Miroslav Kárný was a historian and writer from Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

, Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

.

Biography

He was born into an assimilated Jewish family, his mother ran a shop selling candy and haberdashery. His father, a tradesman, left the Jewish community during the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After Kárný graduated at the gymnasium

Gymnasium (school)

A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...

, he continued his studies of history and Czech language

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...

 at the Charles University of Prague between 1937-39. During this time, he became member of the students' communist organisation Kostufra. Due to his Jewish origin, in November 1941 he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was deported on 24 November, 1941, with the first transport "Ak". In Theresienstadt he met his future wife, Margita Krausová (1923-1998). Margita and Miroslav were active in the Communist resistance group in Theresienstadt, they collaborated with many members of resistance group, i. e. with Josef Taussig

Josef Taussig

Josef Taussig was a Czech journalist.Taussig was a journalist with the youth magazine "Hej rup". In 1942 he was transported to Theresienstadt but survived by using his skills as an amateur trombonist to play with Martin Roman's Ghetto Swingers...

, Bruno Zwicker, Valtr Eisinger, Josef Stiassny and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Frederika "Friedl" Dicker-Brandeis , was an Austrian artist murdered by the Nazi's in their extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau....

. In September 1944, they both were deported to Auschwitz

Auschwitz concentration camp

Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

. From here, Kárný was deported for slave labour to the auxiliary camp Kaufering

Kaufering concentration camp

Kaufering concentration camps were a network of subsidiary camps of the Dachau concentration camp.With the intensification of the Allied air war against German industrial and military enterprises after 1943, the German Armaments Ministry and the Schutzstaffel agreed to accelerate construction of...

 of the Dachau concentration camp.

After the war, he became a journalist and then a freelance historian, specializing in the Holocaust and German fascism. He was expelled for the first time from the communist party due to condemnation of his brother Jiří in the anti-Semitic Slánský trial, and for the second time in 1969, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main satellite states in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring political liberalization...

. He retired in 1973.