In 1952, when Ivan Margolius was five years old, his father Rudolf, a
former deputy minister of foreign trade, was found guilty in the notorious
Slansky show trials, surely one of the darkest chapters of the Communist
era. Rudolf Margolius, who like Ivan's mother Heda had survived the Nazi
death camps, was executed. Ivan Margolius left Czechoslovakia in 1966 and
is now a successful architect in the UK. When I spoke to him recently, he
recalled growing up in the shadow of his father's death.