In every country there are certain relics, carefully preserved and shown only on very special occasions, which are held in great veneration because they are the living evidence of that nation's intention to survive in spite of everything. They may be a final message of some small group of patriots telling those who will find their remains that the men and women who lie buried among the ruins died faithful to their trust. Or again they may be a bit of broken pottery, dug out of the shambles of a castle or a city which preferred destruction to surrender. Or the last remnant of a flag that was flown when all had been lost except honor and the loyal devotion to a lost cause.
But there are other evidences of the national will to live which I have nothing to do with an actual clash of arms, yet are as powerful in their testimony to a people's valor and tenacity as the guns that fired the last shot in the struggle for freedom. I refer to those evidences of the national genius which took the shape of paintings, of pieces of sculpture, of musical and literary compositions and which belonging to the realm of the spirit were as indestructable as the laws of God and of nature.
The ancient land of the Czechs, betrayed by those who should have been its friends and protectors, today lies at the mercy of an enemy who for sheer brutality and lust for cruelty has never been quite surpassed within the written annals of history. Death stalks through those streets which were the first to hear the merry strains of Mozart's operas. The melodies arising from the banks of the Vltava river are silenced by the raucous shouts of bands of youthful gangsters, loudly singing the praises of the late and unlamented Horst Wessel, and the silences of the forest calms are broken by the angry staccato of shooting squads, going about their hideous business of exterminating all those who dared question the greatness of the Aryan race as it has revealed itself in the ungainly person of Adolf, son of Alois Schickelgruber, its most conspicuous prophet and illustrious Messiah.
This is a gloomy picture and hardly the sort of thing we like to see printed in our blessed land of wishful thinking in which Candide, amidst the bombs of Pearl Harbor and the flames of the Normandie can still proclaim that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if one only closes one's eyes against those facts which might have a disturbing effect upon that equanimity of the soul necessary for the enjoyment of a good meal and a pleasant evening at a night club.
