Michael Munk

Crangle: Please start by stating your name and your place and date of birth.
MUNK: I’m Michael Munk, and I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on July 5, 1934.

Crangle: And tell me about the makeup of your household growing up. Were there any siblings?
MUNK: I have one sister who is three years younger than I am, and my mother and father. That was the family.

Crangle: And what did your mother and father do for a living?
MUNK: My mother was the editor of a women’s magazine in Prague, and she was also working with the refugees from Austria and Germany who had come to Prague escaping from fascism in the late 1930s. My father was a director of a chain of department stores called Teta that existed mainly in Germany and Czechoslovakia and central Europe. Previously, he had been director of the Prague International Fair in the late 1920s. He’d had a Rockefeller Grant to come to the United States in the early ’30s, studied at Harvard University, at Chicago, UCLA. And he spent, I think, with my mother, about six months, maybe a whole year in the early 1930s. My parents were also involved in a kind of an intellectual community effort to build a modernistic housing development in Prague, which still exists, called Baba, Bauhaus-type houses, that attracted a variety of artists and writers and intellectuals who were all pretty wealthy and built their own villas, as they were called then.

Crangle: Do you know what motivated them to get involved with this housing project?
MUNK: I think that they considered themselves interested in modern culture. They liked modern furniture and paintings and associated with artists and writers, and through my mother’s connections at the women’s magazine and my father’s connection with academics — he also taught some courses in economics at private schools in Prague at the time. So it was a kind of a milieu that they operated in and in which I grew up.

Crangle: How did your parents meet each other?
MUNK: They were both residents of the town of Kutná Hora, which is about 50 miles east of Prague. My father’s family ran a haberdashery store on the main street of Kutna Hora, and my mother was the daughter of the director of an agricultural school in the town. She had a very large family, six sisters and one brother. They met as residents of this relatively small city and got married in 1925, I believe, when they were both in — my father was born in 1901 and my mother was born in 1902.

Crangle: So they were in their early to mid-20s at the time they got married.
MUNK: Right. And when they were growing up they were both involved in the Ethical Culture movement, which was kind of a secular youth movement that engaged in hikes in nature and so on, and was considered a very progressive group of people. My mother was born in the Catholic Church, but when Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, her father took the entire family out of the church as a protest against Austria-Hungary’s — it was the established religion under Austria-Hungary, and when Czechoslovakia became a secular republic, many people left the Catholic church. My father grew up — this is something that I learnt much later — in the Jewish community of Kutna Hora, and his father was actually the treasurer of the Jewish community. It’s interesting that on their marriage certificate they each put down, where there was a place for religion, “no religion.” They were able to do that because my father, shortly before he got married, formally resigned from the Jewish community of Kutna Hora. And of course, my mother had been taken out, not against her will, of the Catholic Church when she was, I think, a teenager.

Crangle: So they both identified as non-religious then.
MUNK: Exactly.

Crangle: That’s interesting. And you mentioned your parents spent some time in the US as well.
MUNK: As I said, my father got a Rockefeller Scholarship, I think in 1930 or ’31. I believe it was a whole year that they spent travelling, Cambridge and Chicago and Los Angeles. They also spent time in Houston because two of my mother’s sisters had already married Americans and had come to the United States. They both married professors at Rice Institute in Houston, and that’s where they were living, so my parents spent time with them in Texas.

Crangle: They must have had fairly good English skills then.
MUNK: Yes, they all knew German, English, French. And my father always claimed he knew nine other languages. I’m not sure how well he knew them, but he made a big thing of his facility with foreign languages. My mother had a less-perfect grasp of those languages. But nevertheless, they got along in English and French and, of course, German, which was like the normal second language in Prague, especially among the Jewish community, which in Czechoslovakia was pretty well divided between German-speaking Jews and Czech-speaking Jews. It was an ideological and not just a linguistic schism. And it was kind of important in the city of Prague, in the other major cities as well, but it was less sharp in communities like Kutna Hora.

Crangle: That’s interesting. Tell me a bit about your early childhood in Prague. Do you have any memories of living there?
MUNK: I have some, as much as a five-year-old would. I was speaking Czech, and my memories are that of a child. I remember going downtown with my mother on the streetcars and eating hotdogs on the town square. I remember family gatherings. Both of my grandmothers were still alive — they were alive well into their 90s — as well as this large contingent of aunts that were my mother’s siblings. I remember living in this Bauhaus thing, and I took an interest in the house for some reason. I remember driving around with my father in his Skoda. He told me to use the turn signals. There was a thing on the dash that you turned for left or right, and this arm would pop up on the side of the car. So these are kind of childhood memories. I remember my sister got an ear infection that was quite serious at some point. I remember that for some reason I was already interested in the United States, and I remember trying to figure out the difference between what time it was in Prague and what time it was in the United States.

I had a full-time nurse, and we had a full-time cook and housekeeper. I remember them very well because, with my parents both working outside of the home, I spent a lot of time with the servants. But I suppose that my strongest memories from Prague were the Nazi invasion. I really did not follow the Munich thing very well, but I think [there was] the sense that there was some kind of big happening out there in the real world. Until March 15, 1939 [the date of the Nazi takeover]. I remember specifically listening to the radio, and the radio announcer kept repeating over and over again that the trains were not running. The trains had stopped running. Of all the things that caught my attention, it was the damn trains. That just grabbed me, and I have that memory through today.

Later on, I remember an open car passing by our house filled with Nazi officers, and I instinctively was repelled by that. And my parents tell me this, although I don’t remember it, that when we were preparing to move, to get out of there, I was protesting that Hitler had stolen my bicycle. I don’t remember saying that, but my parents both do.

Crangle: Did you lose a bicycle around that time?
MUNK: I don’t even remember that I had a bike, maybe a tricycle.

Crangle: Do you remember your parents talking about the Nazi invasion?
MUNK: Actually, no. That’s why I felt sort of out of it. I felt that there was something happening. But until much later, when I decided, for myself, to understand better what was going on in their minds, by talking to them, and most importantly, by reading the letters that my mother was sending to her sister, who was one of those who married Americans and by 1939 had moved to Portland where her husband was a chemistry professor at Reed — this is Vera Scott that I’m talking about.

And the letters that my mother wrote, I did not see until after my father died. I found an envelope which was headed “escape letters,” and they were all the letters that both of my parents had sent to my aunt and uncle in Portland relating to what was going on, from Munich on. Arthur Scott, the husband of my mother’s sister, visited Prague around the time of the Munich negotiations, and he had already at that time advised my parents to get out of there when it was just normally possible to get up and leave. “Take all your money and whatever,” and so on. These letters reveal what was actually going on in their minds much more specifically and dramatically than they ever said, or that my father wrote. He wrote an autobiography about this, and so there is a sort of official narrative of all of that time, but when you compare that with what was revealed in the letters, there was so much more to it. This is what I go into in great detail in that “essay” that I wrote to my sister.

Crangle: Could you summarize the main reasons your parents chose to leave?
MUNK: The thing that impresses me is the reasons that my father gave for not leaving after Munich. These are laid out in — to me, it’s completely befuddling; I’m baffled by this. He presents himself, and I think there’s good evidence for it, of being very informed about the state of international affairs. Of course, that’s the subject that he taught here at Reed College and at other places around the country in his academic career. He says, for example, that he was sent to England by President Benes [president of Czechoslovakia] as sort of an information gatherer about the views of British aristocracy toward Hitler in the mid-’30s. And he was very active in a political party, the National Socialist Party. Despite its name, it was an anti-Fascist party; it was a party of middle-class liberals. And in that, he says, he participated in all kinds of discussions with political leaders, that he was a friend of Masaryk, the Foreign Minister. He was a friend of Benes. In fact, he visited Benes in Chicago. Benes, of course, fled right after Munich, went to London.

He wrote to my uncle at Reed that, “After Munich everything seems to be normal, so don’t worry about us.” I thought this was incredible bullshit once I learned what was going on. After Benes fled, the country was taken over by a fascist collaborator in a period that historians call the Second Republic. In this, the guy’s name was Hacha, he became president after Benes and implemented all kinds of antisemitic laws preventing Jews from being in the professions, all kinds of stuff like that. There was a fair amount of antisemitism.

My mother wrote to my aunt that in the bars they’re calling, “Jews out!” and “Jews are shit!” Stuff like that. She was very depressed by the fact that after Munich the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia was taken over by Germany. Anschluss. And at the border there were all kinds of refugees trying to get into what was left of Czechoslovakia. They were prevented from entering by border guards in the middle of winter under terrible conditions. Since she was working, as I said, providing help for refugees, this was something that was acutely important for her views.

And to form the difference between my mother’s perception of what was going on and my father’s. Father said, “Everything is fine.” My mother said, “Everything is terrible. We’ve got to get out.” She mentioned, for example, that the Nuremburg laws would prevent her children, me and my sister, from attending school, higher education at least. Because we were, under the Nuremburg Laws, considered half-Jews. So it was very, very clear that the fact of my father’s being Jewish was a central point in my mother’s perception, but my father never mentioned it in any of the discussions, and I always remain puzzled by that.

So what were they doing? As it turns out, there were all kinds of things going on. My mother’s friends were urging her to divorce my father, to get out of the Jewish thing. And this was a friend who also had married a Jewish man. It kind of gave you the atmosphere that there was a lot of fear and anxiety going on in Prague that my father chose to ignore. He obviously knew about it, but the fact that he didn’t respond to it in a coherent way — and finally, of course, when the Germans invaded, well then, “Yes, we’ve got to get out, and we’ve got to get out fast.”

So then the letters went back and forth, and fortunately for us, my uncle had become acting president of Reed College at the beginning of the war, or at the beginning of 1940, I think it was. In any case, he was a senior faculty member, and he was able to get Reed to offer my father a kind of a — it was an instructorship, one year and so on and so on. But it was enough, together with — actually, it was a bit of a complex situation. To get a non-quota visa to the United States at that time from Czechoslovakia or from most of Europe, since the quotas were completely backed up, it was years and years. To get a non-quota visa, you had to prove, if you were an academic, that you were a full academic professor for at least two years before your application. Well, my father was not in that category, but he was able to get a private school in Prague to certify that he was. So when we arrived in the United States, the afternoon paper here in Portland had a big article about his arrival. They mentioned that he was an academic. They never mentioned that his job was actually as a businessman in a department store chain.

Crangle: Do you know which newspaper that was in?
MUNK: It was the Oregon Journal, the afternoon paper. When we arrived in ’39, there were two papers, dailies, the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. I have clippings of that front page. I think my parents were in the papers a lot during their time in Portland. But this particular article, of course, does not mention he’s Jewish, and it creates a false — he deliberately created a false picture of Czechoslovakia after Munich. He says in the article, “Until March 15th we were free.” Well, bullshit! They weren’t free [laughs]. And then, “The Nazis came. Now we weren’t free anymore.” I think he had an alternate view of reality that he wanted to present about himself and about Czech history because whenever he spoke about the Czech situation he never mentioned antisemitism, and he wrote books about the Nazis. One of his books, The Legacy of Nazism, was dedicated to his mother. Now his mother escaped. Well, didn’t escape. In the late ’20s, she went to France to live with her daughter, who got married there. And all he says is, “To my mother, lost in the tempest,” but he doesn’t say that she’s Jewish and so on. And “lost in the tempest.” She was living in Nice, France, in the Vichy France part of the country, masquerading as a Catholic. Jesus.

Crangle: I was wondering if we could go back to that decision to leave Prague and talk about how you felt when you became aware that you were going to have to leave, if you remember that at all.
MUNK: I was aware that there was an occupation by bad people and that we — I don’t really remember the details because they didn’t talk about the detail, but I became aware, I would say probably a couple of weeks before we left, that we were leaving, because there was packing going on and stuff like that. I knew nothing about the details of what had been going on; as I say, I got them much later in my life. Now I know what was going on, but at the time I did not know. I just knew we were getting out and that I had the feeling that it wasn’t something to talk about. At least I shouldn’t go blabbing to my friends and the kids I was playing with that we were leaving.

I do have one source of information about what I was doing at the time, and that’s my own cousin, who was the son of one of my mother’s sisters and who we spent a lot of time with because that family lived in Prague. We were apparently close friends. He told me later that nobody knew in the family exactly how and when we were leaving. He says that we had a regularly-scheduled playdate or something, and when he said to his parents, “Today I’m going to go play with Michael,” they said “No, Michael is gone.” And he said, “What? He’s gone?” He didn’t know, and therefore, he wasn’t told. And his parents were people who knew what was happening. Again, I don’t have a specific memory of this, but my father writes that without telling the servants or anyone else, we took a taxi to the train station in Prague and took a train.

The reason that he was able to do that was that, through my mother’s connections with refugees, they became friends with a woman known as Wellington. For some reason she was always referred to as Lady Wellington, but she was a Canadian Quaker who was in Prague, and many people who were writing about this period mention her. She was instrumental in helping people get out. Again, I have no documentation of this, but the official narrative written by my father says that she was able to get Gestapo permissions for us to leave with my parents, ages given as seven and six years old. I don’t know how that can be, but nevertheless that is the accepted version of how we got out. With her help, they got these visas that said that my parents were children.

Now this was not the Kindertransport, as far as I know. That was a highly-organized process in which, I think, she did participate. It was run by the British Quakers. There was a British committee for Czechoslovak refugees — I even have letters from them — that was instrumental in the Kindertransport. Originally it was for children whose parents were already abroad, many of them in the UK, but I believe that it also included other children whose parents were not abroad, whose parents were staying in Czechoslovakia. The rule was that each Kindertransport, which could involve 100 or 200 kids at one time, had to be chaperoned by Czechs who promised to return to Prague after dumping the kids off. If they didn’t return, the Kindertransport would be cancelled. This was the German policy on Kindertransport. I believe that Kindertransport only went to England, although some people said that it went to Scandinavia too. I don’t have any information about that.

In any case, I do remember getting on the train, and I do remember a tense scene at the border. Now my recollection of the train is that it was virtually empty, that there were only a few people and no other children. This is what convinces me that it wasn’t Kindertransport; there were no other kids on the train. There were two German soldiers sitting in the back of it. When we came to the German border, it stopped for inspection. I didn’t witness this, so I can’t vouch for it, but my father writes that he presented these visa permissions to the German border guards, and they seemed to be suspicious and wanted to take it into the office. He says that he somehow intimidated them, saying, “Well, of course. This was issued by the Gestapo. Why don’t you call them?” So they said, “Well, fuck it,” and they went [laughs].

He even arranged, through a friend in, I think, Dresden, to whom he had lent money in the ’30s — and this guy was a Brownshirt Nazi. But he arranged for this guy, I guess because he owed him, to meet him at the platform in Dresden with, I think, some money, and also with a bag of oranges. Apparently, that happened. I didn’t see it, but we did have a bag of oranges to eat on the train. A similar thing happened when the train passed out of Germany and into Holland, but there was no drama there as far as my father writes. My mother writes that she was very nervous all that time through Germany, and that she had hidden a 20-dollar bill behind a frame of a picture that was in the train, but in all the excitement she forgot about it. When we got off the train, she left it [laughs]. Anyway, we went to Hoek van Holland and took it over to Dover and spent a couple of weeks with another aunt of mine who was then in Cambridge with her husband who was teaching there. Then we got a boat trip to New York.

Crangle: Did you come straight to Portland after that?
MUNK: Yes. This I remember very well. I remember the ship, the USS American Merchant. I even have a trunk we took with us still here, with the label of the thing. I even have — I think my sister got the original — the passenger list of the trip. But I remember leaving — where did we leave, Liverpool? Where do the ships go?

Crangle: Liverpool sounds right. [Munk’s later correction: It was Southampton.]
MUNK: I remember leaving the pier there. For some reason my sister reached up and took my hat and threw it into the water. Another one of these childhood memories. And I remember in the ship, waking up in the middle of the night. My parents weren’t there, and I went out to look for them and found them in the movie theater watching a movie. We got to New York, it was towards the end of June, a very hot and humid day, and I spent the day in a hotel bathtub filled with cold water. I’d never experienced weather like that. The next day we took a train via Chicago to Portland, and we arrived at Union Station here on June 30th, 1939. That was five days before my fifth birthday. We lived over on Woodstock, right by Reed College, in a faculty house. Well, first we lived with my aunt and uncle in Eastmoreland.

Crangle: What were your first impressions of the USA?
MUNK: In New York, I was very impressed by the climate [laughs], and I didn’t really see much of it, but I was right in Manhattan. I remember the ship docking on the Hudson side. I remember the Pullman train. We had a layover in Chicago of enough time so that we took a boat ride on Lake Michigan, and I remember that. Arriving in Portland, I remember Union Station; it was the same as it is today. And I remember the Eastmoreland trolley bus. At that time, they had electrical trolley buses on the same line as the Eastmoreland bus runs now, on Woodstock Boulevard. This video that I have from that time shows me getting into the trolley bus and taking it over the Hawthorne Bridge to see a submarine that was anchored on the seawall that day. These were all movies that my father took. And I remember, mainly, the time with my cousins. I had three cousins, the children of Arthur and Vera Scott, all girls. One was a baby, one was a couple of years older than me, and she is now the patriarch of our generation of cousins. The youngest daughter died a few years ago. The middle daughter lives here in Portland.

Crangle: Presumably, you started school. You went to school soon after you arrived?
MUNK: I went to kindergarten and first grade at Duniway School. We were here just two years, and I didn’t know English when I started kindergarten. But I was a kid, and just before Christmas, a few months into the first school year, we were singing “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” and suddenly, just like that, I understood every word. From there on I spoke English more or less, as good as I do now, I think. It was just an instant thing. Up until then, I knew a few words but really didn’t get what we were singing about or what we were talking about. Then at that point I did, and everything fell into place.

Crangle: So how quickly did that take you to pick up English then?
MUNK: It took about two or three months. I think it was sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. School started in September, so it took several months. We were still speaking Czech at home, and I think we continued to speak Czech at home. As it turns out, my [Czech] vocabulary today is about that of a ten-year-old because sometime around the age of ten my parents stopped speaking Czech to us.

Crangle: Do you know why they stopped speaking Czech?
MUNK: I think it was just less trouble. Maybe they wanted to polish up their own. My mother was very concerned with “proper” English, and she studied it hard. She has whole notebooks filled with, particularly pronunciation. She didn’t have trouble with the language, but she was a little bit concerned that she had too thick of an accent and that she made funny errors in English. My father spoke a very precise and kind of stiff and formal English, but it was always grammatically correct. You could tell he was not a native speaker. Since he was lecturing in public all the time, it was a big deal. But yes, I picked it up, and by Christmas I was speaking fluent English among my friends, and at some point I began to — maybe this is what happened. I started to respond to my parents in English. They still talked to me in Czech, and I responded in English, and blah blah blah. But it’s important to remember that our family assumed that we were returning to Prague as soon as it was liberated.

For the context of this, we lived in Portland for two years, then my father got a job at UC Berkeley teaching economics, and we were there for three years during the war itself. In 1944, he got a new job as Director of Training for the UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was set up by Senator Lehman and Fiorello La Guardia to assist with displaced persons and rehabilitation in Europe. Well, it wasn’t just Europe. It was also China. They had their headquarters in Washington, and their training center was in College Park, Maryland. So we lived in College Park, Maryland, for two years toward the end of the war, ’44 to ’46, when UNRRA disbanded a year after the war. That’s the context. Then my father returned to Reed College, and so we came back to Portland in 1947. They lived the rest of their lives here in Portland. I did not. I got drafted in the Army in 1959, and when I got out I went to New York and spent the rest of my adult life mainly in the east.

Crangle: So you came back to Portland, originally, when you were an early teenager. Is that . . .?
MUNK: No, earlier. I came back in 1947. I was 12 years old.

Crangle: And presumably around that time you were starting high school roughly?
MUNK: No, I was in the seventh grade, and I was sent to the private Hillside School for two years, and then I went to Lincoln High School, and then I went to Reed College for four years. Then I went to Eugene for two years, or actually only one year on campus. At that point, I got drafted into the Army, and I got sent to Korea. When I came back from Korea, that’s when I went to New York.

Crangle: You mentioned Lincoln High School. I know there was quite a big Jewish population at Lincoln High School.
MUNK: Yes.

Crangle: Did you have much engagement or interaction with Jewish kids?
MUNK: Sure. At that time, I thought I was not Jewish, but I didn’t have any difficulty relating to Jews as — whether they were Jewish or not did not make a big impression on me. I wasn’t particularly sensitive to that. How could I be? I didn’t know [laughs]. I was more interested in discrimination against Blacks and Asians because at Lincoln there were also, not a huge number, but there were a significant number of Black students. In fact, our senior class selected one of them to be president. So there was a kind of a liberal atmosphere among the kids there. Lincoln at that time was pretty sharply divided by class, and there were the rich kids in the hills and in Oswego, because the Oswego kids came to Lincoln in the 1950s. Well, ’40s.

I started high school in ’48 and graduated in ’52. I was the last class out of the old building, which is now one of the main buildings of PSU, Lincoln Hall. I met Japanese-Americans who were put into the concentration camps, and they talked about it. I was amazed. In fact, I wondered how come nobody told me about this? How come my parents didn’t tell me? We were still in Portland in early ’41. I didn’t know about this roundup of Japanese-Americans in Portland until the victims of it discussed it in class at Lincoln.

Anyway, so there were the rich kids, and there were the people who the rich kids called “flatlanders,” who came from Northwest Portland, working class. It was the school for the East Side, and the East Side was broken up, very sharp class distinctions. But see, in high school nobody thought that I was Jewish. Maybe some of the Jewish students who I hung out with had a suspicion. I remember they asked me, “How come you came here from Prague?”

The myth, the story that my father put out was — yes, this is important. The reason that he says he left was that a few days after the Nazi invasion and occupation, a member of the Czech secret service came to his office at the department store headquarters and said to him — this is all dramatized in my father’s biography — “I am to show you a little paper.” He says that the paper was a Gestapo arrest order for all members of the National Socialist Party’s Economic Advisory Committee, of which he was a member. Now if I think back on this, from what I know, that doesn’t sound right. If there was an arrest order, how come he wasn’t arrested? We stayed another two months in Prague with apparently no effect, so what is this arrest order? It just doesn’t make sense. But it does give him cover for explaining how come he didn’t leave earlier. And that explanation was always out there. This is what I told people when they asked me, “Why did we leave?” In his autobiography, which he wrote after the secret came out, he had to acknowledge that he was Jewish, and he talked a bit about that, but he doesn’t relate it to that original event. But anyway, when people would ask me, “How come you left Prague?” Because of that.

However, that particular answer became much less persuasive to me when I came to Reed College because there were a very significant number of Jewish students there, and a lot of them became close friends of mine. The fact is, they all assumed that I was Jewish, so I had to keep saying, “No, I’m not. I’m not” [laughs]. Finally, that cousin who I mentioned earlier, his name was Ivan Vesely, his family was then living in Switzerland, and he came to Reed as a student. And so, even when I was already in high school — he was a couple of years ahead of me — we hung out on campus together. And so he told friends of his, other Reedies, “Of course, he’s Jewish.” He said, “His father is Jewish” [laughs].

My cousin knew completely the truth about it, but he didn’t tell me this until I’d been at Reed about two or three years. I think I was a junior. I forget the context. One day he said, in a sort of casual, off-hand way, “Your father’s Jewish.” It made an impression on me, but I didn’t make a big deal of it. I didn’t say, “How do you know?” or anything, but I went to my mother a few days later and said, “Ivan says that Dad is Jewish.” My mother said, “Oh, that’s not true at all.” So I went back to my cousin. I said, “My mother says that’s not true at all,” and he just laughed. I had a little suspicion that something was funny.

Then I started to go over in my mind what I knew about my father’s background. I remember that when we lived in Berkeley and I was about ten years old, my mother spent a fair amount of time talking about her family’s background, that they lived in the southern part of the country before they went to Kutna Hora, that her father was involved in academic agriculture and stuff like that. She talked about her sisters and one brother and how they went to Catholic school and went to the Catholic Church and then were taken out, all of this in great detail, and it was fascinating. I remember my sister and I were both fascinated by the story.

Then it occurred to me, “What about our father? What about his background?” I asked my mother. All she said was, “Well, you know, the name Munk is very common in Scandinavia.” I remember this to this day. I said, “Well, okay” [laughs]. So now I got the idea he was Swedish, that that’s what she was trying to tell me. But anyway, I now see it as trying to deflect me from my curiosity and the fact that my father’s background was rarely discussed at all. Now, of course, I’m completely convinced that the reason for it was to keep his being Jewish a secret.

Crangle: So when did you find out for sure that he was Jewish?
MUNK: It was exactly when I was 40 years old, in 1984. It was at a Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house, Vera Scott, the same one. There were mainly family members there, I think about 12 of them. In fact, it started out as a discussion, of all things, about anti-Nazi parades in Portland downtown in the late 1930s or 1940s, something like that. It came up in a very specific context. There was a famous sculptor in Portland at the time. His work is in public parks and so on. Somebody said that he was in this protest, this famous sculptor, Fred Littman. Then somebody else said, “Well, but he’s Jewish, so that’s why he was at this anti-Nazi protest.”

Then my aunt, in a very calm and casual voice, as part of the discussion said, “But Frank, you’re Jewish too.” I said, “Whaaat?” [laughs]. That’s when it happened. It was very specific and very to the point. My aunt, who died at the age of 99 or 100 or something like that, eventually she developed Alzheimer’s, but this was long before that, and I’m sure that it was not a consequence of not understanding that this was a secret. I don’t know what arrangements they all made. In other words, the family knew perfectly well that my father was Jewish, but all conspired to keep this secret from everyone else.

Crangle: Presumably your sister didn’t know either.
MUNK: Oh, no. My sister has a completely different take on all of this. I can explain that later. My sister obviously knew less than I did, was less curious about it, is not really that interested even now. And this is kind of ironic because her oldest son converted to Judaism. He married the niece of Senator Carl Levin from Michigan and so converted in order to have a Jewish marriage, and both their sons had bar mitzvahs that we all attended, at Seattle’s Temple de Hirsch. So the whole thing is kind of crazy [laughs].

Crangle: How did you feel when you found out about your Jewish background?
MUNK: The thing is that it didn’t make me feel Jewish, but it made me angry because I said, “If you can’t trust your parents, who are you going to trust?” I put this to my father later, and he pointed out one interesting point. He said, “You never asked me. You asked your mother.” Well, it’s true. I had no reason. I thought that when my cousin told me, it was enough to ask my mother. I didn’t think that it needed to be confirmed with my father. But he said, in order to defend his position — but I never even went further in asking him the correct follow-up: “If I had asked you, what would you have said?” Because his basic explanation for all of this is that he did not consider himself Jewish. He writes that he was certainly brought up in a Jewish home in a Jewish community in Kutna Hora, but he tends to downplay it to the extent that he denied that he ever had a bar mitzvah.

But I’m telling you — this story of mine is really weird. I was in Kutna Hora in the late ’80s. It was after this revelation. I was actually rehabbing the house that his father had on the town square, this shop, and my wife at the time and I were eating most of our meals at the local hotel across the way. And would you believe it, the night clerk at the hotel was a former classmate of my father’s. He was also, by that time, around 90 years old, and by God he spoke Yiddish, and my wife at the time also spoke Yiddish. The two of them started to talk, and it turned out that he attended my father’s bar mitzvah. So when I got back to Portland the next time, I said, “We met this guy who went to your bar mitzvah” [laughs]. He said, “Oh that, well — yes, I studied some Hebrew with the local rabbi, and I thought, ‘Why not go to this? You get some good presents.’” Forgetting completely that he denied having a bar mitzvah.

There’s another odd element to it. His own mother, my grandmother, came to Portland when she was quite old, I think over 90, because her granddaughter who she had been living with in France still, all this time, was killed in a car accident. So she came to live with my parents up on Council Crest. She lived until 97 or something like that, but when she died my parents took her ashes to a cemetery in Czechoslovakia where her husband was buried. Okay. I knew that happened. But until I made that visit to Czechoslovakia — my uncle told me that was a Jewish cemetery. Now I believe this happened before the revelation. So again, they went to some trouble to do this ritual business. And so I dutifully went to the cemetery and saw her tomb and that of my grandfather, and I put the stones down and so on and so on.

And I wondered, “Well, this is all stuff that I hadn’t known about. It was all kept secret.” And it seemed to me that it was quite an elaborate effort because I was — I do remember that my father also said to me he was suspicious of my interest in that. He didn’t get that it was not so much about being Jewish as about being lied to. He even suggested that my interest in, he called it my “obsession” with this issue, was because I was pro-Israel. I told him, “Come on, I’m anti. I’m pro-Palestinian. I have proposed that Israel be moved to Nassau and Suffolk Counties, New York.” That’s what my position on Israel was. So — God knows.

Crangle: Did you manage to get him to open up about his Jewish background any more and talk to you?
MUNK: I’ll tell you, I was looking at my notes last night, and it turns out that he was always very reluctant to get into it. Once the secret was out, he would tell me things like he didn’t consider himself Jewish. He went into a long historical discussion about this schism between the German Jews, who were self-consciously Jewish, and the Czech Jews, who were self-consciously Czech, and that he considered himself very much in the Czech tradition. He considered himself a Czech.

He was disparaging of the Orthodox Jews that had been refugees in Kutna Hora during World War I. And he remembers that his mother was taking care of these, what he called “smelly and quarrelsome, with the beards and the kaftans and all of that stuff” that had come. He thought that was not a good representation of being Jewish. Even the observant German-speaking Jews in Prague were “not real Czechs.” It’s exactly that strain of Czech nationalism that provided the basis for Czech antisemitism, that Czech Jews were not considered Czech because of the German part of it. Then, of course, the invasion and so on, there was all this stuff mixed up in it, the anti-German thing, the anti-Jewish thing.

These are the kinds of things that I tried to talk to him about, and he would consistently remind me that he came from this Jewish background, but one that was very intensely Czech, and that he believed that his understanding of the Czech community of Jews was that, “We were like the rest of the Czech people; we were not separate.” And I did have some evidence of what he’s talking about. There was another refugee from Prague who came to Portland, Elisabeth Linder, and her husband taught at OHSU.

[Munk’s later note: Elisabeth Linder was a distant relative in the Czech-Jewish Petschek family. She told me that the head of the family, Hans Petschek, rented an entire train to bring all the relatives out of Czechoslovakia in 1938. “The Petschek family constitutes a notable example of the continued prosperity of the Jewish economic elite in Bohemia from the end of the Habsburg era well into the days of the first Czechoslovak republic, despite the political vicissitudes that east Central Europe suffered during the interwar period” (YIVO).]

I got to know her because he was a left-winger in politics, and she told me that she came from a banking family in Prague, that they got out right after Munich, and that the family was so huge that they had a special train that took them out of Prague. I think she went to Switzerland first and then eventually ended up in Portland. Her cousin showed me a Prague newspaper that headlined her family’s leaving as proof that they were Jewish, that the Jews were not Czech, and that was the headline. This was a famous family. Their banking headquarters, “Petschek Palace,” became the Gestapo headquarters in Prague. My uncle, who was in the resistance, actually fought a battle with the Gestapo troops in there during the liberation of Prague in ’45.

Crangle: So did you ever find out why both your parents wanted to keep this a secret when they got to Portland, the fact that he was from a Jewish background?
MUNK: I’ve already suggested one theme. One thread of that speculation is that they believed that there was antisemitism. They once told me — they had a very close friend in Portland, a doctor by the name of Al Levy. His wife was German and not Jewish, and they had — again I’m not 100 percent sure the story is true — they said that they had arranged to go down with them to Neahkahnie on the coast, and that the Levys were refused the room because they didn’t allow Jews in that hotel. Now the reason I’m a little suspicious of that is that I found a photograph of the Levys leaving the hotel room as if they lived there. But it could’ve been at a different time or something, I don’t know. Anyway, they gave that as an example.

Then as I say, your colleague’s article mentions that even after the war there was antisemitism. And of course, there were Nazi sympathizers in Portland, and I ran across them when I was doing research for my Red Guide. There were marches — the Silver Shirts [Silver Legion of America] had an organized, pro-Nazi — and there were antisemitic leaflets handed around town denouncing Meier and Frank and other Jewish stores, stuff like that. This was all in the late ’30s. If you read the Red Guide, you’ll see that there was a certain amount of anti-fascist opposition, like when the Nazi ship came to Portland — there was a photograph of it in the Red Guide — that the local reds organized protests. But the city welcomed the Nazi crew, and it was a big civic welcome like it was the Rose Festival or something. So you could make the case. But I think his major point was that he did not consider himself Jewish. Anyway, there are all kinds of contradictions there.

Now I had another suspicion, which I only revealed to my sister. My sister married into a Portland stockbroker family, the Regans, and she told me after the secret came out that her husband’s father was antisemitic. That got me to thinking that, when I was in high school and college, my sister was a student at Catlin School, which was at that time a private girls’ school. They had dances, and the girls there relied on the brothers of their classmates for dates to those dances because they’d have to invite them. So there was always this question, “Will you go if this person invites you?” It all had to be arranged. You couldn’t be turned down [laughs]. So my sister would occasionally ask me if I would go with such and so, her friend, or this friend.

And there was no issue at Catlin because they also had Jewish students, but at some point they held a dance at the Waverley Country Club, and it occurred to me that a lot of the people who were going to these dances did not come to that dance. I learned later it’s because they didn’t allow Jews at the Waverley Country Club at that time. So I thought, “Maybe my parents are concerned, since they wanted my sister inserted into the society of Portland, that if her background was known she may have had some problems getting into it. Maybe it’s that point when it became relevant that this was a consideration in keeping it secret too.”

Crangle: Did your parents have any connections to the Portland Jewish community more broadly? You mentioned they had friends.
MUNK: First of all, they became active Unitarians here. They joined the Unitarian church, and my father was a frequent speaker, giving sermons in the Unitarian church. The same thing happened in Berkeley; we also went to the Unitarian church there. And when we lived in College Park, they wanted me to go to a Quaker School, the Sidwell Friends School. I didn’t do it, but that’s what they wanted.

However — and this is one of these delayed-reaction things that I think about — in the papers that my father left, I found a program of one of the synagogues, the Orthodox one in Northwest Portland. Not the big, old one. There was a program at that synagogue welcoming Torahs from Czechoslovakia. After the war, they apparently got all these that the Nazis put into storage in Prague. One of the Torahs was from Kutna Hora, and evidently they invited my father, because they knew he had come from Kutna Hora, to speak at this ceremony welcoming the Torahs. Now I didn’t know about this except I read the program and it had his name on it. So I said, “What is he doing? He’s coming out” [laughs]. But I didn’t know this until he died. It was in these papers that I found when he died. He didn’t tell me this, nobody told me this, but it happened, and it had an effect.

I told my sister, and it was just before one of her grandsons was having a bar mitzvah, so she got her son, the one who had converted, to go to the rabbi here in Portland and ask if he could borrow the Torah for his son’s ceremony. And even though I understood it’s unusual for it to travel like that, they got his permission, and they used it in his bar mitzvah, that same Torah from Kutna Hora. And when my father was bar mitzvah, he got a big atlas, that was one of his big presents, and he kept that atlas for the rest of his life. I thought that when his grandson was having a bar mitzvah it might be a good time to pass it on, so my sister and I presented it to him on the bar mitzvah. There’s even a photograph in the next room of that event. Anyway, among the people who attended it was the uncle of the grandson, who was Senator Levin from Michigan, and at that time still the head of the Military Policy Committee of the Senate. He came, and he was quite taken with the Torah. I remember there were some photographs taken of he and I and the Torah, and then I put it in my car and brought it back to the synagogue in Portland afterwards. But her son was the one who picked it up and brought it to Seattle. This all happened in Seattle. That’s where my sister and her family live. So there was that one incident, again, completely under the wire, not public.

Crangle: Were you ever tempted to try and connect with your Jewish heritage once you found out? Were you ever tempted to get involved with any community organizations?
MUNK: I have connected with Jewish organizations, both before and after I found out. For example, the Jewish Voice for Peace is one that I was involved with. Also, there’s a family here — Helen Gordon, she and her husband used to run the Jewish Community Center downtown before it moved out. Their son runs a school in Israel for both Palestinians and Israelis. I was helping them on that. But again, not because I feel Jewish but because I’m an activist about politics, and I think the Palestinians are getting screwed by the Israelis. I could go on against Netanyahu and the far right that has, I think, hijacked Israel. It’s turned it into a really aggressive, warmongering place, and I’m certainly not a fan of its policies. I’m an active enemy of its policies. So if I identify as being partly Jewish, I identify with that part of the Jewish community that has similar views and that identifies also with the progressive left in Israel.

Crangle: Do you think it has affected your sense of identity, finding out about your Jewish heritage? Especially in light of your quite narrow escape from Nazism.
MUNK: It certainly made a difference in my perception of myself. In other words, I think that there are much more important things about my persona that seem to me to be much more critical than that aspect of it. I’ve always been secular. I’ve never had any attachment to any religion. In fact, kind of an activist against the evil consequences of religious ideology. But the ethnic part, I’ll tell you that, in terms of my reaction to cultural, I think I’m probably much more sensitive to how Jewish culture and folkways are depicted in things like movies and plays, stuff like that. For example, I was really taken with this series that I’ve sometimes watched on cable, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It just won an Oscar, this series, and it’s about a Jewish family in New York in the ’50s. I very much identified with the precision with which that historic community was depicted. I first came to New York in the late ’50s, and I recognized so much of it from there. But again, when I was living in New York, I did not consider myself Jewish, though I was certainly comfortable and familiar with the culture, the Jewish influence on the culture of the city.

Crangle: What was it that brought you to New York in the first place?
MUNK: I came to New York, first of all, because I had a wife who was living in New York while I was in Korea with the Army. So I came back to be with my wife, and I thought it was a good time, since I’d finally got free of the military, to get into left-wing politics. I was able to get some work in, I think, a farmworkers’ organization first, and then later I went into left-wing journalism at the National Guardian. And I got involved with the group around Monthly Review and then just stayed there. Then at some point I decided that the academic scene was now more amenable for radicals than it was before I went into the Army, and so I went back into academics, and really that was what I did for the rest of my life until I retired.

Crangle: You mentioned your wife spoke Yiddish as well. Was she from a Jewish background?
MUNK: Yes. That was Marion Weiss, or Marion Engelmann. Her father was a Jewish chicken farmer in New Jersey who had come from Poland originally and worked in a brush factory on the Lower East Side and then after the war got into the chicken farming business. That’s why she spoke Yiddish, because her father and mother spoke Yiddish, from eastern Poland. They came in the ’20s or early ’30s, I forget when. Yes, that was one [wife]. I had several wives, but the one I’m talking about now was not her. She [Marion] was the only Jewish wife I ever had. Is that right? [Munk’s later correction: My second Jewish wife was converted before we married. She was observant, and we had a Jewish wedding.]

Crangle: And do you have any children?
MUNK: No. I’ve had five wives but no children.

Crangle: Five wives and no children. Sounds a like an interesting life. So when did you come back to Portland?
MUNK: When I retired in the mid ’90s. ’96, ’97, something like that.

Crangle: What brought you back?
MUNK: Retirement. I was then teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and I kind of felt burned out in the academic business. I was able to negotiate an early retirement deal because they were trying to get rid of the more senior faculty. But the reason I came back here is that I realized, for the first time in my life, I could choose a place to live rather than being dependent on where I could find work. I didn’t come to any conclusion, but I started to have serial dreams about the Oregon coast, and that’s why I came back here.

Crangle: Did you have any family still living?
MUNK: Sure. My parents were still alive.

Crangle: Okay.
MUNK: They were almost 90 at that time, but they both lived to be 97. My father died in 1999, and my mother died in 2000, so I was here 12 years while they were still alive.

Crangle: You were talking a bit before we started recording about getting reparations for the experience you had. Can you tell me about how that came about?
MUNK: I think I just read about the program in the newspapers and sent in my credentials and got a check.

Crangle: When was this roughly?
MUNK: I have the record somewhere there, but I think it was ten years ago.

Crangle: Was that something that you applied for on principle?
MUNK: Yes, you bet. It’s the German government, right? And I thought, “Those fuckers, they owe me. They displaced me.” I didn’t go to the camps, but they displaced me from my home, and they stole my bike and all that stuff. Yes. I was pissed. My motivation was, “Compensate me. Give me reparations.” And I don’t remember that there was any place on the form where you had to give the religious or ethnic background of your mother. So I thought it was curious that — what was her name? I still have it.

[Munk goes in search of an article.]

MUNK: She wrote this, I thought, a good piece about reparations in general [Michael is referring to an article written by April Slabosheski in Oregon Humanities, Spring, 2018, p. 26 “a non-Jewish mother was grounds for denial of reparations”]. There was only this one brief comment about reparations for Holocaust survivors.

Crangle: And she stated that you could only get reparations if your mother was Jewish?
MUNK: Yes.

Crangle: Whereas you obviously didn’t have that experience.
MUNK: Yes, but I don’t remember it being in the application. You had to specify, in my case that my father had lost things like bank accounts, insurance policies. For example, when he left Prague the department store company gave him a golden parachute. I’m not sure how they paid him or whatever it was, but it was considered — first of all, the company was Jewish and all of its directors were being replaced by non-Jews. And again, I found this in my father’s files. About a year later, after we came here, a friend of his in New York sent him a clipping from a Nazi newspaper in Prague which said that the arrangements between the Teta department store and Frank Munk are hereby declared null and void.

Not only that, but another aspect of this was that he tried to transfer ownership of that house in Prague to my mother before we left. That was also declared null and void, and the property was taken over as Jewish property by the Nazis. The same thing happened to my grandmother’s house in Kutna Hora; they also took that over. And I remember specifically, my father, when he was working for UNRRA, he also was working in Europe, both in Vienna and Prague. He was the economic advisor to the UNRRA mission to Prague and to Czechoslovakia, the two together. So he was able to go to Prague and, in fact, stay in our house, his former house.

I asked him what that was about, and he said that one of the first declarations of the Czech government that came back from London in 1945 on liberation was to declare all real estate transactions of Jewish property null and void. So everything reverted automatically to what it was before there was any action taken to confiscate Jewish property, regardless of what that meant for the consequences. In many cases, the people who owned the property were dead, but they had family and so on, some of them. I don’t really know what the full consequences of that decree were, but it was so clear and definitive, and it was done at the initiative of the Czech Communist Party.

Crangle: That’s interesting.
MUNK: At the end of the war, the Czech government, the Benes government, held a conference way in the east of Czechoslovakia, which had already been liberated by the Red Army. They held a conference there about the postwar politics of Czechoslovakia, and they decided that only non-collaborators would be allowed to participate in postwar politics, and that that they would be organized by only four political parties because the other ones were discredited as being collaborators, not only with the Nazis under the protectorate, but that Second Republic business after Munich. Those were the Peasant Party, the National Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Socialist Party. Only those four parties. And in the first free elections that were held the following year, the Communists won. So according to the parliamentary system, the head of the Communist Party became the prime minister, and the other parties were members of the cabinet. That’s how that kind of influence occurred.

But I have the real estate documents for the Kutna Hora house because in 1988 the house became mine. My father passed it on to my sister and I. My sister didn’t want any part of it, so it became mine and I eventually sold it. So I had to look at the documents then, and they had the swastika stamp on it, being confiscated, and then they had the Czech symbol, coat of arms, nullifying that.

Crangle: How many times have you visited Czechoslovakia, or the Czech Republic, since you left?
MUNK: I first went back in the ’60s, and I went back maybe four times. Then, after the restoration of capitalism, I went back once. But I went back for various reasons. At one time I had a wife who was a potter, a ceramicist, who went for a workshop in ceramics there. Other times, it was to fix up that old house. I was there on the anniversary of the Russian invasion, the first anniversary, 1969, so I was there in a big protest [laughs]. It was interesting because I had just been at a big protest at the Pentagon against the Vietnam War and got tear-gassed there. So I went to Prague to protest the Russians, and I got tear-gassed there too [both laugh].

Crangle: Did you feel a connection with that country at all?
MUNK: Sure. I felt at home in Prague. And the fact that I could get along on the streets — my vocabulary is like a ten year old, but I could ask for directions, I could order food. I couldn’t have any serious discussions with anybody, but I could get along. And it felt familiar. Even though I didn’t understand the language, I got its rhythms and I got the intonations. It just sounded familiar. And the food was familiar, and those hotdogs were still down there at the main drag in the middle of Prague, yes. And the streetcars were still there. And I would stay in places that my parents knew, really interesting places like a villa right underneath the Prague Castle, right off the steps. And my uncle had a nice place in town that I would stay at. And I had the cousins there. Yes, it was a familiar kind of thing.

Of course, at that time all of my family — well, not all. One of my aunts was a communist before the war and married a fairly high-ranking communist after the war. They were both in exile in England during that time. I visited them, and they had my grandmother living with them, so I visited my grandmother. And my uncle, my mother’s only brother, he was also a communist. The rest of the family was anti-communist, including his kids [laughs]. In any case, after the invasion, then everybody was against the communists. The two family members who were in the party quit or were expelled, I forget which. Whatever, they were all expelled.

Crangle: Did your parents ever go back?
MUNK: Sure. They went back a lot, a lot more than I did. I think they went back fairly regularly. And after my father died, my mother even went back for one last time because her brother died. All of my aunts lived into their 90s, either early or late 90s. I think the last one died about five years ago, and she was 99. That was my cousin Ivan’s mother, the one in Switzerland. But my uncle stayed there until he died, and so did the youngest sister, who was the communist. Two of the sisters came to the States, three of them eventually, because my mother too. So three of the daughters came to the States. One of them went to Switzerland, but she stayed in Czechoslovakia during the war and was active in the resistance. Then the two that stayed, one was in England but then came back. So it was an interesting consequence.

And did I tell you that we did intend to go back? This was kind of a big issue. We were living there in Washington DC or College Park, and we had already started to pack for that trip. We had all kinds of special military visas that you had to get. We were crating kitchen appliances, and this whole house was filled with these crates and boxes and so on. We were going back because my father was offered a big job as a director of the chemical industry, which was then nationalized. He was really interested in going back. He had spent time after the war in Prague in the house. He wrote me a letter saying how important it is. I, apparently, was resisting going back by then, even though during most of my time in the States I assumed it was a temporary thing.

Crangle: Do you know why you didn’t go back in the end?
MUNK: Yes. It was explained in my father’s autobiography. I had always assumed we were going back, and so, when we lived in Berkeley especially, I kept telling everybody, “We’re only here until liberation.” I spent an awful lot of time watching the war in the Eastern Front. It was the Red Army that was beating the fascists, and so I was very much interested in that, just where they were, and I kept track of the maps and so on.
But then, when we went to Washington, for some reason I started to not want to go back, and so my father wrote me a letter trying to persuade me that, “It’s really great over here, and there’s all kinds of old German weapons you can play with. Your friends are asking about you” and blah blah blah. Finally, he said, “And it’s our country. It’s a beautiful place and in some ways more progressive than the United States.” I remember these were the ways he was trying to persuade me.

Well, it turns out that one of his colleagues on this international economic commission in Vienna was a Soviet army colonel, and he invited my father to dinner at the Russian officers club in Vienna and had a discussion about postwar Czechoslovakia. He said, “The current plan for a multi-party system,” according to my father’s record of that conversation, “probably will not last forever. Since you’re planning to go back, you should consider joining the Communist Party.” My father claims that’s what scared him off and changed his mind, that he was ready to do it. He, I guess, had a longer-range view of how long the multi-party system would last. And of course, it did last another three or four years, so it’s not — in any case, he says that just at that point he got a letter from Reed asking if he would come back to Reed, so he changed his mind. He wrote us to, “Drop everything. We’re going back to Portland.”

Crangle: That’s a really interesting story, everything you’ve told me. I don’t know if you feel like there’s anything you want to add on top of it?
MUNK: No, I would say it’s really up to you to ask me what might be interesting for you. As you can see, I’ve got an awful lot of stuff in my head.

Crangle: I think that for now we’ve got a lot of interesting material. We might come back to you at some point for sure. I’ll stop here.

END OF INTERVIEW

[Munk’s later addition: I was about nine years old when, during World War II, I was walking with my mother in the Virginia countryside, probably near Mt. Vernon, and we came upon a sign in an open field telling us that a new housing development would be built there when the war was won and promising it would be “for gentiles only.” Without a word, my mother suddenly picked up a big rock with both hands and threw it against the sign, knocking it over. I was amazed and shocked; I had never seen my mother so outraged and physically aggressive. I asked her why she did that. “They’re bad people,” is all she said, and we resumed our walk in silence. I had no idea who or what “gentiles” were, and she never wanted to explain that incident, once even suggesting she didn’t remember it. As an adult, I told her that it had left a huge, lifelong impression on me, especially after learning Dad was Jewish. At her memorial gathering for family members, I told the story as a memory that made me especially proud of her.]