CZECHOSLOVAK STATE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 29, 29 October 1942, Page 6

CZECHOSLOVAK STATE

Foundation Anniversary CONSUL’S ADDRESS In an address on the occasion of Czechoslovakia’s Foundation Day the Czechoslovak Consul in Wellington, Mr. E. J. Hymns, last night reviewed the geographical, historical, ethnological, and home-life bases of the Czechoslovak State, which, before the days of Hitlerian aggression, was the home of 15,000,090 people. The people of Czechoslovakia, he said, were probably better educated titan tlie majority of the people of Middle Europe. In normal times they read what they pleased, and they did not exist for their Government; their Government existed for them. The feature of their home life was its coffee house centralization. The cafes acquired the character of their clientele. There journalists wrote, business men closed tlieir deals, and patrons played chess, dominoes or cards, or read magazines and papers from the library of the cafe owner. A number of the people even entertained their friends in the cafes in preference to their homes.

Referring to the tragedy of the village of Lidice, Mr. Hyams suggested that, in parallel with the renaming of towns in the United States and Mexico after the martyred village, when a name was wanted for a new airport or housing settlement in New Zealand, the name of Lidice might be applied in its memory. Mr. 'Wendell Willkie, added Mr. Hyams, recently told a gathering of some 50,000 people at the opening of a new housing settlement in Chicago named Lidice that the memory of its martyred' people would fire us, now and till the battle was won, with the iron resolution that the madness of tyrants must perish from the earth. No Nazi force could destroy either the love of human freedom or the courage to maintain it. The Czechs steadfastly refused to bow- the knee to tryanny, and Czechoslovakia would rise again.