The death of North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, has obscured the passing of a truly heroic figure: Vaclav Havel. The Czech writer and dissident who became his country's first postcommunist president died Dec. 18. Mr. Havel was Mr. Kim's worst nightmare — an incorrigible and irrepressible dissenter, who never lost his moral compass, remaining suspicious of power even when he was his country's leader. The world is surely smaller after his passing.
Mr. Havel was born into a bourgeois family. His father was a successful real estate developer, a life that quickly ended when the communists took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. As he explained in his memoir, the new regime "confiscated all our family's property and we became objects of the class struggle."
Denied a higher education because of his background, Mr. Havel began working as a teenager as a stagehand at the ABC Theater in Prague. Night school afforded him a degree in economics at the Czech University of Technology.