ObituaryJaroslava Moserova
Czech plastic surgeon who treated Jan Palach, politician and authorIn January 1969 the burns specialist and plastic surgeon Jaroslava Moserova, who has died of cancer aged 76, came face to face with the despair provoked by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. That was when a still conscious Jan Palach, the student who had set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square as a protest against that invasion, was brought to her clinic at Prague's Vinohrady hospital. Palach's purpose was to "shake the conscience" of a nation sinking into apathy five months after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring associated with Alexander Dubcek, the Communist party reformer, and his "socialism with a human face".
Twenty years later, when history took a better turn for Czechoslovakia with the velvet revolution and the restoration of democracy, Moserova herself became a politician. She was subsequently elected vice-chairwoman of the senate, and in 2003 emerged as a presidential candidate. Diplomacy - and cultural diplomacy in particular - was another area of achievement, whose hallmark was Moserova's chairing of the UN's scientific and cultural organisation Unesco's general conference for two years.
But to many Czechs, Moserova was best known for her translations, including more than 40 of Dick Francis's horse-racing thrillers. Moserova also had a string of plays and collections of essays to her name. She partly attributed Francis's immense popularity among the Czech public to the sense of fair play that pervades his novels. Fairness was also one of her own defining characteristics.
As a teenager at the end of the second world war, Moserova tracked down her childhood nanny, Hilde, to the detention camp where she was being held along with other Sudeten Germans - to await their mass expulsion from Czechoslovakia as part of their punishment for the widespread collaboration with the Nazi German occupation. The unhappiest moment of her life was when Moserova carried Hilde's suitcase to the station from where she was to be deported. Few Czechs showed such acts of solidarity.
Born in Prague, Moserova spent three years on a scholarship in the US before returning to what was by then communist-ruled Czechoslovakia in 1949. She chose the medical profession - one of the few areas of life where she could serve society without having to make major political compromises. She began her career in the northern town of Duchcov, frequently treating injured miners.
In 1969 Palach had repeatedly asked Moserova "to tell everyone why I did it", and she set out to preserve his memory and the reasons for his suicide. She returned to the theme in her play, Letter to Wollongong (1993). The main character is a nurse, who having treated Palach, describes to her brother in Australia why she subsequently made compromises with the regime for the sake of her children. The play echoes Moserova's moral dilemmas during communist rule when she did not openly join the pro-democracy dissidents, but neither did she endorse the policies of the unrepresentative regime.
By the time she wrote - in English - Letter to Wollongong, Moserova was the Czech Republic's ambassador to Australia and New Zealand. Her two-year stint in Canberra followed on her political involvement which had begun in 1989 with the velvet revolution.
Moserova's friendship with Vaclav Havel went back to childhood. She became a prominent figure in Civic Forum, the pro-democracy umbrella group that spearheaded the peaceful transition to representative government. She was elected an MP in the free elections of 1990, and after a break for diplomatic work, she joined the senate in 1996, where she was voted in as vice-chairwoman. A campaigner for the extension of education and the preservation of cultural monuments, Moserova chaired Unesco's Czech national commission for several years. It was an association that had started with a letter she wrote immediately after the velvet revolution to the culture minister, calling for more efforts to get Prague listed on Unesco's world heritage list. "I think we saved it," Moserova said just two weeks before her death. "I think that Unesco really prevented some architectural crimes."
In 2003 Moserova emerged as a somewhat improbable contender in the protracted presidential elections to find a successor to Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. Even more improbably, she helped eliminate from the race Milos Zeman, the former social democratic prime minister, during one of several rounds of voting by MPs and senators. Zeman had been one of the two favourites, along with his great rival, and the eventual winner, the centre-right ex-prime minister, Vaclav Klaus. Although Zeman's defeat was due, in great measure, to dissensions in the ranks of his own Social Democratic party, Moserova's performance in taking second place behind Klaus exceeded expectations. It also demonstrated her political skills in portraying herself as being fundamentally different from the divisive figures of Klaus and Zeman.
Failure to win the presidency was something of a relief for this truly all-round public figure whose main purpose in standing for the post had been to show the possibility of a less aggressive and more consensual form of politics. "Had I been elected," Moserova explained, "I would have lost everything that I enjoy. Anyone who takes on this kind of office does."
She is survived by her husband Milan David and stepson Tomas.
ยท Jaroslava Moserova, plastic surgeon, politician and author, born January 17 1930; died March 24 2006
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