Prague, 9 December 2015. A public hearing is being held in the Czech Senate on 10 December 2015 in response to a call issued a year ago by the Platform of European Memory and Conscience together with organisations of former political prisoners. Its aim is to find a way to deal with the large mass grave in Prague – Ďáblice which contains the remains of victims of Nazism and Communism.
On 10 December 2014, the Human Rights Day, the Plaform co-authored a letter to Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka asking for urgent attention to the mass grave containing over 2,800 bodies, among them victims of Nazism and Communism and members of the 2nd and 3rd resistance from the years 1943-1961 (see the press release of the Platform of 23 February 2015).
The Human Rights Committee of the Czech Senate is responding by calling a public hearing to the Senate which will take place on 10 December 2015 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Speakers will be historians and forensic scientists, family members of the victims, representatives of victims’ associations and the state as well as guests from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, founding Member of the Platform, who have been conducting successful exhumations, identifications and solemn re-burials of victims of totalitarianism in Poland.
“In post-Communist Europe, we are still counting the people killed by the totalitarian dictatorships”, says Platform Managing Director Neela Winkelmann. “Next, we need to redeem from oblivion the names, faces and life stories of those who died for the values which democratic Europe is enjoying today. We also need to pursue criminal prosecution where perpetrators are still alive.
It is a necessary process which will lead to healing and strengthening democracy internationally”.
Czechoslovak exile fighters Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš who carried out the assassination attack on Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 and whose bodies are presumed to be in the mass grave in Prague-Ďáblice.
photos: cs.wikipedia.org