The Old Country
When the Old Country Fell
1938, 1948, 1968 — three times Czechoslovakia was taken, and three different villages received the news.
Bohemia, New York is named for a country that no longer exists, after a homeland its founders left on purpose. For most of the village’s history that name was a matter of pride and little else — a word on a post office, a word on a firehouse. But three times in the twentieth century, the place the name pointed to was taken by force. In 1938 it was carved up at a conference table. In 1948 it fell to a coup. In 1968 it was crushed under tank treads. And between the first of those and the second came the occupation — six years in which the country did not fall again because it had nowhere left to fall, and in which this village made the one gesture toward the old country we can still point to.
What did a Czech village on Long Island do each time?
The honest answer is that we don’t fully know — and the reason we don’t know is itself the story. Each time the news came, it reached a different Bohemia. The village that heard about Munich still ran a Czech-language hall. The village that heard about the tanks had sold that hall eight years earlier. What follows is what the record shows, what the wider Czech-American world was doing, and what we still need to find in our own attics and minute books.
September 1938
The Week of Two Disasters
On September 21, 1938, the Long Island Express came ashore without warning. In Bohemia the hurricane shattered the glass of the new commercial greenhouses, flattened the chicken coops families had built to survive the Depression, and uprooted thousands of old-growth trees. Smithtown Avenue and Church Street were impassable for days. The village was cut off, digging itself out by hand.
Nine days later, in the small hours of September 30, Britain and France signed away the Czechoslovak borderlands at Munich. Czechoslovakia had no seat at the conference that dismembered it; its representatives were kept waiting and informed of the result afterward. In Czech the event has its own name — Mnichovská zrada, the Munich betrayal — and it has carried that name for nearly ninety years.
We have no record of how Bohemia received it. The village was still clearing its own roads.
That absence is easy to misread as indifference, and it would be a mistake to read it that way, because the largest Czech-American organizations in the country were just as silent — for reasons that had nothing to do with feeling. The Czechoslovak National Council in America, founded in 1918 to support Masaryk’s independence movement, had been financially destroyed by the 1929 crash. Its investments were lost or frozen. It held no meetings. One participant’s later history of the organization describes it plainly: the events of 1938 aroused concern, but almost no activity.
What broke the paralysis was not Munich. It was March 15, 1939, when German troops took the rest of the country and the fiction of the Munich settlement collapsed. Five weeks later the Czech National Alliance held a congress in Chicago that its own minutes called historic, and Czech and Slovak societies across America began asking to affiliate. The machinery that would raise money and pressure for the next fifty years was built in the spring of 1939, not the autumn of 1938.
So the quiet in Bohemia in October 1938 was probably not a quiet of indifference. It was the quiet of a small place absorbing a blow it had no instrument to answer — while cleaning up after a literal storm.
Under Occupation, 1942
Lidice
Munich was not the end of it. In March 1939 the Germans took what remained, and for the next six years there was no Czechoslovakia to lose — only an occupied country whose news reached Long Island in fragments. It was somewhere inside those six years, and not in the autumn of 1938, that Bohemia finally found its voice. And when it did, the answer had nothing to do with relief funds or protest meetings. It had to do with the village’s own name.
On May 27, 1942, Czech operatives attacked Reinhard Heydrich in Prague; he died of his wounds on June 4. In reprisal, on June 10, German forces destroyed the mining village of Lidice — the men were shot, the women deported to Ravensbrück, and the children taken away, most of them murdered. The village was leveled and struck from the maps. The erasure was the announced point of it.
The response abroad was immediate and unusual. Communities around the world adopted the name so that it could not be erased. In Illinois, Stern Park Gardens renamed itself Lidice at a ceremony on July 12, 1942, with Wendell Willkie speaking. In England, the mining town of Stoke-on-Trent launched a campaign under the slogan “Lidice shall live,” with local miners pledging a share of their wages toward rebuilding it.
And in Bohemia, New York, residents proposed renaming their village Lidice.
The proposal failed. It joined earlier attempts — North Sayville, MacArthur — that had also failed to win enough support, and the hamlet kept the name it had chosen in the 1880s.
It is worth sitting with what that vote actually was. A community of Czech descent was asked to trade one memorial for another: to give up a name honoring the homeland in general for a name honoring one specific murdered village. Whichever way an individual voted, the debate itself is the evidence. In 1942, in a hamlet of a few thousand people on Long Island, the destruction of a mining village outside Prague was close enough and real enough to put on a ballot.
Who raised it, where it was argued, and how the vote went are not recorded in anything we currently hold. It is the single most answerable question in this article, and the most worth answering.
February–March 1948
Forty Miles West
In February 1948 the Communist Party took control of Czechoslovakia. On March 10, Jan Masaryk — son of the republic’s founding president, and its foreign minister — was found dead in the courtyard beneath his bathroom window at the Czernin Palace. Whether he was pushed or jumped is still disputed in the Czech Republic today.
The same day, Ján Papánek, Czechoslovakia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, sent a letter to the Secretary-General denouncing the seizure of power and asking that the Security Council take it up. On March 23, over furious Soviet objection, he was allowed to address the Council in person and accuse the Soviet Union of destroying his country’s independence.
That scene is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as a set piece of the early Cold War: a Czechoslovak diplomat facing down the Soviet delegation at the United Nations, somewhere far away and consequential. What is almost never noted is where the United Nations was sitting that spring.
It was at Lake Success, in Nassau County — the organization’s interim home from 1946 to 1951. Some forty miles west of Smithtown Avenue.
That proximity is the strangest fact in this history. The most consequential Czech protest of 1948 anywhere in the world was delivered an hour’s drive from a village named for the country in question. Papánek then stayed and built the response: the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees, legalized on May 4, 1948, headquartered in New York City, with Eleanor Roosevelt on its board. In March 1948 there were some two thousand Czechoslovak refugees in Germany and Austria. By 1950 there were thirty thousand. Over its lifetime the Fund resettled 25,300 of them in the United States.
Did any reach Bohemia?
We do not know, and this is the question most likely to have a documentary answer. The village still had the institutional capacity to receive them: the ČSA lodge was active and would not sell its hall on Smithtown Avenue for another twelve years. But the cultural ground had shifted hard. By the Society’s own account of the 1940s, the unifying patriotism of the war years had accelerated the decline of Czech, and by the end of the decade English had become the primary language in Bohemia’s homes and shops. The village dedicated its World War II honor roll — 118 names — on November 9, 1947, three months before the coup. It was, by then, an American village that remembered being Czech.
A refugee family arriving in 1949 would have found people who could still speak to them, and children who could not.
August 1968
The Hall Was Already Sold
On the night of August 20–21, 1968, Warsaw Pact forces crossed into Czechoslovakia and ended the Prague Spring within two days.
The American response was substantial. In a memo dated September 4, Walt Rostow advised President Johnson to allocate $20 million for the reception, care, and resettlement of Czechoslovak refugees, arguing the case on grounds of national heritage and America’s humanitarian tradition as much as on Cold War interest. A draft statement prepared for the President declared that America’s doors were open, as always, to those seeking freedom. Later drafts softened it considerably, promising instead the orderly entry of refugees in accordance with existing immigration law. Canada admitted roughly twelve thousand Czechoslovaks in the following six months; the United States took comparable numbers.
In Bohemia, as far as we know, nothing happened.
And here the explanation is structural rather than emotional. Consider what the village had lost in the eight years before the tanks rolled. In 1960 the ČSA sold its grand hall at 1339 Smithtown Avenue — the 250-seat room built in 1920, the one that had hosted Czech-language theater and masquerade balls through the twenties — and it was converted into apartments. The Sokol dances that had defined Saturday nights for two generations had given way, in the Society’s own telling of the 1960s, to diners and gas stations where teenagers showed off Mustangs. The pearl button factory, the last working link to Žirovnice, would file for bankruptcy in 1969.
In 1942 the village had halls, lodges, a common language, and a proposal on the table within weeks of Lidice. In 1968 it had none of the first three, and so there was no room to gather in, no lodge to pass a resolution, no Czech-language newspaper circulating on Smithtown Avenue.
The last moment Bohemia could have responded to the old country as a Czech village was 1948. By 1968 it was a Long Island suburb whose grandparents had been Czech — and grief in a suburb is a private matter, conducted in living rooms in front of the evening news. Some of those living rooms surely held people who wept that August. We have no way to count them, because by then there was nowhere for them to gather and be counted.
Open Research
What We Don’t Know Yet
This article is built on documented national history and on our own timeline. The village-level record is largely missing, and most of it is recoverable. Specifically:
The Lidice proposal (1942). Who raised it, in what forum, and what the vote was. Likely sources: Fire Department and ČSA lodge minutes for 1942, Town of Islip records, and the Suffolk County News and Long Island Advance for June through September 1942.
The ČSA lodge minute books, 1938–1960. If these survive anywhere, they are the most valuable documents in this entire subject. Relief contributions, resolutions, and collections would appear in them as ordinary line items.
Local newspapers at four moments: late September and October 1938; March and April 1939; February and March 1948; and August and September 1968. Four short runs of microfilm would likely settle most of what this article has to leave open.
St. John Nepomucene parish records. Masses offered for Czechoslovakia, special collections taken, and any notice from the pulpit — particularly in 1938, 1942, and 1948.
Naturalization petitions and census records for Czech-born arrivals in Bohemia between 1948 and 1952, and again between 1968 and 1972. This is how the refugee question gets answered from documents rather than memory.
And memory itself. If you remember a new Czech-speaking family arriving on your street after the war, or a relative who sent money or parcels to relatives in Czechoslovakia, or an adult who cried at the radio in 1948 or the television in 1968 — that recollection is a primary source, and we would like to record it.
The village kept its name through all of it. What we still owe the record is an account of what the name cost, and what it meant, at the three moments the country behind it disappeared.
Share Your Story
Help Us Fill the Gaps
Have a memory, letter, or photograph that touches on any of this? Contact the Bohemia Historical Society at Info@BohemiaHistoricalSociety.org, or use the Share Your Story page.