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Dr. Prisca von Dorotka Bagnell lives a quiet life on Hilton Head Island, but her life had been anything but quiet. She has lived through fleeing her home during World War II, suffered through bombings as a refugee in Budapest and Vienna, and came to the United States as a young bride who couldn’t speak English. She has traveled around the world and speaks several languages. And did we mention that she also taught one those languages to American spies?
“War dominated my childhood,” said Bagnell. “I had a privileged childhood until I was 16.” That changed when her family fled their home in Yugoslavia in 1944 because the Russians were invading. “It wasn’t frightening then because I was so young. I didn’t realize how much my life would change,” she said.
The family landed in Budapest, where their home was shelled by heavy Russian artillery. They then went to Vienna, where they “lived through terrible bombings every day by American planes. We survived by going to the cellar, but our home was hit by a bomb and destroyed. I would never go to the cellar after that, but would go to a cemetery near our house to wait out the bombings.”
After leaving Vienna, the family landed in Bavaria in the American-occupied zone. “My mother and I called this period of being refugees ‘the nine months without a bath trek,’ ” said Bagnell.
In Bavaria she met her husband, Lewis Bagnell, who was in the American army, and she came to the States as part of the War Brides Act of 1947. “It was difficult. He couldn’t speak my languages (Serbo-Croatian, German and Hungarian) and I didn’t speak English. It was not the usual romance by any means,” she said.
The Bagnells had two children, Bruce and Jeanette. Lewis was eventually transferred to Syracuse, N.Y., and Prisca took classes at Syracuse University. “They were looking for an instructor to teach Serbo-Croatian. The program was identified by Radio Moscow as the school for spies, which indeed, it was,” she said.
“The job was offered to me, yet I had no experience in teaching, no paper that proved that I indeed could teach, yet I was hired to teach in this important program. … This speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, that if one has the courage to try and prove one’s self, one can be offered the opportunity to succeed.”
Bagnell eventually earned her master’s and a doctorate in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Her time at Syracuse also led her into other unexpected waters. In 1972, the university received a grant to establish a Gerontology Center and Bagnell was asked to join the program. “I was particularly interested in the study of international gerontology and in 1982 received a grant from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, and the Russian Academy to visit gerontology centers in Russia. I visited centers in St. Petersburg and Kiev, but worked primarily in Russian Georgia and in Azerbaijan. That was very exciting professionally and personally.” She also visited Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Taiwan’s University of Hong Kong.
She retired in 1989 and moved to Australia to be near family. In 1996, her daughter, Jeanette and her husband David Delany “had the good sense to move to Hilton Head Island,” and Bagnell followed.
“I’m now in my 80s and I do the things I enjoy, like going to concerts, to the theater and the opera (Bagnell is president of the Opera Lovers Group of Hilton Head ). I enjoy life and have a lovely home in a lovely spot.
“I must have done something right in my life because my class of 1958-59 still meets here, in my home, every few years. One of my students, Alton Moore, told me at the last meeting, ‘Do you realize, teach, that I drove 2,000 miles just to have dinner with you?’ What nicer compliment could I ask for?”
