Citizens of the Czech Republic are waiting with bated breath for a longstanding mystery to be solved: What were the last words of the country’s revered first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk?
The final thoughts of the statesman, who governed the Czechoslovak Republic from 1918 to 1935, are believed to have been recorded by his son Jan Masaryk just before his death in September 1937 and have been sealed in a letter ever since, according to Czech public radio, which has set up a special section of its website to cover the opening of the envelope on Friday.
Historian Dagmar Hájková, head of the department of modern social and cultural history of the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, a public research institution that focuses on modern Czech history, told the radio station that Jan is thought to have written down his dying father’s words as he sat at his bedside.
“If we imagine the moment, he might have written it on his knee, in a hurry, nervously, so the handwriting might not be legible. It might also be more fragmentary and not in a form of a coherent speech,” she said.
Masaryk had been in poor health since 1934, said Hájková, so there is a chance that the letter could date from earlier than 1937, when it may have appeared that he might not live much longer.
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