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Filmmakers to spotlight Legions' history

Documentary part of bid to raise awareness of forgotten fighters

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 25th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
T.G. Masaryk, above center, inspects the Czecho-Slovak Legion commanded by French General Janin, right, in 1918.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Soldiers of the Russian Legion.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Czech Americans show their support during a parade in Nebraska.
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KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Bruce Bendinger and John Iltis.
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American filmmakers Bruce Bendinger and John Iltis don’t mince words when stating the purpose of their current project.
“The Czech Republic had its history stolen,” Bendinger says matter-of-factly. “We’re trying to give a country back its history.”
This week, the two Chicago-based men will begin filming for a TV documentary about the Czechoslovak Legions. The history of the Legions, small armies that fought with the allies during World War I and played a significant part in Czechoslovakia’s independence from Austria-Hungary, was suppressed and rewritten here under Nazism and communism.
“For 50 years, you got yourself in a lot of trouble talking about it,” Bendinger says.
Drawing upon the expertise and experience of advisers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the documentary is part of a long-term effort called the Czech Legion Project (www.czechlegion.com), aimed at reviving popular knowledge about this oft-forgotten but pivotal episode in Czechoslovak history.
Those well versed in the Legions’ past have welcomed the project, and are working with the filmmakers to bring a rounded portrayal to light.
“It’s the roots of the states in which we are living now,” says Tomáš Jakl of the Military History Institute, who has provided historical background for the project since 2005. “It’s the story of why we’re not speaking German.”
Suppressed history
According to documents from the Military History Institute in Prague, Professor Tomáš Masaryk had by 1914 concluded that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was incapable of reform.
The exiled future president of Czechoslovakia, along with Edvard Beneš and Slovak Milan Štefánik, formed small armies in France, Serbia, Russia and Italy to support the Allies during World War I. Legionnaires also fought against Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War.
After the war, the efforts spearheaded by Masaryk had drummed up international support for an independent Czechoslovakia.
The legions’ 100,000-plus volunteer members, recruited from Czechs and Slovaks living abroad as well as prisoners and deserters captured by the Allies, thus played a major role in achieving Czechoslovak independence in 1918. But knowledge about them suffered after decades of suppression and persecution, first under Nazi then communist rule.
The Nazis felt legionnaires were “strictly anti-German,” Jakl explains. “They did not want to support Czech nationalism.” Thousands of legionnaires perished in concentration camps, while others joined resistance movements.
After the Soviet takeover in 1948, the communist regime suppressed this history and took steps to marginalize surviving legionnaires and their families.
“Legionnaires were described as reactionaries and capitalists and so on,” Jakl says. They were barred from working in state services and their children were not permitted to study at high schools and universities.
While books had been written about the Legions during the First Republic, they were taken from public libraries and destroyed, according to Jakl. As a result, the Legions are mentioned only tangentially in history books and barely register in Czech and Slovak classrooms.
“The general public doesn’t know much because the topic wasn’t taught in basic schools,” Jakl says. Though the history of the Legions had been resurrected in schools after 1989, a dearth of experts and books, as well as limited teaching hours for history subjects, has left many people in the dark.
Tomáš Netopil, head of the Memory of Czechoslovak Legions Civic Association, is helping to unearth personal stories for the Czech Legion Project. He recalls his own childhood spent in ignorance of that part of his grandfather’s life.
“When he was recounting the things he had gone through, it was always like a traveling tale,” he says. “When I was a grown-up I understood that these were his life experiences. He feared that I would be telling these stories at school.”
“Every legionnaire did what he could to make a living during communist times,” Netopil continues. “My grandfather learned to be a signwriter.”
Stories like Netopil’s will feature in the TV documentary to be completed in about one year. Bendinger and Iltis will start filming in the United States, and plan to visit the Czech Republic in October for additional footage. Correcting gaps in schools will be another big part of their work here.
“Our main focus in Slovakia and the Czech Republic will be to supply materials for education,” Bendinger says of the upcoming trip.
For Netopil, bringing the legions to public consciousness is a matter of preserving the “important things” their members stood for, “the spirit of unity, friendship, cooperation.”
“Legionnaires were capable of sacrificing their own lives for their fellows,” he says, “Who would do that now?”
— Naďa Černá contributed
to this report.
Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at
lvenbrux@praguepost.com

Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at lvenbrux@praguepost.com


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