Speaking to My Country
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Written and delivered by the then Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, they were broadcast over BBC radio as part of the Allied media campaign against the Nazis during the Second World War. Listening to them was punishable by death under Hitler's regime. Yet untold thousands of Czechoslovak citizens regularly risked their lives on Wednesday evenings to hear Jan Masaryk.
From September 1939 through the end of the war, Masaryk was one of the wittiest and most popular voices on the air, hosting a program called Volá Londýn (London Calling). He evoked Jan Hus and the Good Soldier Švejk, recited poetry, told jokes, provided eyewitness reports of the bombing of London, news of battles in Europe and Africa, and of public opinion in the United States.
His extraordinary broadcast marking the Jewish New Year 5704, in September of 1943, includes one of the first explicit references by an international leader to the extermination of the Jews.
Masaryk's broadcasts were so treasured that after the war, a Czech collection of the talks sold out its 60,000-copy printing, followed by similar success in London.
"Seven decades have come and gone since these speeches were first aired, but the fundamental message of respect and caring for one another — and of living in freedom — remains both timeless and timely." Madeleine K. Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1997-2001
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Jan Garrigue Masaryk was born in 1886, the third of four children in a prominent family in Prague. His father Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk would become the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic; his mother Charlotte was an American intellectual. After an unpromising adolescence and young adulthood, Jan Masaryk became one of the most popular diplomats in London and one of the most admired broadcasters of the Second World War. Untold thousands of Czechs risked their lives to listen to his program Volá Londýn (London Calling), a public and personal diary of 1939-44, as experienced by the Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. In 1945, Jan Masaryk returned to Prague and became part of the post-war government. He died shortly after the Communist putsch of 1948.
Born in Prague in 1947, Helen Epstein grew up in New York City, where she graduated from Hunter College High School in 1965. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. She became a university correspondent for that newspaper while still an undergraduate. Subsequently, she studied at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times.
Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks that, like Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From, has been translated into several other languages. She herself is the translator of Heda Kovály's Under A Cruel Star and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín. Her biographies of Joseph Papp and Tina Packer grew out of her journalistic work. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues in Europe, and North and South America. She blogs for The Arts Fuse, a New England cultural web site.
