Dagmar Skálová (née Šimková, 6 November 1912 – 15 July 2002) was a Czech Scout and a

political prisoner A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although ...

. She was born in

Plzeň Plzeň (), also known in English and German as Pilsen (), is a city in the Czech Republic. It is the Statutory city (Czech Republic), fourth most populous city in the Czech Republic with about 188,000 inhabitants. It is located about west of P ...

in then what was

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...

Early life

Dagmar Šimková was born on 6 November 1912 in

, and christened Dagmar Eleonora Věnceslava. She attended elementary, secondary and high school in Plzeň. In 1934 she started Scouting, where she acquired the nickname Rakša ( Raksha), based on the mother wolf from Rudyard Kipling's

The Jungle Book ''The Jungle Book'' is an 1894 collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who ...

. She subsequently led a Scout troop in the Šipka group in

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

. She practised Scouting together with her husband, , who served as a Prague Scout leader before 1948.

Background

Scouting in

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

was banned at the beginning of the Second World War. After the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 she joined the

anti-communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...

resistance. On 17 May 1949 she was arrested in connection with the preparations of the , in which several Scouts were involved, among others František Falerski, Jiří Řehák, Pavel Holý and Ivan Kieslinger. She was supposed to provide communications and medical care to the rebels, cooperating with Jiří Navrátil, then a leader of the 2nd Prague Water Scout troop. Her husband Karel was involved in the planning of the whole operation. The coup attempt was discovered in May 1949 and the organizers arrested. During interrogation, Dagmar Skálová attempted to shift all the blame to herself in hopes of averting any

death penalties Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in s ...

, since no women had been sentenced to death until a later trial with

Milada Horáková Milada Horáková (born: Králová, 25 December 1901 – 27 June 1950) was a Czech politician and a member of the underground resistance movement during World War II. She was a victim of judicial murder, convicted and executed by the Communis ...

. Dagmar Skálová succeeded, after communicating with other arrested, including using

Morse code Morse code is a telecommunications method which Character encoding, encodes Written language, text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code i ...

, in convincing the

StB State Security (, ), or StB / ŠtB, was the secret police force in communist Czechoslovakia from 1945 to its dissolution in 1990. Serving as an intelligence and counter-intelligence agency, it dealt with any activity that was considered oppositio ...

that all the Scouts involved assumed they are only playing a night game organized in the streets of Prague by the local branch of the Czech Scouting organization,

Junák Junák – český skaut (''Junák – Czech Scouting''), is the internationally recognized organization of Scouts and Guides of the Czech Republic. Founded in 1911, Junák – český skaut is the largest organisation of children and youth in ...

. This resulted in the release of most of them. On 8 May 1949 she was sentenced to

life imprisonment Life imprisonment is any sentence (law), sentence of imprisonment under which the convicted individual is to remain incarcerated for the rest of their natural life (or until pardoned or commuted to a fixed term). Crimes that result in life impr ...

; Jiří Navrátil was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment alongside her. She remained in prison until 1965. Even there, she remained active – in 1956 she and a group of other women sent a letter to the UN General Secretary with a protest against human rights violations in

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

. In 1997, she received the

Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk The Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk () is an order (decoration), Order of the Czech Republic and the former Czechoslovakia. It was established in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution, and re-established in 1994 (following the dissolution of Czechosl ...

. She died in 2002 and is buried at the together with her husband.

References

External links

Skaut.cz, 2015, Právě před 66 lety se skauti zapojili do pokusu o státní převrat...

Lilie pod klopou, lilie za mřížemi (V. kapitola) Jiří Zachariáš - Pedro
{{DEFAULTSORT:Skalova, Dagmar 1912 births 2002 deaths People from Plzeň Scouting and Guiding in the Czech Republic 20th-century Czech women