The Harrowing Escapes and Joyful Life of Dr. Milan Reban
Honored by the Texas Oral History Association with the Kenneth Hendrickson Best Long-Form Article Award. Published in TOHA’s journal, The Sound Historian, Volume XXI, in fall 2020.
By Betsy Friauf and Michael Phillips
When Dr. Milan Reban, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of North Texas, tells stories about his childhood, the listener will be given a tour through some of the twentieth century’s greatest turning points and tragedies. Before Reban’s childhood ended, he had endured the rise of Adolf Hitler; the British and French complicity in the German takeover of his Czechoslovak homeland; the horrors of Nazi rule; the defeat of the Germans in Czechoslovakia at the hands of the Soviets and, in the southwestern part of Bohemia, by the Americans; the start of the Cold War; and his own harrowing escape, with assistance from the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, from Czechoslovakia’s post-war communist regime.
Reban, 85 years of age at this writing, is part of the larger history of European refugee immigration to the U.S. after World War II. In sharp contrast to the treatment of asylum-seekers from Central America during the Trump Administration, in the post-World War II years the Truman Administration initiated a policy that facilitated the influx into the U.S. of 200,000 Europeans displaced by the war.
We interviewed Reban and recorded his oral history at his home in Richardson, Texas, on April 8, 2017, and May 12, 2017. The recording and transcript are archived at the University of North Texas.
Reban’s personal story, with its many intersections with pivotal historical events, is instructive and poignant. Particularly striking is his empathy for the defeated German citizenry, and his insistence that even during his own wartime privations and flight from persecution, good fortune often favored him.
Early Years
Reban was born in Prague in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and was handed dictatorial powers. Reban’s family had a farming background and lived in a town near Prague. His mother went to the Czechoslovakian capital to give birth to him, on advice from her doctor that she would receive better care there. His father was active in journalism and in politics as a regional secretary for the center-right Agrarian Party, and the newly ascendant Communists persecuted him as an enemy after World War II. “The Communists sort of tilted the playing field and the [Agrarian] party was not permitted to re-establish its activity after the war,” Reban said.[1]
World War II
Reban’s first memory of the war was when he was five years old and living in Sedlčany, about 40 miles from Prague. Shortly after annexing Austria, Hitler sought to absorb Czechoslovakia into his German Reich. In 1938 he demanded that the Czech government surrender the Sudetenland, home to most of the nearly four million ethnic Germans in the country. Czech President Edvard Beneš sought help from the French government, which had agreed to defend the nation against any aggressors. French President Édouard Daladier, not wanting his country to go it alone in facing a potential conflict with the Germans, in turn asked for assistance from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Just two decades removed from the horrors of World War I, Daladier and Chamberlain agreed to a conference with Hitler in Munich, Germany, with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini acting as mediator. The French and the Germans allowed the exclusion of Beneš (and any representative of Czechoslovakia) from the summit. Chamberlain and Daladier acquiesced to the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise to leave the rest of Czechoslovakia alone. Less than six months later, on March 15, 1939, the British and the French did nothing when Hitler violated the terms of the Munich Pact, with German troops invading the rest of Czechoslovakia.[2]
Still a small child, Milan Reban saw military vehicles rumble into the town square as German soldiers occupied Sedlčany. “. . . [W]e got to see the lighter vehicles and machine guns and artillery pieces and of course the [motorcycles with] sidecar, BMWs, you see in every German [war] movie.”[3] The Nazis turned Sedlčany into “sort of the SS and Wehrmacht military base,” called SS-Truppenübungsplatz Böhmen.[4] Reban’s family and many others were forced to move out on very short notice. In spite of the hardships this entailed, Reban described his family’s forced departure as “propitious.”[5] Troops stationed in the new Nazi base eventually fought the Czechs in the 1945 Prague Uprising, a rebellion that resulted in perhaps as many as 4,000 Czech and German deaths and war crimes committed by both the Nazis and the resistance.[6]
But Reban, his parents and younger sister were compelled to leave Sedlčany in 1939, taking refuge in the small town of Sobotka where they lived, early on, in one room of an old farmhouse. He was just starting school, and here is another instance of Reban remembering something good in a difficult circumstance:
“You have no idea how glorious the building was that these small-town people committed to building as kind of a temple of education. And luckily, looking back, the teachers were obviously very unenthusiastic supporters of– . . . you could tell that they disapproved of what was happening.”[7]
And again, asked about shortages the Germans inflicted on occupied Czechoslovakia, Reban said, “Well, food. Actually, the Czechs: You cannot say they ‘lucked out,’ but they were not subject to the same horrific repression, let’s say, that the people of Poland were.”[8] Because the Germans allowed the Czechs no anesthetic medications, Reban underwent surgical adenoid removal, and his sister a tonsillectomy, without anesthesia. And yet he said, “Luckily, I did not suffer as much as some of the people.”[9] Like all families, the Rebans had to contend with extensive rationing.[10]
World War II was a time of great fear in Czechoslovakia. Reban remembers his family listening surreptitiously each night to a radio tuned illegally to the wavelength of the BBC News in the Czech language. The windows of the family home were blacked out to evade bombers. But there were amusing moments as well. After Allied planes dropped tinfoil strips, called chaff, to confuse the German radar, “I remember in 1944 picking up this tinsel in the fields and using it for Christmas decorations!”[11] But he also remembers the atrocities of war. In mid-February 1945, when he was 11, Allied bombers laid waste to Dresden, Germany, and tens of thousands of people died in the resulting firestorm.
“. . . [T]here was a hill up above Sobotka, and during the two-day bombing of Dresden, people went up this hill close to a hunting chateau to look at the glow . . . .”[12] He remembers “getting used to” being hungry, but suffering sores that would not heal due to nutritional deficiencies. “But we were sort of fortunate,” he said. “The Nazis knew exactly what they wanted to do with Russians and Poles, and all these people just having to starve. One leader in Germany was saying, ‘Thirty-five million Russians, let them die. Lebensraum. We need that space.’ But they did not really fully decide what to do about the Czechs. They needed them during the war for industry,” and so the decision was deferred.[13]
Juxtaposed with these small inadvertent mercies were the horrors. Reban remembers seeing a farmer saying goodbye to his family after being sentenced to death for withholding food from the Nazis. He remembers refugees on the road, fleeing the Soviet Army, and his school being given over to house them. The exigencies of war prevailed. “Our physician, the wife of our doctor, also a doctor, performed [an] appendectomy on their dining room table.”[14] A Jewish family vanished from Sobotka, never to return, and their names are on a wall of Holocaust victims in a synagogue in Prague. A man fled with his daughter as a Nazi armored vehicle chased them. The Germans shot the father to death 300 yards from Reban’s home, but the little girl survived. British Commonwealth prisoners of war (POWs) had been held in camps farther east and their Nazi captors marched them through Sobotka to keep them out of the hands of the advancing Soviet forces. Jan Reban, Milan’s father, offered assistance to the Commonwealth prisoners, but aiding Soviet prisoners proved much more dangerous. Nazi troops viewed the Soviet captives as expendable. “I recall standing along the road and I was afraid, you know, of being shot . . . because I was tossing some shriveled apples from the previous fall harvest, trying to [provide them food]. It was pitiful how they tried to fight for it, and if they deviated too much from the line” they were shot dead by their captors.[15] Reban noted, “Sobotka folks had to add an addition in front of the cemetery for a smallish mass grave for Soviet POWs.”[16] Czech survivors of concentration camps came home to Sobotka after the war, but at least one died because he was so ill from severe malnutrition and other abuses.[17]
At the war’s end, the Red Army liberated Sobotka. But the U.S. Third Army under Gen. George S. Patton liberated Reban’s grandparents’ town, and Reban remembers the Americans fondly. While he visited his grandparents in the summer of 1945, an American soldier gave 11-year-old Reban his Boy Scout knife. “And my grandpa needed gasoline for his thresher, and so my father and I went to this big farmhouse arrangement where there was a crew of Americans set up to stay for a while, and they gave us several canisters of gas and in fact drove us back in the Jeep, my first Jeep ride.”[18]
War’s end was celebrated even though Soviet soldiers occupied the town. The Soviet soldiers, including women, danced to accordion music in the town square. The only incident for his family was his mother being threatened because the Russian soldiers wanted alcohol to drink and suspected she had hidden some in her house. Joy was mixed with tragedy. A few miles away in the town of Rovensko, Czechs massacred 400 German civilian refugees and soldiers.. “I remember somebody saying that one young man from Sobotka happened to be there, and he went mad.”[19] Asked if he has lingering emotional disturbance from all he experienced as a child, he said that he loves animals but still finds it difficult to be near German shepherds.[20]
Communist Rule Begins
Archie Brown, a historian of communism, has noted that before the war Czechoslovakia had been a far more democratic and politically open society than its neighbors in Eastern and Central Europe. A vibrant Communist Party was a successful participant in pre-war elections. About 40,000 members of the pre-war Communist Party of Czechoslovakia survived when the country was completely freed from Nazi rule in May 1945. Before the end of that year, membership in the Communist Party had jumped to more than 800,000. Soviet tanks soon left the country and the Communists won about 38 percent of the vote in early multi-party elections across the nation, Czech industrial areas giving the strongest support to the Communists. The party did not seize full power until February 1948. Klement Gottwald, the Communist leader, rose to the position of prime minister. Using the pretext of a post-war economic crisis, Gottwald pressured the non-Communist members of his cabinet to resign and placed party members in charge of the police and military, achieving a coup that imposed one-party rule by February 1948.[21] Many Czechs were not very worried that the communist takeover would affect their lives, Reban said, thinking that the communist model “seemed to fit” a less industrialized nation and would not last in Czechoslovakia.[22]
According to Reban, the Czechs were disillusioned with the West, since the Munich Conference had sold them out. But they soon learned that the Soviet regime brought more persecution.[23]
For example, imprisonment, torture and relegation to a life of hard labor in the mines was to be the fate of Czech pilots who had flown with distinction in Britain’s Royal Air Force during the war. “Well over two thousand Czech airmen joined the RAF to fight the Germans, and many took part in the Battle of Britain,” Radio Praha reported in 2001. Nearly 200 of these former RAF pilots escaped to Britain, many with help from the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps.[24]
Reban’s father was in trouble with the Communists, who wanted to demolish his Agrarian Party. Also, he had befriended British Commonwealth prisoners of war during World War II, finding badly needed shoes for some, and helping one receive urgent dental work. After the war, these former prisoners expressed their gratitude. The elder Reban received mail and CARE packages from former POWs. One such former POW was a Toronto firefighter, another a farmer from South Africa. Reban recalled his family’s mystification at some of the gifts, such as Jell-O. The new Czech communist regime viewed these exchanges with suspicion and questioned Mr. Reban’s political loyalty. Milan’s art teacher, in a selective school, told Milan that half the students would not be there the next year but would be relegated to manual labor such as coal mining. Because of his father’s work, and his own independent attitude, Milan knew he would not be allowed a thorough education, certainly not higher education. One of his uncles was sentenced to three years in the uranium mines. Another uncle was convicted of treason and served 13 years in uranium mines, then was given a document apologizing to him and exonerating him. He was given a tiny monetary compensation. He soon died of cancer caused by exposure to radiation in the mines.[25]
Escape
Within weeks of the 1948 Communist takeover, Reban’s father fled Czechoslovakia for a refugee camp in Bavaria. He was among 150,000 who fled Czechoslovakia before the border was fully sealed. Jan Reban did not tell his children that he was leaving, in order that they could legitimately tell the police they did not know where their father had gone. As punishment for Jan Reban defecting, the family’s ration coupons were cut off.[19] They could not get adequate food or clothing, and Reban says his feet were deformed by wearing the same pair of shoes for years while he grew rapidly in his teen years. He and his family subsisted with the help of friends who gave them food and clothing. The family doctor, named Kafka, gave him free treatments for ear infections. Eventually, Reban’s mother was allowed to work in a cut-glass factory, a risky kindness for the factory owner, as he was employing a “tainted” person. [26]
He also remembers something fortunate. Sobotka “was, for me, a good place,” he said. “It was very inviting, with gorgeous nature. These rock formations all around for miles, you could walk in all kinds of interesting valleys.”[27] Hnot long after his own escape, Reban’s father arranged an escape for his son. The boy, 15 years old, was at summer camp only three miles inside the Iron Curtain near the Bavarian border, in 1949, the last year that the Communists permitted Boy Scouts. He received a postcard advising that his grandfather was very ill and he should go see him in the grandfather’s village. Arriving, he was introduced to a man who had met Reban’s father in Germany. The man told Reban, “If you are interested in going [escaping to West Germany], you do this and this.”[28] The man made it clear that no women were to be involved in escaping. Reban talked it over with his mother, who was ambivalent at first. “I was her pet. But she realized more so than most people that there was no future for me so it was–you know, I never quite fully appreciated the act of supportive love that it represented.” Milan would never again see his mother, who died of cancer in 1961 at the age of 53. Milan saw his sister one more time when she received a rare permit to visit family members in 1967, an event Reban describes as a “sad reunion.”[29]
Events unfolding over the next few days were worthy of a spy novel. Following the instructions of the man acquainted with his father, Reban went with his aunt, at a certain time on a certain day, to a specified table in the restaurant of Prague’s main train station. “And a man comes, had a Communist lapel pin and held a Communist newspaper and some Communist magazine,” Reban recounted. “It was maybe a little bit too much.”[30] Reban immediately suspected the man was an agent but he could not figure out which side the stranger was on. He rode the train with the mystery man, plus another mystery man, to a place called Klenčí under Čerchov Mountain on the Bavarian border. “And somehow [we] managed to get out of the train without being stopped by the police,” Reban said. “I kind of wondered about that,”[31] because police normally checked all passengers’ travel authorizations in the restricted border zone. In later years, Reban strongly suspected that this refugee pipeline, at the time part of the US Counter Intelligence Corps operation helping Czech pilots escape, was being allowed to operate temporarily under Communist surveillance so the authorities could identify and eventually arrest all those involved.[32]
After disembarking the train, Reban and the “Soviet” spent several hours in the Bavarian forest under cover of darkness. About 6 a.m., a US military car appeared. Reban recalled, “So the door opens. ‘I’m glad you are— !’ Some hugging went on and I get inside. There was a case of Coca-Cola. And to this day I regret that I did not parlay that scene into some money-making commercial – the Drink of Freedom’,”[33] he joked. Then things got serious. Reban recounted:
[T]here’s a shot at the border and these five guys come out of the woods, armed to the teeth. They have some machine guns and all that, and it was this other guy named Stefan Gavenda, who was not one of the two I was with, obviously. But he was leading four Czech Air Force pilots who had flown for the RAF in World War II, and they were defecting, they had maps, they were armed, and one of those got into the car with us, and we went to the interior of the country to a small town of Rottenburg–not the touristy Rothenburg, kind of a hole-in-the-wall community. And I began to realize that this was somehow a CIC, Counter-Intelligence Corps, a military intelligence operation I was involved in.[34]
Stefan Gavenda became a hero of the Czech Third (anti-Communist) Resistance as a “walker agent,” an operative who helped refugees illegally cross the border to freedom. He helped dozens of people escape, and he himself escaped from prison a few times but eventually, in 1954, was hanged by the Communist authorities.[35] Years later, Reban learned of Gavenda’s fate by reading US press reports. [36]
Safely inside West Germany, Reban traveled by train to Landshut to reunite with his father. Thence they traveled to a Czech refugee camp in Ludwigsburg, not far from Stuttgart. In the war-damaged Stuttgart station he saw crowds of people meeting a train carrying former POWs who were being returned to Germany from Russia. “And it was so sad, all these people with pictures,” hoping to find a loved one or someone who knew what had become of their soldier, Reban said.[37] During the hours-long interview, several of his recollections obviously moved his emotions, but the only time he wept was when he recounted the despairing people in this train station.[38]
Reban’s father had kept in touch with a woman from a village near Sobotka who had emigrated to Miami, Florida, in 1926. She was a leader in the American branch of Sokol, an organization devoted to gymnastics and Czech culture. She visited Sobotka Sokol immediately after World War II and gave Reban’s father her address in Miami. She and her husband became the sponsors for Reban and his father. Eventually both father and son arrived in the U.S., in New Orleans. Milan was to be settled with a family in Miami, Florida, but because of a paucity of suitable jobs, his father went to Cleveland, Ohio, to edit a Czech newspaper, Nový Svĕt (New World).[39]
In the New World
Reban credits US President Harry Truman with taking a major political risk to bring refugees such as Reban to the United States at a time when many Americans considered Central and Eastern Europeans biologically inferior and prone to political radicalism. [40] In 1924, Congress had passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, the Johnson-Reed Act, which established national immigration quotas. The law limited the number of immigrants allowed from each European nation to 2 percent of that nationality living in the United States as of 1890, a census year before the biggest wave of immigration from Eastern, Southern, and Central Europe. After implementation of the law, 82 percent of immigrants coming into the United States were from Northern and Western Europe. World War II, however, created a refugee crisis. Just after the war ended, in the summer of 1945, an estimated seven million people “on the move” in Eastern Europe, as historian Mark Wyman put it, including refugees, those fleeing retribution for wartime grievances or Communist occupation, and soldiers from various national armies trying to get home. There may have been as many as 14 million such people for the entire continent, and many had no home awaiting them. In the US, the 1924 immigration quotas shut out most of these displaced persons. After World War II, Americans showed little empathy for refugees, including Jewish victims of the Holocaust. There was widespread opposition when Truman recommended that the Congress pass legislation allowing Europeans displaced by the war to settle here. Rep. William Stratton of Illinois introduced legislation on April 1, 1947, allowing refugee entry. As Congress debated this bill, members received furious letters from constituents. “The word ‘refugee’ is synonymous with ‘Jew’ and the latter is synonymous with Red!” wrote a New York woman. Anti-Semitism animated many opponents of what became the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. One Texan complained that the law would cause “a flood of Jews coming to the United States. We have too many Jews.” Nevertheless, Truman signed the bill on June 25, 1948. The law allowed permanent US residence for 205,000 refugees including any “native of Czechoslovakia who has fled as a direct result of persecution or fear of persecution from that country since January 1, 1948,” and who had reached American, British, or French zones in Berlin, West Germany, Vienna, or the American sector of Italy.[41] Reban got in through this window; some 15,000 Czechs reached the United States.
After arriving in the United States as a high school student and being resettled in Miami, Reban had to learn English and earn money for food, clothing and other necessities. He rode a bicycle to throw a 4 a.m. newspaper route. A high school friend’s wealthy parents took a liking to him and paid for his first year of college. He became a U.S. citizen, finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Miami, received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and earned his master’s in political science at Vanderbilt, then began his doctorate in political science at Michigan State University. His dissertation concerned the economic and political factors that led to the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. Not allowed by the communist authorities to travel into Czechoslovakia for research on the dissertation, he instead went to Munich and with the help of a friend was allowed to delve into the files of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,[42] which at the time was covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.[43] He had moved to Texas in 1967, and finished his dissertation there.[44]
The Prague Spring a — seven-month period when Czech leader Alexander Dubček attempted, amid large demonstrations, to promote greater freedom of expression and democratize the political process — awakened hope in Czechoslovakia and abroad that cracks were forming in the Communist Bloc in Europe. Reban shared this hope. Having studied conditions in Czechoslovakia, he believed “that things were not going well for the Communist Party, that it was very incapable of actually running the system…”[45] But on August 21, 1968, tanks from the Soviet Union and their allies in the Warsaw Pact rolled into the streets of Prague. “I remember midnight or so, receiving a phone call from my father who happened to hear it before I heard it, and it was shocking,” Reban said.[46]
In 1967 Reban began teaching political science at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). Despite suspicions harbored by some administrators that he might be a Communist, Reban brought speakers to his political science classes who represented various viewpoints, including those of the Communist Bloc. Reban’s sense of humor was evident throughout the interview. He co-authored a book on ethnicity and nationalism that was poorly received by the Communist Party of the Ukraine, whose theoretical journal branded Reban a “Bourgeois Nationalist Falsifier.” Reban said, “I wish I had put that on my office door!”[47]
Based on experience, Reban realized that politics could be a deadly serious business and he dedicated himself to activism throughout his career. North Texas State University students protested against “absolutely horrific marijuana laws. You know, one grain in your car and it was a felony,” he said. [48] He feels pride that North Texas students enthusiastically participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement and held numerous peace rallies on campus. He participated in a quiet form of student resistance common among professors at the time: sometimes he chose to not fail students who might have deserved an F, in order to protect them from draft eligibility. “From my contact with Vietnamese students and officials at Michigan State, I knew that the war was a struggle for national independence,” he said. “The senselessness of the US intervention in the war was a consideration when, in effect, I was deciding the future of vulnerable students who could be sent to Vietnam.”[49]
Beginning in 1979, he also took students to visit the Soviet Union, which brought its own set of ironies. At his own university, his loyalty to the United States was questioned in a mild way; conversely, he said he felt certain that in the Soviet Union, officials assumed he was a CIA agent. He described being closely watched by handlers during trips to Russia, but said the citizens sometimes tried to speak with him surreptitiously. He described walking for two hours in Kiev’s back alleys where they could talk about sensitive topics without being detected. Also in Kiev, the hotel manager sat him down to have coffee after telling him that his plane was delayed. It was unusual for anyone to be frank about a Soviet flight failing to run on time; travelers normally had to go to the airport without knowing their flight’s status. The hotel manager had seen his passport, and told him she noticed he was about her age. Reban recounted that she asked him, “‘When you left Czechoslovakia, was it very difficult for you to study?’ Then before long she starts crying. ‘I had a chance to go but didn’t take the opportunity.’ ”[50]
Reban encountered commonalities and hopes for commonalities in unexpected places. At a Russian Orthodox church he spoke with an elderly woman who asked, “Tell me. Was [John F.] Kennedy orthodox?’ ”[51] Reban told her that, in a way, he was. During successive trips he could see the Soviet Union beginning to crumble. Veterans of the ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan could be seen in the streets. They were maimed, many of them missing legs:
It was obvious that official policy seemed to be to get these maimed people–they had no decent wheelchairs, not even decent crutches, just a little board with four wheels like you have on the bottom of your suitcase. . . . And they would put on some gloves and push themselves on the ground, and the police would try to chase them away from the center of Moscow, and you could tell that they said . . . an expletive … When I began to see, on Soviet TV, pictures of wounded soldiers in Afghanistan, you could tell that represented a change in policy.[52]
Reban is now a professor emeritus at UNT, where he continues to present occasional lectures. He was much in demand for talks to various civic groups during his entire career, and as a study leader on trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for groups including the Smithsonian Institution, he continues to be a resource for the World Affairs Council and similar organizations. He makes presentations to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. And he can be counted on to come out for rallies in support of civil liberties in the Dallas area and beyond.[53]
Now in his ninth decade, Reban is far removed by time and distance from his formative years and homeland so fraught with repression, privation, and danger. He and his wife, Winnie Hinson, travel the world and open their suburban Dallas home to visitors on holidays. Rather than seeming damaged by the tumult of the twentieth century, an era the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as when “Uncertainty and unpredictability impended [and] [c]ompass needles no longer had a North, maps became obsolete,”[54] Reban inspires optimism in listeners as he takes the long view of history. Childhood suffering can teach. An involuntary witness to some of the century’s most horrific crimes, Milan Reban learned early on to be resilient. He hopes he has imparted some hard-won wisdom to his students about survival gained from a sometimes harsh, sometimes inspiring life.
Dr. Reban passed away on Sept. 13, 2020.
[1] Dr. Milan Reban, Interviewed by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, audio recording, Richardson, Texas, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017, audio recordings, University of North Texas Oral History Program, Denton, TX.
[2] Reban interview; Frank McDonough, Hitler, Chamberlain and Appeasement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A classic treatment of the conference that divided Czechoslovakia can be found in Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (New York: Doubleday Press, 1979).
[3] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6]A thorough account of Nazi rule in Prague and the 1945 uprising can be found in Chad Carl Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
[7] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Ecco, and imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 154-160.
[22] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Jan Velinger, “Czech Pilots in the RAF,” Radio Prague International in English, published December 18, 2001, https://www.radio.cz/en/section/talking/czech-pilots-in-the-raf.
[25] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.; email to Betsy Friauf and Michael Phillips, March 4, 2020.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Gavenda’s capture and execution is described in Jan K. Coetzee, Lynda Gilfillan, and Oktar Hulec, Fallen Walls: Prisoners of Conscience in South Africa and Czechoslovakia (New York: Routledge, 2017), 116-117.
[36] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39 Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), 164-168; Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 238; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 324; Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 17; Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 160-161; “The Displaced Persons Act of 1948,” 80th Cong., 2nd Session, Public Laws, Chapter 647, June 25, 1948, 1,009-1,014, http://library.uwb.edu/Static/USimmigration/62%20stat%201009.pdf.
[42] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[43] See John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2012), 47.
[44] Milan Reban, interviews by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, April 8, 2017 and May 12, 2017.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 338-339.