College Record 2019

MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
106
Hans and Willy
Schenk: two
refugees from
Prague in
war-time Britain
by Christopher Schenk
(GS 1972–75)
Hans Schenk, one of the original Iffley
Fellows of Wolfson, arrived in Harwich on
17 March 1939 as an asylum-seeker, with
his younger brother Willy. Both of them had
Czechoslovakian nationality but they were
not Czechs, nor were they Slovaks.
The photograph (on p. 109) of Hans aged
ten and Willy aged four, with their mother,
Ilse, and their nanny, Lissy, reveals their true
ethnicity. They were born subjects of the
Austro-Hungarian monarch: Hans on 6
April 1912, when the Emperor Franz Joseph
was in the 64th year of his reign, and Willy
on 26 July 1918, during the short reign of
the Emperor Charles, the last monarch of
Austria-Hungary. Before the war they were
part of the German-speaking minority in
Prague. It was a substantial minority and
Prague was a bilingual city with parallel
Czech and German institutions,
including universities.
Ferdinand, Hans and Willy’s father, was a
Professor of Gynaecology and Obstetrics
in the German University in Prague. He
was born into a Jewish family but became
a Roman Catholic in order to marry Ilse in
Vienna in 1911. She was a good linguist and
spoke fluent Italian, and good English and
French.
In pre-war Prague, Hans made a name
for himself as a strong chess player. In the
1970s he wrote an article for Lycidas called
‘Chess Reminiscences’, which recalls that
in 1929, when he was 17, he was one of
thirty players taken on in Prague by Aron
Nimzovitch in a simultaneous exhibition.
‘I happened to be the last player left after
the other 29 games had been finished’, he
writes, ‘so Nimzovitch sat down to play the
end game against me. Although I had a
slight disadvantage, I managed to hang on
for a draw.’ He went on to even greater
things in the 1930s when he defeated
José Capablanca, in another simultaneous
exhibition.
In 1935, Hans was awarded a doctorate in
law and was appointed as an assistant at the
Institute of Political Science at the German
University. He worked closely with Professor
Hans Kelsen, an eminent legal and political
philosopher, who was an outspoken critic
of the Nazis. During Kelsen’s short time in
Prague, from October 1936 to February
1938, he had many difficulties with Nazisupporting
students. In a testimonial written
in 1947, when Kelsen was Professor of
Political Science at Berkeley, he says of Hans:
‘In my conflict with the Nazi students in
Prague, he firmly and courageously stood on
my side, in spite of all disadvantages he had
to endure as a consequence of his attitude.’
The first disadvantage was that his university
post was not renewed at the end of 1937,
so in January 1938 he started working
COLLEGE RECORD 2019
Photo: Christopher Schenk