Your Excellency ambassador Rozbora,
Dear Mr. Bielik, and Mrs. GOGOVA
Distinguished guests,

The violent events of the August-days in 1968 - ended the hopes of a people for a peaceful transition to democracy. Documented so movingly by Ladislav Bielik.

More than two decades after the Prague Spring events are once again unfolding in Bratislava, but under very different circumstances.

This time it is the peaceful events of November 1989 - fulfilling the hopes of a people for a peaceful end to totalitarian rule, an end to a divided Europe, and a new dawn of democracy at the European heartland.

Winston Churchill spoke in 1948 passionately of a movement for European Unity. "In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law" he said.

It was a call for human dignity and humanity.

A year later his idea gave way to the Council of Europe.

Another year on, the Council had adopted the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European idea of democracy and humanity was born. Now it had to find its way forward.

“Information is the currency of democracy” it’s been said. In 1968 we all hoped that this would be the currency of Czechoslovakia. But it failed.  

But the photograph of Emil Gallo the bare-chested man in front of the invader’s tank was hard currency in the democratic world. It was published all over the western world. It won prizes and it is ranked among the century’s most important photographs.
 
Today, information flow free on a European continent based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The history of the success of these European values is the history of a new kind of power – about spreading norms rather than always getting your way.

It’s the European way. Born in 1948, shattered in 1968 and fulfilled in 1989.

Ambassador Rozbora,
Distinguished guests,

Winston Churchill also said that “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross, on a little bit of paper.”

Ladislav Bielik and Emil Gallo were ordinary men, that became giants. People to look up to. People that inspired us to continue working for a democratic future.

The bare-chested man in front of a tank. A photo of a century. Changing the world.

With these words, I declare the exhibition for opened.