General Milan Rastislav Stefanik, Slovak National Hero
Near Cleveland, Ohio
This memorial, erected by Cleveland's Slovak community in nineteen thirty-four, honors one of the founding fathers of Czechoslovakia, a man most Americans have never heard of.
Milan Rastislav Stefanik was born in Kosariska, Slovakia, in eighteen eighty, the son of a Lutheran minister. He became an astronomer, a pilot, and finally a general in the French Army during the First World War. While fighting for France, he worked alongside Tomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes to build the diplomatic case for an independent Czechoslovakia, traveling to Russia, the United States, Japan, and Siberia to organize Czech and Slovak troops scattered across multiple fronts.
When the war ended and Czechoslovakia became a sovereign republic in October of nineteen eighteen, Stefanik was its first Minister of War. But he did not live to see the country take shape. On May fourth, nineteen nineteen, his plane crashed while trying to land near Bratislava, and rumors that it was shot down have never been substantiated. He was thirty-eight years old.
Cleveland's large Slovak population kept his memory alive when the homeland could not.
