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player ready...Barred by war and politics from a country he helped found, Milan Hodza will be given his third funeral on Monday in a Northwest Side church and then be taken home to Slovakia for the burial he had wished for decades ago.
The former Czechoslovakian prime minister had lain for more than half a century in Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, a modest headstone inscribed in Slovak as his memorial.
Now Hodza, a man who was written out of his country’s history books, is to be brought home and honored. His remains, disinterred last week, will be escorted to Slovakia and reburied, with pomp and circumstance, in the national cemetery.
On Monday dignitaries will sit alongside members of Chicago’s Slovak community in Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church on North La Crosse Avenue to honor Hodza, once eulogized as the “most interesting and picturesque figure in Slovakian history.”
It marks the third time Hodza’s funeral will be handled by John Zidek & Son Funeral Home, which held his wake in 1944, the year of his death, and 1948, when political conditions made it impossible for his body to be returned to Czechoslovakia.
His reburial this month brings an end to the long story of a man whose destiny was shaped by the political tides of the 20th Century.
“He was the Slovak version of George Washington,” said funeral director Ladimir C. Zidek, who was a teenager when his father and grandfather held Hodza’s earlier funerals.
Hodza was one of three men who in 1918 helped the Czechs and Slovaks achieve their thousand-year-old dream of a national homeland. He also saw the country fall victim to Nazi aggression. Hodza, who was the nation’s last independent prime minister, fled Czechoslovakia in 1938 just ahead of Hitler’s invading forces.
After World War II, Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet Union’s sphere of control, and Hodza and other key politicians were forcibly erased from the country’s memory for four decades of communist rule.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the division of Czechoslovakia into two countries four years later, the Slovak government has been revising the schools’ history curriculum, said Viera Viskupova, press secretary for the Slovak Embassy in Washington.
Bookstores and libraries are stocked with new biographies and encyclopedias, and a Slovakian television crew will cover the return of Hodza’s remains. The footage will be coupled with a documentary on his life.
“You are seeing a reawakening or reassessment of historical situations in Slovakia and the Czech Republic,” said Dave Muhlena of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Communists controlled all the media and had a very good propaganda machine, so a lot of this information was suppressed. Now they are getting in touch with their unvarnished history.”
Hodza, who was born in 1878, served in the Czechoslovakian Cabinet several times after helping form the country’s first government in the wake of World War I.
He became prime minister in 1935 and espoused the notion of a united Central Europe, Viskupova said. Although Western Europe was highly industrialized, countries between the Baltic and Black Seas consisted mainly of farmland, and Hodza reasoned a federation could leverage that strength economically.
“He was very progressive,” she said. “He fought for a federal structure similar to the European Union nowadays.”
But with the rise of Nazism in nearby Germany, Czechoslovakia got caught up in World War II. Determined to avoid a bloody repeat of World War I, Britain and France tried appeasing the German dictator, allowing him to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking region on Czechoslovakia’s northern border.
Soon the entire country fell under Nazi control and its government fled abroad. When Hodza died of colon cancer in Florida on June 27, 1944, his wife, who was living in Chicago, placed his body in a Rosehill Cemetery mausoleum until it could be sent home.
His first funeral at Zion Lutheran Church was lavish, attended by exiled Czechoslovakian dignitaries and hundreds of immigrants living in the thriving Czech and Slovak communities on the Southwest Side and West Side. It took five cars to transport the flowers from the funeral home to the church.
Yet the mood was upbeat, with expectations that Hodza’s body soon could return home.
“It was a holding situation; everybody knew it,” Zidek said. “Then it all collapsed.”
In 1948, the country fell under the control of the Communist Party, which declared Hodza, a fervent anticommunist, persona non grata. Hodza was buried, with a second funeral, in Bohemian National Cemetery.
“This was a man that was revered by the Czechoslovakian community” in Chicago, said Zidek. “That chapel was wall-to-wall humanity, and flowers were lined along all the walls.”
Now the funeral home is making the arrangements for its third Hodza funeral. A reception is planned for Sunday in Garfield Park Conservatory for a Slovakian delegation led by the nation’s minister of culture, Milan Knazko.
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On Monday, a seminar on Hodza will be held at Benedictine University in Lisle before the memorial service at 4:30 p.m.. Afterward, the coffin will be taken to O’Hare International Airport, where a government plane will be waiting.
Finally, on Thursday, the 58th anniversary of his death, his dying wish will be honored as Hodza is reburied alongside his wife, Irena, in the national cemetery in Martin, about 150 miles from Bratislava.
For Ladislaus Bolchazy, a historian and publisher of Slavic books, the homecoming is bittersweet, bringing out competing emotional loyalties. “As a Slovak-American, I’d rather have Hodza in America,” he said.
The news also reminds Stefan Kopecky, who is active in Czechoslovakian fraternal organizations, that the Slovak community in Chicago, like all immigrant groups, is dispersing. Places like Bohemian National Cemetery no longer are a focus, he said. This year on Memorial Day, no flowers were placed on Hodza’s grave.
“It is a good thing he is going back to Slovakia,” Kopecky said. “He would be lost here.”