A memorial ceremony was held at Ďáblice cemetery in Prague on Sunday, one day before the official Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Communist Regime on June 27.
The event was attended by representatives of the government and army, foreign diplomats and former political prisoners.
Representatives of the government, the army, the embassies of some countries, and former political prisoners took part in the annual event at the monument in the honorary burial ground of executed and tortured political prisoners and members of the Second and Third Resistances.
“We have been meeting here for 28 years to honor the memory of the victims and remind the public of what was happening at the time,” said Jiří Línek, chairman of the Association of Former Political Prisoners.
In Ďáblice, around 200 victims of the communist regime lie in mass graves. Political prisoners were disappeared and subsequently secretly buried so that not even families could say goodbye to them and no one knew their final resting place. Línek pointed out that today we are witnessing the creation of new mass graves.
Multiple speakers likened the former regime to the current situation in Ukraine. The Minister of Defense Jana Černochová (ODS) warned against the “lure of totalitarian leaders” and emphasized that, like the Communists, the Nazis buried their victims in unmarked graves in the same place.
According to Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský, politicians are responsible for ensuring that a similar situation does not happen again. “We must prevent people from being persecuted for their political convictions,” he said.
The Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Olga Richterová (Pirates) reminded that the KSČM did not get into the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in the last elections. “But this year we are convinced that human rights are not a matter of course everywhere. There are still penal camps and torture in the 21st century,” she said.
A gathering on the grounds of the Ďáblický cemetery is held yearly to honor the memory of the communist-executed and tortured political prisoners of the 1950s, resting in mass shafts. The honorary burial ground was declared a national cultural monument in 2017.
