Kárných Margita a Miroslav

Miroslav Kárný was born on September 9, 1919, in Prague into a Czech Jewish family that ran a confectionery shop in Letná, later replaced by a haberdashery. After graduating from the Academic Gymnasium in Prague, Kárný began studying Czech language and history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. At the university, where he had to interrupt his studies on November 17, 1939, due to the closure of Czech universities, he became a member of the communist student faction Kostufra. On November 24, 1941, he was placed on transport Ak from Prague to Theresienstadt, which was intended for the establishment of the Jewish ghetto. There he became involved in resistance activities, taking part in publishing the illegal journal Přehled, the copying and distribution of which was organized by Margita Krausová, who later became his wife. Margita Krausová was born on February 26, 1923, in Trnovany near Teplice, in the family of a factory clerk. From the end of 1938, she lived in Prague, where she became a member of the left-wing Jewish youth organization Hashomer Hatzair, which organized departures to Israel. From 1940, she also worked in the illegal Communist Party organization. She was deported from Prague to Theresienstadt on May 15, 1942, on transport Au 1. Miroslav and Margita married in the Theresienstadt ghetto in January 1944. On September 28, 1944, Miroslav was deported by transport Ek to Auschwitz, while Margita was sent to Auschwitz on transport Em on October 1, 1944. Miroslav was later transferred to forced labor in the Kaufering subcamp of Dachau concentration camp, from which he was forced into a death march and liberated in Allach. Margita was liberated in the Kudowa-Sakisch concentration camp. They reunited in Prague in May 1945. After the war, Kárný began working as an editor of Rudé právo. After being dismissed in 1951 in connection with the campaign against the so-called Zionist danger, he worked in the editorial office of the magazine Kladenský kovák at the United Steelworks in Kladno. From 1958 he served as an editor, later as editor-in-chief of the daily Svoboda. In 1968, he worked as head of the press, radio, and television department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, from where he had to leave the following year in connection with the Prague Spring. Margita Kárná worked at the foreign trade company Merkuria in Prague. From the mid-1970s, both devoted themselves to historical research on German occupation policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, focusing on the Holocaust. In 1976, the then State Jewish Museum (today the Jewish Museum in Prague) accepted their project The Nazi Solution of the Jewish Question in the Czech Lands. At the beginning of the 1990s, Kárný played an important role in the establishment of the Terezín Initiative, an international association of former prisoners of the Theresienstadt ghetto, and until 2001 he served as its vice-chairman. In 1993, he was also among the founders of the Terezín Initiative Foundation, whose task was to concentrate research on the history of the Theresienstadt ghetto. He also took part in its transformation into the Terezín Initiative Institute in 1998. He contributed to the creation of a database of Theresienstadt ghetto prisoners and to the publication of three volumes of the Terezín Memorial Book, as well as to the founding of the scholarly yearbook Terezín Studies and Documents. Together with his wife Margita, who died in Prague on April 27, 1998, he began preparing the manuscript of the Terezín Calendar, which presented life in the ghetto day by day. He did not complete this work; he died in Prague on May 9, 2001. The personal collection of Miroslav and Margita Kárný contains, in addition to biographical material, documents arising from their scholarly and public activities. As they devoted more than 25 years – particularly M. Kárný – to historical research on the Holocaust in the broader context of Nazi occupation policy, the collection represents an important source for understanding the development of this field and approaches to it, especially since the mid-1970s. Of particular research value are the results of their heuristics relating to the Theresienstadt ghetto, concentration camps, forced labor, the German industry, and the SS organization, gathered in some eighty card indexes. Also noteworthy is the Kalendárium – a chronology of events from January 1938 to May 1945 based on excerpts from literature and archival material, including copies of selected documents. Among the card indexes are also indexes of Theresienstadt prisoners, which served as the basis for the Terezín Memorial Book, comprising data on 123,000 Czech and German Jews who passed through the Theresienstadt ghetto.