<translate>Památník Ležáky</translate>

During the time from the beginning of World War II, Ladislav Žák definitively determines that he no longer wants to realize himself in villa architecture. He focuses on the documentation of the landscape, so that he can draw on this knowledge in his theoretical work, advocating the merging of our life with nature as a consequence of a higher developmental stage of humanity.
The pinnacle was the post-war commission for a monumental memorial to the victims of Nazism in Ležáky. Many of Žák's colleagues would surely have designed either under the influence of neoclassicism, which subsequently transitioned into socialist realism, or in the spirit of late monumental functionalism. Žák chose a traditional solution and although monumental, the body of the memorial appears natural. Žák pays the same level of attention to the arrangement of the surroundings. He proposes a ceremonial tribune on the opposite slope and a memorial at the site of the former Švandův mill. He understands the entire memorial complex as a living organism through which a person can walk undisturbed, perceiving rather the spiritual aspect of their presence at this place.
In 1949, when Žák, due to criticism of the industrial direction of the Czech landscape pursued by the communist political representation, falls into disrepute, he interrupts work on the memorial. He completes it only after the situation eases in the second half of the 1950s in 1960.