Alice Glasnerova

Yes, I don’t think many people feel ready to thank Senator McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee for Un-American Activities) but I do owe him a debt. Had he not made sure that all American civil servants (among many others) had to explain themselves and prove they were not communists, I would not have the document that has set me on this path.

In 1954, a few weeks before I was born, my father was required to answer a series of questions sent to him by the International Organisations Employees-Loyalty Board. He was an American citizen, an army veteran, an international civil servant with the WHO (World Health Organisation) in Geneva, but his first wife, Alice Glasner, had been a member of the Communist Party. In 1950s America, this was a dangerous alliance, so he had to justify himself. In his answers, he explains why the marriage ended and details his efforts to persuade Alice away from communism.

He charts her early involvement with the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, her year volunteering in Spain during the Civil War, her work with the International Workers Order in New York and her desire to return to Czechoslovakia after the war to help build the new communist state. What he could not know then was that she would spend much of the later part of her life in prison. I don’t know many more facts, but I want to find out about this principled and determined woman and also about the life and experiences of my father in the fifty-three years before I was born.

There is a whole story here, one that spans the key conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. I am about to start learning Czech and researching into the lives of Alice and Erwin, hoping that by charting my progress in this blog, I might contact people who know about the world they inhabited and learn more than I can by myself.