Possible Remains of Political Prisoners Recovered in Prague

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC—Brno Daily reports that cremated remains possibly representing more than 80 people who died or were killed while political prisoners between 1948 and 1965 have been discovered at the site of Pankrac prison. Archaeologist Ales Kyr, Alena Simankova of the National Archives of the Czech Republic, and Jan Marik of the Czech Academy of Sciences were looking for any trace of political prisoners of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia who had not been buried in the two cemeteries in Prague reserved for that purpose. Once they determined from a search of historic records that some of the missing had been cremated, the researchers tried to determine if urns holding the remains had been handed over to family members. But Kyr explained that this rarely occurred, and most of the urns were stored at Pankrac Prison. An archival document dated 1961 showed that the interior minister at the time ordered that the contents of the urns be mixed with soil at Pankrac Prison. Kyr explained that the newly identified burned bones were found in what had been the prison’s execution site between 1947 and 1954. "We can assume that these are the remains of people whose urns were emptied here,” Marik concluded. For more on archaeology in the Czech Republic, go to "Off the Grid: Historic Prague."