Czech and Slovak Cultural Center

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

That is the question that we do not often ask. Instead we focus on the cost of education that is climbing and affects virtually everybody’s checkbook. Yet ignorance does cost a lot, more than most people recognize, and the Czechs could tell you a gruesome story about it. However, they probably won’t because, according to Martin Jan Stransky, this subject falls into the category of selective attention, convenient lapsed of memory, or conspiracy of silence. Stransky is the publisher of Pritomnost, originally founded by his grandfather in the 1920’s, and now one of the most respected journal.

So how much does ignorance cost? One million crowns? Hundred million? How about ten billion crowns and climbing; three billion is damage for breach of business deal, and seven more for accumulated interest, increasing by one million each day.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

I wanted to write something different about Vaclav Havel and his passing than the meager media disappointedly covered. Media have a tendency to explain people by shortcuts, finding a label everybody recognizes and then placing a person into the box with that label. For Vaclav Havel who disliked these labels of being a playwright turned dissident these categories are insufficient and inaccurate. The problem is not only one of scale but also of historical significance and meanings. Theater has had a special significance in the Czech and Slovak history because it is associated with national awakening that may have saved the Czech language from extinction. Anybody who is associated with this tradition is not writing just for entertainment of people, but for a cause of solidifying national consciensness.  He prestige of the theater touched nearly everybody and people started creating an entire network of voluntary theater clubs and traveling puppet groups that still exist today and that neither the Nazis nor the communists could control. Being a dissident is relatively common with many examples from individual countries like Burma, China, India, Ukraine and many others. In comparison with these dissidents, Havel was a global dissident who challenged the entire Soviet empire that ruled almost half of the world on issues on which this empire was based, namely to turn everybody into one type of a socialist personality, to gain compliance through fear and to punish those who do not fit this model.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

Most of us know that the entire village was leveled, that men and boys over 15 years were executed, that women and children were send to concentration camps, and that children were separated from parents. The brutality of this “event” far exceeds the common knowledge, however.

I was sixteen when Lidice and Lezaky “happened” and lived through the massive retaliation by the Nazis that followed the assassination of the Reichsprotektor Heydrich. The memory of these years came back when a Czech student of mine sent me two recently published books about Lidice, both in English. One is a carefully researched commemorative volume providing detailed information about the “old” Lidice, the events of June 10, 1942, and the town’s subsequent rebuilding. The second book is the memoirs of one of the very few survivors, written by Jarmila Sklenickova, the student’s relative. She has put to good use her photographic memory in accounting the gruesome events of that June and its aftermath, providing a graphic but unemotional picture of the bestiality of the Nazis that has not been generally known until recently. The peaceful village was encircled by more than 500 Nazi police, Gestapo and SS troops, who woke up residents with instructions to collect their most precious possessions and gather: men and boys over 15 to the Horak orchard, and women and children to the schoolhouse.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

I was introduced to the concept of the Civil Society during my sabbatical leave in the Philippines in the late sixties where I studied leadership and organizations in the context of social and cultural change. In travels throughout the country, I observed the creation of non-profit organizations and the volunteer spirit that drove their accomplishments, in a society traditionally dominated by a few wealthy families. My interest continued in my work in the post-Soviet Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus (under extenuating circumstances), and Kyrgyzstan. Sokol is one of the examples I used to demonstrate a society that depends almost entirely on volunteers who have made the organization a bastion of what I want to describe as the Civil Society.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

This is a complex question. It can be answered in terms of our own associations, such as Sokol, or the Czech and Slovak Cultural Center because part of the concept of the civil society does imply existence of many voluntary associations. And indeed we all cherish and practice the idea of voluntarism. At the same time it can be answered on several other levels of analysis. For example, is the US a civil society, or, as the globalization has caused many to argue, should we be striving to establish a global civil society. The “Arab Spring” is often used as example of this “trend” if indeed it is a trend. To Czechs and Slovak that analogy with the Prague Spring is music to our ears because it relates the “trend” to the former Czechoslovakia, the record of the dissidents in helping to evict the oppressive communist regime and the subsequent explosion of creation of voluntary associations. Vaclav Havel’s name is, of course, associated with the concept of the civil society, but to be more accurate, the term can be traced all the way back to the Greek heritage of our Western Society.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

These are three questions in one – and answers depend on three different concepts that I will try to relate to each other. One is what we actually know – in our case about the Czech and Slovak republkics that we have learned from school or experience that is “stored” in our brain. For most people that knowledge about the Czech and Slovak Republics and their people is very skimpy. The second concept is one of motivation to learn new things. The answer depends on the priorities people establish in their minds regarding the immediate or future use of such knowledge, the priority they attach to other kinds of learning and the perceived relevance to our daily lives. Again for most people knowledge about two small countries far away does not appear to be very important and as long as the Czech and Slovak republics are not in daily news, almost irrelevant. Other people might know a little and believe therefore that they know what is there to know. This leaves the third concept, namely what we should know – and the answer to this question exposes a gap between what most people know and what they should know.

This discussion raises three questions: 1) how much and what kind of knowledge is enough, 2) why should we want to learn it, and 3) if we should, how do we bridge that gap? For people who have special interest in the Czech and Slovak Republics either because of their own ethnicity or other connections, these questions ring a different tone, which is what I am doing to my readers in this article.

The first and the third questions are simple to answer. The Czech and Slovak Cultural Center spends a great deal of time to organize regular lectures on selected aspects of these two republics and their roles in the world (which includes us). The topics are timely, do not require any prior knowledge or preparation, and are limited to the most important issues and events. Speakers are well prepared and now, thanks to the modern technologies, we can bring any speaker to the Twin Cities on the SKYPE system; this proved effective and we will be doing much more of that. This technology is also extremely cost effective because most voluntary associations do not have sufficient funding to bring prominent speakers here from abroad.

For the next two years we have prepared a tentative list of topics that will be refined and augmented when people contact us with their additional recommendations. We in fact solicit the readers’ suggestions urgently.

Some of the topics are controversial or thought provoking as the three “curses”: Munich, Yalta, and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Others are designed to explain what happened to the people and their organizations, including SOKOL and the churches, during the two most horrendous occupations, Nazi and communist. One program may be devoted to the legacy of Lidice while another will feature the “crimes of communism” – findings of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism. This Institute prepared an excellent exhibit of the methods used by the secret police – which we hope to bring to the Twin Cities. Additional sessions will focus on the positive aspects of how people are building and improving their democratic institutions and through them a civil society, rebuilding religious institutions, and catching up with the rest of the world in the European Union, NATO, the Atlantic community, and the world society at large. We do have many connections in both republics and plan to bring some prominent personalities on the SKYPE to discuss such topics as the revival of SOKOL and its role in the development of these two republics, or the survival of the religious organizations. For people interested in tourism, the SKYPE system enables us to present our audiences with the beauty of these countries by way of a virtual “tour” of the Czech and Slovak Republics, going way beyond the capital cities.

The answer to the second question, why we should want and feel we need more knowledge, must remain with individual people to answer. This article does challenge each person who might read it, to respond to it at least mentally. I hope the answer will be consistent with the demands of the information society in which we now live, that requires more knowledge and skills to connect different pieces of it. This way we will not be surprised when events happen around the world that we did not expect because we were ignorant of the conditions that create these events. These events are happening constantly and affect us and our own society.

With suggestions for additional topics contact

• John Moravec – (612) 325-5992, Moravec@umn.edu;
• Allyn Johnson – (763) 427-9307, cell (703) 670-3016, john2023@umn.edu; or
• Josef Mestenhauser – (612) 822-8862, j-mest@umn.edu.

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

Now I will present the evidence supporting the argument that Jan Masaryk was indeed a victim of murder.

The first support for the murder theory arises from the denials of the Russian government to open its archives from that period. The Russians have released a great deal of other archival material, and still more records have become available through defectors who have smuggled important evidence about the Soviet system abroad. The question becomes, what are the Russians hiding in regards to Masaryk’s death? Even though there is no firm evidence that the archives contain an answer, the implication seems obvious that such is indeed the case. The only hard evidence that Masaryk was murdered comes from the results of the second autopsy, which found a type of foam in his mouth which would have been produced if his death was caused by asphyxiation.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

This portion in my series of articles about the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk took me the longest time to write. New evidence and historical facts led to several reviews to make sure I was neither neglecting some important evidence nor distorting it through excessive abbreviation. Furthermore, it is important to cite not only the facts but the context in which Masaryk lived and worked. Jan Masaryk is still revered in the Czech and Slovak Republics for his enormous contributions to international relations and Czechoslovak foreign policy. Not surprisingly, he is celebrated by both the communists whom he helped to power in 1948 and also by those who honor his contributions to democracy. He was not just a son of a great President, but a skilled diplomat, leader, and thinker who championed the common people. Unfortunately, he was also the victim of the times he lived in, caught between one world which betrayed him and the other which killed him.

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By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

Will we ever know what happened the fateful night of March ninth 1948? The question is: “Was Jan Masaryk murdered that night between the 9th and 10th of March, or did he commit suicide by jumping out of the window of the Cernin Palace into the inside court yard?”

I had always assumed that the answer was obvious: he was murdered by the hands of the Soviet – or on orders of the Soviet secret police because he became inconvenient to the revolutionary regime the Communists installed in February of that year and because Stalin was bent on taking the world under his sway. This explanation was confirmed by one of the inquiries that was conducted between 2001 – 2004; it concluded that Masaryk was indeed murdered, although there was no exact evidence who and how this may have been done. All indications were also clear, that this was done on the connivance or direction of the USSR and its secret services. Yet the Russian government refused to open its archives to the Czech investigators, which further reinforced the idea that these archives are hiding the secret of Masaryk’s death. Why else would the Russian government not wish to cooperate unless they had something to hide. Their explanation was that these archives are subject to their “Top Secret” regulations.

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By Donald Pafko, Honorary Consul for the Slovak Republic

According to local newspapers and TV stations, the bridge debris from the I-35 collapse is going to be removed from a Minneapolis Park Area, commonly referred to as “Bohemian Flats”. The bridge collapsed on August 1st, 2007 and the debris has been stored on this area since that date.

This area has always been referred to as the “Flats” by those who lived there and/or had relatives who lived there. The “Flats” have been occupied by several different nationalities but was primarily occupied by people from Slovakia from the period 1904 to 1934. The last Slovak resident was evicted in October 1934 and the site was then used to store coal that was unloaded from barges on the river. The majority of Slovak people who lived in this area were from the region of Slovakia called Liptov which is located in northern Slovakia, and most of those individuals were from a village called Vazec.

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