Day for Freedom and Democracy in the Czech Republic
Description:
On October 28, 1939, students demonstrated in Prague to commemorate and celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak state (28.10.1918). However, the units of the occupiers dispersed the demonstration, while a medical student Jan Opletal was shot dead. He died on November 11. On November 15, 1939, the day of Jan Opletal’s funeral, hundreds of people again took to the streets. The funeral turned into a new demonstration. German units dispersed people again, and dozens of demonstrators were arrested.
The apogee of general tension was on November 17, when the Gestapo and SS officers surrounded the student dormitories in the early morning. More than 1,200 students were arrested and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. Nine students and student activists were executed without trial in a prison in Ruzyne, Prague. By Hitler’s order, all Czech higher education institutions were closed until the end of the war. This day has written a tragic page in the history of the Czech people, since 1941, the date of November 17 was celebrated as “International Students’ Day”.
On November 17, 1989, the 50th anniversary of the resistance of Prague students and the funeral of Jan Opletal, about 75,000 citizens - students, actors, dissidents, including future President Vaclav Havel - gathered in the Albertov-Vysegrad district of Prague. The demonstration was violently dispersed by communist Czechoslovakia. The next day there was a storm of protests across the country. On November 19, the Social and Political Movement “Civil Forum” was created at the Drama Club, which united all independent initiatives, representatives of churches, art unions and other citizens seeking regime change. The Civic Forum expressed its support for the general strike on November 27, and proposed to start a dialogue with the state authorities on the removal from senior positions of all statesmen, especially those who contributed to the introduction of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, on the release of political prisoners, on the provision of freedom of speech and the press to the media, and on the punishment of those responsible for the brutal crackdown on student demonstrations on November 17. There was a general strike on November 27.
All these events represented the beginning of subsequent demonstrations, speeches, negotiations and strikes and went down in history as the “velvet revolution”, which resulted in the collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the country gradually began to develop democracy.
During the November events, students addressed all democratic-minded citizens of Czechoslovakia with an oath dedicated to the late Jan Palach, who became a symbol of the struggle for freedom. In 1968, in protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, he committed self-immolation. “I swear in the name of the students and all the honest people of this nation that we will never give in, we will never change, and we will finish the fight for your and our vision of a free life. Jan Palach, you will never leave our faculty, you will remain forever with us, in us and in all who come after us.
On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia. Five years later, in 1994, he recalls the atmosphere of the November events, which, in his opinion, can never be repeated: “The atmosphere of community, dedication, unity that was characteristic of these revolutionary days, such an atmosphere will not return. These were such special moments of a huge rise in public will, of which there are not many in history. But, nevertheless, this should not be forgotten. On the contrary, I think that it is about such moments of mobilizing the best in man that we should remember and be inspired by them. So that they remind us of the good things in us that we often forget.”
By Law No. 167/1990 Sb., 17 November was declared a public holiday – “Students’ Day for Freedom and Democracy”, and in 2000 it was renamed “Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy”.
A plaque with the inscription “17.11.1989” is installed on one of the buildings on People’s Street in the center of Prague, from where the “velvet revolution” began in Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1989. Since the morning of November 17, people come here, bring candles and flowers.