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Odd Liberation Day Celebration in Czech Republic

10. 5. 2010 / Milan Daniel

I admit that those monstrous events we had during communism, like military parades and Liberation Day celebrations were never my thing and actually they gave me the shivers...

With one exception: that when I was requested by the Agriculture School people (where my daughter was then able to study regardless of her father's bad profile at the communist expected activities or support system) to be part of the celebrations around World War II Liberation Day, together with other parents, where we all had to spread manure over the school property. Until now I am not sure whether that was just stupidity or ironic fun.

The former regime's Liberation Day celebrations were covered with demonstrations of adoration towards the communist system, so most people came out of pressure. Carrying a Soviet flag or one of those propaganda signs during the celebration in the end even meant some special bonus at work, no matter the fact that most oportunistic flag wavers would throw all out just around the corner, after the duty was fulfilled.

Nowadays we don't have to do anything. On the other hand we can freely learn true history and from that we can objectivelly realize that the Soviet Union was a country that lost -- of course also thanks to Stalin's total disrespect for human life -- over 20 million people in that horrific war.

In our case it was different, for the vast majority of Czechs survived the War unscathed and we have a rather bi-polar relationship with the victims from among us.

Perhaps that's why we have such a badly hidden ironic attitude towards all that pomp with which the Russians celebrated the 65 years since the end of the Second World War.

Soviet soldiers, who passed through the hell of war, unfortunately sometimes -- in moments of triumph -- also lost their human inhibitions.

Whatever crimes thet may have committed, no matter how we can partly understand why they happened -- is still unforgivable. Nonetheless, those crimes should not cast a dark shadow over our minds to such an extent that it doesn't let us, 65 years after the most frightful war in history, realize what happened back then and who fought for our freedom (regardless of the regime that followed, which stripped our diginity and devalued our people) losing so many lives.

It is important because the current Russian president is visibly turning around their foreign policies. For the Polish, whose elite was murdered by Stalin, they opened the archives about Katyn.

He even turned against Russians themselves, Medveděv clearly stated that "Stalin committed a lot of crimes against his own nation and even though during his leadership our country reached success, that, which he did against his people is unforgivable".

That is a huge shift, which only those who don't want to see can ignore. It is also nice that were present at the commemorations in Moscow not only high State representants, but also, symbolically, even military troops from other Allied countries.

But that's not all: the protagonists were the people. It was the veterans, who managed to survive the War in their youth and became living reminders of Soviet heroism. The commemorations may have looked a bit to pompuous. For those, who survived so many evils, the end of the War was just a step towards achieving human freedom -- the most important thing in life. Freedom was a mill from which a new life emerged. Whoever has not been though it, cannot really understand it.

Reflections over the political turnover do not show up in the Czech media very often. The only thing that interested the local media was the presence of the Czech president Klaus in the Moscow festivity. On the other hand, the event commemorating the liberation of Plzeň got so much space -- as if had been the Americans who liberated our whole country from the German troops. Oh, well... that brought me back to those days when the communist propaganda taught us that even Plzeň was freed by the Soviets!

On top of that, the Czech public television channel didn't program even one Russian film, which would remind us of the country which suffered the most with that war.

It is true that programs of local production related to the date were so many, but from all of them the one which caught me the most was the documentary about the post-War murder of Prague Germans ("Zabíjení po česku"/"Killing the Czech Way, shown on the ČT 2 channel), however, I still would like to know why young viewers were not given the opportunity to see something about what their peers went through at the time of their greatgrandparents`?

This question is obviously jusr rhetorical. It wouldn't fit the local media propaganda.

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