Loran Smith: Bezecny family tells story of freedom

NORTH PALM BEACH, Fla. | A party with sustained tinkling of glasses and unrestrained conversation, laced with humor and levity, was taking place in an upscale residence near the Seminole golf club, the kind of social atmosphere you might have found in Klatovy, a village near Prague, in the 1930s.

In those pre-World War II days, Dagmar Bezecny was a single, pretty and athletic young girl who was an expert at skiing, the popular national sport of the Czech Republic. While this recent party was seguing into a hospitable and engaging dinner, Dagmar was recalling how it once was in her home country and was explaining that it vanished in a flash.

Her good life – she was the daughter of a distinguished Czech general – not only was taken from her, so were her parents. She was fortunate in that she escaped the Nazis. Then the Communists took over, casting a long and heavy shadow. She wanted out.

At age 17, she miraculously skied down a mine-infested mountain into the American zone; she was free – but her parents later paid the ultimate price. They were executed.

When Dagmar Bezecny began her trek on a bitterly cold night, she knew the perils she faced, but did not consider that she would never see her parents again.

Her mother and father were prominent Czechs who had an enduring distaste for the Nazis and resisted the Communists, who were quick to inflict retribution on her family. Her sister, a concert pianist, was so brutally beaten that her fingers became deformed and crippled, taking her talent with them.

Recalling those days has always been tough for Dagmar as her life, since escaping to freedom, has been bittersweet. She knows the joys of the good life she has found in America – “Such a marvelous place where you can do anything you want to if you take advantage of opportunity,” she says – but regrets losing her family, to the extent that she cannot talk about her journey without her emotions causing her to tear up.

“You try to block it out of your mind, but you can’t,” she said in the company of her doting son, George Bezecny, who was a star tennis player for the University of Georgia and is now a teaching professional in south Florida.

“I have watched my mother closely over the years and have seen the hurt,” George says. “She would not talk about her past because of the pain she had to endure.”

“The atrocities were so widespread,” Dagmar said. Near Prague, the Nazis massacred an entire village, including 82 children, as punishment for the Czech Resistance’s assassination of one of Hitler’s favorite generals, Reinhard Heydrich, considered the architect of the Holocaust.

“The Nazis took our house and made it their headquarters when I was 6 years old. They abolished the Czech language. It was humiliating,” Dagmar said.

Her message is that no society can insulate itself from such tyranny.

“We never thought our lives, which were so pleasant, would evolve into such nightmares,” she said. “Americans should never take for granted what they have.”

George Bezecny Sr., her husband-to-be, was kicked out of medical school because he would not join the Communist Party. With forged papers, steel nerves and unflinching audacity, he clandestinely made his way to the United States, but found that his credentials were such that he was refused admission to any medical school. He wrote universities all over the country asking for an opportunity to pursue his dream.

Fate often has peculiar twists. A professor at the University of Alabama answered his letter in Czech. Talk about serendipity! That connection allowed George to become a dentist, which was his longtime goal.

“That is why I tell you,” Dagmar smiled, “that America is so great.”

When Dagmar finally arrived in the United States, she went to see relatives in Chicago, later earned a journalism degree at Northwestern, and met George Sr. at a wedding. A romance began and they soon found work in south Florida where they have made their home, raising a fine son, who truly is a gentleman and a scholar. You hear all the distasteful stories about immigration, and I worry about uncontrolled borders for our nation’s future, but for all those we link with understandable contempt, we need to remember that the countless Bezecnys of the past are among those who helped make America great.

Loran Smith is a contributing columnist to the Athens Banner-Herald.