Prague, Jan 13 (CTK) – Most of the Czechs and Slovaks who fled Czechoslovakia after the 1948 communist coup faced no imminent threat in their homeland and most of them were young men, Petr Zidek says in daily Lidove noviny (LN) yesterday in relation to the present wave of refugees coming to Europe from the Middle East.
Well-known opponents of the communists faced immediate persecutions after the coup in February 1948, but they formed a small part of the hundreds of people who started escaping from the country every day, Zidek writes.
Prominent politicians, military officers and diplomats were welcomed in the Alaska House in Frankfurt am Mein, but a majority of the people who fled Czechoslovakia went through the Goetheschule refugee camp in Regensburg, Germany.
A register of all people accepted to Goetheschule from March 5, 1948 to December 8, 1948 has been available thanks to one of the refugees, Vaclav Lavicka, who made several copies of their list in 1949, Zidek writes.
The Lavicka List contains records on 9277 refugees and it was published by historian Borivoj Celovsky in 2003-2004.
“We can say for sure that the list from 1948 shows a true picture of the refugees who left Czechoslovakia in the first years after the communist coup in February 1948,” Zidek quotes Celovsky as writing.
As it is estimated that about 25,000 people fled from the country after the communist coup, the Lavicka List presents data on 40 percent of them. There is no reason to believe that the rest of the refugees would be very different from those in the list, except from the prominent personalities and their families, but this group included only some 300 people, Zidek writes.
According to the Lavicka List, 81.5 percent of the refugees from Czechoslovakia were men. The average age of the refugees was 23.7 years and 67.1 percent were not married. Most of the men (69.6 percent) were 15-29 years old.
According to the official Swedish data, 162,877 people sought asylum in Sweden in 2015 and 70.4 percent of them were men.
German authorities stated that “more than two thirds” of the refugees were men, Zidek writes.
Men in the current refugee wave from the Middle East thus form a smaller part that they made up in the refugee wave from the communist Czechoslovakia after 1948, he says.
Nobody who has at least basic knowledge of migration processes can be surprised by the fact that men dominate the present refugee wave. Young men migrate first of all, always and under all circumstances, Zidek writes.
The moral panic in the countries in which the immigrants are heading is not new either, he says, hinting at the heated debate following recent sexual assaults on women by immigrant men.
American and British newspapers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries expressed the fear of the immigrants, though people were afraid of Catholics from Italy, Ireland and Eastern Europe then, not of Muslims, Zidek writes.
