The Five Crown Bank Note – Symbol of Resistance
I visited Czechoslovakia in 1971. A few years earlier my family had been involved with two young Czechoslovak au pairs who had been in England in 1968 when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. One had decided to stay, and one had decided to go back. I was visiting the girl who had gone back so my family could be sure she was all right.
While I was there I was shown the 5 crown bank note, the smallest value bank note in Czechoslovakia. At first sight it was just a foreign bank note. A little exotic, as all foreign bank notes are.
The face on the bank note was Jan Hus, the Czech national hero. He had lost his right eye in battle. My Czech friend told me that Jan Hus had actually lost his left eye in battle, not his right eye. He folded the bank note at Jan Hus’s eye. Held one way one could see the silhouette of a woman in mourning. The other way up was the face of Jan Palach, the boy who had burned himself to death in protest at the invasion.
The entire background was printed in very small letters so as to look like a pattern “SOSOSOSOS….”
Near the bottom of the bank note were some names – quite common on bank notes. They were the names of three prominent Czechs who had escaped to the West.
This was a genuine Czech bank note. Apparently the engravers had prepared this bank note as a protest and then quietly left the country. The bank note was in mass circulation. The Russians probably knew about it by now, but other than generating a new bank note to replace it there was not much else they could do.
What genius, what patriotism, and what courage those engravers had!
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