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, readers are presented with the complete story of her entire family - brave people who paid a cruel price for refusing to accept evil and unfreedom. This is true of Milada Horáková, her husband Bohuslav Horák and their daughter Jana Kánská, who had to do without her parents because of the 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 have been in front of her eyes for more than 70 years. For example, when she recalls her last meeting with her mother a few hours before the execution, during which she and her aunt and uncle cried while the condemned Milada gave them courage. Or when he recounts the fate of his family, whose members were systematically persecuted and punished by the communist regime.
The book also contains the previously unpublished memoirs of Bohuslav Horák, who managed to escape arrest dramatically. During the First Republic he was a well-known journalist with his own, very popular radio show. 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 pedestrian agents even had the task of taking Jana across the border several times. But why didn't it happen? How did the daughter of an executed politician live in communist Czechoslovakia? What was the reunion of father and daughter after eighteen years of separation like? And how does the still vital Jana Kánská, at the age of 87, remember her mother, her father and the few years they spent together as a family?
Daniel Anýž's book I Go with My Head Up also answers these questions and is thus a powerful testimony to the 20th century with an appeal to the present. The book will remind the Czech public 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.
