PRAGOTI

On the 66^th anniversary of the execution Julius Fucik, Pragoti remembers and salutes him. A Czech journalist and communist, Fucik resisted the Nazi occupation of Prague, his native city and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. Executed brutally through beheading on 8 September 1943, he was forty at the time of his death. Fucik, as an organic intellectual, fused his experiences of growing up in a working-class family with his Marxist-Leninist politics through his writings on society, culture and class. His most celebrated piece of writing remains ‘Notes from the Gallows’, penned from a Nazi prison and while facing torture; it is a testament to his enduring optimism of both will and intellect. Smuggled out by a sympathetic guard, this remarkable text was later edited and published by Fucik’s wife, Gusta Fucikova, who had survived the concentration camps. Pragoti reproduces a review of the ‘Notes’ by Howard Fast and a more recent homage, in the early years of the 21^st Century. As long as resistance to oppression lives and its histories are recorded, Fucik will return as more than a memory.