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THE CZECH EMBASSY TELLS ITS STORY

The Czech Embassy in Budapest is just a few steps away from Andrássy Avenue, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, rebuilt in the style of French boulevards for the millennium celebrations at the end of the 19th century. Although there are many embassies in the area, the Czech one has a unique story that reflects the history of the entire twentieth century.
With this text we will take you through the story of the building from its beginning, when it was built in 1900 by a count-traveller to house his family and numerous ethnographic collections, through the 1920s of Czechoslovak diplomacy, when the building was acquired by the then ambassador Hugo Vavrečka, Václav Havel's grandfather. The difficult times after March 1939 brought out the characters of the good people who lived here - not only military diplomats and later resistance fighters like Bohumil Klein, but also the equally brave caretaker, Emanuel Zima, who fed and hid 13 Jewish people in the basement of the then German embassy branch. The building experienced the horrors of war first-hand, for example when it was hit by an air raid at the end of the war, but it was repaired and returned to Czechoslovakia, and later the Czech Republic.
In the following sections you can find out more about our embassy building and the extraordinary stories of the people who stayed here.

Table of Contents

 

1. Being a Museum, Casino and Embassy
2. The Rise of Nazism and Embassy Changing Hands
3. Resistance fighters and Other Diplomats
4.. The Zímas – Saviours of Lives
5.. Through Budapest to the Balkans
6. From Czechoslovak to Czech: What Came Next

 

1.Being a Museum, Casino and Embassy

Since 1918, the newly established "Office of the Delegate of the Czechoslovak Republic" rented a seat in the building of the former Imperial-Royal Austrian Delegation in Budapest. However, the building in Akadémia utca 17 was too small for the needs of Czechoslovak diplomacy. Therefore, from 1920 onwards, an intensive search for a suitable building began. For example, offers to buy the buildings on Andrássy út 109, a house on Lendvay utca 5 or Eötvös utca 11/b were considered (note: út is Hungarian for class, whereas utca means street). In the end, the diplomat Hugo Vavrečka chose Count Zichy's palace on 61 Rózsa utca. The palace was commissioned by Jenő Zichy himself in the 1880s and was rebuilt in 1900 according to the plans of architect Frigyes Kovács. Kovács also designed the Art Nouveau-Functionalist town hall of Zenta (now in Serbia, Senta), the Kemény Palace in Kaposvár, and participated in the reconstruction of the former Haggenmacher brewery in Budafok in 1910.

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 Zenta Town Hall, designed by the same architect as the Embassy building, Frigyes Kovács

Count Jenő Zichy was a lawyer by education but a politician by profession. From 1861 until his death he served, with minor interruptions, as a member of parliament and for 25 years he chaired the National Industrial Association. Apart from his political life, the Count also devoted himself to the study of the geographical origins of the Hungarians. The national revival of the 19th century, coupled with the romantic yearnings and celebrations of the thousand years since the arrival of Hungarians to Europe, which was culminating at the time, prompted a scientific inquiry into the origins of Hungarian tribes. Not only in studies, but also in newspaper articles, photographs, paintings and literature, the idea of the Caucasian 'cradle of Hungarianness' became widespread. This led Count Zichy to organise and finance several scientific expeditions to the Caucasus. He amassed a unique collection of around 3,000 artefacts (utilitarian objects, clothing, etc.) and 100 photographs directly from the field, and it was his mansion in Rózsa utca that they found their first home.

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Count Jenő Zichy, in expedition attire, oil painting from the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, 1903

In the Szegfű utca wing of the building, where the Czech Centre is now located, the Count created the first ever private museum in Budapest from his collections. Visitors could admire objects brought back from three Asian expeditions, and these Central Asian collections were also displayed in the Millennial Exhibition under the title Remnants of Ancient Hungary. The second wing in Rózsa utca, where the embassy premises are now located, served as the residence of the Zichy family. After the Count's death in 1906, the family disposed of the building, and his private collection was given to the city, and then to the ethnographic section of the National Museum. The collections are not the count's only legacy: Zichy Jenő Street, about a fifteen-minute walk from his former palace, is also named after him. 

The house has then changed hands several times over the years and has been rebuilt many times. For a short time, it even housed a casino. In 1912, the building became a ‘House of Artists’, owned by an artist association bearing the same name. Interestingly, until 1937, the house was bound by an obligation, recorded in the land register, that its second floor would always be used for artistic purposes.


The last owner of the palace before its sale to the Czechoslovak state was the real estate company Clubház A.G. The purchase contract was signed on 22 June 1922 by Hugo Vavrečka, the first Czechoslovak envoy to Hungary and one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the inter-war era, who bought the building for 25 million Hungarian crowns. The building underwent a complete reconstruction in 1923-1925, which eliminated, for example, the one-storey, 250 m2 theatre hall and created a representative apartment for the ambassador.

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 Purchase contract of 22 June 1922

 

Anton Straka (1893, Košice - 1944, Gross-Rosen concentration camp) 

Anton Straka served as cultural attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Budapest from 1926 to 1936. Although he originally studied theology and was a catechist, after leaving the Church he worked as a journalist and civil servant, and later as a diplomat. In addition, he was also a translator who gathered progressive writers around himself. As a devout supporter of Czechoslovakism, he worked to unite the relatively small Czech minority in Hungary with the much larger Slovak community. During his time in Budapest, for example, he organized "Friday nights" where he hosted Hungarian, Czech and Slovak artists. As a result of this Czechoslovak-Hungarian rapprochement, Straka published the first anthology of Czech and Slovak poems in Hungarian (Cseh és szlovák költők antológiája). It was Straka's dissemination of Czechoslovakism that was problematic for the Hungarian leadership, as was his leftist orientation, which he shared with many Hungarian intellectuals. Therefore, as we know from the reports of the government agent Adolf Péchány, Straka was kept under surveillance in the 1920s and 1930s. His links with communists of the time made him a target of the Nazis during the Second World War. He died on a death march from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.

Hugo Vavrečka (22 February 1889, Ostrava - 9 August 1952, Brno)

As a graduate in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, including ship engineering, he worked first as a technical advisor in his field, and then as an editor of the Lidové noviny newspaper in Brno, where he was able to apply his literary talent and knowledge of economic issues. During the First World War he served in the Austro-Hungarian Navy in Trieste, cooperated with the Czech Resistance, and even secretly founded the Czechoslovak Naval Committee. After the war, he accompanied the Czechoslovak delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on transport and economic issues, and after a short time back at Lidové noviny he was recruited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a naval expert. He served as Consul General in Hamburg (1920-1922), then as Ordinary Envoy to Hungary (1922-1926). In both positions he was the first to hold the post. Between 1926-1932 he was also ambassador to Austria. In July 1932, he left diplomacy for the private sphere at his own request, reportedly disappointed by the rapprochement between Germany and Austria that he had been reporting on. At the same time, he had a long-standing close relationship with Tomáš Baťa, and until 1945 he worked as director of one of Baťa's factories in Zlín. In September 1938 he was called as a minister without portfolio to the first official government of General J. Syrový, and after its reconstruction in early October of that year he became (until 1 December 1938) Minister of Propaganda. Just before the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Vavrečka sent Jewish managers of Baťa's enterprises abroad to save their lives, and during the war he financially supported Czechoslovak resistance fighters and their families. After the war, however, the Communists accused Vavrečka of collaboration in the management of the company, and after the Communist takeover of February 1948 he was sentenced to three years in a prison and the confiscation of all his property. However, due to his poor health, he never entered prison. He wrote a number of scholarly treatises, and also published detective stories under the pseudonym Hugo Vavris. His memoirs Life is More of a Novel were published posthumously by N. Pavelčíková.

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 Hugo Vavrečka, source: the Czech Centre Budapest

2. The Rise of Nacism and Embassy Changing Hands

After the severing of diplomatic relations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary (March 1939), the embassy was closed. After March 15, 1939, only a few staff members remained in the embassy building (envoy Miloš Kobr and military attaché Bohumil Klein, see below). On March 20, 1939, at 7:20 p.m., they received an order arrived from the Ministry of National Defence to leave Budapest. Three days later Klein handed over the equipment of the building to the Chief Secretary Josef Medřický, a former diplomat turned administrator of the building due to the circumstances. The German side received office equipment, including unusable stamps of the office of the Czechoslovak military attaché, various often outdated maps and three bottles of sulphuric acid. On 27 April, Medřický also took possession of a relatively rich library with Hungarian, Czech, German and French titles, which unfortunately did not survive. Klein destroyed important military materials. According to his words, the handover process was carried out with correctness on the German side. The equipment that was not handed over was either taken to Prague or sold off.

Several stories related to the Second World War follow: the resistance fighters at the embassy, the story of the father and son Zíma, and the fate of the Czechoslovaks who fled through Hungary to Yugoslavia.

 

3. Resistance Fighters and Other Diplomats

In this section, you will learn about several brave Czechoslovak, mostly military, diplomats, who are united not only by their courage but also by the fact that they all spent part of their lives at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Budapest. The ones we know about so far (as of May 16, 2022) are probably not the only ones worth mentioning, so if you discover anyone else connected to the Embassy, we would love to hear from you.

Bohumil Klein (1898-1939) served as Czechoslovak military attaché in Hungary from September 1937 to April 1939. He had already served as a volunteer during the First World War, and after graduating from a grammar school in České Budějovice, which he interrupted for a year during the war, he also graduated from a school for reserve officers. He went to the Italian front, where he was captured and interned for almost three months in a prison camp in Verona. In January 1918 he joined the Czechoslovak army and served in various capacities in the interwar period. He completed the Military School in Prague, after which he attained the rank of staff captain. From 1935 he worked as a clerk in the Hungarian section of the main staff of the Ministry of National Defence and two years later became military attaché in Hungary.

The last six months of his diplomatic service were said to have taken place "in a suffocating, even hostile environment". Klein did not leave the embassy until the end of April 1939, although from March onwards the Hungarian government made it clear to the diplomats that it did not accept the existence of Czechoslovakia. Ambassador Miloš Kobr and military attaché Maj. Klein and the other diplomats, according to Zlatice Zudová-Lešková, were regarded as private persons who stayed in Budapest to hand over the building rather than as representatives of the state. After handing over the office, Klein returned to Prague and was immediately arrested by the Gestapo. He was released, but from then on, he had to report daily to the Gestapo office. He completed a course for press officers and became editor-in-chief of the Czech Press Office in Brno. On 25 August 1939, he was arrested by the Gestapo at a secret meeting of press officers and imprisoned at Špilberk Castle, where he was held until his transfer to Prague on 12 October 1939. A day later he was subjected to a cruel interrogation in Petschek Palace, from the consequences of which he died. After the liberation, General Klein's heroism was recognised by the award of the Czechoslovak War Cross 1939 in memoriam, and by promotion to the rank of Colonel of the General Staff in memoriam.

Josef Jedlička (1897-1942) was born and studied in Hungary. At the time of his matriculation exam, he already knew German and Russian in addition to Hungarian and Czech. After graduating from high school, he volunteered for the 60th Infantry Regiment in Eger, with which he was sent to the Russian front later that year. He fell into Russian captivity in Ukrainian Eastern Halych. Near Kiev, he joined the Czechoslovak legions and with the rifle regiment took part in the Battle of Zborov. Between May and June 1919, Jedlička helped protect retreating Czechoslovak Legion troops on the East Siberian railway line, and in January to February 1920 he moved to Europe by ship transport, where he served as assistant commander.

After returning to Czechoslovakia, Josef Jedlička became an officer, serving as an intelligence officer in Uzhhorod (1921-1923) and as deputy head of the Office of the Military Attaché in Budapest (1923-1924). From 1925 he attended a topographical course in Prague. He also studied meteorology, climatology, astronomy and geography and received the degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences (RNDr). He applied his knowledge in the descriptive department of the Military Geographical Institute (VZÚ).

While serving as a staff captain in Brno, he accepted an invitation to join the Masonic Lodge. He gained there many contacts which he later used in the resistance. From the autumn of 1938, a group of resistance fighters, often former members of the foreign Czechoslovak legions, began to form in Prague-Dejvice.  Jedlička was actively involved in the activities of the Prague headquarters of the resistance group Obrana Národa (Defence of the Nation) from the spring of 1939 and in the summer of 1940 he began to lead his own illegal intelligence resistance group, Julek, which later worked closely with the Czechoslovak headquarters in London. Following the USSR's involvement in the war, Jedlička was appointed to the rank of GRU colonel in 1941 and functioned as the resident chief liaison with Moscow.

Jedlička was arrested on the night of October 9, 1941, and after his arrest a wave of interrogations and arrests of dozens of other collaborators began, probably because they had long been under surveillance and there was a danger that they might escape at the last moment. The Gestapo imprisoned and interrogated Jedlička at Pankrác, and on 30 June 1942 he was sentenced to death for treason. On the evening of the same day, he was executed by firing squad at a mass shooting site in Kobylisy, Prague.

In addition to medals for their service in the Czechoslovak legions, Josef Jedlička and his wife Magdaléna Jedličková also received the Czechoslovak War Cross in memoriam for their resistance activities in World War II.

Ladislav Kodet (1899-1942)

Ladislav Kodet spent almost twenty years at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Hungary: he served as Chief Actuarial Secretary from 15 July 1919 to 21 April 1939 (the Actuarial Secretary at the embassy was usually in charge of the consular or economic agenda). After the abolition of the office, he was transferred to the Protectorate Ministry of Industry. He became a member of the resistance group called Captain Nemo, led by the MFA employee Karel Nejedlý. Ladislav Kodet was executed in Kobylisy on Tuesday 30 June 1942 (at 7.30 pm) at the age of 43. Unfortunately, we have no further information about his life.

Rudolf Viest (1890-1945) served as Deputy Military Attaché in Budapest in 1922-1923. At that time, he had already had experience of the First World War, in which he was captured near Kraków, then enlisted in the Serbian army and took part in recruiting volunteers in Russia. In 1920 he returned to Czechoslovakia via Japan, Canada and the USA as a regimental commander with the rank of major, and after completing the course at the Military School in Prague he was sent to Budapest, already familiar to him from his high school studies. Between the wars he served in various capacities, for example as a military attaché in Warsaw. He was the only Slovak in the pre-1939 Czechoslovak army to reach the rank of general: in 1933 he was appointed brigadier general and in 1938 division general.

In the autumn of 1939 he went to France, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris and commanded the 1st Czechoslovak Division in France. After the defeat of France, he moved to the United Kingdom, where from July 1940 he served as Secretary of State of the newly formed Czechoslovak government-in-exile. In December 1940 he was appointed Minister of State by President Beneš. While working in the highest Czechoslovak foreign institutions, he was stripped of his citizenship in absentia and sentenced to death in Slovakia. In 1944, as a member of the London delegation of the Czechoslovak government in Moscow, he learned of the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising and was appointed commander of the 1st Czechoslovakian Army and led the rebel troops. In exhausting battles with German troops, he was captured together with other Czechs and Slovaks on 3 November 1944 and transported to Vienna and then to Berlin. The circumstances of the general's death have not been clarified to this day.

The following two men were neither military diplomats nor resistance fighters, and unlike the previous four, they were not in a situation where they had to lay down their lives for their country. Both, however, were at the Czechoslovak embassy in the crucial days of March 1939. Their stories illustrate the spirit of the embassy at the time, on which later drew also the heroism of father and son Zíma.

Miloš Kobr (1878-1953) was the Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary from 1933. He came to Budapest as an experienced diplomat (he had already been posted to Shanghai and Buenos Aires in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to France, Spain and Turkey as a Czechoslovak diplomat). The situation in Hungary was very difficult and he tried to contribute to the improvement of mutual relations, but he had to face difficult situations, especially in March 1939. After the mission Kobr retired. In 1941, he managed to get to Great Britain via Switzerland, where he re-joined the service of the Czechoslovak MFA in exile as an expert on Hungarian issues and also wrote several comprehensive studies and a work in English on Hungary: Hungary's War (1942). After the communist takeover in 1948, he emigrated again and at the end of his life became involved in the activities of the Institute of Edvard Beneš in London.

Zdeněk Augenthaler (1899-1975) worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Budapest from April 1936 as a legal secretary. After the beginning of the war, he remained formally employed by the MFA in liquidation, but later emigrated to the West and worked for the MFA of the government-in-exile. After the end of the war, he immediately returned to the reconstituted ministry, this time as Ministerial Counsellor of the National Economy Section, and from October 1946 he even headed the section as Envoy Extraordinary. After the Communist takeover he was replaced in his post, but as an expert on foreign economic relations he still led a delegation to the European Economic Commission. He was dismissed from the MFA in December 1957 and began publishing studies on international economic relations under a pseudonym.

 

4. The Zímas - Saviours of Lives

After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the embassy became a branch of the German embassy, and the building housed the consular department for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, headed by Czechoslovak diplomat Josef Medřický (according to other sources, there was also a propaganda office in the building at that time, the presence of both offices is not excluded.) In addition to Medřický, only one more Czech - Emanuel Zíma, boilerman and housekeeper – was transferred from the Czechoslovak to the German embassy. In 1943 Medřický had to leave the embassy, probably because he was not politically reliable; among his compatriots he was considered a protector of the Czech minority in Hungary. Zíma continued to work at the embassy, probably because he was able to operate the building's complex heating system. Otherwise, the Germans did not pay any attention to him - his name did not even appear in the reports they regularly sent to Berlin.

Emanuel Zíma (19 December 1881, Příbram - 8 April 1963, Prague) moved to Budapest with his wife in 1908, after which they had two children:  sons Josef and Ede. After various jobs as a confectioner or baker, Emanuel worked at the embassy from 1928 as a housekeeper and maintenance man - heating the former palace of Count Zichy, changing light bulbs, installing shelves and probably even dusting the bust of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk that stood at the embassy at the time.

After the Germans seized the embassy, Zíma fell ill during the winter and was treated in hospital by a Jewish doctor, Mária Flamm. He gratefully offered that she could turn to him if he needed help. Flamm took advantage of his offer in the summer of 1944, because after Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, until then relatively protected by Horthy's government, began at a massive scale. Mrs. Flamm, her brother Sándor and his wife came to see Zíma, who decided to hide them in the boiler cellar he knew so well. When Zima brought them to the building in the middle of the night, they were frightened by the swastika sign hanging from it. One of them reportedly said, "Why did you do this to me? I trusted you so much!" But Zima assured them that they would be safe.

Emanuel Zíma gradually "accommodated" a total of 13 people in this way: in June 1944, a part of the apartment space got damaged in an air raid, where Zíma subsequently hid other relatives of the Flamm family - Gábor and Margit Kemény - and in November 1944, he took care of the family of Czechoslovak officer Tibor Rosenthal-Rival, who had escaped from the concentration camp in Kistarca.

Zíma would get up early in the morning to carry supplies to the cellar and scavenge for food after work in a time of general shortages and skyrocketing inflation. He was helped by his son Josef, who also brought food and warm clothes to the cellar and cheered the sheltered with news of the end of the war.

When the Soviet troops approached the town, the administration ordered the evacuation of all the employees, but Zima managed to stay thanks to the argument that he had to take care of his sick wife. There was heavy fighting on the streets of Budapest, and even after the arrival of the Red Army, it was not clear whether the part of the city where the embassy was located would be retaken by the Germans. Therefore, Zíma did not allow those in hiding to leave the place, and once even discouraged fleeing German soldiers from hiding in the building, explaining that it was not a safe hiding place. During this period, Aron Grünhut with his wife a well Hillel Kornfeld, whose previous hiding place had become unsafe after a search by the Hungarian secret police, also joined the hiding group.  

It was Aron Grünhut who was instrumental in remembering the deeds of the Zímas, when in 1969, he asked other rescued people to write testimonies attesting to the heroism of the Zíma father and son. Based on these testimonies, Yad Vashem awarded Emanuel and Josef Zíma the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1971, and a year later a ceremony was held in Israel where a tree was planted in their honor in the Avenue of the Righteous. Gábor and Margit Kemény and Hillel Kornfeld attended, but unfortunately the news about their reward did not reach the Zímas. Meanwhile, Emanuel Zíma moved to Prague in the 1950s and his son Josef took care of him until his death. Despite Yad Vashem's efforts to contact the honourees, the news never reached the Iron Curtain-encircled Czechoslovakia, and neither Emanuel nor Josef themselves ever mentioned what they had accomplished. Josef had no children and cut off contact with the Hungarian branch of the family, who only learned of their relatives' heroism when they received a call in 2014 from Slovak investigative journalist Martin Mózer, who discovered their story.

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 Tree planting in the Avenue of the Righteous in honour of the Zimas

 

Mózer was interested in Winton's children from Jewish families in Bratislava and found out that the father of one of them - Benny Grünhut – was saved by Zíma. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the descendants of the now deceased Emanuel, Mózer managed to contact his great-grandchildren Ildikó and Miklós, who lived in Budapest.

Since 2015, Emanuel and Josef Zima have had a commemorative plaque on the facade of the embassy, and in 2016 their names were carved on the "Truth of the World" memorial plaque in the garden of the Dohány utca Synagogue, where the names of all the Budapestian people who saved lives during World War II are displayed. In 2018, Emmanuel’s relatives took part in a ceremony associated with the opening of a modest https://www.mzv.cz/budapest/en/news/archiv_2018/

opening_of_the_permanent_exhibition_of.html

located in the basement of the embassy. The permanent exhibition is available by appointment to anyone who is intrigued by the Zímas' story.   

You can also learn more about Emanuel and Josef Zímas in the following media and videos:

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txktAwP8Clo

https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10316155327-horizont-ct24/218411058050717/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIasCWePXKM

https://www.mzv.cz/public/4d/e5/d5/2955804_1987065_pod_nohama.pdf

 

5. Trough Budapest to the Balkans

We are adding a chapter that did not take place in the building but is worth mentioning and illustrates the picture of wartime Budapest.

After the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany, an escape route was closed to Czechs who wanted to get out of the Protectorate and had previously used the safer "northern route" through Poland. In the period between the start of the war and the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, Czechs therefore chose to travel through Slovakia, where they had good contacts, through Hungary, which was the most stressful stage due to the language barrier and the country's position towards refugees, into Yugoslavia, which supported the fleeing Czechs with similar enthusiasm as Hungary supported Poles. Those leaving were mainly individuals who joined the Czechoslovak army in exile.

We have information about the fate of these refugees from the Hungarian Consulate General in Prague and from documents from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, which had very detailed information about the refugees. Because of the general mistrust, the Hungarian authorities had orders to imprison the Czechs during the war. Those who did not have passports were locked up for a maximum of two weeks, and after their imprisonment they were expelled from Hungary. If someone had suspicious documents, their departure from Hungary had to be delayed in order to investigate the origin of the documents, followed by deportation, usually to Slovakia, sometimes to Germany. The Hungarian government wanted to avoid political problems and therefore did not deport Czechs to Yugoslavia. Hungarian soldiers at the border told their prisoners that they could be shot if they tried to cross the border again, but despite this, deported refugees often tried for a second time, and thanks to their previous experience, they mostly succeeded.

Refugees travelled by car or train, with the generous help of the French Embassy, which sent assistants to the station, helped buy train tickets, or paid local people for their help. The Hungarian Ministry of the Interior knew about the role of the French Embassy and warned it that it had to stop issuing passports to Czech exiles.

The detained Czechs were in various locations in Budapest. The most common place was Toloncház near the eastern (Keleti) station. It was originally set up in the 1880s for 1,800 people. In 1939, 1940 and 1941 Toloncház had 19,038, 20,662 and 24,469 prisoners per year. Some Czech exiles were held in the Maria Theresa military barracks and the Citadel.

Foreign diplomats often asked about Czech refugees in Hungary - there was a lot of political pressure to release or expel them. Hungary therefore faced double pressure: while Western countries demanded release, Germany pressured the Hungarian government to expel the Czechs and Poles back to their occupied countries. Among the prisoners was, for example, Bruno Sklenovský, an officer in the First Republic army, whose release was demanded by the Czechoslovak military attaché in Paris, the British embassy and the Holy See nunciature in Budapest. At the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Hungarian Ministry of Defence issued a report with the names of 117 Czech internees and a detailed description of their living conditions, including their diet.

An important figure was the American pastor Robert C. Dexter, who had good relations with both sides and connections with American newspapers that were dangerous for the Hungarian side. Therefore, after official visits to the Citadel in the spring of 1940, the Hungarian government released most of the Czechs - just in time to prevent journalists like Donald A. Lowrie, Dexter's colleague, from seeing the conditions in which the refugees had to live.

 

6. From Czechoslovak to Czech: What Came Next

At the turn of 1944 and 1945, during the fighting in Budapest, the building suffered considerable damage; for example, the wing of the building that housed the living quarters was damaged in an air raid.

In 1945, negotiations were held for the return of the building to the Czechoslovak Republic and after the necessary modifications the palace began to serve again as the Czechoslovak embassy. In the following years, the embassy moved to the building on Stefánia út 22-24, and the Embassy's Economy section remained in the palace on Rózsa utca. After the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the palace went to the Czech Republic and Slovakia acquired the building in Stefánia út. Between 1995 and 1997 the palace underwent extensive renovation, largely based on the original plans.

The first ambassador of the Czech Republic from 1994 to 1998 was Richard Pražák (1931-2010), a prominent Hungarist and historian. Since 1968 he was the head of the Cabinet of Balkan and Hungarian Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. During his tenure at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Hungary, he was awarded the honorary title of Dr.h.c. at the University of Miskolc in 1996 and the Lotz Medal, the highest scientific award in Hungarian studies, which he received at the World Congress of Hungarian Studies in Rome. He wrote many publications on Czech-Hungarian history, cultural relations, Hungarian studies and Hungarian studies.

The following ambassadors were Rudolf Jindrák (1998-2002), Hana Hubáčková (2002-2006), Jaromír Plíšek (2006-2010), Helena Bambasová (2010-2019), Juraj Chmiel (2014-2019), Tibor Bial (2019-2023) and currently Eva Dvořáková since 2023 .

Michal Černý was chargé d'affaires in Budapest in 1993-1994, worked in the office of President Václav Havel and later returned to Budapest as director of the Czech Centre (until 2015).

In 2019, the more than 100-year-old building received the FN Nano photocatalytic coating from Czech company Advanced Materials JTJ, which chemically breaks down emissions, including greenhouse gases. The building, which has seen so much, is therefore ready to face the challenges of the 21st century with its "nano-wall".

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 The building of the Czech Embassy and the Czech Centre on the corner of Rózsa utca and Szegfű utca (note: rózsa means rose, szegfű gillyflower)

We would like to thank historians Jan Němeček, Daniel Miklós and Lukáš Kopecký, who enriched this text with factual information and led us on the trail of forgotten people and their stories, which are ours too.  

 

Sources of the text and photographs:

Cseh, G. (2012, December 21). Csehország Magyarországon - cseh nagykövetség, Cseh Centrum AZ Egykori Zichy-Palotában. Csehország, nem csak Prága! Available at: 

https://nemcsakpraga.blogspot.com/2012/12/csehorszag-magyarorszagon-cseh.html

Flajšman, M. (n.d.). Mjr. RNDr. Josef JEDLIČKA - the forgotten history of Czechoslovak meteorology and the national liberation movement during the First and Second World War. Contributions. Available at: 

https://www.vojzesl.cz/prispevky.php?a=Jedlicka_do_knihy_II.html

Matyášová, J. (2016, březen). Emanuel Zima, domovník v Budapešti, který zachránil Židy. Lidovky.cz. Available at:

https://www.lidovky.cz/relax/lide/pohnute-osudy-emanuel-zima-

domovnik-v-budapesti-ktery-zachranil-zidy.A160306_165242_lide_ELE?setver=touch

Miklós, D. (2016). Czech refugees in the papers of the National Archives of Hungary. Central European Papers, 4(2), 38-52. Available at: 

https://doi.org/10.25142/cep.2016.013

Němeček, Jan. (2008). The Twilight and the Establishment of Czechoslovak Diplomacy: 15 March 1939 and Czechoslovak Embassies. Academia.

Soukupová, J. (2017, August 13). He wrote, ran companies, helped the resistance. Václav Havel's grandfather was destroyed by the communists. iDNES.cz. Available at: 

https://www.idnes.cz/brno/zpravy/hugo-vavrecka-deda-

vaclava-havla.A170809_344171_brno-zpravy_krut

Tasnadi, Z. (2019, January). Count Jenő Zichy and the Caucasian "cradle" of magyardom. Museum of Ethnography. Available at: 

https://www.neprajz.hu/en/gyujtemenyek/artefact-of-the-month/2019_1_

count-jeno-zichy-and-the-caucasian-%E2%80%9Ccradle%E2%80%9D-of-magyardom.html

Valkay, Z. Zentai Városháza. Zenta. Available at: http://www.zenta-senta.co.rs/hu/1/p/243

Wlachovský, Karol. (2008, květen). Aktuálný odkaz Antona Straku 1893-1944. Oslovma. Přístupné na:

http://www.oslovma.hu/index.php/sk/historia/

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Zudová-Lešková Zlatica. (2011). Zapomenutá Elita: Českoslovenští Vojenští diplomaté v Letech 1938-1945. Mladá fronta.

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We also drew on investigative work done for the Czech Embassy by journalist Martin Mózer to find information about the Zíma family and on the following profiles of MFA staff, which we have shortened and edited for the purpose of this text: 

https://www.mzv.cz/jnp/cz/o_ministerstvu/organizacni_struktura/utvary

_mzv/specializovany_archiv_mzv/kdo_byl_kdo/augenthaler_zdenek.html

https://www.mzv.cz/jnp/cz/o_ministerstvu/organizacni_struktura

/utvary_mzv/specializovany_archiv_mzv/kdo_byl_kdo/kobr_milos.html

https://www.mzv.cz/jnp/cz/o_ministerstvu/organizacni_

struktura/utvary_mzv/specializovany_archiv_mzv/kdo_byl_kdo/vavrecka_hugo.html)

 

 

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