Czech founding father Masaryk’s message revealed in long-sealed envelope
“It’s the end, but I’m not afraid.”
This is the message delivered on Friday to a nation on tents shooters, sealed for almost a century inside an envelope designed to carry the last words of his founding father.
The words of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk – the first president of an independent Czechoslovakia, who has since been divided into Chechie and Slovakia – have been revealed in a live broadcast to which current Czech President Pellop.
Speculations had entered overmultipled before the announcement, the experts wondering if Masaryk had been able to transmit a fateful warning before the descent of Europe at war. His words would have been dictated to his son Jan, surviving both the Second World War and the subsequent communist domination.
The former secretary of Jan gave the limits to the national archives in 2005 provided that it was not open for another 20 years.
Even the Masaryk family did not know what mystery contained the white envelope. But when he was opened early Friday, he still managed to surprise.
Inside was another yellow envelope, containing five pages of handwritten notes in Czech and English (the wife of Masaryk, Charlotte Garrigue, was born in the United States.)
Rather than a final message before his death in 1937, the experts assessed that the message was rather dictated three years earlier.
“I am sick, seriously ill – it’s the end, but I’m not afraid. You will continue the work, you know how, but you have to be careful. You know how to behave; I don’t need to tell you more,” said the letter, according to the country’s official broadcaster.
At the time, Masaryk was seriously ill after a stroke, and those around him thought that his days were counted.
Masaryk became the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1918 after declaring the independence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was defeated during the First World War. He served until 1935. Jan became Minister of Foreign Affairs at the end of the Second World War, until his sudden death in 1948.
In the envelope, Masaryk spoke a lot about his death and his subsequent funeral and thought about the complex political situation in the ethnically diverse country.
In addition to derisory comments on a Slovak politician, he urged to keep the German minority part of the State. “Give them what they deserve, but no more,” he said about the Germans, according to the state diffuser.
“”[This was a] The crucial time in Czechoslovakia with Hitler who has just come to power in Germany, “said Mark Cornwall, professor emeritus of modern European history at the University of Southampton in England.
“It was a very turbulent period in Europe on what was going to happen,” said Cornwall, hiding the head of the Nazis of the Subdetenland, a Czech region that had a large German -speaking population and the last epidemic of the Second World War.
“Masaryk is still very revered” in the country, Cornwall told NBC News during a telephone interview. “I cannot think of an American equivalent. Maybe he’s George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. ”
