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On the International Day of Democracy, CADAL announced the winners of the Milada Horáková Prize, awarded among the young participants of the online seminar of the Goodbye Lenin Program, an annual educational activity of CADAL’s Václav Havel Institute and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation that reflects on the impacts and legacies of communist authoritarianism. Out of the 43 participants who attended all the seminar sessions and qualified to compete for the Prize, the texts by Candela Pilar Aguierre, María Candela Costa Taralli, María Lourdes Lobo, and Lucila Fernández were selected.
The prize is named after the Czech heroine who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, which she survived, but in 1950 she was executed for her opposition to the communist dictatorship. Inspired by the story of Milada Horáková, this year the award recognized research papers on individuals who, like her, were victims of two regimes of different ideologies because of their humanist and democratic convictions. With this recognition, CADAL not only provides young students with a vocational training opportunity, but also contributes to keeping historical memory alive and fostering critical reflection among new generations.
Candela Pilar Aguierre (2005), from Salta, studies Institutional Relations at the Catholic University of Salta. She presented the case of Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010), a Jewish woman who grew up in democratic Czechoslovakia and who, after the Nazi occupation, was first sent to the Łódź ghetto and then to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She escaped during a death march and managed to survive in hiding until the end of the war. Under the subsequent communist regime, Heda lived marginalized with her children after the execution of her first husband in 1952, sentenced to death for alleged espionage in a show trial. From exile, she wrote about her experience and defended democracy and resistance against tyranny.
Lucila Fernández (2001), a student of International Relations at the Catholic University of Salta and resident of the city of La Plata, researched Zofia Korbońska (1915-2010), a Polish woman who resisted the Nazi occupation by reporting atrocities to the world through radio broadcasts. After World War II, she went into exile in the United States, where she continued her journalism work and defense of liberal democracy.
The case of Margarete Buber-Neumann (1901-1989) was studied by two of the winners: María Candela Costa Taralli (2001), a student at the Catholic University of Salta, and María Lourdes Lobo (2000), from the University of San Pablo Tucumán. Both study International Relations. Buber-Neumann was a victim of both Soviet Stalinism and German Nazism, as well as of the collaboration between the two totalitarian regimes: she was imprisoned in a gulag and later extradited to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After World War II, she dedicated herself to publicizing her testimony and, through her writing, denouncing dictatorships and inhumanity.
The winners will be invited to Buenos Aires on November 9–10, 2025 by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. They will receive the award diploma at the closing conference of the Goodbye Lenin Program, which will commemorate the anniversaries of Kristallnacht, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution, and their stay will include an agenda of activities organized by CADAL.
