Ladies and Gentlemen,

Addressing you, soldiers of the Allied Armies, members of the Czechoslovak units that fought abroad as well as of the domestic Resistance, our foreign guests and my fellow citizens, I am proud that today - fifty years after our country was freed from Nazi rule - I can on behalf of the Czech Republic thank all those to whom we owe the liberation.

My thanks go to all the surviving men and women of many nationalities who took part in the liberation struggles on both the eastern and the western fronts. I thank them for having risked their lives for the restoration of the democratic Czechoslovakia, for the freedom of us all, for the victory of the human race over Nazi violence.

By the same token, my thanks go to all the surviving Czechs, Slovaks and other Czechoslovak citizens, including those of German birth, who joined foreign military forces to fight on the side of the Allies for the liberation of their home country. Furthermore, I thank all the surviving members of the domestic Resistance. Acting for all their fellow citizens and in their name, they saved the honour of our nation, and it was also due to the important contribution which they made to the liberation struggle that our state became a member of the victorious coalition.

I bow in homage before the memory of the thousands of participants in that great fight for the salvation of humanity who fell on battlefields, were executed or tortured to death, or passed away before they could see this commemoration day.

The present generations owe a debt of gratitude to them all, the living as well as those who are not with us any more, because all of them stood up, with or without arms, to combat an evil that sought to subjugate the entire civilized world.

It was not their fault that the fight would not have taken such a heavy toll if the international community had not made concessions to Nazism for so long and had resisted it earlier. Nor was it their fault that Stalin was no true military leader and that he sacrificed on the eastern front uselessly and wantonly millions of troops who could have survived had the operations been conducted more skilfully. And it was not their fault either that the freedom we finally won was half-baked and did not last. Soon after the end of World War II our country was again subjected to a totalitarian regime, this time to one of the Communist type, and more than forty endless years had to pass before we succeeded in shaking it off and became truly free.

Today, we are commemorating V-E Day at a time when we are, at last, genuinely free, in every way and, as I firmly believe, forever.

Everyone who fought against Nazism as well as everyone who opposed Communism made a contribution to this accomplishment, not only in the form of the tangible results of their fight but also through something that goes beyond that, something that cannot be confined to the history books alone: the moral example which they set for us and for our successors. It is first and foremost thanks to all those who fought against evil in different periods of modern history that we understand today better than ever before that evil must be resisted consistently and from the very beginning, and that there are moments when personal interests have to be forgone for the sake of a brighter future of the community.

If, as a nation, we want to have backbone, to preserve our honour and to be able to respect ourselves, we must never forget the heroism shown by our liberators as well as by our ancestors in resisting violence. At the same time, however, our nation must acknowledge the depth of the failure of those of its members, many as they were, who remained passive in the face of evil or even abetted it. We should never cease to feel shame at the indifference with which a great part of our population stood by and watched how disgracefully the Communist regime, in the name of us all and of our country, treated the heros and the victims of World War II. Those who did more than anyone else for our liberty were among the first to be persecuted. This is what I consider one of the biggest crimes of Communism, one through which Communism most clearly revealed its true nature: the new oppressors, proceeding to stifle freedom again, dealt first with those who had proved that they treasured freedom before all else.

Therefore, I avail myself of this moment of celebration to apologize on behalf of our national community to all those who during World War II saved its honour and helped restore its liberty for the inaction toward the persecution which they suffered after the war.

The cringing caution which many of us were so good at showing both after Munich and during the Nazi occupation and later under Communism must never again be our national programme. We have to build on something else: on love for freedom and justice, on respect for human dignity, and on the ability to prove the validity of these feelings, if need be, by concrete deeds. In other words, the values which we need now are the very qualities which were demonstrated by all the men and women to whom we give our thanks today and whose memory we honour.

One more thing has to be said today: while World War II ended with a victory of the Allies over Germany, in the years that followed Germany itself has accomplished a victory over Germany as the new Germany triumphed over the old one. Today's Germany, having dissociated itself long ago from its nationalist and expansionist past, is an important component of the democratic and increasingly united Europe, and has become the Germany which brave German antifascists longed for. I therefore avail myself of this occasion also to appeal to all my fellow citizens not to give in to the anti-German sentiments which certain enemies of a peaceful and democratic Europe would wish to foment, but to find in themselves the courage to condemn as well all the injustices and cruelties which many of us once perpetrated when taking revenge on Germans for the pernicious work of Nazism.

Nazism and Nazi Germany receded into the past long ago. What has not receded and must never be allowed to recede is the valour of the men and women who resisted Nazism and the memory of those who on the various battlefields of World War II continued to fight the battle which the human race has been waging since time immemorial against the evil it breeds and to which it has so often succumbed.

World War II Veterans and Resistance Fighters,

Never again shall we betray your legacy!