At the beginning of last summer, three memorial stones, known as Stolpersteine, were added to the entrance of the Rozkvět department store on Panská Street in Brno. They commemorate a large Moravian family with Jewish, Czech, Polish, and German ancestry. Its current prominent representative is George Tomas Drost (*1946), who lives in the US and initiated the publication of his father's biography, "Silent Hero, Bridge to Freedom." He recently presented the book and his family's story at universities in Brno and Olomouc, contributed his memories to the Memory of Nations collection, from which we drew information for this article, and financially supported the Eternal Hope festival, for which the organizers thank him. He enjoys returning to his birthplace and does so more and more often.
The vicissitudes of Georg's parents' lives, and indeed those of the whole family, were full of twists and turns. Georg's father, Jan Antonín Drost, graduated from Masaryk University's Faculty of Law in 1932 and obtained a position at the prestigious law firm of Alois Jaroslav Pražák. His clients included wealthy Jewish industrialists, such as the family of textile entrepreneur Redlich. As World War II loomed, people appeared who needed help. Either because of their Jewishness or because of property they wanted to take out of Czechoslovakia.
The Drost family itself also found itself in a dangerous situation. A week after the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Georg's grandfather Otta placed an advertisement for his typewriter shop in Lidové noviny, in which he claimed that his business was "Aryan," and his German citizenship was also supposed to help. It is easy to guess that he was not trying to attract customers, but to protect his Jewish wife Anna and his half-Jewish sons Jan and Theodor. He saved his wife, but he was unable to save her family.
His wife's brother Ernst Deutsch was deported from Brno to Terezín on December 2, 1941. On the same day, but on different transports, his children, his son Josef and his daughter Gertruda, née Řehořková, were also taken to Terezín. A year later, they were all transferred from Terezín to other places, where they died. They were Georg's father's uncle, cousin, and cousin. These names are inscribed on the Stolpersteine in front of their last residence in Brno on Panská Street. The stones were laid here on June 15, 2024, at Georg's initiative in cooperation with the Jewish Community of Brno and the Štetl Jewish Culture Center.
According to the Nuremberg Laws, Georg's father was considered a so-called first-degree mixed-race person because he had two Jewish grandparents. In addition, he was known to have helped Jewish clients move their property out of the reach of the German authorities and continued to help them even during the war. His connection to Alois Pražák, who joined the resistance at the beginning of the war and emigrated, also weighed heavily against him. To protect himself and his family, he used every legal loophole and trick he knew. "He used his knowledge of the law to falsify or alter records, and essentially tricked, lied to, or deceived the authorities," explains his son George during discussions.
Towards the end of the war, the ground was literally burning beneath his feet and he had to go into hiding and feign health problems to avoid being transported. His brother Theodor did not escape imprisonment. There is a document in the archives confirming that he spent some time in custody in January 1944. During the last few months of the war, he was imprisoned in a labor camp in Načetín in the Ore Mountains.
After the war, however, further complications arose unexpectedly due to Jan Antonín's unjustified accusation of collaboration. Later, he also became unacceptable to the communist regime as a representative of the market economy and free speech. In 1948, the entire family logically emigrated, but it was not easy.
Georg's father, Jan Antonín, originally planned to join the hijacking of the plane on which Vladimír Nedvěd, Alois Pražák's son-in-law, left the republic. In the end, he preferred to pay a smuggler who took him to a place where it was possible to cross the then not very well-guarded border into Austria. From the Soviet zone, which occupied Upper Austria, he tried to get to American-controlled Linz as soon as possible. His wife and older son Rudy joined him there in July 1948. George, who was only one and a half years old, remained in Brno in the care of both grandmothers, as he would not have been able to make the secret journey across the border.
The StB investigation file has been preserved, which mentions the forged Red Cross documents seized by the police, which George's relatives wanted to use to take him to Austria. When this plan failed, his parents looked for other legal and illegal ways to get their son out of the country. Finally, the escape was planned for New Year's Eve 1949, in the hope that the border guards would be less vigilant due to the celebrations. South of České Budějovice, George's grandmother Jana was to hand him over to a certain Marie Bednářová, a friend of the Drost family. The border guard caught his grandmother, but when she explained the situation, he took pity on her and let her go. George was handed over at the border and taken to Linz, where he was reunited with his parents after a year and a half of separation. He was almost three years old at the time.
The beginnings in the USA in 1950 were not easy. Jan Antonín Drost's university education was of no use to him there. He worked in a meat processing plant, cleaning meat machines, while his wife and young son worked as cleaners. Right from the start, the couple decided to integrate as quickly as possible. They tried to speak only English at home, started calling little Jiřík George, and socialized mainly with Americans, even though there was a strong Czech community in Chicago that would probably have made their lives easier to some extent. John Anton's friends and family encouraged him to attend night classes at John Marshall Law School, where he earned a college degree, passed the bar exam, and reopened his law practice.
Later in life, John Anton Drost began to record his life experiences. The pages of notes were bound in a binder for 30 years and stored in a corner of his granddaughter Julie Lokun's office. The Velvet Revolution awakened his son's interest in his father's past and revived the idea of bringing his life story to the public. George therefore invited the renowned writer Nicki Pascarella to help write the story in a modern, readable way. She summarized the remarkable story of the family in a biographical book, "Silent Hero, Bridge to Freedom," which was published in the US by The Media Casters LLC in late 2023.
John Anton Drost's younger son, George Tomas, continues the family tradition and is also a lawyer. He graduated from Augustana College, the University of Illinois College of Law, and De Paul University. George focuses on estate planning and trust administration. He has experience with various sophisticated estate planning and asset transfer techniques, including various types of revocable and irrevocable trusts, limited partnerships, charitable gift planning, and tax-qualified plans. For example, George worked for three years as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service of the United States Department of the Treasury and as an estate and gift tax examiner. He then held the position of corporate attorney.
In 1987, George Tomas Drost and his colleague Kivlahan founded a law firm in downtown Arlington Heights. Today, DKMO (Drost Kivlahan McMahon & O'Connor) has sixteen attorneys and a diverse team of talented administrative staff serving thousands of individual and corporate clients throughout Illinois.
One of George's most significant contributions to preserving ties with his native region is his collection of Joža Uprka's works of art, which capture the beauty of the landscape, people, and customs of Moravia. His paintings are considered some of the finest examples of Czech Art Nouveau and offer a glimpse into a bygone era of Moravian life. George's collection is extensive and includes over 400 works, including paintings, illustrations, and sketches. The collection is housed in the J. A. Komenský Museum in Uherský Brod. Part of this collection was exhibited last fall at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
George Drost currently lives with his wife Beth in Arlington Heights, near Chicago. They have three adult children and twelve grandchildren, and also serve as foster parents. He is involved in local expatriate associations and is a member of the board of directors of American Friends of the Czech Republic, the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids. He served as Honorary Consul of the Czech Republic for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin (2001–2006) and was nominated for US Ambassador to the Czech Republic in the past. He received the Medal of Merit in Diplomacy from the President of the Czech Republic. He often visits not only his native Brno, but also universities and cultural institutions in other places.
When asked whether his parents missed anything Czech in their new homeland, he replied with a smile for the Memory of Nations project: "Olomouc tvarůžky cheese in any quantity." And he added more seriously: "In reality, it was the relationships they didn't have with their family members and the loss of mutuality with their mothers, brother, and sister. The opportunity to be with friends and family and the comfort they had in the places they visited – in Velké Bílovice or on Radhošť." Nevertheless, George Drost is extremely glad that his parents once decided to move to the US, and he would not want to live anywhere else: "I feel very good as an American." The motto of the Drost family is: "per aspera ad astra," meaning "through hardship to the stars."
Using materials from the Memory of the Nation project, compiled by Mgr. Svatopluk K. Jedlička.
The biography "The Quiet Hero: Bridge to Freedom" can be ordered from Amazon:
Amazon.com: The Quiet Hero: Bridge To Freedom eBook : Pascarella, Nicki, Drost, John , Lokun, Julie, Drost, George: Kindle Store
