Post-war emigration of Czechoslovak citizens to the Netherlands

The emigration of Czech citizens took place in two major waves in our country’s post-war history. The first wave was those who left after the communist coup of February 1948. Most of them believed their exile would be temporary and they intended to come back once the communist regime was over. Some twenty-five thousand people left the Czechoslovak Republic at the time. There was poverty in Europe and the memories of the World War II were still fresh. The system of refugee reception was only beginning and it developed slowly. Most of them tried to escape the war-scarred Europe and start a new life in America. Some Czechoslovaks applied for asylum in the Netherlands where several émigré assistance organisations were set up in 1948. Thanks to grants, refugees could study or change their qualifications and get a good job. The first Czechoslovak émigrés in Holland founded an association called Our President Liberator T. G. Masaryk. It raised used clothes and food for Czechoslovak refugees in German refugee camps and organised lectures on the political situation in Czechoslovakia and regular meetings at Comenius’ grave in Naarden. A group around Mr Beran in Rotterdam issued Blue Revue, a social/cultural magazine. Beginning in 1952 the iron curtain was being built around Czechoslovak borders – an electrified barrier fence that made emigration substantially more difficult. Two hundred and fifty people on average would leave the country every year between 1952 and 1964. The second major emigration wave left the Czechoslovak Republic after the Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion in 1968. Approximately 300,000 people, most of them of high qualifications, left at the time. The numbers of refugees from Czechoslovakia decreased in the 1970s and amounted to approximately five thousand people per year from 1979 on. By then, nobody really believed that the totalitarian communist regime could collapse and everyone leaving thought that it was for good. The Czechoslovak émigrés who were granted asylum in Holland could not understand the leftist enthusiasm of young Dutch intellectuals whose convictions were rooted in the superficial knowledge of socialist ideas and slogans by Mao Tse-tung, Trotsky, Che Guevara et al. They found the views of most Czech émigrés to be conservative, outdated, and provincial. Generally, Czechoslovak émigrés of either wave were not really interested in association activities, focusing rather on individual assimilation with the native population.

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