Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek was born on January 9, 1890, in Malé Svatoňovice. A close confidant of President Masaryk whose conversations he recorded in Hovory s T. G. Masarykem, Čapek was seven times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), he coined the word 'robot' (from the Czech word robota for forced labor). His brilliant anti-fascist satires, including War with the Newts (1936) and The White Disease (1937), made him Target No. 2 of the Gestapo in Prague; he died of pneumonia months before Nazi occupation.