In Czech thought, Božena Komárková personifies the struggle to set humans free. She developed the problems of freedom with specific re¬ference to human rights. Those were for her not of purely theoretic interest, but rather a principal condition of human progress and dignity. She followed the development of human rights as a specific western unfolding of the Christian idea in confrontation with philosophy. The source of rights cannot refer to humans alone without a reference to transcendence. She based her political philosophy on the analysis of community in Plato and in his Christian heir, Augustine. Her life story testifies to her commitment to humanitarian ideals, confirmed particularly by her civic courage in the time of totalitarian regime. In that spirit, too, she became a signatory of Charta 77. Together with a theological foundation, the philosophical tradition of the first Czechoslovak republic, influenced primarily by the humanistic perspective of T. G. Masaryk, grew in her thought into a powerful educational ethos which remained with her from Nazi prison through subsequent Communist persecution.