Чешский солдат, воевал с нацистами, сидел у коммунистов
Czech soldier who fought to drive the Nazis out of his country but was then jailed by the communist regime
Tomas Sedlacek was one of the last of an indomitable group who fought their country’s domination by both Nazism and Communism.
At the start of the Second World War he made his way from Czechoslovakia to France and then Britain, where he joined the Czechoslovak forces in exile. He then fought from 1944 on the eastern front as his country was liberated.
After the communist coup in Prague in 1948 he was one of the senior military figures seen as tainted by wartime association with the West. He was convicted in a show trial and imprisoned in harsh conditions. Only after the end of communist rule in 1989 was he fully rehabilitated as a highly respected military figure and symbol of resistance who used his position to urge the new Czech society to remember the crimes of the past and to guard against future loss of freedom.
Sedlacek was born the youngest of four children of a Habsburg army officer in Vienna in 1918 — a dramatic moment as the Habsburg empire came to an end and Czechoslovakia was created. After school in Prague he trained at a military academy in Moravia as part of the new Czechoslovak State’s armed forces. He was a lieutenant at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, when the British and French prime ministers, meeting Mussolini and Hitler, agreed to the German leader’s demands to annex the Sudetenland territories of Czechoslovakia, thereby removing many of the Czechoslovak State’s key defences. German invasion of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia followed in March 1939.
It was a traumatic period for young Czech officers, ordered not to resist their country’s dismembering. The Munich agreement and what followed were a “huge blow”, Sedlacek recalled. Fighting Germany then, he believed, “would have been a gesture of nonsurrender but the consequences would have been terrible.”
Determined to resist Nazism in other ways, however, he made his way via the Balkans to France, where he joined a Czech foreign legion. After France was defeated in 1940 he moved to Britain. He was trained as a parachutist in Scotland.
In 1944 he was part of a Czechoslovak airborne brigade sent to assist Soviet forces fighting on the eastern front. His unit was airlifted into Slovakia where a national uprising was under way, and fought in the famous intense battles in the Dukla pass, surviving the bitter winter of 1944-45 in the Slovak mountains.
After the war Sedlacek, promoted to major, looked set for a successful military career. Once the communists had taken power in Prague, however, and Stalinist paranoia grew, all those who had been in exile during the war fell under suspicion. He was arrested in 1951 on conspiracy charges, tortured and kept for months in solitary confinement, before being convicted of treason and espionage, and imprisoned.
“When I heard the sentence at the show trial, I had to laugh,” he recalled. “It was so incredibly absurd that I couldn’t take it seriously. But it was indeed serious.” One of his close associates was given the death penalty. Sedlacek served nine years in some of the toughest Czech prisons including Leopoldov and one of the camps where inmates mined uranium in appalling conditions for the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.
Sedlacek was sustained by a huge determination to survive and in 1960 he was released. Resuming his military career was impossible, and he earned his living with jobs including mason and warehouseman.
After the revolution against communism in 1989 the new Czech State fully rehabilitated Sedlacek and many of his colleagues. He was promoted to general and given various state honours.
He used his position as chairman of the Czechoslovak Legionaries’ Association to criticise what he saw as the new State’s failure to prosecute those guilty of crimes under communism, including the murder of former Czechoslovak soldiers and airmen who had fought in the war.
“How is it possible that no one has been sentenced for such judicial murders,” he asked. “We are still waiting in vain that something will happen, but we are not likely to live to see it.”
He also urged his fellow Czechs to see their newly recovered political liberty as in need of constant defence: “I would like people to realise that they must fight for freedom,” he said, “and that if freedom is violated elsewhere in the world our freedom is also in danger.”
General Tomas Sedlacek, Czech soldier, was born on January 8, 1918. He died on August 27, 2012, aged 94
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
