New Documentary on the Swashbuckling Tale of the Founding of Czechoslovakia
Otto Mann
A new documentary recalls Chicago’s role in the founding of
Czechoslovakia.
By Ed M. Koziarski
June 18, 2009
Article URL: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/ourtown/090618/
Accidental Army
Sat 6/20, 8:15 PM, Mon 6/22, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N.
State, 312-849-2600, czechlegion.com, $9.
Bruce Bendinger has sold everything from Popeye’s Chicken to Gerald
Ford. John Iltis sold the movie Hoop Dreams to Fine Line Cinema. Now
the two veteran marketing professionals have teamed up on a campaign
of their own. “We want to give a country back its history,” Bendinger
says.
Their new documentary Accidental Army: The Amazing True Story of the
Czechoslovak Legion tells the swashbuckling tale of the founding of
Czechoslovakia — and Chicago’s vital role in it. “This is a city that
created a country,” Bendinger says. “There would not [have been] a
Czechoslovakia if there wasn’t a Chicago.” The Accidental Army has
its theatrical premiere Saturday, June 20, at the Gene Siskel Film
Center.
The seed for the film was a photo in Bendinger’s middle school history
textbook. The image of rakish-looking Czechoslovak Legion soldiers
fighting their way along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway stuck
with him for more than 40 years. Then, ten years ago, while looking
for a movie topic to explore with his screenwriter daughter Jessica
(Bring It On, First Daughter, Aquamarine), Bendinger’s thoughts
returned to the legion.
“Here was a story that almost nobody knows,” Bendinger says. “You
pull a thread and the more you pull, the more interesting it got.
Even in the Czech and Slovak republics, it’s become a historical blind
spot.”
The Chicago connection goes back to 1902, when local plumbing magnate
Charles Crane recruited Tomáš Masaryk, a philosophy professor and
Czech nationalist who’d served in the Austro-Hungarian parliament, to
lecture at the University of Chicago. (A memorial to Masaryk and the
Czechoslovak Legion now stands on campus, at the east end of the
Midway Plaisance). The Slavs of Central Europe had no state of their
own at the time: most Czechs and Slovaks were subjects of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, while a sizable minority lived in Russia. Nearly
100,000 Czechs had immigrated to Chicago, giving the city the world’s
second-highest Czech population after Prague.
After his summer stint at the U. of C., Masaryk returned to Austro-
Hungary and resumed his political activities. When the empire invaded
Serbia in 1914, initiating World War I, he fled to England, becoming
leader of an Allied spy network and the foremost international
spokesman for the Czechoslovak independence movement.
On the day the war broke out, thousands of Chicago Slavs gathered in
Pilsen Park at 26th and Albany — in Little Village, then called Czech
California — to urge the United States to join the Allied effort
against Austro-Hungary and the Central Powers. They launched a letter-
writing campaign aimed at getting their relatives in Europe to resist
conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, or to desert and fight
for the Allies. “The letters [showed] how people were feeling,”
Bendinger says. “Thousands of [Slavic] Austro-Hungarian soldiers
surrendered as quickly as they could.” Chicago Czechs and other Slavs
“were at the forefront of being on the Allied side in World War I.
Their relatives were the ones being killed, or being drafted to fight
for the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.”
The first Czechoslovak Legion was a force of 10,000 in the Russian
army — ostensibly volunteers, though many were pressured to fight
under threat of losing their land. Their ranks swelled after Masaryk
convinced the Russian government to allow 50,000 Czech and Slovak POWs
from the Austro-Hungarian army to defect and fight for Russia. The
Czechoslovak Legion is credited with helping to tie up German forces
on the Eastern front, giving the Allies a crucial edge on the Western
front. Their service, Bendinger says, also gave the Czech
independence movement vital “skin in the game.”
In May 1918, Masaryk went on a barnstorming tour of the U.S. to raise
political and financial backing for Czech independence. In downtown
Chicago, outside the Blackstone Hotel, he addressed a crowd of 150,000
supporters, demonstrating the independence movement’s political muscle
and turning American political discourse in favor of a Czechoslovak
nation.
(Standing before a statue of Masaryk in Prague on April 5, President
Obama said, “Masaryk spoke to a crowd in Chicago that was estimated to
be over 100,000. I don’t think I can match Masaryk’s record, but I’m
honored to follow his footsteps from Chicago to Prague.”)
Two months before Masaryk spoke in Chicago, the Bolsheviks had signed
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, giving Russia an early exit
from World War I. Bowing to pressure from the Germans, Red Army
commander Leon Trotsky ordered the disarming and arrest of the
Czechoslovak Legion, which prompted the legionnaires to mount an
insurrection. Living in boxcars on the Trans-Siberian Railway,
fighting their way across the “Wild, Wild East,” the Czechoslovak
Legion became a bulwark against communist expansion into Siberia.
Lacking sufficient support from the West and disgusted at the
brutality of anti-Bolshevik White Army forces, the legion cut a deal
with the Bolsheviks after two years, under which they handed over
White Army leader Aleksandr Kolchak and eight railcars of gold that
had once belonged to Czar Nicholas II. Masaryk had meanwhile secured
official recognition for the Republic of Czechoslovakia at the
Versailles Treaty talks, which ended World War I. “The Czech Legion
gave Masaryk the leverage to get a seat at the table,” Bendinger
says.
Masaryk was appointed provisional leader and won Czechoslovakia’s
first presidential election, in 1920, serving until 1935. The
legionnaires returned to their new country and became the core of
Czechoslovakia’s army.
The question of what happened to some of the Czar’s gold remains a
major controversy in the story of the Czechoslovak Legion and the
founding of Czechoslovakia. While it’s widely believed to have helped
finance the fledgling nation, “a lot of people maintain they didn’t
take a penny,” Bendinger says. “It’s a question of whether your
grandfather is a hero or a thief.”
Germany swallowed most of the republic after the Munich Agreement of
1938. Recognized as a threat by the occupying forces despite their
advancing age, many legionnaires were persecuted, arrested, and killed
by the Nazis — and later by the Soviets, who systematically tried to
erase the legion’s legacy. “If you were a legionnaire, you were on
the Nazi hit list,” says Bendinger. “To the Soviets, these guys were
the running dogs of capitalism. They took away their pensions, and
they died in poverty and disgrace.”
Though it didn’t pan out as the subject for a collaboration with his
daughter, Bendinger got interested enough in the Czechoslovak Legion
to spent five years researching it as a hobby. Then, online, he met
Czech Military Museum historian Tomáš Jakl, who turned him on to the
artifact that would form the core of Accidental Army: Rudolf Medek’s
1928 photo history of the legion, To a Victorious Freedom.
Visiting Jakl in Prague five years ago, Bendinger got a look at a rare
copy of Medek’s book and found a wealth of images that hadn’t been
widely seen in decades. He scanned the photos and created a slideshow
using the “Ken Burns effect” pan-and-zoom function in iPhoto. In the
ensuing months, Bendinger says, he showed it to anybody who’d “put up
with it”: “You run into guys who want to show you their baseball card
collection or the trains in their basement. For me it’s my Czech
photos.”
Out to dinner with longtime friend Iltis and their wives, Bendinger
brought up the slideshow. Not only was Iltis — whose Czech father
Fritz fought for Austro-Hungary in World War I — willing to watch, he
was ready to help turn it into a full-fledged documentary. Along with
Bendinger’s wife, Lorelei Davis-Bendinger, they started the nonprofit
Czech Legion Project to produce the film.
With $15,000 in support from the Anheuser-Busch Foundation, the
military heritage-focused Tawani Foundation, and private donors, as
well as $10,000 in volunteer labor from commercial colleagues, Iltis
and the Bendingers made several more trips to Europe, interviewed
historians and survivors, and whittled the intricate, sweeping history
down to a 47-minute film that Bendinger himself narrates.
The Czech Consulate sponsored a screening of Accidental Army at the
Chicago History Museum in October, and it’s been shown to a handful of
private audiences in the States. Iltis and the Bendingers are raising
the estimated $50,000 to subtitle the film in Czech, after which
they’ll pursue a Slovak version.
Iltis admits it’s been harder than he expected to distribute the film,
probably due to its tough-to-program run time (though Bendinger points
out it’s just right for an hour broadcast with commercial breaks).
But Accidental Army is really meant “for the young men and women in
the Czech Republic to know the history of their country,” Bendinger
says. “How often do you get a chance to do something like that?”
Documentary website: www.czechlegion.com
Slovak version: http://web.mac.com/czechlegion/SKLegiSite/SkVerzia_.html
3 minute video trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B444ox14WJE&feature=channel
R_P
> The question of what happened to some of the Czar�s gold remains a
> major controversy in the story of the Czechoslovak Legion and the
> founding of Czechoslovakia. While it�s widely believed to have helped
> finance the fledgling nation, �a lot of people maintain they didn�t
> take a penny,� Bendinger says. �It�s a question of whether your
> grandfather is a hero or a thief.�
How the heck did they get their hands on all that gold and Kolchak?