The Memory in Holostřevy: When less means more - by Ondřej Klípa
Again in Holostřevy! After some 25 years.
A tiny village in Western Bohemia, deep
in the pre-war German settlement. As a young boyscout, I used to camp in nearby forests every year. This year, I was lucky enough to enjoy that again, at least for a few days, with kids from our troop. Since my childhood, I remember only a rundown, almost empty village with a dilapidated church. It hasn´t changed much since then, actually, except most of the houses (excluding the church) have been repaired and painted. The somber war monument in the village square perfectly fits my overall impression from this godforsaken place all those years ago. It’s inscription reads, quite simply, “To the victims of the First and Second World War” and the old motto of Czech(oslovak) presidents, “Truth Prevails.” How different it is from my hometown Říčany in Central Bohemia! On the wall of our town hall, we have a large sculpture of Czechoslovak legionaries with all the names of fallen soldiers as well as a metal box with “mold from Zborov.” Next to it lies a panel with all the local heroes, murdered and tortured by the Nazi Germans, and a list of holocaust victims just a bit further away. But Holostřevy (Hollezrieb for Germans) had no memory.
Until I entered a local cemetery. There are many small gravestones with Czech and some Roma/Hungarian surnames, the oldest of which were from the 1950s. However, a handful of large majestic tombstones stick out high above them all. Old, glossy blocks of black. Only here, at the site of family memories of the local inhabitants, one can read the collective memory of the place. Only here can one find a counterpart of the rather reticent memorial in the middle of the village. As in a scout game, one can use the cemetery tombs as a key to puzzle out the cipher, “To the victims of the First and Second World War”.
In the new Czechoslovak state (after the Great War), the mothers of Holostřevy mourned for their sons who “heroically scarified their lives for homeland”… an Austrian homeland! Should they have built cenotaphs for the national heroes who – from their point of view – betrayed their sons and even might have been the cause of their death (at least theoretically)? After some two decades in interwar Czechoslovakia, their sons – and this time fathers too – died again. At Stalingrad or other places of the horrific East. Could the newcomers to the empty village pay respect to the fallen Wehrmacht soldiers of the expelled Germans?
The tangible signs of memory in
Holostřevy do not say who exactly was good or bad, who exactly deserves tribute or not. The local memorials speak about the pain of parents and wives whose sons and husbands were stolen by the wars. They speak about parallel worlds, dreams and hopes of Germans and Czechs in which there was a lot of sorrow, misunderstanding and manipulation. Rather than to violate history with a one-sided “truth” and selecting only “some” victims or heroes, it is better to keep quiet. Maybe the intention of the memorial´s creators was different. Maybe they simply wanted to erase the German past of the village while having no one (non-German) to commemorate. No matter what the case is, it seems to me, a stranger, that Holostřevy could not have captured the memory of the place better than with its “silent” monument.
Reference: Klípa, Ondřej. The Memory in Holostřevy: When less means more. PRIMUS BOHEMS Web, 9.10.2017. Link: https://kocian1.wixsite.com/primus/single-post/2017/10/09/The-Memory-in-Holost%C5%99evy-When-less-means-more---by-Ond%C5%99ej-Kl%C3%ADpa
