Stock Photo - Five personalities who resisted the Nazis, the Communists or the Russian occupiers received the Memory of the Nations Awards at the National Theatre tonight, on November 17, 2023: a Czech dissident, two Slovak women persecuted by the communist regime, a Czech woman imprisoned by the Gestapo, and a Ukrainian Orthodox priest. Maria Sidova (photo) and Eva Karvasova from Slovakia also came into conflict with the communist regime. Sidova and her relatives helped people persecuted by the regime during totalitarianism. In the 1950s, they hid the priest Jan Hutyra, who had escaped from prison. The police eventually caught Hutyra and arrested Sidova as well. She ended up in a labour camp for a year and a half. In accepting the award, she said that at her young age she did not take her persecution tragically, she was glad that she had saved her parents from punishment in this way. Each year, the Post Bellum NGO awards the prize to the memory of the turning points of the last century, and this year it has extended it to a hero of the current events. President Petr Pavel with his wife Eva attended the ceremony, as the first head of the Czech state since the awards began in 2010. During the ceremony, the organisers remembered the recently deceased former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg. (CTK Photo/Jaroslav Svoboda)