Gene embarked on a career as a cartoonist and animator. He drew covers and cartoons for the jazz magazine The Record Changer and joined the animation studio UPA (United Productions of America). He later became the creative director of CBS Terrytoons. In 1959, Gene had started his own studio, Gene Deitch Associates, Inc, which was primarily producing commercials. He was asked to travel to Prague by a client who wanted him to direct a film there. As Gene was reluctant, this client promised to fund a project particularly close to Gene’s heart (the pet project was a film called Munro – which later won an Oscar). In October 1959, Gene arrived in Prague, and he recalls his first impression of the city as ‘creepy.’ However, he soon met Zdenka Najmanová, the studio’s production manager, and fell in love with both her and the city. Gene says that as soon as he returned to the States, he was ‘looking for ways to get back’ to Prague. He returned shortly thereafter and married Zdenka in 1964. Gene’s career flourished in Prague; he produced many films, including several installments of the popular series Tom and Jerry.
Gene says that he was received with some suspicion in communist Czechoslovakia; his reasons for being there – love and work – were too simple for people to believe. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Gene and Zdenka traveled to Vienna to contact his family back in the United States. When they attempted to return, Gene says they were not allowed back in, as the country had closed its borders. The two went to Norway to work on a project while the studio convinced the government that Gene’s work was beneficial to the country and that he should be allowed to return. He says that in the mid-1980s, the two considered moving to the United States, and even went so far as to buy a house in San Francisco; however, the event of the Velvet Revolution led them to stay in Prague. Gene remains an American citizen and over the years he has frequently traveled back to the United States. Today, he lives in Prague with Zdenka.
Gene’s newest project, an online book about people who have influenced him
]]>Gene Deitch was born in Chicago in 1924 to Ruth Delson Deitch and Joseph Deitch, a salesman. The Deitch family moved to California after the stock market crash in 1929 and Gene started school in Hollywood. Gene enjoyed creating classroom and neighborhood newspapers, and the different printing techniques he used over the years speak to his lifelong love of technology. He was also fascinated by the movie industry and especially enjoyed watching cartoon shorts. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1942, Gene joined the war effort and drew aircraft blueprints for North American Aviation. It was there he met his first wife, Marie. They married in 1943 and had three sons together. That same year, Gene was drafted and, although he trained to become a pilot, he fell ill with pneumonia and was honorably discharged in May 1944.
Gene embarked on a career as a cartoonist and animator. He drew covers and cartoons for the jazz magazine The Record Changer and joined the animation studio UPA (United Productions of America). He later became the creative director of CBS Terrytoons. In 1959, Gene had started his own studio, Gene Deitch Associates, Inc, which was primarily producing commercials. He was asked to travel to Prague by a client who wanted him to direct a film there. As Gene was reluctant, this client promised to fund a project particularly close to Gene’s heart (the pet project was a film called Munro – which later won an Oscar). In October 1959, Gene arrived in Prague, and he recalls his first impression of the city as ‘creepy.’ However, he soon met Zdenka Najmanová, the studio’s production manager, and fell in love with both her and the city. Gene says that as soon as he returned to the States, he was ‘looking for ways to get back’ to Prague. He returned shortly thereafter and married Zdenka in 1964. Gene’s career flourished in Prague; he produced many films, including several installments of the popular series Tom and Jerry.
Gene says that he was received with some suspicion in communist Czechoslovakia; his reasons for being there – love and work – were too simple for people to believe. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Gene and Zdenka traveled to Vienna to contact his family back in the United States. When they attempted to return, Gene says they were not allowed back in, as the country had closed its borders. The two went to Norway to work on a project while the studio convinced the government that Gene’s work was beneficial to the country and that he should be allowed to return. He says that in the mid-1980s, the two considered moving to the United States, and even went so far as to buy a house in San Francisco; however, the event of the Velvet Revolution led them to stay in Prague. Gene remains an American citizen and over the years he has frequently traveled back to the United States. Today, he lives in Prague with Zdenka.
Gene’s newest project, an online book about people who have influenced him
“I was infected with all these kinds of things, of ways of creatively communicating; and seeing the cartoons every day, I got to be really big on Mickey Mouse and all the cartoons of the day. When I did get up into the high school level and was putting out this magazine, and the magazine, incidentally, was called The Hollywood Star News, and we made ourselves fake press cards. By this time we were teenagers and we were even able to borrow my partner’s car – he was the son of a doctor so they had money – and we would actually go to the cartoon studios, show our press cards – and it was a great joke, a great laugh – and they always let us in. And I met the real, great stars of the Disney studios in those days as a kid. Later I even found one guy, Ward Kimball, who remembered me. He was one of Disney’s Nine Old Men (the Disney studios had key animators they called the Nine Old Men). But when I first met them, I was a kid and they took me in to their work, they showed me their test animation on the movie auto machine, and I immediately became infected with that, and because I had this toy [movie] projector, all these things somehow came together and focused me on what I really wanted to do.”
“When this plane landed, of course the airport in Prague was extremely primitive then, and we landed at what looked like a shack, a wooden building that actually a neon hammer and sickle over the top, and it was really a foggy day in October. It was creepy; I was scared as hell coming in there. Out of the fog comes loping this woman right onto the tarmac – in spite of the fact that there was communism and everything, you could do things then you couldn’t possibly do today, just walk out on to the tarmac where the airplanes are landing, and there wasn’t any fancy way of getting off the plane; they just moved a ladder up to the plane, a metal ladder, and you walked down – and she comes to me with her had stuck out and said ‘Mr. Deitch, if you thought you were going to be taken directly from the airport to the jail, it’s not true. Welcome to Prague.’ Those were the first words I heard getting off the plane, because she knew that any American coming here was going to be frightened at the idea of coming to a communist country. And, of course, they took my passport away right away, and I began to wonder whether this whole thing was a trap, I was being set up, who knows what. I was absolutely in the dark, and I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying, so that was my introduction.”
“Naturally, in my situation of being here officially with a contract and everything, making films for export to America, I was invited to different affairs and I did meet communist dignitaries. Nikita Khrushchev was supposed to have said, or he did say in the U.N., ‘We will defeat you, we will overcome you, we will prevail…’ Nobody ever said that to me here; that was the funny thing. I would meet ministers in the government who’d say ‘Oh Mr. Deitch, we’ve heard you were here, we hope that everything is ok. We know we don’t have everything that you’re used to, but we’re making great progress,’ and always apologizing. They never said ‘We will defeat you.’ They never said ‘Communism is going to prevail in the world.’ They were quite aware of how I was seeing it. That it was primitive and it was rundown and that you couldn’t buy anything in the store. There weren’t enough fruit and vegetables in the store. There wasn’t enough of anything; you couldn’t even buy toilet paper. So there was no point in them trying to tell me how great everything was. They just said ‘Of course we’re having certain difficulties because we’re isolated and there are trade embargoes against us and we are struggling. We know we don’t have the things we’re used to, but we hope that you’re comfortable. We try to make everything as good as we can.’ But they were really defensive. That was the amazing thing. Nobody tried to give me propaganda. Nobody. It was really amazing. First of all, even those people, even those high [ranking] people didn’t believe in any of it. It was just the way that it was and the way that it had to be.”
“Just the fact that I was here was the message. I realized that I didn’t have to say how great capitalism was, and I mean, I had plenty of problems with capitalism. They saw that I had an American passport. That I could get in my car and drive in the morning and do shopping in West Germany and come back with all the things I needed in one day. They thought that was amazing. They said ‘Any of us who would be able to cross that barbed wire fence and get out of this country, we’d never come back!’ But that I got in my car in the morning and drove there and back the same night with all the stuff in my car – that was the message. What did I have to say? I didn’t have to say anything. It’s just the fact that I realized that all I needed to do was be here, stay out of trouble and I was the message without having to say one word in favor of capitalism.”
“He came to Prague in 1964 and gave a series of concerts which I recorded. The local Communists, on the one hand, were happy to have him come, but on the other hand, were suspicious because they knew he was an American Communist, and that was not the kind of communist they were. They didn’t bother to record him. By that time, I had really good, professional equipment, and I did record his concerts, and they realized too late the importance of his visiting here. Supraphon, the recording company here, they never did record him, they had to buy my recordings, and they did put it out on an LP, and later it’s been put on CD of those original recordings of mine.”
“Things were gradually… in the mid-’60s you started to see a few things in the newspapers that seemed to be really weird, little by little. There was even, in the late 1960’s, a picture suddenly of Masaryk was published in one of the literary newspapers. That was just a miracle, tiny little picture of Masaryk. His name was never mentioned; he didn’t even exist as far as the news here or in Rudé právo, a Communist newspaper, his name was never mentioned. So when things like that started to happen, you knew something was happening. And then plays by Václav Havel began to be performed at the Theatre on the Balustrade [Divadlo na zábradlí]. There was a certain softening up; we began to have a little hope. Better quality goods began appearing in the shops in the mid-’60s. But you couldn’t take it too seriously, but there was a certain kind of liberalization. There was obviously an internal pressure within the Communist Party and we didn’t know from whom. But January 1, 1968 suddenly we heard this guy – never heard of him – Alexander Dubček was named First Secretary of the Communist Party, and week by week, month by month, really strange things started happening.
“We knew something was really happening, it was absolutely beyond understanding that this was going on. And suddenly newspapers started to print interesting stuff, magazine articles and even the news reels were all propaganda before. So then the highlight came in May. The May Day parade in 1968 was something unforgettable. This was the first time we all wanted to go there, even me, and I never wanted to go to Communist things like this, but we said we were all going to go to the parade this time. We all wanted to go past that stand and wave to Dubček, because he suddenly was a fantastic hero.”
Zdeněk Pavel Bažant was born in Prague in 1937. He was raised in Prague, though during WWII he spent a long period in southern Bohemia with his aunt. His father and grandfather were engineering professors ČVUT (Czech Technical University) and his mother – a junior colleague of Milada Horáková – held a doctorate in sociology. Zdeněk recalls the time following the Communist coup in 1948 as difficult for his family. He was labeled ‘bourgeois’ because of his parents’ backgrounds. His maternal grandmother had acquired a number of properties through the sale of her factory; at this time Zdeněk says that all of these buildings were nationalized. He says that it was at this young age that the idea of leaving the country began to germinate. An excellent mathematician, he was national champion of the Mathematical Olympics in 1955.
Zdeněk studied civil engineering at ČVUT and graduated at the head of the class. He was not, however, accepted into a postgraduate program, which he attributes to his decision not to accept an invitation to join the Communist Party. Instead, Zdeněk began working as an engineer for Dopravoprojekt, a state company, and was able to complete a doctorate in engineering as an external student. In 1966, after earning a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University, he traveled abroad on two fellowships, to Paris and Toronto, and then on a visiting appointment to Berkeley, California. Zdeněk was in Toronto during the Prague Spring in 1968. He and his wife Iva (whom he had married the previous year) were planning on returning to Czechoslovakia; however, upon hearing the news of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, they decided to stay abroad.
In 1969, Zdeněk was appointed associate professor at Northwestern University, and is still today at this school, holding a distinguished professorial chair in civil engineering and materials science. He is a world-renowned, frequently-published researcher with much of his work focusing on structural and materials engineering. Zdeněk and Iva have two children, Martin and Eva, who, although they did not learn it at home, can both speak Czech. Zdeněk enjoys many hobbies, including skiing, tennis, and playing the piano. His passion for skiing led to his 1959 patent of a safety ski binding which was mass-produced and became very popular among Czech skiers. Although he visits Prague several times a year and says he misses the ‘beautiful landscape of Prague,’ Zdeněk says that he has been ‘very impressed with America’ and has no plans to return to the Czech Republic to live. He also has no plans to retire. Today, Zdeněk lives with his wife (a retired physician) in Evanston, Illinois.
]]>Zdeněk Pavel Bažant was born in Prague in 1937. He was raised in Prague, though during WWII he spent a long period in southern Bohemia with his aunt. His father and grandfather were engineering professors ČVUT (Czech Technical University) and his mother – a junior colleague of Milada Horáková – held a doctorate in sociology. Zdeněk recalls the time following the Communist coup in 1948 as difficult for his family. He was labeled ‘bourgeois’ because of his parents’ backgrounds. His maternal grandmother had acquired a number of properties through the sale of her factory; at this time Zdeněk says that all of these buildings were nationalized. He says that it was at this young age that the idea of leaving the country began to germinate. An excellent mathematician, he was national champion of the Mathematical Olympics in 1955.
Zdeněk studied civil engineering at ČVUT and graduated at the head of the class. He was not, however, accepted into a postgraduate program, which he attributes to his decision not to accept an invitation to join the Communist Party. Instead, Zdeněk began working as an engineer for Dopravoprojekt, a state company, and was able to complete a doctorate in engineering as an external student. In 1966, after earning a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University, he traveled abroad on two fellowships, to Paris and Toronto, and then on a visiting appointment to Berkeley, California. Zdeněk was in Toronto during the Prague Spring in 1968. He and his wife Iva (whom he had married the previous year) were planning on returning to Czechoslovakia; however, upon hearing the news of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, they decided to stay abroad.
In 1969, Zdeněk was appointed associate professor at Northwestern University, and is still today at this school, holding a distinguished professorial chair in civil engineering and materials science. He is a world-renowned, frequently-published researcher with much of his work focusing on structural and materials engineering. Zdeněk and Iva have two children, Martin and Eva, who, although they did not learn it at home, can both speak Czech. Zdeněk enjoys many hobbies, including skiing, tennis, and playing the piano. His passion for skiing led to his 1959 patent of a safety ski binding which was mass-produced and became very popular among Czech skiers. Although he visits Prague several times a year and says he misses the ‘beautiful landscape of Prague,’ Zdeněk says that he has been ‘very impressed with America’ and has no plans to return to the Czech Republic to live. He also has no plans to retire. Today, Zdeněk lives with his wife (a retired physician) in Evanston, Illinois.
I remember my grandpa returning from the concentration camp, which was very lucky because his good friend learned of his imprisonment and intervened with the Allies and put him on a list to be exchanged. So my grandpa and the other leaders of Sokol – he was one of the five leaders – were on transport to Auschwitz, all the others died there, but they took him out of a railroad car, cattle car in Terezín and gave him a ticket to Prague.
I was largely with my aunt in southern Bohemia, and I started going to school in the village of Radějovice which was about three miles away. I had to walk across tracks and through the fields, and I loved that, because the first bench, first row, was first grade, second row was second grade, fifth row was fifth grade, everything together. The teacher was fantastic: ‘Now I’m teaching for the first graders, now I’m teaching for the second graders.’ I listened to it all. It was very stimulating. And he was such a dedicated guy who loved to teach. He played the violin for us in class; he would hit our fingers with the bow. That was during the War, it was a great memory. I liked it more than the school in Prague when I came to regular school with a big class. So education does not only depend on how much money is spent and how big classes are. That guy, he achieved alone more than probably the teachers gave me subsequently.
I invented, in 1958 after a ski accident which busted my knee, a ski binding – which was an alternative to Marker, which was the first, a year before – and had it patented. With a big effort, I managed to get it produced. It was not so easy, but eventually, in 1962 or ’63, one third of Czech skiers – by my sales figures – were using my binding, the ZPB binding. Then I had some other patents of systems for bridges and such things, but this one is the best known. It is actually exhibited, my binding, in the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, New Hampshire. On the other hand, the income was decent but not like it would be here, so fortunately I didn’t go into this kind of business, otherwise I would have been diverted from what I really like.
In this country, we recognized quickly that education has a completely different spirit. My children never had a systematic course of history or geography. But what they do for example, my son in the second grade – already from the first grade at school – they have to go to the library and the teacher says ‘You study Richard III’ and then he has to make a presentation at school, or study the Napoleonic Wars and make a presentation, or tell us something about Indonesian history. But they never had a systematic drill, the rote learning, so I think in this regard, many Americans are not properly educated, like systematically, but it leads them to be creative and that’s a plus.
When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
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Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.
When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
“I took German but before you… when I went [to school] in the ‘60s… before you could take an elective language you had to do well in Russian. And if you wanted to be a cool kid, you would have As and Bs but you’d have a D in Russian because that was a sign of a little bit of a protest, you know. But if you had a D in Russian, then you couldn’t get in to the other languages. So I ended up having a C or something and just squeezing by, so they let me take some German and some English – I took English for five years. But that didn’t help much when we came to the States – that’s another story. Because, you know, you learned the British English and that was kind of harsh, you know.”
“In eighth grade we started a rock and roll band, of which I was the lead singer and guitarist. And of course we played The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was seen like not only blasphemy but an anti-communist gesture, you know. So… we always had a lot of troubles, because of the long hair and everything else… But somehow it all sort of worked out, we squeezed by, you know. We had good grades, sort of. But my mother was frequently summoned to school by the principal and told ‘Have your son have a haircut!’ And of course I would fight it, and so they would cut a little bit, you know – the usual trials and tribulations of growing up. But for me, being in the music band changed everything because… this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with girls. Because, you know, older girls were interested in me, which is a big thing to a young boy pre-puberty or just when puberty comes in. And we left the country when I was 16, almost 17, so my formative years – I still have the accent, when we came to the States was maybe just a little bit, a year, too late, where it never went away – but, in the school, my self confidence, being surrounded by these fans, was great! And all the politics at those moments went aside, yeah.
“Everybody listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe was only… they had signals so that you couldn’t listen to the news, but they would let it go for the music. So like from two to four everyday you could listen to music on Radio Free Europe. So we would record the music on reel to reel tape recorders, so then we could then learn the music by phonetics. But it was not that difficult, you could buy records, people had collections, it was available for those who were interested, you know. And the quality wasn’t very good, because it was recorded over recordings, you know, there was a lot of hisses and scratches, but you could still listen to The Rolling Stones. So you could do that, yeah.”
“Now, my dad was over six feet tall, he used to play soccer for Sparta, he was an athlete. Up until his late 70s when he passed away he had black hair, he never had grey hair. He was a good looking, good looking guy. And he walked upright, as opposed to… the people in our building signed a petition against his walking. They said ‘He’s walking too arrogant. He’s not saying hello to the neighbors.’ There was like a meeting of all these people who lived in this building, because every building had a caretaker… The caretaker was a member of the Party, they usually lived on the bottom floor. They were snooping around, they were the ones who knew… And this was the woman who made this official complaint that my dad comes home from work and… My dad worked 18 hour shifts, I mean, he worked like a slave to make money. So when he came home, it’s possible he didn’t say hello. But not because he didn’t like her, because he was dead beat tired. But he walked upright, so she thought that he was walking with his nose up. My dad was not. But that’s the kind of environment that we lived in. My dad, of course, when he had to come up and explain himself in front of these morons, you know. So he would never join that group on any level, let alone the Communist Party.”
“They said to my mom ‘Go and apply for a job at Western Electric – a company that makes telephones – on Cicero and Cermak Road, in Cicero basically. They’re hiring.’ They told me ‘Since you’re a guy, go to a steel company called Seaco, and the chances are you’ll get a job there, they’re hiring.’ So my mom took one bus, I had to take like four or five buses to get to this location. So my mom got in, got hired. I walk into this place. I knock on the door, there’s a man who says, again, ‘How have you been?’ If he said ‘How are you?’ I would have said ‘Fine.’ But that phrase ‘How’ve you been’ I’d never heard. So again, there is this exchange, I’m a total idiot, I can’t… He says ‘I have no work for you. Go away.’ Just then, somebody comes in and says ‘I need one guy for my department.’ And the guy says ‘I’ve got no one.’ He says ‘Well, what about this kid here?’ He says, ‘He’s an idiot.’ So he says to me ‘Hey kid, you speak English?’ And I say ‘Yes!’ And he said ‘Well, if he speaks English… So, what’s your name?’ And so, somehow it came out that I am Czech and he says ‘Well, I’m Czech. My name is Ferjencik!’ He never spoke Czech, you know, but he was very proud of his… He said ‘I’ll hire this kid.’ So I got the job.
“So, to this day I don’t know what I was doing, I was in charge of some… some… something, I don’t know. But the footnote to this story is that people would always say ‘Where do you work?’ And I’d say ‘Well, a company called CECO. A sheet metal company.’ Every Friday we would get checks, and outside would come a Brinks truck and you would cash the check and you would come home with cash. One Friday we missed this truck and so I brought the check home. And on the check it said Sears. I went to the wrong place, I took the wrong bus. I thought I was working at CECO, I was working at… So, a true moron you know, but I was hired, I was working for Sears. Then I went to school. I realized that manual labor was not for me.”
“We wanted to appeal to the younger crowd, the people like us. And we were very much influenced by Dadaism and Jára da Cimrman, and we poked serious fun at the establishment. We poked fun at how badly they spoke Czech. How they mixed the English language into the Czech language. And we were ruthless. And little by little the advertisers started to check out. We finally decided to temporarily go off the air. But while it lasted we had a great time. I composed a song called ‘Emigrant’s Cry’… It was introduced by Jan Novak who said ‘Vážení krajané’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”
Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’
“My teachers at the Art Institute… the teachers were pretty much always far left, understandably perhaps and all that stuff. But it bothered me that they would not… that they saw communism as something so distant, something on another planet. A thing that really doesn’t affect us, you know. And there was this residue of McCarthyism – ‘We know what… let’s not stir up another round, you know, look where that got us, you know, just paranoia.’ So, it was troublesome, because my views were pretty much to the right of center when I came. Because I wanted to go to Vietnam and fight the communists. I actually was eligible to be drafted that one year, there was a lottery and they filled the quota two numbers before mine came up. So I came very close, but my mom would not survive it. She would do something not to let me go but it never had to come to that. So, having my American friends being completely oblivious to anything that was happening in Europe was and is still troubling.”
“In 1992, my wife and I and our two daughters go back to Prague, and I’m telling them how I grew up, I’m telling them all the stories, you know. So we go, and we visit the place where I grew up – the apartment building. We walk inside, and in all of these buildings there’ll be like a little plaque on the wall with the names of all the people who live there. Our name was still there. Nobody, this is after communism, and nobody cared to change it. Other people came and went, but ours was never removed or replaced. So that was a freaky thing seeing our name. So then as we go up, I knock on the door and nobody opened so… But I tell my girls the story of when I was little, and I would go down into the cellar to fetch the coal or whatever, right? As you open the door, you walk in the cellar, but you would never see the back of the door, because it was of course this way, right?
“But as a little kid, for some reason, I looked on the back of this door. And there was a poster from the Nazis. It had, you know, the big swastika, and it said in the left column Czech and the right column German, something about not stealing property from this cellar. And finally it said ‘This offense is punishable by death!’ So, I’m telling them this story and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’ So, I take them into the cellar, we open the door and… it was still there! Semi-decayed, you know, barely clinging on, because any time anybody would open the door would go… there was no reason to ever… So that was a kind of interesting experience, you know, how little had changed in all these years.”
Vladimir spent his last year of military service helping farmers in the Šumava region of the Czech Republic. Following his time in the military, Vladimir returned to work at the collective farm in Kl’ačany. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969 when he visited Vienna on a bus trip organized by his employer from which he did not return. He says that he was approached by two Slovak emigrants in the Austrian capital who gave him information about how he too could claim asylum. Vladimir spent five months in Austria, where he found a job as a glazier’s assistant and started learning English. He came to Cleveland in March 1970, where he was met at the airport by two of his distant relatives who had also recently arrived in the city.
Vladimir says he almost immediately found a job in Cleveland, at the city’s Sherwin-Williams Paint plant. He worked at the company for 12 years until he was laid off and found employment at Joseph & Feiss tailors. Outside of work, Vladimir was a member of the Cleveland Slovak soccer team, where he played goalkeeper. He met his wife Maria in 1980 when she came to Cleveland from Kolačkov, Slovakia to visit her sister, Ludmila Anderko. The two were married at Sts. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, later that same year. Vladimir and Maria have two children who were raised understanding Slovak and as members of the Lucina Slovak Folklore Ensemble. Vladimir says it was ‘important’ for him that his children maintained Slovak traditions and the language, and that he is happy his children’s involvement in dance troupe Lucina has taken the family back to Slovakia on several occasions. Today, Vladimir lives with his wife Maria in Parma, Ohio, and is a grandfather. In his retirement, he maintains several rental properties around the city of Cleveland.
]]>Vladimir Cvicela was born in Kl’ačany, Slovakia in 1946. He came from a farming family and says that, after school, he would chase rabbits with dogs and play hockey with the other village children. Growing up, Vladimir wanted to become an electrician, but began working as a repairman on the local collective farm instead. When he was 19 years old, Vladimir was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and sent to České Budějovice, where he trained as a tank driver. He says his tank unit was disbanded two years later, however, following the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968.
Vladimir spent his last year of military service helping farmers in the Šumava region of the Czech Republic. Following his time in the military, Vladimir returned to work at the collective farm in Kl’ačany. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969 when he visited Vienna on a bus trip organized by his employer from which he did not return. He says that he was approached by two Slovak emigrants in the Austrian capital who gave him information about how he too could claim asylum. Vladimir spent five months in Austria, where he found a job as a glazier’s assistant and started learning English. He came to Cleveland in March 1970, where he was met at the airport by two of his distant relatives who had also recently arrived in the city.
Vladimir says he almost immediately found a job in Cleveland, at the city’s Sherwin-Williams Paint plant. He worked at the company for 12 years until he was laid off and found employment at Joseph & Feiss tailors. Outside of work, Vladimir was a member of the Cleveland Slovak soccer team, where he played goalkeeper. He met his wife Maria in 1980 when she came to Cleveland from Kolačkov, Slovakia to visit her sister, Ludmila Anderko. The two were married at Sts. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, later that same year. Vladimir and Maria have two children who were raised understanding Slovak and as members of the Lucina Slovak Folklore Ensemble. Vladimir says it was ‘important’ for him that his children maintained Slovak traditions and the language, and that he is happy his children’s involvement in dance troupe Lucina has taken the family back to Slovakia on several occasions. Today, Vladimir lives with his wife Maria in Parma, Ohio, and is a grandfather. In his retirement, he maintains several rental properties around the city of Cleveland.
“We were schooled for one year where we learned everything about everything, mainly about tanks because I was a tank driver. And the second year we went to Prachatice. And at the end of that, in August 1968, the Russians came and occupied Czechoslovakia, so we thought that maybe we will stay longer in the Army or something but our activities ended, so… Russian soldiers were behind our barracks and we went to work on farms my last year in the Army. [We were] helping the farmers and they treated us nice. They cooked for us, good food.”
“We went on a trip to Austria and my mother said ‘If you have a chance, you should stay there somehow.’ So I got the chance and I stayed. We went [on a work trip] to Austria and we were visiting the Stephansdom [St. Steven’s Cathedral] there. And there were lots of people in the front saying ‘Hey, do you want to go to America?’ They were asking us people, the Czechs and Slovaks, and we went in and checked the Stephansdom inside, and we went to the Praterstrasse and on the [Ferris] wheel. We spent the schillings that we had, a few schillings, and then went to the hotel to sleep. And two fellows from Okres Topol’čany, friends, saw the bus there, they saw the plates on the bus and they came over to my room and said ‘Hey, do you want to go somewhere, to America or somewhere?’ And I went with them and they showed me the Catholic charity and they showed me (at night) where I can register.”
“We went to the German Central [Deutsche Zentrale] for dances, it was here on York Road close, or Ceska Sin Sokol on Park Avenue, they had dances or even we played some divadlo – we put on plays. And we had a soccer team, a Slovak soccer team, so we played between the different nationalities; Germans, Hungarians, Serbians and stuff.”
Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
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Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
“There was no rabbi or synagogue to really practice the religion. My parents were Holocaust survivors. They didn’t go to any concentration camp, but they survived in hiding and they were afraid to practice, but we always knew from people that we are Jews because kids in school made fun of us and even the teacher would not favor us, knowing that we were Jewish.”
How did you take it?
“Up until 12 years old, not terribly bad, but when I was 12 years old, all the children went to religious school on Wednesdays, and around Easter time, I think, the subject was the Jews drink Christian blood during Easter, and all of the sudden my best girlfriend didn’t want to sit with me, nobody wanted to walk to and from school with me, because I was the only Jewish kid – and my sister, but we were two classes apart, so we had different schedules. So it was very difficult, because at 12 years old you want to have a girlfriend. We used to walk and do things together – on the bicycle, after school we had fun things to do – and all of the sudden I’m all by myself. Nobody wanted to associate with me. Until high school, and then I went to Piešt’any for high school and things were a little different.
“In the first grade when our teacher was giving us our school certificate, she asked every student where they were going for summer vacation. Since my name started with ‘N,’ I heard the words ‘grandma, grandpa, cousin, aunt.’ I never heard these words at home, so when I came home I asked my mom ‘How come I’m not going for vacation to some relatives?’ So my mom was crying and said ‘Oh, we don’t have any relatives.’ But then she found some family in Nitra – friends – it was also a Jewish family that had no children, and they became our aunt and uncle, so we used to go there practically regularly for summer vacation to Nitra.”
“I really did believe in it until the invasion of Czechoslovakia because I think my parents kind of taught us to believe in communism, knowing that this is the only system you can live in. I think they believed in communism out of fear. I really believed that this is the best because you don’t have any other literature and you’re really not connected with the world, so you really believe that this is what it is and the Russians are the best, and American imperialism is the worst and they’re enslaving people or hurting people and they’re really not good for people, and how wonderful we have a life in a communist country. So I really did believe it until it was the invasion. I was shocked. I was just finished with physical therapy school, worked for a couple months, and one morning you have Russian tanks in the city and you say ‘How could that be? They were such people?’ and ‘Why did they do that to us?’ I was just so unhappy.”
“We had a choice to go to Israel the next day due to our professions. My sister was a biochemist, I was a physical therapist, and they looked for professional people and the agency was right there in Vienna. But [I wanted] some kind of adventure. I just wanted to come to America. And they wanted to send us to California because New York was full of Czechoslovak refugees who had a lot of family here since WWII, or before WWII, so they had preference, and somehow they kind of squeezed the two of us to bring us to New York, so we came to New York.”
“In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the job I had as a physical therapist was a place where a lot of influential people came – politicians, economists, artists – so I was able to provide jobs and accommodations for almost everybody. Even the legal papers, the senators, ambassadors. All different people. But even people I didn’t know would ask me. My parents were even scared that somebody was going to arrest them because somebody would knock on the door and bring a present for my father: ‘Oh your daughter in New York let my son stay for two weeks or found him a job.’ My parents didn’t even know who these people are. Yeah, always.”
“I had to phone my parents to get them to Vienna and from Vienna to fly to Israel, but I cannot tell this on the phone because Czechoslovakia and Israel had no communication; they didn’t have any contact at the time. This was 1984. So I told my parents on the phone ‘Come to Vienna. We are changing the wedding to Vienna.’ So my parents were hysterical and came to Vienna. They said ‘Where is Eli? Where is my sister?’ so I had to whisper and say ‘They went to Israel.’ So my parents almost fainted at the bus station where I met them. Because also this rabbi got me all these connections. His daughter was married in Vienna to the Minister of Finance, and I needed a visa for my parents to fly from Vienna to Tel Aviv, out of the passport. They cannot come back to Czechoslovakia with an Israeli stamp in a passport. He also told me to be careful who to contact. ‘Vienna is full of Czechoslovak spies and your parents are going to be followed all the time.’ We needed to get to the embassy which is a little bit on the outskirts of Vienna, and not to be followed. But we got to the embassy and they already knew everything about us. They issued [a visa] on tissue paper for my parents to go to enter Israel and exit Israel. But they needed another visa to enter Austria again because they had already used it used. Everything needed to be out of the passport, so all this was issued. We happily went to Tel Aviv and quickly got married. My sister was there, her husband was there, and so we got married in Tel Aviv.”
Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
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Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”
“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”
“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”
“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.
“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”
“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”
“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?
“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”
Vera attended commercial academy in Prague and then worked for Ferromet, a steel export company. In 1955, she met her husband, Pierre Dobrovolny, at a dance. The pair were married in 1958 and have two children, Eva and Lucie. Vera had been raised by parents who strongly believed in building socialism, but says her relationship with Pierre ‘spoiled her’ ideologically. She was repeatedly denied promotion in her job, which she says was most likely due to her relationship with Pierre. In 1968, Vera was finally promoted and says her family enjoyed a degree of financial stability. She refers to this time as one of the happiest in her life.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion, in 1969, Vera and Pierre decided to leave Czechoslovakia. They traveled to Vienna in the summer, where they applied for visas to the United States and registered at the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest child Lucie, however, fell extremely ill after a couple of days, and so the family decided to return to Prague and seek medical assistance. After a couple of months, on August 21, 1969, Vera and Pierre again left Czechoslovakia. They traveled with their children to Yugoslavia from which they crossed into Austria without the correct paperwork; Pierre says the border guards did not care. The family spent about one month in Traiskirchen refugee camp near Vienna before being sent to stay in Bad Kreuzen. They arrived in America in December 1969. Vera says her first impressions of the United States were less than flattering and did not live up to the expectations she had formed from films and books. The family first lived in a rented apartment in Cicero before settling in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois. Vera worked as an accountant for CSA Fraternal Life before taking a job at Bosch, where she remained for 26 years. She has played active roles in the Czechoslovak National Council of America (CNCA) and the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in Chicago. She makes frequent trips to the Czech Republic and has taken her grandchildren to Prague to show them where she was raised.
]]>Vera Dobrovolny was born in Prague in 1938. Her father Jan worked as a quality controller for Škoda during WWII and then as a technician at Správa spojů (the state-owned telecommunications company). Her mother Aloisie, meanwhile, worked as a supervisor at a dorm for student nurses in the capital. Vera spent a part of WWII being raised by her aunts, as her mother was hospitalized following the birth of her younger brother. He was named Vladimír, which was (like Věra) deliberately Russian-sounding, as both of her parents were, she says, ardent Pan-Slavists. Towards the end of WWII, Vera’s family moved out of Prague to live in their summer house near Mokropsy, where she remembers attending school in the corner of a local pub, as the village schoolhouse was occupied by German troops.
Vera attended commercial academy in Prague and then worked for Ferromet, a steel export company. In 1955, she met her husband, Pierre Dobrovolny, at a dance. The pair were married in 1958 and have two children, Eva and Lucie. Vera had been raised by parents who strongly believed in building socialism, but says her relationship with Pierre ‘spoiled her’ ideologically. She was repeatedly denied promotion in her job, which she says was most likely due to her relationship with Pierre. In 1968, Vera was finally promoted and says her family enjoyed a degree of financial stability. She refers to this time as one of the happiest in her life.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion, in 1969, Vera and Pierre decided to leave Czechoslovakia. They traveled to Vienna in the summer, where they applied for visas to the United States and registered at the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest child Lucie, however, fell extremely ill after a couple of days, and so the family decided to return to Prague and seek medical assistance. After a couple of months, on August 21, 1969, Vera and Pierre again left Czechoslovakia. They traveled with their children to Yugoslavia from which they crossed into Austria without the correct paperwork; Pierre says the border guards did not care. The family spent about one month in Traiskirchen refugee camp near Vienna before being sent to stay in Bad Kreuzen. They arrived in America in December 1969. Vera says her first impressions of the United States were less than flattering and did not live up to the expectations she had formed from films and books. The family first lived in a rented apartment in Cicero before settling in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois. Vera worked as an accountant for CSA Fraternal Life before taking a job at Bosch, where she remained for 26 years. She has played active roles in the Czechoslovak National Council of America (CNCA) and the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in Chicago. She makes frequent trips to the Czech Republic and has taken her grandchildren to Prague to show them where she was raised.
“Actually, I had two aunts, so one was working and the other was supposed to take care of me. But she was partially deaf, so when there was an air raid announced, all children were sent home, and parents came – we were in the first grade, so all the parents came to pick them up – but because my aunt couldn’t hear, nobody picked me up. So I went home by myself. But it was only like two blocks, so it wasn’t so bad. And there was another boy on my street, in my school, and also nobody came for him. So we walked together and, you know, it was an eerie feeling because there was nobody, nothing. Only those airplanes overhead. And I remember it until today. And that bad feeling came in ’68 when Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, and I was home again alone because my daughter was born, and again nothing – nobody around, quiet and just those airplanes. And then I forgot about it, and then September 11 here, when they started to guard those cities – airplanes over Chicago – it came again!”
“I remember we got, when I was living with my aunts, they bought some beef bones, and we had soup on Sunday, and on Monday they mixed it with some chemicals or whatever and they made soap, because there was a shortage of soap. And it did not smell too good. It was like brown little bricks. We didn’t have to use it for baths but for washing clothes and stuff like that.”
That was an example of making the most of everything you had?
“Yeah, we ate lots of potatoes and plums. We made plum jam, it was povidla in Czech. And stuff like that. Actually I was malnourished; I had those bumps behind my ears. But it was mainly because I didn’t want to eat.”
“Sixty-eight – I said it was the last time I was quite happy. Because I got my promotion, I was pregnant finally after ten years, between the two of us, we made enough money so that we could get furniture for our apartment. We even had enough money to buy a car. It was exactly ’68 – I remember it because you could not go like here to some place and buy the car, you had to put up the money first, and then wait, and wait and wait. And after years, they ask you if you want your car beige or green. But, another option was to get a used car. And I still remember we went to look at a used white Simca somewhere. And we sent Eva to summer camp, she was ten years old, we went to look at that car and where my parents live, behind them, there are beautiful gardens. Have you ever been in Prague? So they live under Petřín hill, close to that funicular. And we were walking through those gardens, and it was actually really nice, relaxing, beautiful, and I felt so good. And my parents were sitting in the park, so we were talking to them. And it was a Sunday or Saturday, and a few days later, Russians came.”
“I remember standing in the line, because suddenly there was… everybody tried to get some supplies, some food, and they sent the Russian Army without any provisions. They told them ‘There is a contra-revolution’, and that they will find food and everything when they went to the town. And there was no food for Russians, nobody wanted to give them anything. And I was standing in the line with my mother to get some potatoes again, and they were in the street, all those tanks going, and I was crying and my brave mum said ‘Don’t cry! Don’t show it to them!’ Then again the next day I was sitting on a bench in the park looking at the bakery, waiting for bread. Because by that time the Russians got smart and they actually ambushed the delivery guys. So it was very important to get there first.”
“We came from Vienna, from Europe, where everything was like nice and clean and everybody was dressed-up, civilized. And we ended up at JFK at some time of reconstruction and hippies. And there were hippies all over the floor, all over. And somehow I was still in my mind on vacation, until I saw what was around me. So I started to cry, what did I do?”
Did you start to have second thoughts about the United States when you saw that?
“Definitely! I definitely did. Those friends like that [engineer] Hana, they found us an apartment – besides a job for him they found us an apartment in Cicero. And they even found some second hand furniture and everything. They were waiting for us at the airport at O’Hare. So, it was really nice, but when I saw it, it wasn’t the America we knew from movies and books. Those houses and everything in Cicero – it was like, I was deeply, deeply disappointed. To me, America was behind.”
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
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Susan Lucak was born in Teplice in northwestern Bohemia in 1955. Her parents, who were originally from the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, had moved to Teplice when her father Mirolslav became the conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra. When Susan and her older sister were in school, Susan’s mother Jiřina went to work as an after-school teacher. Susan says that her parents had decided to leave Czechoslovakia shortly after the Communist coup in February 1948, but that they had to remain in the country when their plans fell through. In 1967, Susan’s family moved to Prague when her father got a job as the director of a music school there. She says that the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 21, 1968, once again led her parents to the decision to leave the country. In 1969, Susan’s family applied for travel permits to Yugoslavia; she says they were lucky to receive permission to travel through Austria, as one of Susan’s father’s students was performing at the Salzburg Music Festival. They left Czechoslovakia on April 17, 1969, and made their way to Vienna where they lived for over three months while awaiting permission to immigrate to the United States.
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
“My father, when he was a conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra, he had to be present at the Communist meetings that were held in, let’s say, Teplice, and these Communist meetings were very long and in the beginning of the meetings, the orchestra that father conducted played the Czechoslovak national anthem, the Russian national anthem, and then the song ‘Internationale’, and those pieces of music were played at the beginning of those meetings and they were played at the end of the meetings and so the orchestra had to sit there for hours and hours and listen to these discussions that were endless. After some time, my father suggested that perhaps they could get a recording instead of the orchestra being there for so many hours, and what they told my father was that if he did not like doing that, then he may as well pack up and then go and work in coal mines. So he obviously retracted that and continued to sit at these meetings.
“Then there were things that happened in the school where he was a director where people were advanced based upon not their abilities necessarily, but based upon whether they belonged to the Communist Party and so on. So he always felt that in music, one cannot advance people based upon their participation in a party, and so there were certain frustrations that I think that he experienced because he was always interested in having a good quality school and good quality music teachers, and that wasn’t always possible. So I remember him speaking about that.”
“Approximately a week after the invasion, my father and I walked from Nusle to Václavské Náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and things had sort of somehow calmed down a little bit. There was less shooting and we were speaking with the Russian soldiers. People spoke Russian pretty well because it was a language everybody had to learn in school. All of the sudden, the soldiers started to shoot at us, so my father and I hit the ground and we crawled to a nearby street and all the doors to the buildings were closed because people were frightened, so my father and I, we crawled about a block and a half and made a turn and kind of disappeared from the scene on Václavské Náměstí. Then we walked quickly and ran back home. So it was a very, very scary time.”
Those were warning shots?
“They were warning shots. Nobody, to my knowledge, was killed during that time. But they were just sort of very arbitrary about shooting, and it was frightening.”
“The way this kind of worked out was that my father had a student that wanted to perform at the Salzburg Music Festival. So he said that he wanted to go to negotiate the details of the concert, and we wanted to go on vacation, as a family, to Yugoslavia. He applied for permission to go through Austria and stay there for four days, and we didn’t necessarily expect that we were going to get permission as a family to leave and do that, because we could have been told ‘Oh, don’t go through Austria. As a family, go through Hungary,’ and then for my father to go alone and negotiate the concert in Austria. But somehow, for reasons that we still do not understand until today, we got the permission to go for four days to Austria. So on April 17, 1969, we drove down to the southern border and we couldn’t see the signs because the snow was sticking to the signs and so we got lost and I think my father was a little nervous. Then we got through to the Czech-Austrian border and the officials at the border, they kind of had a sense that we were escaping and they made us come out of the car. They searched through, even under the hood of the car, and they searched through everything, and the only thing that we had that would have been suspicious were English textbooks. Because we knew we wanted to come to the United States or go to an English-speaking country and we were not sure that we would be able to find textbooks. So somehow, my father took these textbooks, and we were nervous about that. Why would we have been taking English textbooks to Austria? But they didn’t find the textbooks. My father had sort of hidden them, so they didn’t find the textbooks.
“Then finally when we drove through, which was around 5:00 in the morning on April 18, we then went through the Austrian part of the border, and there the Austrians just basically saluted us, they looked at our papers and then they allowed us to come in, and once we got across the border, we just stopped the car and we just sat and couldn’t believe that we had gotten across the Iron Curtain and that we were in a free country and that we escaped the oppressive communist country. And yet at the same time, I think that there was also a sense of sadness of leaving your homeland, with the idea that we would never be able to return. We thought that this was a step where we would never return to Czechoslovakia because we never thought that communism would ever not be there.”
“I did not go to school. I told my parents that I didn’t want to go to school because we came in April and I felt it was towards the end of the school year and I did not want to start learning German, and so I started studying English on my own using these textbooks that we brought from Czechoslovakia. So I used them during the day and then in the evening when my parents and sister came home, I would give them the textbooks so they would learn them and then I was sort of taking care of other things. So my job in a way – they were working as gardeners – and my job was to kind of take care of the paperwork that was necessary to immigrate to the United States. So my father would write down for me where to go and what to say, and then I would go and actually take care of the paperwork that was required for us to immigrate to the United States.”
“I remember the very first Sunday we went to Central Park thinking that we were going to a park the way one would go in Europe, and we were dressed in our best clothes. I remember I was wearing this white blouse with a navy blue skirt and matching shoes, and expecting that we will be strolling in Central Park. And what we were seeing was this wild scene that you kind of see in the movie Hair, by Milos Forman, where people were barely dressed. Men were topless and wearing no shirts and wearing minimal clothing and jeans with bell-bottoms, and women were not wearing bras and they were very open with one another in terms of expressing their affection publicly. And I was 14 years old and I just didn’t even know where to look, and it was all very embarrassing.”
“It was very hard that first Christmas. We were happy to be in the United States, certainly, but there was a certain harsh reality where my parents had no job. So we bought a Christmas tree for one dollar and we bought very simple decorations. We obviously had no money to buy any presents, but that was kind of not really that important to, and we sat around the Christmas tree. I have to say that we were happy to be in the United States, we were happy to be in a country which was democratic and we had freedoms, but there was also a certain harshness about being in a country and not having a job and having somewhat of an uncertain future.”
“I kind of felt that when I came here at the age of 13 that I, in a sense, lost my childhood because of the responsibility of learning English and trying to make it here. I kind of felt a certain responsibility to my parents for making this step, and I felt that I obviously wanted to succeed in the United States and so I felt that I needed to take advantage of opportunities that were presenting here that I would not have had in Czechoslovakia. So there was a certain kind of heaviness that I felt even at the age of 13 and 14, and I felt that I really needed to succeed in a way for my family, as well as for myself. I worked pretty hard and I have to say that I was a little disappointed in myself after six months of working pretty hard and studying and feeling that I wasn’t speaking the language fluently. It took about two years before I felt comfortable with the language.”
“I became a Dvořák lover when I came to the United States in 1969 and everything was very unfamiliar and the only thing that reminded me of home and Czechoslovakia was Dvořák’s music. I knew it rather well because music was always around my house and, also, I always went with my father, with my parents, to concerts in Czechoslovakia. So when we came here, the only thing that I heard that reminded me of home was Dvořák’s music, and it always sort of warmed my heart. So when his house, where Dvořák lived, on East 17th Street was threatened to be destroyed, I felt that I wanted to get involved and see if we could save the house or somehow honor Antonín Dvořák here in New York City in a way that made it very special for me. I felt a special connection that he was somebody who came from my homeland who had lived here in New York City, and I felt that he deserved to be honored here and so that’s how I got involved in the Dvorak American Heritage Association here in New York.”
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
]]>Pierre Dobrovolny was born in Brno, Moravia, in October 1933. His father Ferdinand was an artist who worked with, among others, the Czech archeologist Dr. Karel Absolon. Pierre’s mother Růžena was a seamstress. Growing up, Pierre wanted to become a radio mechanic but, he says, this profession was a predominantly feminine one at the time of his graduation, so he went to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study electrical engineering instead. He graduated from technical university in 1958 and says he was ‘lucky’ to do so, given his outspoken nature and his critical view of the Communist government at the time. That same year, Pierre married his partner Vera. His first job upon graduation was at the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where he worked on equipment to measure radiation.
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
“When I was in the dorm I believe they knew everything I was talking about. Because those speakers… Every room had a speaker – like a radio – and the speakers were built two-way. And there was a secret room right at the front of that dorm where nobody was allowed to go, only some students who were Communist Party members. Besides that they had also guns with them. So there was something special going on in that room. And I believe they were listening to people in the dorm. But I didn’t… somehow I didn’t care at that time. It caught up with me later. I mean, somehow I was lucky enough to graduate. Then I got my first job which was with the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where we were building equipment to measure nuclear radiation. I was there for about half a year, and I found out that there was an opportunity to do a PhD – some PhD openings. And since I worked in the ultrasound labs, it was kind of close to what I had been doing before. I applied for that, and they made such a thorough research of my background that they kicked me out, even from my job.”
“There were two parts of the personnel department. One was like here, open where all the files are kept, and there was the other part of it, which was political, which was secret – all your background, even that you had forgotten a long time ago is still recorded. So that guy, who was the head of that department said ‘What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here! You were let go!’”
“You get blamed for it when it is not finished, that thing, but you have what they call responsibility without authority, or something of this kind.”
Vera: “In those days, if something went wrong, he wouldn’t lose his job, but he would go to prison.”
“That’s right, because it could be looked upon as sabotage. So all my colleagues over there, you could see the attitude, they were staying away from it, because the general opinion was – we got all the papers, all the research reports about how things were put together as far as the transmitter is concerned and you could see what they did, how they did it – and the general opinion was ‘It’s an experiment in physics.’ Not something where things have been concluded to the very end. Because some stuff was made really thoroughly, and some other parts were made really in such a way that nobody who was a real engineer would put it together that way.”
Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
]]>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”
“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”
“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”
“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”
“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”
“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of it.’”