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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Crossing the Boarder</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pu6iupj8-PQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“In ’48 when the Sokol Slet was having a Prague exhibition, I crossed the border – it was easier to cross, illegally. My sister was already in Germany because her husband was the secretary of the American Institute in Prague, so he was told as soon as the prisons were empty, he would be arrested. So I thought that the best thing would be to go before they are after my family.</p><p>“I had a rucksack with dried salami and an English dictionary. I had contacted my sister who lived in Germany and she sent a guide who took me across the border. He was a very brave man, [he had] no sense of danger. We crossed at night, it was several hours walk.”</p><h4>Archives of Czechs and Slovaks</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQLL3r5qryM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were two people who collected newspapers in Chicago and they were Karel Prchal, head of the Sokol, and Josef Cada, the Roman Catholic professor at the college [Saint Procopius in Lisle], and when I spoke with the Czech librarian here at the University of Chicago, Vaclav Laska, he gave me three shelves where I could store the newspapers. Well, it grew into a much bigger collection. It took some kind of active participation to get newspapers from other places outside of Chicago. I remember my friend Mr. Marek (whose picture is on the wall), he took me in the car – because I don’t drive – he took me in the car to Michigan and we collected some newspapers there.”</p><p><strong>Is there one thing in the collection that you love the most?</strong></p><p>“We have a handkerchief which Tomas Garrigue Masaryk used!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Zdenek Hruban
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zdenek Hruban was born in 1921 in Přerov, Moravia. His father was a mathematics professor who had studied in Austria while Czechs were still subject to Austro-Hungarian rule. By the time Zdenek himself was old enough to attend university, WWII had broken out, and all the universities in what was then the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were closed by the Nazis. During this time, Zdenek went to the University of Rostock in Germany to study medicine. After the War, he returned to study in Hradec Králové, northern Bohemia, where he says there was standing room only in lectures, since there was such a demand for higher education.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenek left Czechoslovakia in June 1948, after his family received threats from the Communist police. He crossed the border into Germany near Mariánské Lázně with the help of a guide sent by his sister, who had escaped ahead of him. Zdenek spent one year as a trainee nurse in Horton Road Mental Hospital in England before returning to the refugee camps in Germany and working for the International Refugee Organization pending an American visa. Zdenek was sponsored to come to the United States by an acquaintance of his sister, who had already settled with her husband in Milwaukee. He himself arrived in Wisconsin in 1951. In 1952, Zdenek gained a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he proved a brilliant student. He became a professor of pathology at the University of Chicago in 1973. One of the achievements that Zdenek is best known for is the foundation of the Archives of the Czechs and Slovaks Abroad (ACASA), a collection of more than 10,000 books, periodicals and other materials housed at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Zdenek lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, with his wife <a href="/web/20170609145451/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/jarmila-hruban/">Jarmila Hruban</a> until his death in September 2011.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145451/http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/slavic/acasa.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to ACASA – the collection which Zdenek founded</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Communist coup
Community leadership
emigrant
German language
Hradec Kralove
marriage
Prerov
refugee
Unitarians
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1bedfa3fada0c91ea5b1e6300546d5a3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Schooling & WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2Y5HJ3gCr8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We could sort of tell that something very unusual and very unlucky was happening to us. At the beginning of the next school year in 1939, we were asked to cut out the pictures of Presidents Masaryk and Beneš from our textbooks, and we got new students coming in, especially those who were expelled from Slovakia, or [who] left Slovakia in a very difficult position. Among them was a young man who became my good friend, whose father was a dentist in Bratislava and also had to leave.”</p><h4>Trouble with Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zI063PTqETg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was that one unfortunate, well, peculiar incident just one year before I went to gymnázium when I was on the street with a couple of my friends and one of them was eating, I think it was plums, and was spitting the pits out into the street. And suddenly a German who had a swastika attached to the fender of his car stopped and seized us, claiming that we were desecrating the German flag. And he called a policeman who then went and took us to the police station. And our parents had to come and take us out. It seems as if the matter was somehow settled without any further consequences, but needless to say we were very scared by the whole event.”</p><h4>Shocking Vengeance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fUx0ljKO9-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of them happened right under our windows where, in 1939, I saw the coming of the German tanks. This time, a large procession of German prisoners was being taken up the street, and occasionally one of the guards would shoot one of these Germans, about four or five during the time we watched, and I remember my mother got very upset about it and thought this was really bestial behavior. And the other one, even more gruesome, event which I witnessed, was the burning of two presumably Germans on Wenceslas Square, about two or three days after the Russians came in. And these two victims were hanging by their feet, with their heads down, in an arch which I think was used for advertising where Vodičkova ulice comes into Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square]. There were Soviet tanks close and it looked like both Soviet soldiers and members of these Revolutionary Guards were pouring gasoline over these bodies, which were still squirming and alive, and setting them on fire. So that was very shocking, but it was kind of in a way overshadowed by the rejoicing over liberation.”</p><h4>Fashion Mom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xdRoO2LjcB0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother actually did take on employment after essentially working at home after the Communist seizure of power. Women were supposed to, everyone was supposed to, work. And she found an interesting job for herself with a fashion magazine which also was designing knitting patterns, and that was one of her great hobbies. That was something she got some training in when she was going to the art school. So she continued there, and she enjoyed the people she worked with.”</p><h4>Wilson Center</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QU1IEJDW8M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mentor James Billington became the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1973, and a year later he brought me to the center to be on the staff. And it seemed particularly fitting that it should be an institution honoring Woodrow Wilson since Woodrow Wilson was so intimately involved in the creation, independence of Czechoslovakia and therefore also the Czech Republic. So I started working at the center, involved again in building up the library resources and, more importantly, surveying resources for the study of certain foreign areas available in Washington, D.C. And that resulted in a series of some 14 volumes discussing the resources in Washington for the study of various major areas of the world, such as the Soviet Union, China, the Near East, Africa and Latin America.”</p><h4>Palacký Medal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UYkOKvZmNSA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Because of my work on the Bohemian Reformation, especially for my book, I was awarded the Palacký medal for social sciences, which is given, I believe it’s annually, to a scholar who is to be honored for his contribution to Czech history. This happened in [September] 2009.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Zdenek David
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zdenek David was born in Blatná, South Bohemia, in May 1931. He moved to Prague at age seven, however, when his father Václav (a judge) was appointed to the capital’s circuit court. Zdenek spent most of WWII in Prague and remembers his schooling changing under German occupation. He says students at his gymnázium on Husova Street were taught no history during the War and were expected to learn subjects such as mathematics in German. Zdenek remained in the capital at the time of liberation and remembers ‘chaos’ as reprisals were inflicted upon ethnic Germans and those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Zdenek left Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1947, when he gained a one-year American Field Service scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Putney School in Vermont. When the Communist takeover happened in 1948, his parents urged him not to return home in light of the political climate.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609043310/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=sf.profile&person_id=3405" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Zdenek on the Wilson Center’s pages</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Blatna
Child emigre
Czech-German relations
Education
emigrant
German occupation
gymnazium
Munich Crisis
Nazis
Palacky Medal
refugee
Teachers
Vaclavske namesti
World War II
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648cd4a5efcadc683927b57e960dd6d3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Elementary </h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6JC_kreNgis?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was two years in the elementary school and my recollections of that time are not happy ones. I was being punished by my teacher constantly for being able to read when I came to first grade.”</p><p>So that was out of line for the times?</p><p>“Today that would be something a teacher would welcome probably. I was reading already Greek mythology and all sorts of things and I was bored with the primitive things that you learn if you are learning to read. I already was reading quite well.”</p><p>And how had you learned to read? Did anyone teach you, or did you just pick it up yourself?</p><p>“Well, I had an uncle who was a teacher – a first grade teacher – and he said, ‘Don’t let her learn to read because she will have problems.’ So I asked the maid to teach me. And I learned to read from tabloids.”</p><h4>American School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9nSsuNTQwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This school was just really outstanding. It was a Presbyterian missionary school, and it was such an outstanding [school]. We learned things that, well, we learned about democracy. We learned about getting together and having relationships – good relationships – with people of other nationalities or religions. In that school, when I was graduating, we had 200 students, 20 different nationalities, and eight different religions. Tolerance was one of the things we learned, above all. And the principal [Commodore Fisher] was the best man I ever knew.”</p><h4>Vet Dreams</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iyC0DKFrgKc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My favorite uncle was a veterinarian. Since I was a little kid, he would take me around when he was making his rounds all over the country, and I wanted so badly to be a veterinarian like him. There weren’t many veterinary school and they really didn’t want women either, and I said ‘I want to go to that university in Brno that you went to.’ And he said ‘What do you think you are? Look at yourself, you’re too [small].’ I was littler then. And he said, ‘You don’t have the strength to be a veterinarian. Come with me.’ And he took me out and he showed me how he was pulling out a calf, how he was pulling out a colt. And he said ‘Can you do that? That’s what a veterinarian has to do. No, you go to the philosophical school in Prague and do something else.’ So I went and I did English studies and then later I was lured into Oriental studies because of my living in Iran and knowing something about Persian literature.”</p><h4>How We Met</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7IZyJIjUJpA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then one day he [my boss, František Slabý] said, ‘Věruška, I have to find you a nice husband. I have just the man in mind. He’s in Ludwigsburg [refugee camp], and I will call him and he can be our accountant here.’ And guess who arrived? Sasha Borkovec. When he arrived I thought ‘Good looking enough, but he seems so aloof and so stand-offish.’ I wasn’t particularly interested. But then, František, my boss, invited us to a party and I went there with my sister, and Sasha was playing the guitar and singing beautiful songs. That was it. And then at that party, I think that’s what sort of started things going, he asked me if I would teach him English. And I said yes, and we would take walks and I would teach him English, spoken English, and I guess that brought us together.”</p><h4>Immigrating</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nB7bbzruyuw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We thought we would stay in Bolivia. It was a beautiful country. I was working for Braniff Airways and Sasha was working for a pharmaceutical company; we were quite comfortable and everything. But then they had another revolution. We lived through three different revolutions during the year and a half that we lived in Bolivia, but the last one was socialist. They were going to nationalize everything, and so again we said, ‘This is not for us.’ Because I was working for Braniff Airways, I could get Sasha a ticket for five dollars to go to Brazil to find out what Brazil looked like, and to Uruguay. And he went on this expedition to find out where we could move to. And then he came back very happy from Brazil. He had been to Uruguay as well and to Paraguay. But he came back from Brazil and said, in front of a gathering of Czechs, ‘So we are moving to Brazil. Brazil is a fine place and we can find work.’ And I said ‘No we’re not. We’re not going to Brazil, we’re going to the United States because we received immigration visas to the USA.’”</p><h4>PhD</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/66bT-_lNEgg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1968 when we were in Prague, my relatives and friends would say ‘You poor thing, how can you teach that awful language, that awful Russian literature?’ And I would say ‘The Russian language is a beautiful language and Russian literature is really world-class literature. I don’t teach socialist realism. I teach the classics, which have nothing to do with communism.’”</p><h4>Czech Playwright</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BZUGIuSLZdg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Recently, two or three years ago, I published a book on Josef Topol and his various plays. But I wanted to meet the man, and I knew people here at the embassy who knew him and they said ‘Oh, you will not have a chance to meet him because he’s very shy and he doesn’t want to meet other people.’ So I asked people in Prague and everybody said the same thing, that you just can’t get close to this guy, that he doesn’t want to meet anybody. And then finally, the former cultural counselor came very happy to me and he said ‘I have found a way and Mr. Topol is willing to accept you. He’s inviting you to his home.’</p><p>“And he took me inside, brought the dog inside, he put me on the sofa and asked if I wanted coffee. I said ‘Yes, please, thank you.’ And so he went to the kitchen to make some coffee and the dog and I were sitting there together. And you know I told you that I wanted to be a veterinarian and how much I love animals and dogs especially. I called Zorinka – her name was Zorinka – I called her over and she came, sniffed me, and then she sat in my lap. And the playwright comes out of the kitchen with the coffee, he nearly dropped it and he said ‘My god! She’s sitting in your lap. Zorinka sat in your lap!’ And I said ‘Well she knows, she knows I like dogs.’ Well that did it. He started talking, he was telling me his whole life story, his love stories, whom he was going to marry, whom he married, how he worked with [Václav] Havel. He didn’t want to let me go home. And we have seen each other ever since. Every year when I go to Prague we see each other, in Café Slavia usually.”</p>
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Vera Borkovec
Description
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<p>Vera Borkovec was born in Brno in 1926. She grew up in Prague with her parents and younger sister until 1934, when her father became the director of Škoda Works in Tehran, Iran. Vera remembers Tehran as a progressive city, and the schooling she received there was an important influence on her. After graduating from the American Community School, she began teaching sixth and seventh grades there, and the principal encouraged her to continue with her education. Vera moved to Beirut where she attended a French school for one year. After WWII, Vera and her family returned to Czechoslovakia; she says they were very happy to be back. Vera majored in English and Oriental studies at Charles University and received her degree in 1949. That same year, she left the country with her family. Through an uncle (who had been involved in the resistance during WWII) Vera’s family was introduced to a guide who helped them across the border into West Germany on July 4, 1949.</p><p> </p><p>Vera stayed in refugee camps in Germany for one year and a half. She and her sister were able to get secretarial jobs at the International Refugee Organization in Munich, where she met her husband, Alexej (Sasha) Bořkovec. Through an acquaintance of her father’s, Vera’s family received permission to immigrate to Bolivia in the spring of 1951. While there, Vera and Sasha married, and Vera worked for Braniff Airlines. Vera and Sasha obtained U.S. visas in the spring of 1952 and they moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, where Sasha was able to accept a fellowship at Virginia Tech that he had been offered five years earlier. Vera worked as secretary for the head of the university’s Department of Dairy Science and also became involved in the theater on campus. She says they became good friends with the faculty and even the president of the university. After short stays in Texas (where they became U.S. citizens) and Roanoke, Virginia (where Vera obtained an M.A. in French at Hollins College), the couple moved to the Washington, D.C. area when Sasha got a job at the Department of Agriculture. In D.C., Vera gained a second masters degree, in Russian, from American University and received her doctorate in Russian literature from Georgetown University. She became a professor at American University, and taught in the Language and Foreign Studies Department for more than 30 years.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vera and Sasha were instrumental in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU) at both a local and international level. Vera became a member in 1965 and sat on several committees before being elected Secretary General of the organization in 1977. She was Chairman of the Washington, D.C. chapter, and also started a student essay contest to promote interest in SVU and Czech and Slovak culture among younger generations. In her retirement, Vera has worked as a translator and published several books. In 2003, she received the Artis Bohemiae Amicis award from the Czech Ministry of Culture for her translations. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Community leader
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Ethnic diversity
interpreter
marriage
refugee
Refugee camp
Russian studies
school
Skoda
speaker
Teachers
Translator
Vera Zandova
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/atqndUlLUt8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“At the time, she [his mother] was working as a press attaché at the Dutch embassy. This is under the communist regime. And the communists had a spy in the Dutch embassy, and they identified my mother’s boss as a spy. So she was under pressure. And she told me, already, under the communists, she had all kinds of pressure – things were being stolen. They didn’t particularly appreciate middle-class, bourgeois people. So there was pressure, but this embassy situation increased the pressure, and so she negotiated with the secret police to be able to leave. The standard of leaving was you get one suitcase; she was able to take a couple of crates. And the Dutch government helped, because she was working for the Dutch government. They arranged for a ship, and at that time there was very little shipping, so [we took] a freighter from Holland to Australia, six weeks. And I have some vague memories of that. I’ve got sort of a King Neptune certificate for crossing the equator.”</p><h4>Australia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/USqHqMGQkoU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Initially, when I came to Australia – I think partially under my mother’s influence; she literally was disgusted with Europe, with the Nazis and the communists, and I, reflecting that, my attitude was ‘I want to learn English, I want to assimilate and to hell with the background.’ Yes, my father was a famous guy, so what? And so in Australia, I had virtually no connection with anything Czech.”</p><h4>Newspaper in Baltimore</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3MgVo938_Bg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Baltimore, at that time, was really the pits. This was post-‘68 riots, but, I was going to the paper of H.L. Mencken, and that swayed me. And I felt I needed some metropolitan newspaper experience, because I was working for a small newspaper in Beirut, and that’s how I ended up here. After moving here, we said, ‘Oh we’ll stay here a couple years.’ But then, part of my assignment was to write about, back in the early ‘70s, [William] Donald Schaefer was mayor, and they made efforts to revive the city, and I was writing about that and I got into it. I got interested in urban affairs. Also, I liked city living. That’s one thing rubbing off on me from Prague was liking living in the city. And my wife was from Westchester County, New York, so she’s rebelling against suburbia. So basically, living in the city suited us, walking to work. And then in ’75, we moved here.”</p><h4>Father's Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qa575jAuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Radan Dolejš organized another concert at Lucerna where leading contemporary Czech musicians played my father’s music. And to me that was a revelation. Compared to in ’72 when I found the records which made the whole sound very schmaltzy, who cares – now we had contemporary musicians giving it a real contemporary interpretation. I said, ‘Wow. This is something.’ Suddenly energized me into the music. Plus, I learnt that he composed jazz music, and dance music. I mean, he was no fuddy-duddy. And, the leading Czech rock group, called Olympic, play one of his songs. So one of his songs was adapted to rock music.</p><p>“And this reconnecting process is multifaceted. From seeing my father, a stony figure in the movie which I had no connection [to] – and my wife said she saw an eerie resemblance, they way she put it. I didn’t see it at all – to hearing <em>Česká Písnička</em> [one of his father’s best-known songs] for the first time and not understanding one word and being hit by it emotionally, to starting to find documents, to mama’s memoirs, to reconnecting to the music through these concerts in Prague, to the documentary, and going through the process of that.”</p><h4>Father's Story</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/niCNaqnDVm0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And Arnošt [Lustig, the author who featured in <em>The Immortal Balladeer </em>with Tom], the interesting thing is, he saw my father as a symbol of the non-Jewish victims. Which, to me, elevated that. And he appears in the documentary, and he adds a sort of philosophical level, a humanistic level to it. Which is above and beyond my father, and that’s the part that so fascinates me. So one of the things I’m really interested in now is to use my father’s story, not for itself, but in conjunction with other people – not only Czechs – other people who are musicians, artists, writers, who defy oppression. And oppression doesn’t have to be Nazis or Communists; it can be anywhere.”</p>
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Title
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Thomas Hasler
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Thomas Hasler was born in Prague in 1941. His mother, Charlotte Jurdová, was a linguist with a doctorate in philology from Charles University, and his father, Karel Hašler, was a very popular Czech songwriter, actor, director, and playwright who, before his son’s birth, was arrested by the Gestapo because of the patriotic nature of his songs. Karel Hašler was killed at Mauthausen concentration camp one month after Tom was born.</p><p> </p><p>Tom says he does not have many memories of Czechoslovakia, as he left the country when he was only seven years old. His mother was able to secure exit visas in 1949 when the department she worked for at the Dutch embassy came under scrutiny after her supervisor was named as a spy. Tom and his mother moved to Australia, where, he says, he did not make an effort to retain his Czech heritage. In 1958, Tom and his mother were sponsored by an acquaintance to come to America.</p><p> </p><p>They arrived in Santa Barbara, California, but shortly thereafter moved to Connecticut. Tom began college at age 16, due to the differences in the American and Australian education systems. He studied political science at Hobart College (in New York) and received his master’s degree in journalism from University of Michigan. Tom interned at<em>The Daily Star, </em>the English-language newspaper in Beirut, in 1968, where he remembers hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also met and married his wife, Bonnie (a New Yorker) while in Beirut. Upon returning to the United States, Tom accepted a job offer from the Baltimore <em>Evening Sun</em>. He became an American citizen in 1975, but says he recently also got his Czech citizenship back.</p><p> </p><p>While growing up, Tom knew little about his father. However, more recently he says he has made an effort to discover as much as possible. In 2007, Tom was the co-producer and subject of a documentary titled <em>The Immortal Balladeer of Prague</em> <em>[Písničkář, který nezemřel</em>] which chronicles his search for his father’s work and legacy. He says he is fascinated by the ‘political side’ of his father’s music, which, he adds, led ultimately to his father’s death. He also discovered his mother’s memoirs and diaries which has given him insight into his father’s personal character. Tom has visited Prague several times and says that he no longer feels like a tourist there. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arnost Lustig
Arts
Ceska Pisnicka
Concentration camp
Education
emigrant
Journalism
Jurdova
ktery nezemrel
Pisnickar
Radan Dolejs
refugee
Sense of identity
Tomas Jurda
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Russian Refugee</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_4ebUPypCHI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were in the woods gathering firewood and a stranger approached us, and he was an escaped Russian major – NKVD political officer – and he wanted to get out to the West. And my father hid him until the war was over, gave him one of his suits and everything, because he was really taken in by the man, and then in May ’45 he delivered him across Czechoslovakia to the American lines and, somehow, he wanted to get to the OSS section and that’s where he ended up, and that’s how my father got the OSS connection with Donovan. And as soon as the Iron Curtain fell he automatically worked for the Americans.”</p><h4>Cheb</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jqvc0C0YwO8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For Czechs right after the war, to go live in the former Sudeten area was like moving to the Wild West.”</p><p><em>Why do you say it was like the Wild West?</em></p><p>“Well, because the inland was more peaceful. Over there, with kids, we go out hiking or something, we find an anti-aircraft machine gun, we find piles of ammunition and rifles. I remember we found an abandoned Tiger tank and about 15 of us started carrying ammunition and just dumping it in the open hatch – this was deep in the woods – and then we emptied out big shell casings and made a long path of gunpowder that went about half mile away, and lit it. What a bang. That was the entertainment for after the war for kids.”</p><h4>Crossing the Boarder</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9XxI3uXsyo0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When the Iron Curtain fell in ’48, I got to be real good friends with them because I was the only Czech in town that spoke Yugo, and they knew my political views too, because a lot of them were not Communist. Three of them asked me how to get across the border to Germany. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll take you.’ And I did, and one of them had a change of heart, came back, and turned me in. I was 15 then, and I’m going to school and a couple of my friends said ‘The state secret police is waiting for you. You better not go to school.’ I did go back home. There was nobody at home. I left a note that I’m leaving, that I have to leave. I didn’t have time to go into detail because I was really, really shook up. I had a gold coin collection. I taped it to the soles of my feet with some kind of tape. I took all the money that I had saved up with me, and I took my little briefcase with school books and everything, just in case I got stopped by the border patrol – ‘I’m visiting my friend that lives down over there…’</p><h4>French Foreign Legion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0KoYyyCP2cs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So they shanghaied me on a ship. Two days later we’re going through the Suez Canal to Hai Phong. Well, that was French Indochina then. And from Hai Phong we were put on a train to Hanoi to pick up French wounded. I was assigned to one wounded guy that I had to take care of. Back on a train, back to the harbor, back to the ship, and all the way to Marseille, and then I just walked away from it. So my stint, it was a good adventure, because, just stop and think, not 18, I’d seen Africa, North Africa, I’d seen Indochina.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aVXdlg-yOp4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And they were poor. I thought I lived much better in Czechoslovakia then he did in America, and once I got there, I knew I did. First thing he says, ‘We got electricity six months ago.’ Outside toilet, phone on the wall with a crank. My uncle, they looked at going to the movies as the devil’s work. They wouldn’t let me listen to popular music, I had to listen to gospel, or…They were fanatical religious.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Savoy Horvath
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Savoy Horvath was born in 1933 in Brno, Moravia. Six years later, his family moved to Hradec Králové where his father worked at a German airport as an interpreter and accountant for the Nazis. Savoy’s father was also the leader of a Czech resistance group called 777. Immediately following the War, Savoy’s father was given management of an ESKA bicycle factory in Cheb, a city in the Sudeten region close to the German border. Savoy remembers being active in politics as a young teenager and, as a supporter of the Czech National Socialist (or Beneš) Party, clashing with his peers who held communist views. Savoy went to trade school and began an apprenticeship at his father’s factory, where he became friends with a number of Yugoslav workers. In 1948, he helped a couple of them across the border illegally and, after one escapee changed his mind, Savoy says he was in danger of arrest. Convinced that he must leave the country immediately, Savoy crossed the border into Germany in April 1948.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3499" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609044934im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-211.jpg" alt="Savoy Horvath" width="300" height="333" /></p><p>After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Anti-communist
emigrant
Hradec Kralove
local
marriage
Military service
Politics
refugee
Refugee camp
Rural life
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Christmas in Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YWJN_Zvkg8A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I liked Christmas, Christmas dinner was on the 24th – the night before – we had always carp and once in a year a glass of wine (which I wasn’t allowed to touch until I was quite a lot older). And the gifts were distributed, I was usually disappointed because there were mostly things that they would buy for me anyway like socks and shirts and pants and things like that. And when my father discovered that, he asked me always what book I would like to get and that changed Christmas. I loved Dumas and so I was getting all his books, stories and so we finished eating and right away I started to read!”</p><h4>Communist Takeover</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aBqPxu3ZGXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was one of the few people who expected that there would be a Communist coup d’état in February. Somehow I had a good political instinct or something! So I went to see a prominent Czech publisher and writer, Ferdinand Peroutka, and I was just a student and I came to see him. His mistress <a class="ApplyClass" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609122502/http://www.pametnaroda.cz/witness/index/id/1380/#en_1380" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Slavka Peroutkova</a> introduced me to him, and I told Peroutka whom I liked to read – he didn’t know me, but he trusted me immediately – I told him I expected the Communists would create a putsch before the elections, and he said ‘I am afraid of that too.’ And I told him I would like to create some kind of a magazine-journal, which would be led by Jan Masaryk, who was a very popular politician and no-party man. And he said ‘Yes, I agree with you, I will give you 200,000 Czech crowns for it and try to persuade Masaryk to take over the editorial job and give you more, 200,000 [crowns.]’ So that was one of the actions – incredible, that he trusted me right away like that.</p><p>“So I started to build up a group of people who would publish the journal. It was supposed to become not only for the members of the young elite, of the cultural society that I founded at the same time with the help of my professor Jan Kozák, but it would be a journal that would represent the whole society of cultural leaders of the Czechoslovak Republic, who were not only Communist, but non-Communist too. But unfortunately when we had a meeting with Jan Masaryk in February, [Soviet Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Valerian] Zorin was faster than we – he was already in Prague in order to lead the coup d’état. And so the journal was never published.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SIKCpUnSx7g?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First I had to persuade the man in charge of passports. And when I came in (which wasn’t allowed, I just marched in his room and he said ‘What do you want? What do you want?’), he looked up my papers and he said ‘You know, I have a problem with getting proper shoes…’ So I brought him shoes and got a passport – I never did anything like that before! My father knew more about what to do in a world that’s corrupted. So I gave him shoes, but then they introduced a new special permission by secret police…</p><p>“So again, that was the so-called <em>kachlikarna</em>, because it was a gray building of the Ministry of the Interior on Letná, and there were large groups of people there, but I saw that some people were coming by the side door bringing food. So, I used the side door and went straight to the top man. Again, he started to shout at me and I said ‘They invited me, they insist on me coming, it would be a scandal…’ He said ‘We will never give it to you!’ And I said, ‘What do I have to do in order to get it? It would be a scandal!’ He said ‘If you bring from the factory a confirmation by the action committee that you are progressive…’ The action committees were always three people, devoted Communists, that were leading then the whole country everywhere. So I took the night train to Chotěboř where I worked during the War and I was lucky. They opened 7:00, I went in, and there were three members of the committee; one was a friend who knew that my girlfriend was a worker and he was a relative of hers, another was a worker with whom, as a worker, I founded a chess club and theater, so he signed it too – I don’t remember the third one. So they said that I was socially progressive, which I was!</p><p>“There was a misunderstanding, they believed only Communists were socially progressive, I thought that was retrograding, that was never really social progress. So I brought it to this man again by the side door, he gave me the stamp and the next day I was in Austria going to Switzerland.”</p><h4>Journal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CQnE_uDY8Kw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1948, in August, several months after the coup d’état I left for Geneva and started a journal there, which I couldn’t have done in Prague. And the journal became very important. It started as a student type of a magazine, but became really the leading journal for a new program, not pan-Slav, not pro-Soviet, but pro-European, Atlantic-oriented. And gradually older people joined us, even Ferdinand Peroutka and so on. And that became… for five years that was really showing the way to European unification when it wasn’t yet so clean. It was still being discussed, for example, the problem of German participation. And again, Truman and Atchison and so on realized that Germany should be allowed to rearm to create a European force. So that was… I’m quite proud of that achievement; that was quite a successful journal.”</p><h4>Czech Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TothkbG6gx4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started to discover by reading local papers from Ostrava, Moravská Ostrava… because they started to have a problem with miners, because the miners were paid very well, but it was very dangerous work, so many of them died. Because the Soviet Union was very much interested in all of the coal and all the steel that they could get from Czechoslovakia. So that was crucial for the Soviet Union – and uranium mines – so I discovered that there was a lot of trouble there; people were dying and trying to leave. So I concentrated on starting to write programs for Moravská Ostrava. So one really got to know quite a lot when one read carefully the communist papers.”</p><h4>US Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RtG2gLtzg7g?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I couldn’t get my American citizenship for a fortnight. And finally, the head of the [diplomatic] mission in Munich asked me to come and said ‘you know…’ You have to understand, under the McCarthy era, we were worried about intellectuals, we didn’t want to have them in America. ‘Just answer me one question,’ I said ‘Sure, I’ll answer any question.’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said no. He said, ‘How can I give it to you when you don’t believe in God?’ I said ‘I knew if I told you I believed in God I would get it, but I didn’t want to lie.’ You know, you get so many spies in America by asking such simple questions that communist agents can answer the way they are supposed to answer them – which later was proved to be true, you know. So he said ‘I have to think about it.’ I said ‘If you explain to me your idea of God, not just somewhere in the clouds and so on, but a vital force and life and so on, I would agree.’ He said ‘I have to think about it,’ and in two weeks I received citizenship.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Hruby
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Hruby was born in Prague in June, 1921. His father, Petr, owned a shoe shop in the Prague district of Karlín (which Peter says went bankrupt as shoemaker Tomáš Bat’a cornered the local footwear market), while his mother, Marie, stayed at home raising him and his younger brother Jiří. Peter graduated from high school in 1939 and planned to study at Prague’s Charles University, but with all Czech universities shut by the occupying Nazis that same year, he went to work in a factory making military equipment in the nearby town of Chotěboř. Upon liberation in 1945, he did enroll at Charles University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, literature and languages.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3517" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609122502im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-118.jpg" alt="Peter's ID card at Radio Free Europe" width="400" height="266" /></p><p>He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal <em>Skutečnost</em> [<em>Reality]</em>, which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as <em>Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia</em> and <em>Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature.</em> He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
American citizenship
Chotebor
Cultural Traditions
Education
emigrant
Journalism
Karlin
refugee
Secret police
Skutecnost
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f9759d447b3e7b529d51e1b75d5c0be6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.</p><p>“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.</p><p>“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.</p><p>“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”</p><p>How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?</p><p>“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Demetz
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Childhood Friction</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2ZSs_sSrvE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Then the Hitler-Jugend came over to Piešt’any, it was a tourist city and they took a lot of hotels over. They were a nuisance to us, they were an arrogant bunch of punks that we didn’t like, they took our places where we used to play. They thought that Slovakia was their colony. Germany was being bombed more, while the war was almost unnoticed in Slovakia, nonexistent, it was peaceful there during the War – especially Piešt’any. There was no bombing, and so they sent their German kids over there to indoctrinate them in Hitler’s propaganda and make them into new citizens, tough new citizens.</p><p>“One time I remember there was a skirmish when I pushed one of those kids into a river. We had to hide in our back yards because they were chasing us and there would have been a penalty if they had caught up with us and found out who did that. It was a little river, there was water flowing and in the middle there was only one board, and he purposely… I was on that board first and he thought that he had the right, that I should back up from it, and I did not. So that was the only skirmish that we had.”</p><h4>Stealing Explosives</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R81LOScj3vQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were two bridges in Piešt’any, we heard that they were blown out by the Germans, so we went up there, and as I got to the bridge there was a boat with soldiers, Russian soldiers, coming across the river, and they had prisoners. And when they came to this side of the river where we were, they told the prisoners to get up out of the boat and walk on the dike. And as one man walked up the dike the Russian soldier who was on the top of the dike pulled his pistol and emptied it right into this guy. So his body rolled down. There was about twenty, thirty, people witnessing this whole thing. They were looking for prisoners, German prisoners, who were hiding. And so people were willing to tell them if they knew somebody was hiding some place.</p><p>“Then later on we walked over to around the airport. There was an airport in Piešt’any, and they had bunkers in there. So we went up there to see what it looks like and we saw some dead bodies of Germans, their boots and belts were missing. And some of the explosives were still there, so we tried to grab some of those explosives, we later on used them for fishing. We threw the explosive in the water and the fish popped out and we had it, but we didn’t do too much of it because it was forbidden.”</p><h4>Orel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ih1WlEMUFFE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We could not go under the Catholic Youth name anymore and so we went under the name Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého. What we did? We put on about five plays every year, and we were pretty good. We competed locally and county-wide and finally we even ended up in Turčianský Svätý Martin, where there was a national competition. And we placed there in a pretty good position, and actually some of us, including myself, were later offered professional acting roles, in Nitra. However, next door to our Orlovna, where we had our own place, was a facility that was owned by a baron. He escaped some place, never came back, and the commies took over that facility and installed a youth program in there. They wanted us to go with them. We resisted. And they were pushing on us in this Catholic Orlovna – what used to be – to get more socialistic. And we resisted, so they were using all kinds of tricks and oppression and threats, and some of the boys were almost ready to go to the military, and I decided to go overseas.”</p><h4>Refugee Diet</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y20y2iUKIXY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had to go see in the garbage dump and see to find ourselves some kind of a can, washed it off, and that is when we got our first food, some kind of eintopf [stew] – a big spoon of it for both. We had no spoons to eat it with, so we just ate it the best way we could. The next day, Joe had a ring, we sold that ring, and bought a spoon and cigarettes – we were smoking in those days. Breakfast every morning was just a slice of margarine, a slice of kind of a bread and a black coffee. For noon, there were mostly things that were in one pot, like what the Germans call eintopf sometimes, like soup. And the same thing was for supper, something close to it, not much food anyway – and bread with it.”</p><h4>Camp Tension</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lV8feWFmFow?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had some political frictions, the Slovaks, but the biggest friction was between the Czechoslovaks and Slovaks. Fights erupted on a weekly basis, and the MPs marched in with big sticks and beat anybody who was outside regardless of what it was, who it was, whether they were fighting or not. Then finally the Germans took over the camp. Rocks were being thrown and even I had to sleep with a pipe in my bed, for my own protection. So anyway, there were a lot of fights, and sometimes the Germans marched in, the German police, and there were a few times that it was so bad that some people… the Germans opened fire and some people got shot.”</p><h4>Lumberjack</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VsVR7pas3S8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When we got to that place, 25 of us, the wagon was pushed to the side, the train continued, and there was only that little station there, where you could stop the train yourself, and hop on the train and go wherever you wanted to. And at the camp, there was a barrack with bunk beds. You picked your own, wherever you wanted to stay, and then next door was a barrack with kitchen and dining room. We were very hungry and when we got in there we ate like we never ate in all our lives, for maybe an hour or so and finally we filled up! We got back to the barracks and next day was an assignment. It was an assignment to go into the bush, three men to a team. Two pushing the saw and one with a horse bringing the wood to the road. Well, I was not strong enough, nobody wanted to get me in their trio, and there was another Czech fellow who didn’t have no trio. So they assigned us to chop the wood for the kitchen. So we did that for about a week or so, supplied the kitchen with the wood, and in the meantime the others were working as a team piecework. They were making better money, we only got around 80, 79, cents an hour. The food was plenty and good. The sleep was okay, even though there were the trains passing by we never heard them anyway. We got used to it.”</p><h4>Festival Founder</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t2AXfBdhNxI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I suggested at the [Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club]… I came with the idea of a Slovak Festival. And immediately they made a chairman of me of the thing, to organize it. So I started organizing and got some of the factions together, Slovak musicians and all the people to participate. And despite some of the opposition that we had, especially from the older generations, it was a huge success from day one. Nobody ever knew that it would be so successful, people were standing in lines of eight or nine for food and drinks and we had a good program. So we found out that the facility is not big enough if we continue – we started continuing – and we moved to a larger facility. The next year we had so many people that they were fighting outside to get in!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Paul Brunovsky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.</p><p> </p><p>The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Catholicism
Catholics
Communist coup
Cultural Traditions
Divadelny kruzok Jana Holleho
emigrant
Holly
Jan
Nazis
Piestany
refugee
Refugee camp
Religion
Slovak-German relations
World War II
Zemplin Club
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8b91cd9c0179a747b00b3120e277356c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Sister Knows Best</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Eiib3no7hIs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Well, in ‘47 or ‘48, my sister was somewhere and someone said, ‘I just heard on the radio that any child born of American citizens can come and reclaim the American citizenship of their parents. Why don’t you look into it?’ So she said to my parents; ‘I’m going to go to Prague, [to find out] the details.’ So, she came back from Prague and she said ‘Yes, I can claim my American citizenship because you were an American citizen when I was born.’</p><p>“So she wrote to her cousin, and her cousin brought her here [to America]. And while she was leaving Prague, my father said ‘Since she’s going, you might as well join her.’ So, he applied for my citizenship and that was in October and in April, I get a letter from Prague that it was okayed and that I could come and claim American citizenship after him.”</p><h4>Settled in U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j3JKsNjWmaw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I tried to bring my parents here, and send an affidavit in 1952 or ‘53, I got a letter from my father. ‘Please do not attempt to do anything right now. Because the situation right now, the only place we would wind up or could get to would be Siberia’ because it was at the time when Stalin was insisting on his program. That was when the Cold War actually started. He just followed the Yalta Treaty, which was for 40 years or 50 years. They were in charge of the Eastern Bloc; US, England, and France were in charge of the Western Bloc. You see, Vienna had four different zones; a Russian zone, an American zone, English and French. The same thing was with Berlin. And that treaty was honored until President Reagan said ‘Okay, the time is up. Take the Berlin wall down.'”</p><h4>Melting Pot</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MgPVjIm_mZs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One thing I learned, and this is where the Czech people have a hard time to understand the American people because, over here, Chicago is called a ‘melting pot.’ You had everybody here: Slavs, Poles, Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes, everything. So especially me, in construction, you never knew from week to week who you were going to run into. You might be working one day with a Swede, the next day, you are working with an Italian, and then, you’re working with a German. But one language is the key, the one language. You could be in the army, or come from New York, and you wind up in Chicago, or you wind up in California, it’s still one language.”</p><h4>Grateful</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wiy78Bmte6I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After 60 years of living in America… A lot of times I say, I’m like the kid who has two mothers; one that gives you birth, and one that gives you a home. I’m grateful to Moravia and Czechoslovakia for being born there, as a birthplace. And I’m grateful to America for having the home here.”</p>
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Title
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Miroslav Chybik
Description
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<p>Miroslav Chybik was born in Jalubí, Moravia, in 1935. His mother Josefa and father Miroslav met in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1920s, but had returned to Europe to care for their ailing parents in 1930. Miroslav’s father retained his American citizenship and attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the whole family back to the United States in 1937. Instead, the Chybíks spent WWII at their farm in Jalubí, parts of which were commandeered by Nazi troops who set up a vehicle maintenance shop in one of their barns, says Miroslav.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Miroslav’s older sister Ester gained U.S. citizenship, on grounds that her father had been considered an American at the time of her birth. She came to America in December 1949 and encouraged her brother to do likewise. Miroslav heeded her advice, applied for U.S. citizenship, and left Czechoslovakia on May 25, 1950. He arrived in New York two weeks later, aged 15, and traveled straight to Chicago, where he was met by his sister who had already found a job for him in a sheet metal factory. When work dried up towards the winter of that year, Miroslav took a job with the Czech newspaper Svornost. He worked there for one year and a half until he decided to become a carpenter. Miroslav’s family friend, whom his father had worked with in Chicago, helped him enroll in an apprenticeship program and join the carpenters’ union. Two nights a week, Miroslav attended Morton High School East to learn English and complete his education.</p><p> </p><p>In 1957, Miroslav decided to move to California to gain more professional experience. He stayed there until he was drafted into the US Army in 1958. After completing basic training at Fort Ord, Miroslav returned to the Chicagoland Area, where he has lived ever since. In 1963, he married his wife, Ingrid Chybik, whom he met at a local Czech folk dance group. Miroslav and Ingrid have three children who all speak ‘some Czech.’ An active member of the United Moravian Societies, Miroslav also mentions his involvement with CSA Fraternal Life and, up until recently, the patriotic Czech athletic association Orel in Exile. Today, Miroslav lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with Ingrid.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
American citizenship
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Ethnic diversity
Jalubi
marriage
Military service
refugee
-
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17f3c8652ee46e3c64f21f810a8a3dae
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>Going to Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OCo6UzNiJ-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It became clearer and clearer that the Communists would take over, and we were very fortunate that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – was living already in Israel, and her best friend was the mother of the person who was Israel’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. This lady told my grandmother that if she wants her children to get out of Czechoslovakia, she needs to get there and bring them, because the phones and the mail and everything was censored already. So she did do that exactly, she took a plane and came. Within a very short time my parents put together what they called a lift, which was filled with whatever belongings they could put in. And by the way, my mother had taken courses in photography, so one of the things they put in there was a camera because they thought that maybe she would be able to make a living in Israel as a photographer, and a few other very valuable things because we were well off in Czechoslovakia.</p><p>But when the lift came to Israel, instead of all these wonderful possible resources, there were rags. So on the way or wherever, these things were stolen or taken.</p><p>“So anyway, this is what we did to prepare to go, and because of this terrible experience of flying from England after the War, I developed a very high fever and they had to postpone the trip to the last plane that left Czechoslovakia for Israel. The plane that we were supposed to go on was one that was shot at, and it fell over, I think, Bulgaria. So that forever was kind of a shock to us that we could have been on that plane.”</p><h4>United States</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dS8t85wQOYs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father had had an uncle who lived in the United States when he was a little boy, and this uncle – as uncles from the United States often did – would come to Czechoslovakia and bring for him and his brothers gifts, he always bore gifts for them. He was one of the co-owners of a large shipping company, so he was able to bring them goodies. And from that time on, my father had this dream to come to the United States. My mother and he had papers to leave, but when the War broke out of course there was no way to leave, and as I said, he joined the Army and so forth and so that fell through.</p><p>“So as soon as they came to Israel he started thinking about going to the United States, but it took about seven years until the papers were arranged and we left for Rochester because there was a family friend living there, which is an incredible story.</p><p>A man whose roots were Czech but he studied medicine and lived in Vienna. Evidently, he took care of my mother who was a tennis player and had some problems with her knee, and he took care of her and fell in love with her and wanted her to marry him, but by that time my mother knew my father already. I don’t know exactly what the story was, but he sent his wife to Israel and she came and saw how we lived and she said ‘Oh, we’re going to send you an affidavit, we will bring you to the United States, we will take care of you.’”</p><h4>Living in Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/55JMcJfy4pY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First of all, it was my formative years, but it also was the beginning of the state of Israel. That was a very exciting period and everybody was very nationalistic and so forth. I think that in those years, I just did not feel so much of the connection to Czechoslovakia as much as I did later on because my parents were so busy making a basic living, and everyone was trying to assimilate. There were people who came to Israel from all over, and everybody wanted to find a common denominator, so the language was an important factor, and the songs, and the dances and so on.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dw9rEIVKa0E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, I never think that you have to choose, especially here because our loyalties to the United States, to Israel, to Czech Republic, they’re not conflicting. We all have very basic, democratic values, so it’s not like if I had to choose between Russia. So I don’t see them conflicting. I also think that religion is one thing, but as I said, I don’t think there’s any conflict between being an American and a Jew, and in the same sense, I don’t see any of it as conflicting. Fortunately, I never had to make big choices between ‘I believe this, or I don’t believe that.’ So I think in a way I look at it as very very enriching, rather than otherwise.”</p><h4>Hardships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zi8tbGPCqwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The wronging, if you will, when you think about it from the economic point of view, yes I know that if it hadn’t happened for it, I’d be living a totally different life because my parents on both sides came from very well-to-do families and I would not have had to struggle with my education, et cetera. But that is not so important. The fact that I never got to meet my grandparents and other relatives; it’s a very painful thing. It’s one thing if a person is taken because they’re ill, but to know that they died such horrible deaths, and with my uncle and aunt and cousin, I really don’t know exactly what happened, because they – the uncle and aunt were young people – they could have been used for forced labor, they might have lived for three, four years, who knows, and who knows what awful life they might have had.</p><p>“It’s a pain that does not go away and it’s a pain that all of humanity has to carry, not just for the Holocaust, but for other genocides, for other wrongdoings that just don’t make sense, not fathomable, not understandable.”</p>
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Title
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Michlean Amir
Description
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<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2336 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609111851im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Michlean-Amir-SQ.png" alt="" width="260" height="260" /></p><p>Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.</p><p> </p><p>Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Child emigre
emigrant
Family life
Holocaust
Jews
Plzen
refugees
Sense of identity