Chapter 2
In: Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions
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Abstract
Ludmila Brožová-Polednová is the only judicial actor convicted in post-Communist Czech Republic for participation in the political show trials that marked the beginning of the Communist rule. In 1950, twenty-nine-year-old Ludmila was one of two People’s Prosecutors in the fabricated proceedings against persecuted regime opponents - Milada Horáková and twelve others. This political trial resulted in four executions and long-term jail sentences. On that account, almost 60 years later, courts in the newly established democracy convicted Ludmila of judicial murder and sentenced her to 6 years of imprisonment. At age 88, Ludmila thus became the oldest jailed individual in the Czech history and, in a way, an aged and conflicted symbol of both the Communist repression and the Czech legal reckoning with the past. This chapter presents the life story of Ludmila Brožová-Polednová – criminal prosecutor and prosecuted criminal – focusing on the visual and auditory aesthetics of these two pivotal trials of her life. The chapter casts the two Ludmila’s trials as ‘show trials’ marred with complex aesthetics, bitter-sweet aftertaste, and conflicted symbolism. Both trials were spectacles primarily designed to show to the public the resolve of the state, be it the old Communist one or the new nascent democratic one, to deal with the ‘crimes’ of the more or less distant past.