If you walk through the crowded front section of the New Cemetery (HB-VP-NH) in Havlíčkův Brod to the end of the central avenue, you will reach a more relaxing area with park landscaping. On one of the meadows is a memorial to the victims of both world wars, unveiled in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the founding of independent Czechoslovakia. It was created by Havlíčkův Brod glass artist Jan Exnar (1951) in collaboration with Prague’s Vitraj Studio and artistic blacksmith Martin Šteller from Havlíčkův Brod.

The memorial is in the form of a geometric recess made of three sheets of grey steel. The interior of the recess is partially illuminated by glass elements set into its walls–a dark blue diagonally set prism and a group of small glass lenses in the colours of the tricolour.

At the bottom of the monument is an inscription with the dates of both world wars in metal letters and a plaque with the names of 35 soldiers and army employees who died during World War I and shortly after its end in Havlíčkův Brod, formerly Německý Brod. In 1932, their remains were gathered from various locations of the local cemetery and buried in this area. At that time, there was probably already a memorial here, though we can only guess at its appearance.

In 1966, the remains of an unknown Soviet soldier from the end of World War II, found in a park near the then District National Committee, were buried nearby. In 1981, Roman Podrázský, in collaboration with architect Zbyněk Trenkvic, created a memorial commemorating the Soviet soldiers. It was a horizontal concrete block with the inscription GRAVE OF OUR LIBERATORS, which was intersected by a slender concrete pillar widening upwards with a red Soviet star at the top. In the foreground of the memorial stood two concrete prisms with inscriptions on the upper plates: THANK YOU AND LOVE TO YOU and HONOR AND GLORY TO THE SOVIET HEROES.

In 2013, museum staff members Eduard Veselý and Jiří Jedlička proposed a reconstruction of the monument to Soviet heroes. They were particularly critical of the omission of other victims of both world wars. Several years later, Jan Exnar created an artistic design for a new memorial and presented it to the Brod councillors, who, however, could not agree on the implementation of the monument. The reservations of those who opposed the design related not only to its artistic conception but also to the role of the Soviet army in the town’s liberation. In 2017, the town announced a public competition for the cemetery memorial. In the end, Jan Exnar’s design won by a very narrow margin, and was retrospectively considered to be the strongest entry in terms of artistic quality. The war victims are commemorated in the memorial space–a symbolic chapel–between the lights of the stars on one side and a blue window, a symbol of human consciousness and human hope, on the other.