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Time 2020-09-10 14:05:17

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1943: Julius Fu ík, Notes from the Gallows Add comment September 8th, 2020 12:24pm Headsman Czechoslovakian journalist Julius Fu ík was executed by the Third Reich on this date in 1943.Nephew of a great composer of the same name, our Julius Fu ík was an 18-year-old left-wing activist when the Social Democrat party he was a part of founded the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Fu ík and his pen grew up in this world, together generating a substantial corpus of essays and analysis on pregnant years.Hitler s occupation of Czechoslovakia drove his party and his work underground, which eventually resulted in his arrest.He d eventually be deported to Germany and hanged at Berlin s Plötzensee Prison, but Fu ík made his lasting fame to posterity through the clandestine diary notes, bursting with anticipation for a bright Communist future, that he scribbled during his initial detention at Prague s Pankrác Prison from 1942-1943.After the war, these would be published as Notes from the Gallows a text so scriptural in Communist Czechoslovakia that it weighed like manacles.In Milan Kundera s The Joke, one of the characters standing trial is browbeaten by a prosecutor using Fu ík s words, while Fu ík s fervent, pure portrait gazes in judgment. (Consonant with the stature of Notes from the Gallows, its author was saluted via many street names, public monuments, and so forth. Quite few still remain today, in Germany as well as the former Czechoslovakia.) Death, you have been long in coming. And yet it was my hope to postpone our meeting until many years hence. To go on living the life of a free man, to work more, love more, sing more, and wander the world over ' I recognized Fucik s Notes from the Gallows. I loved life, and for the sake of its beauty I went to war. I loved you, good people, rejoicing when you returned my love, suffering when you failed to understand me ' That text, written clandestinely in prison, then published after the war in a million copies, broadcast over the radio, studied in schools as required reading, was the sacred book of the era. Zemanek read out the most famous passages, the ones everyone knew by heart. Let sadness never be linked with my name. That is my testament to you, Papa, Mama, and sisters, to you, my Gustina, to you, Comrades, to everyone I have loved ' The drawing of Fucik on the wall was a reproduction of the famous sketch by Max Svabinsky, the old Jugendstil painter, the virtuoso of allegories, plump women, butterflies, and everything delightful; after the war, or so the story goes, Svabinsky had a visit from the Comrades, who asked him to do a portrait of Fucik from a photograph, and Svabinsky had drawn him (in profile) in graceful lines in accord with his own taste: almost girlish, fervent, pure, and so handsome that people who had known him personally preferred Svabinsky s sublime drawing to their memories of the living face.Fu ík, and the idealized Max vabinsk portrait of him one of several times it s been used on postage stamps.Meanwhile Zemanek read on, everyone in the hall silent and attentive and the fat girl at the table unable to tear her eyes away from him; suddenly his voice grew firm, almost menacing; he had come to the passage about Mirek the traitor: And to think that he was no coward, a man who did not take flight when bullets rained down on him at the Spanish front, who did not knuckle under when he ran the gauntlet of cruelties in a concentration camp in France. Now he pales under the club of a Gestapo agent and turns informer to save his skin. How superficial was his bravery if so few blows could shake it. As superficial as his convictions He lost everything the moment he began to think of himself. To save his own life, he sacrificed the lives of his friends. He succumbed to cowardice and through cowardice betrayed them ' Fucik s handsome face hung on the wall as it hung in a thousand other public places in our country, and it was so handsome, with the radiant expression of a young girl in love, that when I looked at it I felt inferior not just because of my guilt, but because of my appearance as well. And Zemanek read on: They can take our lives, can t they, Gustina, but they cannot take our honor and love. Can you imagine, good people, the life we might have led if we had met again after all this suffering, met again in a free life, a life made beautiful by freedom and creation? The life we shall lead when we finally achieve everything we ve longed for and fought for and I now die for?' After the pathos of these last sentences Zemanek was silent.In the post-Communist era Fu ík has had a critical re-examination, with an updated version of Notes published now including for the first time the bits his widow had judiciously excised, wherein Fu ík admits to breaking under torture although he also records that he confessed only inaccurate information that would not endanger comrades. He s also been knocked for failing to use his firearms on either his captors or himself at the time of his arrest.On this day..1873: James Connor - 20191961: Henryk Niemasz, the last hanged at Wandsworth - 20181306: Simon Fraser, William Wallace comrade in arms - 20171914: Thomas Highgate, the first shot in the Great War - 20161292: Johann de Wettre, medieval Europe's first documented sodomy execution - 20151971: Ishola Oyenusi, smiling to his death - 20141686: Jonathan Simpson, merchant turned highwayman - 20131812: Not Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace - 20121999: Double execution in Arkansas - 20111790: Johan Henrik Hästesko, Anjalaman - 20101820: John Baird and Andrew Hardie, for the Radical War - 20091642: Thomas Granger and the beasts he lay with - 2008Possibly related executions:1941: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya 1942: Vladislav Vancura, Marketa Lazarova author 1916: Syrian and Lebanese nationalists, who christen Martyr s Day 1942: The village of Lidice, for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich 1941: Masha Bruskina, Kiril Trus, and Volodia Shcherbatsevich, partisans 1945: Walraven van Hall, banker to the Resistance 1943: Lepa Radic, Yugoslav Partisan

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