“We wanted justice and all we got was the rule of law” was the view of some in the Czech Republic who complained about the release from prison of Ludmila Brožová-Polednová. who helped to bring opposition figures to the gallows in the Stalinist show trial against Milada Horáková in 1950. Ludmila Brožová-Polednová had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in 2008 but will now released by presidential amnesty.
This was the comment of the daily paper Mladá fronta Dnes: “Many are complaining that the torturers from the time of totalitarianism are abusing democratic rights.… The crucial thing is that the prosecutor has been tried and convicted. At least in her case it has been shown that the Communist judiciary was guilty of crimes. Whether she leaves prison or not is unimportant. The main thing is that she had to go to jail, if only for a short time. Participation in judicial murder is a crime. An amnesty can’t change that.”
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The hanging of Milada Horáková in 1950 was carried out in spite of petitions for her life by Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. She was an exceptionally brave fighter for human rights. As a member of the underground resistance against the Nazis she had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and spent the war in various German prisons. After the liberation in 1945 and returning to Prague, she was elected to parliament. After the Communist coup in 1948 she stayed, against the advice of her friends, and remained politically active. In 1949 she was arrested and eventually accused of being the leader of a plot to overthrow the Communist regime. She was subjected to brutal interrogation, tortured and convicted in a show trial in which Ludmila Brožová-Polednová was one of the judges.
In 2008, justice was done, nearly sixty years later, under the re-established rule of law. She was sentenced to six years imprisonment from which she will now be released after two years, as a result of a presidential pardon.
We who lived far away in time and space should not criticize those whose sense of morality is offended by this act of leniency. However, it may be fitting to remember Portia’s lines in the Merchant of Venice:
Mercy is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
The Stalinist trials in the 1950s were a low point in the history of the former Czechoslovakia. From Czech media reports, Brozova-Poldenova is unrepentant. The trials actually took place after Stalin’s death but the Stalinists hung on in Prague for some years after that. The Czech Republic has not yet fully recovered from that period. A whole generation will have to die off before that happens. This “judge” should have stayed in jail for the rest of her life.
You are right to remind us that the quality of mercy has limited application. In the case of German war criminals in their eighties and older, my rule is to apply it to minor offenders but not to the higher levels.
I have heard people of the post-WW2 generation say that Nazi war criminals in their eighties and nineties should not be further pursued. But they should in order to post a warning that no one can get away with such crimes. It might make future dictators think twice before committing genocide. Or maybe I am just being too optimistic human nature being what it is.