Jindřiška Nováková, known as ‘the girl with the bike’, will have a memorial in Prague
This happened after the attack on the representative Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. She is known as ‘the girl with the bike’. who was she Where did she come from? And how tragically did her fate end?
“The story of Jindřiška Nováková is therefore one of the exceptions among the stories of adult participants in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Jindřiška was only less than 15 years old. Her parents helped hide both paratroopers Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík. Jindřiška was born in 1928 in Podmokle, in the Sudetenland the part occupied by the German army.
That is why her parents forced her to move to Prague to Libno, where her father and Václav Novák very quickly joined the Sokol organization, a resistance organization led by Jan Zelenka Hajský. Jindřiška had three siblings and the whole family lived in the spirit of Sokol’s moral credit. So Father Václav participates in the anti-fascist resistance, in that he was willing to support and also hide the future assassins of Reinhard Heydrich for many months.” introduced the environment in which Jindřiška grew up, Vojtěch Kyncl from the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences.
Jindřiška was betrayed by two women
The assassination of Heydrich took place on May 27, 1942 at the well-known bend in Libni. Heydrich was hit by shrapnel from a grenade, but Jan Kubiš was also injured. He left the bloody bike at the Baťa company. When Jindřiška came home, she saw an injured Kubiš sitting in the kitchen, who asked that the bike be taken away from that place as quickly as possible.
“Jindřiška did indeed arrive at the scene. But before that, two women Žofie Čermáková and Cecílii Adamová noticed the bloodied young man. Both were arrested in 1945 and testified before an extraordinary people’s court, because they were the ones who provided information through other Gestapo intermediaries. They said that the bike was taken away by a little girl of 14 or 15. When asked why she was taking the bike away, she said that it was her father’s bike and that she was only going to return it.
The Gestapo got hold of this information. They knew it was probably related to the assassination of Heydrich. On the third of June, girls of a similar age from the Libne region were summoned to the Petschka Palace. They had to walk around the cinema hall with their bike. In the end, it turned out that not one of the whistleblowers was able or willing to reveal anything. Perhaps they even concealed the fact that they recognized the girl. Jindřiška remained among the ten selected, but still it was not possible to determine who it was. The whole affair ended in a great victory for Jindřiška that day, because she didn’t reveal anything, didn’t reveal anything about herself, and endured the enormous danger and tension at the Gestapo.”
Not even Kubiš’s bike was found, which Miroslav Piskáček, the son of another collaborator of the paratroopers, later picked up from the Novákys’ yard. The wounded Heydrich was in the hospital after surgery, and a second martial law was about to be imposed on the Protectorate.
If not for Karel Čurda’s statement, the resistance network would probably have survived
However, the situation was completely different after less than a fortnight. Parachutist Karel Čurda revealed information about his task and other resistance workers to the Gestapo. Thus the resistance network collapsed. As Vojtěch Kyncl from the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, parents, Jindřiška and her siblings delivered on July 9, 1942.
“Only one of Novák’s daughters broke off contact with the family because she married a Sudeten German in the Sudetenland, so disagreements split the family with this one daughter. The others were all executed in the Mauthausen concentration camp as part of the direct liquidation action of the collaborators of the assassination. So it is one of the youngest victims of the heydrichiad, if we don’t include the murdered children from Lidice and Ležák. For example, one girl from Ležák or girls from other families who were perhaps in other camps or in other collections for children who were executed by paratroopers were of a similar age .”
Is there a monument on Jindřiška?
“A plaque has been restored in Libni. A memorial is also being prepared here, so it can be seen that the memory of this girl lives on. This is good, because it is a symbol for us that even the youngest, from whom we would not expect it, had such great moral values and such a strong will that they were able to resist even the great trials of life. If it were not for the unfortunate denunciation of Karel Čurdy, this resistance network probably survived the Heydrichiad and withstood the enormous onslaught that came after the death of Reinhard Heydrich.”
Jindřiška Nováková will have her own monument
The monument will commemorate 14-year-old Jindřiška Nováková next October in Zenklova street in Prague. It will become a dominant feature of the Bohumil Hrabal elementary school yard, which was once called U zámku and was frequented by a young resistance fighter. The monument will not only commemorate Jindřiška and her family, but also other members of the resistance.
The author of the winning work is Lukáš Wagner. According to him, it was necessary to adapt the monument and the environment of the elementary school. The monument thus includes not only a statue, but also pieces of a dismembered bicycle, adapted in such a way that one can sit and swing on it.
A total of 19 proposals are participating in the competition, on which the citizens of Prague 8 could vote. However, the winner of the poll did not succeed in the anonymous election by the expert jury. She unanimously chose the model of Lukáš Wagner.