The Radomír Luža Prize

Background

The American Friends of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance/Vienna, supported by Center Austria: The Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans, are pleased to announce the Eight annual Radomir Luza Prize for an outstanding work in the field of Austrian and/or Czechoslovak History in the 20th Century. This prize carries a cash award of $1000.00 and seeks to encourage research in the above-mentioned fields focusing on the fields Professor Radomír Luža worked in.

To be eligible for the 2020 Radomir Luza Prize competition, the book or dissertation must have been published (or a dissertation defended) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Authors must be citizens or resident aliens (holders of “green cards”) of the United States or Canada. Dissertations must have been awarded by a North American University. The language of the work must be English.

To be considered for the Radomir Luza Prize competition, please send a copy of your work electronically to: gjbischo@uno.edu and winfried.garscha@doew.at

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2020. The winner will be announced at the online GSA conference in 2020.

About Radomír Luža

Radomír Luža (1922-2009) was the son of Lieutenant Colonel Vojtěch Luža, the hero of the Czechoslovak legion from Zborov and Siberia during World War One. His father was murdered by the gendarmes after the German takeover and occupation, and the boy, Radomír, was imprisoned by the Gestapo. Then he joined the resistance, commanded a guerrilla band, and brutally avenged the death of his father. After the war, he became a youth official of the Social Democratic Party, studied law, and drew attention to the spreading Communist danger. He graduated from Masaryk University in March 1948 and, only two weeks later, went into exile in Austria. He offered his services to French intelligence. Several times, he returned to Czechoslovakia illegally to perform various tasks. He barely escaped arrest and became a dangerous enemy for the State Security. He recruited new agents in exile and travelled around Europe. He first settled in Paris, but when the risk of his kidnapping increased in 1953, he moved to the USA with his wife Libuše. He studied history and participated in the publication of the "Testimony" quarterly, one of the most important exile periodicals. In the 1960s he went to Austria and worked in the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), which served as a counterweight to youth unions in the Communist bloc. After returning to the USA, he pursued his academic career, teaching modern European history in New Orleans and writing a number of highly regarded papers. Like a few of the émigrés after 1948, he was alive when the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia collapsed. He visited his homeland very often after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
 
Radomír Luža´s collection consisting of 206 boxes (!) of mostly unprocessed material is deposited at Hoover Institute at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.