Gertruda Sekaninová-Čakrtová

Gertruda Sekaninová-Čakrtová, born Stiassny (21 May 1908, Budapest – 29 December 1986, Jihlava) was a Czech and Czechoslovak lawyer, politician and diplomat of Jewish origin, later also a dissident and signatory of the Charter 77.

[3] Her parents, Richard and Alžběta Stiassny, moved to Hungary from Bohemia to manage family textile manufacture.

In 1910, the family moved back to Havlíčkův (then German) Brod, where Gertrude studied and graduated from gymnasium (1922–1927).

In the same year she graduated and began working as a clerk in the law office of Dr. Ivan Sekanina, whom she married in 1935.

Ivan Sekanina was known, among other things, as an advocate of Ernst Torgler and Georgi Dimitrov, accused of igniting the German Reichstag, which earned him the hatred of Nazis.

She was forced to quit in 1940, due to the enhanced application of the Nuremberg Laws in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

[3][4] In 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was selected for forced labor in Kurzbach (a branch of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp).

[5] After the suicide of her husband, Sekaninová-Čakrtová was removed from office and later worked at the Ministry of Education as head of the newly established legislative and administrative department.

As a former concentration camp inmate, she testified in the 1963 process with a co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke.

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, she voted as one of the four members of the National Assembly against the agreement on the temporary stay of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia[7] and suggested their complete withdrawal from Czechoslovak territory (the other deputies were František Kriegel, František Vodsloň and Božena Fuková[8]).

She was labelled by the State Security as "... a person with hostility directed against the Soviet Union ... she does not accept the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and with her conduct she attempts to undermine the positive results of internal and foreign policy of Czechoslovakia.