Kuderikova, Marie (1921–1943)

Czech anti-Nazi activist and factory worker. Born on March 24, 1921, in Vnorovy-Hodonin, Czechoslovakia; executed in Breslau on March 26, 1943; leader of the illegal youth organization of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

Born on March 24, 1921, in Vnorovy-Hodonin, in the Moravian province of Czechoslovakia, Marie Kuderikova had few economic advantages in her youth and despite her intelligence had to support herself from an early age by working in a factory. Like many of her fellow workers at the Racek factory in Brno (Brünn), she was strongly attracted to Marxism as a doctrine and a blueprint for a better life. These beliefs became a matter of life and death after March 1939, when what remained of the Czechoslovak Republic was taken over by Nazi Germany and became a puppet state, the "Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia." Communist and Social Democratic organizations were brutally suppressed by the German occupying forces and their Czech collaborators, and membership in such groups in most cases made one liable to a death sentence.

Betrayed to the Gestapo, Kuderikova was arrested in Brno on December 5, 1941, transferred to the Pankrac prison in Prague, and then returned to Brno. Eventually she and others in her resistance circle were transferred to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in Germany. There a Nazi People's Court sentenced her and 11 members of her group to death. All were executed in Breslau on the same day, March 26, 1943.

sources:

Gollwitzer, Helmut, Käthe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider, eds. Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of the Resistance. NY: Pantheon Books, 1956.

John Haag , Athens, Georgia