Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ludvík Kysela,and in the twenty-first century it will be regarded as one of the most remarkable functionalist buildings in the world.)
    On May 27, 1942, a group of Czechoslovak paratroopers trained in Britain makes an attempt on the life of Reinhard Heydrich, the most important official of the Third Reich in the Protectorate, who dies in the hospital. The attackers manage to escape. As punishment, Hitler orders the entire village of Lidice, near Prague, exterminated. § Not only do the Nazis kill all the men, send the women to Ravensbrück and take the children to another camp or to Germany, not only do they burn down or blow up all the buildings and raze the village to the ground, but they also go under the ground—they drag the coffins out of the graves and remove the corpses. The operation is considered complete once all the trees have been uprooted and the stream bed has been diverted, so that no one can tell there was ever a village there at all.
    Before the Germans catch the assassins, the authorities force the manager of the Bata store on Wenceslas Square to display in the window an overcoat, hat, briefcase and bicycle found at the site of the attack and an announcement offering a reward of ten million crowns for finding the assailants.
    (For communist propaganda, the display in the window will later be part of the evidence that Bata collaborated with the occupying forces.)
1945: FAME AND INFAMY
    First, Zlín is bombed by the Americans (they destroy 60 percent of the town’s factories), and then it is liberated by the Red Army. The Polish government-in-exile refuses to reach a compromise with the USSR and remains in London forever. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile creates a coalition government with the communists in Moscow and announces its own program.
    The directors of the Bata plants are arrested. Their deputies are forced to sweep the streets of Zlín publicly. In the course of two months, 13,000 inhabitants flee from the town of 50,000.
    Ivan H. and Josef V. make a speech from the factory broadcasting center. During the war, they worked for the firm and were informers for the Gestapo. Now they have signed up with the Security Service—the secret police. “Jan Bata’s fame has ended in infamy,” they say.
    Jan is living in Batatuba (duplicate number three in Brazil), where he finds out that by decree of the president of the republic the state has taken over the joint-stock company of Bata A.S.
    The famous Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg visits Czechoslovakia, and writes: “Bata, who remained in Zlín, praised the Führer and supplied the Reichswehr with footwear. On the eve of Munich, he changed his coat of arms. Until then, it was three shoes, but Bata painted in a fourth, so that the crossed lines would form a swastika.”
    Did Ehrenburg really go to Zlín? (After all, Bata had left the country and had no coat of arms.) This quotation from hisarticle is distributed all over Czechoslovakia, and the communists prepare a lawsuit against Jan Bata, who is charged with betraying the nation.
    Meanwhile, he demands compensation from the Czechoslovak state for the nationalized town of Zlín—the greatest fortune owned by a single man in Central Europe.
    If the court can prove that he collaborated with the Germans, he isn’t owed a thing.
APRIL 28, 1947: THE VERDICT
    “My God, we created Zlín purely in order to give the Czechs wings,” says Jan Bata when he finds out that the national court in Prague has sentenced him to fifteen years in prison and ten years’ forced labor. And has confiscated his property.
    He demanded to be allowed to appear before the court and to be given a chance to defend himself. “I do not believe the accused would really want to appear in court,” said the chairman of the prosecution team during the trial.
    So the prosecutor declared: “An indictment can take place in the absence of an accused man who refuses to come to the country and will not be coming.”
    The accused asked at