Julius Fucik
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Julius Fučík (February 23, 1903 - September 8, 1943) was a Czechoslovakian journalist, a Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa [KSČ]) leader, and a leader in the forefront of the anti-Nazi resistance. He was imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by the Nazis.
Julius Fučík was born into a working-class family. His father was a steelworker. In 1913, Fučík moved with his family from Prague to Plzeň (Pilsen) where he attended the state vocational high school. Already as a twelve-year-old boy he was planning to establish a newspaper named "Slovan" ("The Slav"). He showed himself to be interested in both politics and literature.
In 1920 he took up study in Prague and joined the Social-Democratic Party, through whom he was later to find himself swept up in the leftwing current. In May 1921 this wing founded the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC). Fučík then first wrote cultural contributions for the local Plzeň CPC newspaper.
After completing his studies, Fučík found a position as an editor with the literary newspaper "Kmen". Within the CPC he became responsible for cultural work. In the year 1929 he went to literary critic Franticek Xaver Salda's magazine "Tvorba". Moreover, he constantly worked on the CPC newspaper "Rudé Právo". In this time Fučík was arrested repeatedly by the Czechoslovakian Secret Police.
In 1930, he visited the Soviet Union for four months and painted a very positive picture of the situation there. He went to the Soviet Union again in 1934, this time for two years, and wrote various reports, which again worked to support the Party's strength. After his return, there were heated arguments with authors such as Jiří Weil and Jan Slavik, who criticized developments under Stalin. Fučík took the Soviet Union's side and criticized such critical statements as fatal.
In the wake of the Munich Conference, the Prague government to a large extent restricted the CPC's activities beginning from September 1938. Fučík published now under an alias in civilian newspapers, especially about historical topics.
After Nazi Germany's troops invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Fučík went to work for the resistance. Occasionally he lived with his family, who were now living in Chotimer. Later he went disguised as Professor Horak to Prague.
Beginning early in 1941, he belonged to the CPC's Central Commitee. He provided handbills and tried to publish the Communist Party newspaper "Rudé Právo" regularly. On 24 April 1942 he was arrested in Prague by the Gestapo, probably rather coincidentally during a police raid. First he was detained in Pankrác Prison in Prague where he was also interrogated and tortured. In this time arose Fučík's Notes from the Gallows (ISBN 087905252X) (sometimes also translated Reports Written Under the Noose), which was smuggled out by a sympathetic prison warder named Kolínský. In later years its authenticity was contested. At least the work appeared in a more acceptable version, from which the less pleasant passages, which did not quite fit into everyone's picture of heroic resistance fighters, were stricken out.
In May 1943 Fučík was brought to Germany. He was first detained in Bautzen for somewhat more than two months, and afterwards in Berlin. On August 25, 1943 in Berlin, he was accused of high treason in connection with his political activities by the Volksgerichtshof, which was presided over by the notorious Roland Freisler. Fučík was found guilty, and was sentenced to death. He was beheaded two weeks later on 8 September 1943 in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
After the war, his wife, Gusta Fučíková, who had also been in a Nazi concentration camp, researched and retrieved all of his prison writings and published them as Notes from the Gallows, which became a legendary piece of literature and a bestseller. It has been translated into at least ninety languages.
Quotations from Julius Fučík
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- "It so happens that killing a man is not the greatest evil that one can do that man. The Nazis were specialists, not only in murder and physical torture, but also in man's degradation and debasement, in the extermination of his hope, his attachment to life and his faculty of reasoning."
- "I would like people to know that there were no nameless heroes. That they were human beings who had their names, their faces, their longing, and their hopes, and that for that reason, even the pain of the last one among them was no less than the first one's pain, whose name remains. I would like them all to stay close to you always, like acquaintances, like kin, like you yourselves."cs:Julius Fučík (spisovatel)