Memory of Nations Awards honour heroes and witnesses to history in National Theatre ceremony
On Sunday November 17th, within the splendour of the National Theatre in Prague, five individuals were honoured as this year’s recipients of the Memory of Nations Awards. President Pavel was also in attendance at the gala event.
Chosen by the non-profit organisation Post Bellum, the five awardees were celebrated for their individual struggles against the Nazi and Communist regimes of the twentieth century, and had previously narrated their stories to the international archive of testimonies of historical events, Memory of Nations (Paměť národa). Two Czechs were among the quintet of laureates, along with two Slovaks and one Ukrainian. The nominees were chosen by a panel of historians, journalists, filmmakers and researchers, based on the recordings of their life stories. Held this year for the fifteenth time, sixty-six people have received the award to date.
Among the recipients was sixty-nine-year-old Pavel Záleský. Born in 1955 in the Moravian village of Mutěnice, Mr. Záleský was a dissident in communist Czechoslovakia and a signatory of Charter 77. From the 1970s onwards, he actively participated in the distribution of samizdat (prohibited literature), and was a key figure in the petition for greater religious freedom organised by Augustin Navrátil. By 1989, more than half a million Czechoslovaks had signed it. Speaking to Czech Radio at the awards, Mr. Záleský emphasised that he accepted the award only as a representative of a much larger group:
“Half of our squad now plays in the heavenly team, including our captain Augustin Navrátil, so I agreed to accept the award because I was his closest collaborator. But I take it as an appreciation of all the people who took part in the petition in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, because one person could not have done it; thousands of volunteers took part in it.”
Also honoured was ninety-two-year-old Marta Neužilová, who spent her childhood in Bohušovice nad Ohří, close to Terezín, where trains carrying deported Jews arrived between 1941 and 1943. Her mother joined the resistance, and from the autumn of 1941, she helped Jews at the railway station, delivering food, water, letters and parcels. However, in 1942, after the family was denounced and arrested by the Gestapo, Mrs. Neužilová and her brothers spent the rest of the war with their paternal grandmother. Her mother was murdered in Auschwitz. The children were not allowed to go to school, did not receive food stamps, and so Mrs. Neužilová started work very early and supported her siblings in their studies. Since 1989, she has been active in documenting her experiences for future generations, and in working with Jewish organisations.
The Slovak recipients of the award were Ladislav Szalay, who saved the life of his Jewish classmate in Trnava during the Second World War, and Karol Dubovan, who worked with underground religious communities and was a leading figure of the Velvet Revolution in Trenčín. The fifth recipient was Olha Heiko, a dissident in Soviet Ukraine, who was arrested by the KGB in 1980 and served sentences in a penal colony and a ‘corrective’ labour camp for her beliefs.
Featuring short films and musical interludes, the grand awards ceremony at the National Theatre was also attended by President Petr Pavel and First Lady Eva Pavlová. In a post on the platform X, the president later congratulated the five individuals, who “with their bravery, contributed to the freedom and form of today's democratic society.”
