Has Czech society blocked out the Covid pandemic?
The fifth anniversary of the start of the Covid epidemic in Czechia came and went (March 1st ) without any significant attention or debate. Approximately 42,000 people died of Covid or Covid related complications – a death toll surpassed only by the two world wars. Yet the country has no worthy memorial to the victims. Why are Czechs reluctant to look back at the pandemic that turned their lives upside down?
The arrival of the Covid pandemic came as a huge shock to the nation. The sight of the first victims being transported into isolation by paramedics in protective gear, hospitals operating in crisis mode, closed schools, shops, restaurants and night curfews were something that people had previously only seen in disaster movies. Thousands of people died and every family lost a close or distant relative to Covid. Now, five years later, Czechs are reluctant to look back. Why is that so?
Karel Střelec, from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava, has researched the perception of the pandemic in Czech society.
“I guess you could say there are more reasons. One of them is that people often need more time, they need hindsight to come to terms with negative or traumatic experiences. It is now five years since Covid hit, which may seem like a long time, but we know that 35 years after the fall of communism, we are still coming to terms with many issues relating to that time. The pandemic affected everyone but in different ways – some people lost their loved ones, others lost their income and feared for their livelihood and others still remember it as a time that restricted their freedoms.
"At the same time, the pandemic and the ways of dealing with it became a highly politicized issue. So I guess these factors all contribute to the fact that we have closed the door on that period. But, it is not a healthy approach. Every trauma –be it individual or collective -has to be processed at some stage. There will need to come a time, when we as a society will have to have that dialogue, when we will need some kind of reconciliation, some kind of healing and some kind of image that will remain in our collective memory of that time."
Not only are Czechs reluctant to remember the Covid pandemic, but there are few visible reminders of the death toll that it brought.
In the midst of the crisis close to 30,000 candles burned in the Prague Castle courtyards as people wound their way through the compound to pay tribute to those who lost the fight with Covid-19. President Zeman opened the ceremony with his wife and daughter, lighting the first candle and expressing gratitude to those on the front lines who had fought and were still fighting to save every life. Today there is little to recall the tragedy. The few small memorials that were erected in places were built by church or community groups or relatives of the victims. Karel Střelec says the absence of a bigger memorial is striking.
“It is part of our culture to commemorate past events in a material way. We build museums, we build monuments, crosses, memorials to the victims of accidents and so on. If we look at the pandemic, there is nothing much in terms of a commemoration. For example, there is a small memorial stone in Holešov, which was a local government initiative, there are some crosses near the towns of Odra and Znojmo. In Pardubice, there is a bench dedicated to one of the victims of the pandemic, but that was built by friends and relatives of the deceased. One would have expected to see some kind of memorial in the big cities, in Prague, in Brno, in Ostrava. Other countries already have such places. We can find them in London, in the United States, in France, in Italy, in other countries. As far as I know, nothing like that has yet been created in the Czech Republic. “
In addition to commemorations in the form of a memorial, milestone events are also projected into culture, works of art, cinema, literature. Is Czech culture also silent on the subject of the Covid pandemic? Karel Střelec again:
"Czech culture is not completely silent, although it is relatively quiet. At the University of Ostrava, we are working on a project that focuses on literary, artistic and cultural reflections on the pandemic in the Czech environment. And it appears that after the first wave of attention, which came in the form of documentaries, excerpts from diary entries and authentic accounts of the time, there has been a lull.
"We have several authors who have included the Covid pandemic in their works – for example Tereza Semotamová in her novel Radical Needs, David Zábranský, and also writers of popular literature Halina Pawlowská and Michal Viewegh. But I don't think there has been a really big novel that would treat the subject seriously. It may be that we need more time. The greatest works that reflect, for example, on totalitarianism in the 20th century, or the Second World War, were also produced after a time gap, in the 1960s or even in the 1990s. So it occurs to me, that perhaps Covid is a topic that will be revisited by future generations of writers who are further removed from it.”
