After coming to power in December of 1989 with the unanimous vote of the communist Federal Parliament, beside launching immediately his thinly veiled, “velvet” push for breaking up Czechoslovakia, as then also happened on January 1, 1993, Václav Havel and his team also immediately began deriding the memory, mementos, and monuments commemorating Czechoslovak anti-Nazi resistance in World War along with all its heroes, including the famous Julius Fucik, a Communist leader of the Resistance, executed by Gestapo on September 8, 1943, in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. A wholesale effacing of the names and vicious derision of their legacy, especially on the part of the Communist Resistance, the Resistance’s core and main force, took place. Even in the little village of Bor of my Grandmother Josefa Suchanová, there too, from the monument by the church, they removed Juius Fučik’s famous warning and motto from his testament Notes from the Gallows, “Lidé, měl jsem vás rád. Bděte!”—“People, I loved you! Stay awake!” Julius Fučík’s words to the nation on the eve of his execution were replaced with the text: “To the victims of World War I and World War II,” followed by its German translation—to emphasize which victims are really meant—the Sudeten German victims, including the executioners of Hitler’s Nazi extermination and genocidal aggression and occupation.
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