Thank you, America!
In May 1948, Ida Milotová took part in laying wreaths by the foundation stone of a planned memorial to the US Army in Pilsen. “I bought red and white carnations and placed them by the memorial. All of a sudden a van stopped by and several uniformed members of the SNB (National Security Corps) got out. They pulled out their guns and exhorted us to disperse. They started to push us out saying that if anyone attempted to return, the order was to shoot that person dead.” In the end, the commemoration service went off without the SNB members using their weapons and the participants peacefully dispersed and went home. Ida Milotová returned to her parent’s apartment in the nearby Electra Palace. At night, she heard some noise so she got up to have a look. From the windows of her apartment she could overlook the place where the future US Army memorial was to stand and where the commemoration service was dispersed by the SNB members in the afternoon. “I saw all the flowers, flags and even the foundation stone being loaded on to trucks. Later I heard that everything ended up on a dump.”
Hodnocení
Abyste mohli hodnotit musíte se přihlásit!
Trasy
Příběh není součastí žádné trasy.
Komentáře
The US Army Memorial in Pilsen
The history of the US Army Memorial in Pilsen dates back to the period shortly after the end of the Second World War. The competition for the best memorial proposal, announced in 1946, was won by sculptor Oskar Kozák. The foundation stone was laid in the very same year, but during the demonstrations in May 1948 the stone was removed and probably taken to some unknown dump. At the occasion of the then president Václav Havel’s and ambassador Shirley Temple-Black’s visit to Pilsen in 1990, the foundation stone for the memorial was laid again. In 1993, a new competition for the memorial was announced, this time with fifty people participating in it. The jury chose the proposal of Vladmír Preclík, but it was not accepted well by the public. The city council has therefore decided to organize an open workshop where anyone interested could participate in a discussion about the planned memorial. In the end, the final form of the memorial, accepted also by the public, took the shape of two granite pylons and a circular plate set into the ground in the middle. The “Thank You America” memorial, revealed in 1995, is the work of a team of authors: its overall form is courtesy of the architect Jan Soukup and the bronze items were made by František Bálek. Due to the non-standard form of the competition, all of the authors of the memorial had to pledge to give up the entitlement to the authorship and the memorial is nowadays perceived as collective anonymous work.
