Mysterious envelope from Czechoslovakia’s founding father has been unsealed after decades

President of Czechoslovakia Tomas Masaryk, left, and Prime Minister Antonin Svehla, right, in Prague, November 1927. (AP Photo, File)

PRAGUE — Unknown musings of the founding father of an independent Czechoslovakia, its first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, are believed to have been unearthed.

An envelope, whose existence was unknown to living members of the family, was unveiled in a live broadcast on Friday, with President Petr Pavel in attendance, as speculation swirled about what it may contain.

It was believed Masaryk dictated his thoughts to his son Jan some 90 years ago, when he thought he was dying and was confined to bed at the presidential palace in the municipality of Lány after suffering the latest in a series of strokes.

Antonín Sum, Jan’s former secretary, handed over a sealed envelope to the National Archive in 2005 with a request that it shouldn’t be opened for another 20 years, a condition he said he agreed with two Masaryk granddaughters, Anna and Herberta, who both died in 1996.

Jan, who was the Czechoslovak foreign minister after the end of World War II, died suddenly after the Communists took over the country in 1948. Years after his death, Sum managed to safely deliver the envelope with other documents belonging to Jan, kept out of the country while under Communist rule, to the archives.

The white envelope contained another yellow envelope with five pages of handwritten notes in Czech and English. Masaryk’s wife, Charlotte Garrigue, was born in the United States.

After a brief check, experts said the notes looked genuine but disputed they were from 1937.

“I’d say they are from summer 1934,” historian Dagmar Hajková said. The president suffered his first stroke then and his health sharply deteriorated. He stepped down the following year and settled in Lány.

In a brief summary, Hajková said the handwritten notes suggest Masaryk thought his “days are numbered,” but was not afraid of dying.

He made some critical remarks about Czechs, the German minority and Slovak nationalist politician and priest Andrej Hlinka, something he did before.

The documents will be now thoroughly studied.

Masaryk became Czechoslovakia’s first president on Nov. 14, 1918, after it declared independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was defeated in World War One.

“He became a symbol of the foundation of a state based on democratic principles,” Pavel said.

Karel Janicek, The Associated Press