Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
]]>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”
“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”
“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”
“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.
“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”
“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.
“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.
“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”
“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”
How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?
“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”
“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”
In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.
He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal Skutečnost [Reality], which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia and Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
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Peter Hruby was born in Prague in June, 1921. His father, Petr, owned a shoe shop in the Prague district of Karlín (which Peter says went bankrupt as shoemaker Tomáš Bat’a cornered the local footwear market), while his mother, Marie, stayed at home raising him and his younger brother Jiří. Peter graduated from high school in 1939 and planned to study at Prague’s Charles University, but with all Czech universities shut by the occupying Nazis that same year, he went to work in a factory making military equipment in the nearby town of Chotěboř. Upon liberation in 1945, he did enroll at Charles University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, literature and languages.
In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.
He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal Skutečnost [Reality], which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia and Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
“I liked Christmas, Christmas dinner was on the 24th – the night before – we had always carp and once in a year a glass of wine (which I wasn’t allowed to touch until I was quite a lot older). And the gifts were distributed, I was usually disappointed because there were mostly things that they would buy for me anyway like socks and shirts and pants and things like that. And when my father discovered that, he asked me always what book I would like to get and that changed Christmas. I loved Dumas and so I was getting all his books, stories and so we finished eating and right away I started to read!”
“I was one of the few people who expected that there would be a Communist coup d’état in February. Somehow I had a good political instinct or something! So I went to see a prominent Czech publisher and writer, Ferdinand Peroutka, and I was just a student and I came to see him. His mistress Slavka Peroutkova introduced me to him, and I told Peroutka whom I liked to read – he didn’t know me, but he trusted me immediately – I told him I expected the Communists would create a putsch before the elections, and he said ‘I am afraid of that too.’ And I told him I would like to create some kind of a magazine-journal, which would be led by Jan Masaryk, who was a very popular politician and no-party man. And he said ‘Yes, I agree with you, I will give you 200,000 Czech crowns for it and try to persuade Masaryk to take over the editorial job and give you more, 200,000 [crowns.]’ So that was one of the actions – incredible, that he trusted me right away like that.
“So I started to build up a group of people who would publish the journal. It was supposed to become not only for the members of the young elite, of the cultural society that I founded at the same time with the help of my professor Jan Kozák, but it would be a journal that would represent the whole society of cultural leaders of the Czechoslovak Republic, who were not only Communist, but non-Communist too. But unfortunately when we had a meeting with Jan Masaryk in February, [Soviet Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Valerian] Zorin was faster than we – he was already in Prague in order to lead the coup d’état. And so the journal was never published.”
“First I had to persuade the man in charge of passports. And when I came in (which wasn’t allowed, I just marched in his room and he said ‘What do you want? What do you want?’), he looked up my papers and he said ‘You know, I have a problem with getting proper shoes…’ So I brought him shoes and got a passport – I never did anything like that before! My father knew more about what to do in a world that’s corrupted. So I gave him shoes, but then they introduced a new special permission by secret police…
“So again, that was the so-called kachlikarna, because it was a gray building of the Ministry of the Interior on Letná, and there were large groups of people there, but I saw that some people were coming by the side door bringing food. So, I used the side door and went straight to the top man. Again, he started to shout at me and I said ‘They invited me, they insist on me coming, it would be a scandal…’ He said ‘We will never give it to you!’ And I said, ‘What do I have to do in order to get it? It would be a scandal!’ He said ‘If you bring from the factory a confirmation by the action committee that you are progressive…’ The action committees were always three people, devoted Communists, that were leading then the whole country everywhere. So I took the night train to Chotěboř where I worked during the War and I was lucky. They opened 7:00, I went in, and there were three members of the committee; one was a friend who knew that my girlfriend was a worker and he was a relative of hers, another was a worker with whom, as a worker, I founded a chess club and theater, so he signed it too – I don’t remember the third one. So they said that I was socially progressive, which I was!
“There was a misunderstanding, they believed only Communists were socially progressive, I thought that was retrograding, that was never really social progress. So I brought it to this man again by the side door, he gave me the stamp and the next day I was in Austria going to Switzerland.”
“In 1948, in August, several months after the coup d’état I left for Geneva and started a journal there, which I couldn’t have done in Prague. And the journal became very important. It started as a student type of a magazine, but became really the leading journal for a new program, not pan-Slav, not pro-Soviet, but pro-European, Atlantic-oriented. And gradually older people joined us, even Ferdinand Peroutka and so on. And that became… for five years that was really showing the way to European unification when it wasn’t yet so clean. It was still being discussed, for example, the problem of German participation. And again, Truman and Atchison and so on realized that Germany should be allowed to rearm to create a European force. So that was… I’m quite proud of that achievement; that was quite a successful journal.”
“I started to discover by reading local papers from Ostrava, Moravská Ostrava… because they started to have a problem with miners, because the miners were paid very well, but it was very dangerous work, so many of them died. Because the Soviet Union was very much interested in all of the coal and all the steel that they could get from Czechoslovakia. So that was crucial for the Soviet Union – and uranium mines – so I discovered that there was a lot of trouble there; people were dying and trying to leave. So I concentrated on starting to write programs for Moravská Ostrava. So one really got to know quite a lot when one read carefully the communist papers.”
“I couldn’t get my American citizenship for a fortnight. And finally, the head of the [diplomatic] mission in Munich asked me to come and said ‘you know…’ You have to understand, under the McCarthy era, we were worried about intellectuals, we didn’t want to have them in America. ‘Just answer me one question,’ I said ‘Sure, I’ll answer any question.’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said no. He said, ‘How can I give it to you when you don’t believe in God?’ I said ‘I knew if I told you I believed in God I would get it, but I didn’t want to lie.’ You know, you get so many spies in America by asking such simple questions that communist agents can answer the way they are supposed to answer them – which later was proved to be true, you know. So he said ‘I have to think about it.’ I said ‘If you explain to me your idea of God, not just somewhere in the clouds and so on, but a vital force and life and so on, I would agree.’ He said ‘I have to think about it,’ and in two weeks I received citizenship.”