The following article was written by the Author of “The Accidental Hero,” Pat Dewane.
Everyone in the family called him “The Colonel,” but my grandfather, Matt Konop, never spoke about World War Two.
I’d beg him for stories, but grandpa wasn’t talking. I was a pallbearer at his funeral in Two Rivers in May, 1983, and nobody said a word about the war there either. So, as we lowered him into the ground, I figured either we buried his stories with him or there were no stories.
Twenty years later, my sister, Jane, discovered his unpublished manuscript in a family basement, and my life has not been the same ever since. In the aftermath of that Big Bang, the Czechs have made him an Honorary Citizen for his role in the war. His name is on a monument over there and his image gas been cast on a bronze plaque. In Two Rivers, a second casting of the plaque hangs at the entrance of City Hall and his image is on a building downtown.
Of all the soldiers in the US Army during WWII, grandpa commanded the advance party that liberated Southwestern Czechoslovakia. And of all the places along the Czech-German border where they could have poked across, they were sent to the remote region where grandpa’s four grandparents had lived prior to immigrating to rural Northeastern Wisconsin.
Grandpa’s first language was Czech, the only one spoken on the family farm outside of Stangleville, Wisconsin, just north of the Manitowoc County line. In his grandmother’s hometown, he was the first American any of the Czechs had ever seen. And when he spoke, not only was he fluent in Czech, he spoke their particular dialect. The townspeople couldn’t believe their good fortune to be liberated from the Nazis by, in their words, “one of our own.” They paraded him around town as a folk hero and from grandpa’s perch atop their shoulders, he saw for the first time in his life the truth of his Czech identity—or as the old timers still call it, “Bohemian.”
He returned from the war profoundly changed by this epiphany, although I never considered his various odd hobbies as being anything more than the quirks of my beloved grandpa. He picked wild mushrooms, ate strange meats, entertained his grandchildren with hand puppets, played multiple musical instruments, and loved to drink beer and play cards at Kurtz’s Pub in Two Rivers. All of those activities, I’ve discovered, are profoundly Czech.
And I found this out by performing my grandfather’s story in the Czech Republic each May since 2012. I turned grandpa’s story into a 90-minute one-man play that I also tour around the United States at venues as different as Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, The National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, and Manitowoc’s Capitol Civic Centre, the place where I also saw my first movie (Mary Poppins).
When I was growing up in Manitowoc, it always seemed like nothing important ever happened around here. So, I moved to New York and built a career in theater, only to find out that the most extraordinary story I had ever heard had happened to, of all people, my grandfather, an old bald guy who sold insurance and belonged to the Lions Club. Chasing his story has also awakened my own Bohemian identity and the Czechs treat me like Elvis every time I bring them grandpa’s story.
I’ll be at Manitowoc Public Library to talk about my book about him—The Accidental Hero—and his sprawling epic of a story on Thursday, April 17, at 6 PM in the Balkansky Community Room, just a couple weeks before I leave for the Old Country to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the US Army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia.