Monthly Archives: June 2022

Letter from Ivan S. Kerno, 18 December 1946

My husband Victor is the nephew of Vlado Fabry, the only child of Vlado’s sister Olinka. When Olinka passed away in 2009, we discovered a trove of papers and photos stuffed in old suitcases in the house in New York; we packed them up and brought them to Washington state, and since then I have made it my mission to share the family story with the world. The photo above shows one of these suitcases, which was originally owned by Ivan S. Kerno – Slovak lawyer and family friend, who was Assistant to Secretary-General Trygve Lie and was head of the United Nations Legal Department. We have many letters from Ivan Kerno, but here is one from Garden City, Long Island, New York, from 1946, the year Vlado joined the Legal Department of the United Nations; addressed to Vlado’s father, Pavel Fabry, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to our family home that is still illegally occupied by the Russian Federation, since the coup d’etat of 1948.

Paris Match, 30 September 1961

This article from Paris Match does not give the name of the photographer who took the photo from the Ndola crash site, showing a DELL paperback mystery called “NOW, WILL YOU TRY FOR MURDER?”, but I have not seen it anywhere else. As a side note, this is the first novel of author Harry Olesker, published in 1958, and produced for Kraft Television Theatre in June 1958; according to this link I found, Olesker “received a master’s degree from Columbia University before serving in Army Intelligence during World War II.”

L’Express, 21 September 1961

I was hesitant to share this here, because of the editorial choice of the word “suicide” to describe the death of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, but it is important because this was saved in a collection of other international papers by Olinka and Olga Fabry. The political cartoon, showing Moïse Tshombe collecting his money from the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga mines with the murders of Patrice Lumumba and Hammarskjold, is gruesome but on point. From our personal coin collection, not from the Fabry archive, I have also included scans of two coins from Katanga from 1961.

Letters from Vlado in New York, 1946

Here are two letters in Slovak from Vlado in New York, written in July and August of 1946, shortly after his arrival in the States. At this time, the United Nations Headquarters were located in Lake Success, NY, in the Sperry Gyroscope Company factory. The first letter, written to his sister Olinka in Lausanne, Switzerland, is on onion skin paper and is not getting any younger; it is hard to decipher because Vlado wrote on both sides of the paper, but, for those determined to know what he was up to and wrote, it is not impossible to translate! Ďakujem for the help!

Vlado at Rockefeller Center Rooftop, NYC, 18 July 1946

Good Bye, Czechoslovakia!

In June 1946, Vlado Fabry left his position as Personal Secretary to the Minister of the Interior in Prague, to join the Secretariat of the United Nations in New York. He packed his bags, said farewell to his friends and family, and said good bye forever to Czechoslovakia. The following photos are from Prague, showing Vlado at an undated political gathering, and his departure in June at the airport on a Swissair flight to Zurich.

Vlado Fabry, Prague, circa 1946