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Seven Years in the Gulag

Illustration
  • Where: Václav Havel Library, Ostrovní 13, Prague 110 00
  • When: May 13, 2015, 19:00 – 21:00

Launch of František Polák’s book Sedm let v Gulagu. Vzpomínky pražského advokáta na sovětské pracovní tábory (Seven Years in the Gulag: A Prague Lawyer’s Memoir of Soviet Labour Camps) (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, 2015).

A former legionnaire in Russia, František Polák was a lawyer for workers and communist activists who in 1930 quit the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in protest at the control of the party by Klement Gottwald’s radical wing. As a refugee from Nazism, he became a member of the Czechoslovak Army Corps in the East; however, he was later betrayed by its commanders and handed over to the Soviet NKVD secret police. He was imprisoned in the Gulag from 1939 to 1947. After his release and return to Czechoslovakia in March 1948 he escaped to the West with the aim of informing the world and his home country about the reality of the USSR, which he himself had for years refused to believe. Adam Hradilek will host the evening. In cooperation with the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

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