She was on a special Gestapo list because she had supported German and Austrian refugees in Czechoslovakia who were fleeing the Nazis.

Bergmann was interested in history and philosophy and was fortunate to start his studies while some of the leading scholars still worked at Charles University in Prague.

He had reasons to be wary because he had known a number of prominent people who were persecuted by the Communist regime, for instance Arthur London who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the well-known trial of Rudolf Slánský.

Since the beginning of liberalization in the Eastern Bloc in 1956, he had tried to enter public life as a member of the organization which united victims and veterans of World War II.

At the time, Antonín Novotný, a former mauthausen prisoner, whom he knew from the concentration camp was the president of Czechoslovakia.

It was the fact that helped Bergmann convince him to demand a plaque in memory of the German Social Democrats and Communists who were executed because of their activities as resistance fighters.

Pavel Bergmann worked as a scholar at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague.

In 1964 he was a witness at the so-called Great trial of the leading SS men from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He continued his endeavours in this direction even after the restoration of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia after 1968, the year of the Prague Spring and its suppression.

His very intensive period of political activity culminated in the fall of 1988 with the establishment of the so-called Movement for Civil Liberty which was the direct predecessor of the Civic Forum.

The intensive political opposition actively against the Communist regime was crowned in the autumn of 1989 by the establishment of the Civic Forum which initiated and led the anti-Communist Velvet revolution.