Israeli leaders on Sunday mourned the loss of Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who went on to become the first democratically elected Czech president. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered their condolences to the Havel family and the Czech people. "There was no other Vaclav Havel in our lives," Peres said in a statement following the announcement of Havel's passing on Sunday. Peres said that Havel had been a good friend to Israel and to him personally. "I was always inspired by him," Peres said. "He fought his own sickness; it was terrible. He fought occupation; it was difficult. I shall miss him. God bless his pure soul." Peres said Havel had been a "voice of freedom and a voice of unity for the suffering people of the world." Havel "was many things at once: writer, philosopher king and president," Peres said. "He was a man of his people, also under arrest and under occupation. He was a great talent and a golden voice of our generation in support of freedom. He had deep convictions and honesty." Peres also said that Havel had been a unique man, "determined but pleasant, strong in his convictions but listening to other voices. In that respect, his voice will still be heard even if he himself is no longer with us." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also offered condolences to the Czech Ambassador to Israel, Tomas Pojar, to the Havel family and the Czech nation. "President Havel was a brave and strong voice against totalitarianism and an inspiration to those fighting for freedom around the world," Netanyahu said. "After leading the Velvet Revolution [in 1989], Havel led the peaceful establishment of the Czech Republic's democratic government, and resumed the deep friendship between the Czech and Israeli peoples. He was a true friend of Israel and in recent years acted along with other world leaders to defend Israel against attempts to delegitimize the only state of the Jewish people. We will all miss his courage and his faith in the justice of his path." The end of Czechoslovakia's totalitarian regime was called the Velvet Revolution because of how smooth the transition seemed: Communism was dead in a matter of weeks, without a shot fired. But for Vaclav Havel, it was a moment he had helped pay for with decades of suffering and struggle. The dissident playwright spent years in jail but never lost his defiance, or his eloquence, and the government's attempts to crush his will ended up expanding his influence. He became a source of inspiration to Czechs and to all of Eastern Europe. He went from prisoner to president in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and communism crumbled across the region. Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend home in the northern Czech Republic. The 75-year-old former chain-smoker had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating back to his time in prison. Thousands of Czechs paid tribute to Havel on Sunday, braving cold and snow at the spot where the leader of the peaceful anti-communist revolution rallied protesters. Mourners, some of them too young to remember the Velvet Revolution, met at downtown Wenceslas Square in Prague, where Havel once spoke before hundreds of thousands of people expressing their outrage at the repressive communist regime. Shy and bookish, with a wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Havel helped draw the world's attention to the anger and frustration spilling over behind the Iron Curtain. While he was president, the Czech Republic split from Slovakia, but it also made dramatic gains in economic might. "His peaceful resistance shook the foundations of an empire, exposed the emptiness of a repressive ideology, and proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon," U.S. President Barack Obama said. "He also embodied the aspirations of half a continent that had been cut off by the Iron Curtain, and helped unleash tides of history that led to a united and democratic Europe." Mourners laid flowers and lit candles at Havel's villa in Prague, and a black flag of mourning flew over Prague Castle, the presidential seat. Havel was also remembered at a monument to the revolution in the capital's downtown. "Mr. President, thank you for democracy," one note read. Havel was his country's first democratically elected president, leading it through the early challenges of democracy and its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, though his image suffered as his people discovered the difficulties of transforming their society. He was an avowed peacenik who was close friends with members of the Plastic People of the Universe, a nonconformist rock band banned by the communist regime, and whose heroes included rockers such as Frank Zappa. He never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish. "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred," Havel famously said, and the words became his revolutionary motto, which he said he always strove to live by. "It's interesting that I had an adventurous life, even though I am not an adventurer by nature. It was fate and history that caused my life to be adventurous rather than me as someone who seeks adventure," he once told Czech radio. Havel first made a name for himself after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally minded communists in what was then Czechoslovakia. Havel's plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion. But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent analyses of what communism did to society and the individual. He was born Oct. 5, 1936, in Prague, the child of a wealthy family that lost extensive property to communist nationalization in 1948. Havel was denied a formal education, eventually earning a degree at night school and starting out in theater as a stagehand. His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew widening attention in the West. Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails. His letters from prison to his wife were among his best-known works. "Letters to Olga" blended deep philosophy with a stream of stern advice to the spouse he saw as his mentor and best friend, and who tolerated his reputed philandering and other foibles. The events of August 1988 the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion first suggested that Havel and his friends might one day replace the apparatchiks who jailed them. Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling Havel's name and that of the playwright's hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia's first president after it was founded in 1918. Havel's arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him in May. That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students. It was the signal that Havel and his countrymen had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets. On Dec. 29, 1989, Havel was elected Czechoslovakia's president by the country's still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a televised New Year's address: "Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine." He continued to be regarded a moral voice as he decried the shortcomings of his society under democracy, but eventually bent to the dictates of convention and power. His watchwords "What the heart thinks, the tongue speaks" had to be modified for day-to-day politics. In July 1992, it became clear that the Czechoslovak federation was heading for a split. He considered the breakup a personal failure, though years later he would conclude that it was for the best. Havel resigned as president, but he remained popular and was elected president of the new Czech Republic uncontested. Havel left office in 2003, months before the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined the European Union. He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought his country in 2004 into what is now a 27-nation bloc, and was president when it joined NATO in 1999 a moment of pride for him. "I can't stop rejoicing that I live in this time and can participate in it," Havel exulted. Havel was small, but his presence and wit could fill a room. Even late in life, he retained a certain impishness and boyish grin, shifting easily from philosophy to jokes or plain old Prague gossip. Even out of office, Havel remained a world figure. Among his many honors were Sweden's prestigious Olof Palme Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award, bestowed on him by President George W. Bush for being "one of liberty's great heroes." Havel was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and collected dozens of other accolades worldwide for his efforts as a global ambassador of conscience, defending the downtrodden from Darfur to Myanmar.
Get the Israel Hayom newsletter sent to your mailbox!