Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Rudolf V. Perina The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RUDOLF V. PERINA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Interview Date: December, 2006 Copyright 2008 Q: When and where were you born? PERINA: I was born in Czechoslovakia on January 3, 1945 in a town called Tabor in southern Bohemia which was the seat of the Hussites in the 15th century. Q: I always think of the Hussites and their armored vehicles. That's quite a legacy. What do you know about your family on your father's side? PERINA: I see myself as a product of 20th-century Central European history. My father owned a lumber mill in southern Bohemia started by his grandfather in the 19th century. It was a fairly large enterprise that exported lumber all the way to Germany and throughout Central Europe in the inter-war period. He was thus considered a capitalist by Communists, which came into play after World War II. On my mother's side, her father was a civil servant in Bohemia. He was also trained as a lawyer and served as a type of deputy mayor in the town of Tabor. He was during World War II one of the many Czechs executed following the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German occupation of Bohemia and the most senior Nazi successfully assassinated during the war. The well-known destruction of the town of Interview with Ambassador Rudolf V. Perina http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001619 Library of Congress Lidice was one part of the retaliation for Heydrich's death but in fact thousands of people throughout the country were executed as well. The Germans targeted public figures and those suspected of being Czech nationalists. My grandfather, as a representative of the town government, and his brother who had been a military officer in the Czech army, were arrested within days of Heydrich's death. They were executed by firing squad on June 10, 1942. About 180 other people from Tabor were also executed over the course of the next few weeks. My mother was 17 years old at the time and learned of her father's and uncle's execution through the newspapers. It was a defining experience for the rest of her life. Q: Would you talk a little more about the town of Tabor and how far back it goes. Where did the town fit into Bohemian history? I don't know much about that area. PERINA: Well, the name Tabor comes from Mount Tabor, which is referred to in the Bible. The town was founded by the Hussites in the early 1400's. The Hussite movement was really a type of religious uprising by followers of Jan Hus who was a precursor of Luther in criticism of Church corruption. He was invited to meet with representatives of the Pope at the Council of Constance in 1415. Though guaranteed safe passage, he was in fact arrested and burned at the stake as a heretic. This sparked other social and ethnic tensions of the declining feudal order and led to a kind of peasant uprising against the Church and the establishment. The rebellion gained momentum and led to what is known as the Hussite Wars. All of this was, of course, more complex than I am making it sound here. The most famous leader of the Hussites was a fellow named Jan Zizka, and it was his followers who established this town of Tabor. He was a brilliant military commander who defeated Papal armies across Bohemia despite eventually losing both eyes in battle. Tabor is very identified with this history and with Jan Zizka, whose statue is on the main square. My mother's side of the family moved there from the Pilsen region after World War I. My father's side of the family, as far as I know, had been in Tabor much further back. Interview with Ambassador Rudolf V. Perina http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001619 Library of Congress Q: Sudetenland or not? PERINA: No. It was outside the Sudetenland. It was part of Bohemia and then it became part of the Bohemian Protectorate established by the Germans. Q: Given the Hussite history, was this a Protestant area? What was your family? PERINA: Following the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 when the Hapsburgs defeated the Bohemian forces, there was a counter- Reformation and most of the country was re-Catholicized. So most Czechs are Catholic but not very good Catholics. The Church does not have the standing that it does in Poland, for example. This applies to my family. We were technically Catholic but not practicing Catholics or particularly devout. Q: What about the education of both your mother and father? PERINA: My father was raised to inherit the family lumber business as was the custom of the time. That's why he had the same name as his father, and I'm actually the third Rudolf Perina because it was assumed that I would take over the business someday. My father was educated as a lawyer which is what one studied to go into business. He had a doctor of law degree from Prague University. He grew up in this little village outside of Tabor called Plana nad Luznici where the lumber mill was located on a river bank. Most timber at the time was transported by waterways. My mother studied at a Prague vocational school for secretaries and clerical workers. That is where she was when she learned that her father had been arrested. My mother actually studied some English in this school. My father knew more German and Latin, which did not help much later in America. Q: Obviously, you were born in 1945 which was sort of a critical time at the end of the war. How did things go during the war? Then we'll talk about the Soviet occupation which obviously you didn't experience but you were hearing about. Interview with Ambassador Rudolf V. Perina http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001619 Library of Congress PERINA: Well, during the war my father was allowed to continue operating his business because the Germans wanted it to continue as a source of lumber and wood. He was able to continue operating, though under all the rules of the Protectorate. My mother's family was in a much more difficult situation because when the father was executed the family was also condemned to confiscation of property. She had horrible stories of how a carload of soldiers came with a truck to the house a few days after my grandfather had been executed. They went through the house and took anything of value: pictures, jewelry, the radio, pieces of furniture etc. They left the family with minimal necessities to survive. This was a family of two daughters and two sons, a mother and four children. They were allowed to stay in the house but they lost title to it, and they were moved to the upstairs of the house, with a German family moving into the first floor. It was a very difficult period for my mother through the end of the war. She also had to leave school and was put to work in a factory. Then she met my father, and they were married in 1944. Q: Are there family stories about when the Soviets came? PERINA: Yes. This is when we get to the next chapter of Central European history. I heard many stories about encounters with the Russian army from my parents. Apparently, at one time I was almost kidnapped by a Russian soldier who was drunk and thought I was really cute and wanted to take me with him. In the last months of the war, there was an incident very close to our house, actually just across the road, where there was a railroad track. There was an air raid and my parents saw what people said were American planes coming in and bombing the railroad tracks. With the Russian army, however, the main problem was a total lack of logistical support in the military structure. Russian soldiers had to find their own food and support themselves from the territory through which they passed. Thus stealing and ravaging the countryside were sort of unavoidable. But the real problem came with the domestic political situation after the War. Russia and the Czech Communist Party were the strongest political influences in the country. In February 1948, Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald came to power and began a policy of radical socialization: Interview with Ambassador Rudolf V. Perina http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001619 Library of Congress confiscating factories, businesses, persecuting so-called capitalists and so on. At that time, my parents and many others didn't believe that the Communist government would last very long. Everybody thought it would collapse, given the chaos developing in the economy. Very quickly, however, the government started turning against the so-called capitalists, which included my father's family. It was wealthy in the context of this little town but not really in a broader context. The persecution became so threatening that my father felt he had to escape from the country. At the time, he still believed that it was a temporary move and that the Communists wouldn't last long. He escaped from Czechoslovakia by illegally crossing the border into Austria. He expected to be back in a year or two when the Communists collapsed but it soon became evident that the Communist government might last longer than anyone thought.