<p class="ql-align-justify">It has been seventy years since one of the biggest and most infamous of show trials to take place in post-war Czechoslovakia. Fourteen communist functionaries then stood accused before the Supreme Court in Prague. Amongst them was Otto Šling. The court sentenced eleven of them to death as well as confiscation of property and loss of civil rights. All of the accused declined to exercise their right of appeal and, after President Klement Gottwald refused their pleas for clemency, they were executed on 3 December 1952.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Karel Šling is the last direct descendant of any of the eleven executed men. Even at the age of seventy-five he does not give the impression of being a happy and equable man. His family has been pilloried twice over during the last eighty years. To this day, Karel Šling (and his children) are coming to terms with the traumas over which he had no influence (nor could he have had). To this day, he has nightmares about his family members being executed...</p>