Lawyer and politician Hana Kordova Marvanova, Vladimir Hradec and his late parents and two dozen others received a certificate of participants in the third resistance movement for their fight against the Czechoslovak communist dictatorship at the Army House in Prague today.
Historian Eduard Stehlik, head of the Defence Ministry section for war veterans, told CTK that these awarded people can be moral examples for Czech society. Certificates for anti-communist resistance fighters have been issued for six years.
Stehlik said mostly political prisoners from the 1950s were awarded at first, while people who took part in the dissident activities in the 1970s and 1980s prevailed among the awarded now.
Hradec cooperated with the group of the Masin brothers who fought their way to West Germany in the early 1950s. "The Masins concluded that the only way to fight violence was to use violence against it. People who have such tendencies don't understand anything else," Hradec said.
He said his parents were given high prison sentences for hiding arms of the Masin group. He said his father had serious psychological problems caused by cruel interrogations in the communist prisons.
Hradec said his father had been in Russia during World War One as a soldier and he had seen how communists rose to power there.
Marvanova said she helped political prisoners in the 1980s and ended up in prison herself because of it. She said punishments in the 1980s were not as strict as in the 1950s when capital punishment was imposed on some opponents of the communist regime.
The Defence Ministry has received 5,332 applications for certificates of participation in anti-communist resistance so far, it has made a decision in 5,119 cases and issued 1,830 certificates.
Stehlik said the ministry received about 25 or 30 of new applications a month.
