Michael Flack papers

Michael Flack was born Michal Flach on 12 September 1920 in Lwow, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine), to parents with Czech citizenship. His family moved to Teschen (Český Těšín) in Silesia, where his father worked in a lumber company, and later moved back to Czechoslovakia, first to Ostrava and then Brno. Flack moved to Prague to pursue his studies in law in 1938, and also began to write poetry, counting among his friends the poet (and later Nobel laureate) Jaroslav Seifert. Although offered a scholarship at the University of Iowa, Flack was unable to leave following the German occupation, and was imprisoned at Theresienstadt during the German occupation of his homeland. While there, he was made co-director of children's home L318 at Theresienstadt, due to his previous teaching background. In 1944, however, he was deported to Auschwitz as a forced laborer, and later to a subcamp of Buchenwald, Meuselwitz, from which he was liberated by Allied forces in April 1945. Following liberation and the end of the war, Flack served as an interpreter for U.S. Army forces, and as a result of befriending an army lieutenant, Stanley Newton (of Santa Ana, CA), Flack eventually was able to come to the United States on the basis of an affidavit from Newton. Flack initially studied on a scholarship at the University of Iowa, pursuing degrees in sociology and anthropology while also attending the noted Iowa Writers Workshop. He later studied at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned a masters and doctorate in international law and international relations. In 1957, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where he remained until 1983, when he retired and moved to Washington, DC. Michael Flack died in January 2009.