Nazis couldn’t get to us,” he recalls.

During World War II, Stránský was drafted to join the Protectorate government, where he remained until 1946. That year, shortly after the end of the war, the Communist Party emblem started appearing on military uniforms. Appalled by the political affiliation of the traditionally neutral military, Stránský, a 24-year-old sergeant, told his men to tear the symbols off.

“If they would have listened to me and just taken them off, it would have been fine,” he says. “But they didn’t just take them off — they destroyed them, and that’s when the trouble started.”

Stránský was immediately stripped of his rank and court-marshaled.

“I didn’t want to leave the service, but when a superior told me I had lost all chances of promotion, I realized I had no choice,” he says.

Upon returning to civilian life, Stránský worked for the Health Ministry, participating in international campaigns to prevent infant mortality and tuberculosis.

“In 1948, the local branch of the [Communist Party] accused [United Nations aid group] UNESCO of vaccinating people against communism, and the Danes and Norwegians that were working here with us were forced to leave the country,” he says. But the damage was done — Stránský now had contacts in the West.

Lured by rumors of a foreign-based resistance movement against the communist regime, he was able to cross the border and arrange a safe passage to West Germany, where he was placed in a refugee camp. After a two-month screening process, Stránský received political refugee status and a job at the International Refugee Organization.

But his life in exile was not to last. After spending months in limbo, he began to grow restless.

“I couldn’t just sit in Germany with my arms folded,” he says. “It was time for me to act.”

Thirsty for action, Stránský chose his own mission: “My assignment was to return to Czechoslovakia, find my contact and hand him secret information. And I completed it.”

But it would be decades before he would be able to return to Germany. In what would prove to be a life-altering mistake, Stránský made a stopover at his parent’s apartment, where he was arrested by the secret police (StB).

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There's more at The Prague Post.

See also Graves of Heydrich's Assassins Found.

Also at A Tangled Web