Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.
Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.
]]>Paulina Porizkova was born in Olomouc in 1965 and grew up in the Moravian town of Prostějov. Her parents, Anna and Jiří, left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and settled in Sweden. Paulina remained with her maternal grandparents in Prostějov and says that her time with them was ‘delightful.’ Paulina’s parents, meanwhile, were attempting to reunite their family and gained attention in Sweden for their actions. After three years had gone by, they planned to ‘kidnap’ Paulina after flying into Czechoslovakia with the help of Swedish pilots. On her way to Prostějov, Paulina’s mother (who was traveling on a fake passport) was detained for speeding and arrested when her identity was revealed. Because she was several months pregnant, Paulina’s mother was released to her parents’ house and remained under house arrest. Paulina says that her father, who had remained in Sweden, had managed to keep their case in the media, which put pressure on the Czechoslovak government. In 1973, Paulina, her mother, and her brother were allowed to leave the country.
Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.
Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.
“My childhood was delightful. It was wonderful, even though my parents left to go to Sweden and they left me behind with my maternal grandmother, and that happened when I was three years old and that happened during the Russian invasion in 1968. So my parents got on a motorcycle and they escaped across the border to Austria, like many other people were doing at the time, and I suppose this was quite a dangerous trip so they didn’t want to take a three year old on a motorcycle between them, so they left me with my grandmother. I wasn’t going to see them again, my mother for three years and my father for six years.
“During this time I lived with my grandmother and, I think even before my parents left I was [part of] the old Czech family where grandma takes care of the grandchildren and the aunt takes care of you. You know, it takes a village to raise a family, so we were always either at grandmother’s house or in the country with our great-aunts, so I didn’t feel the loss of my parents too much because I was really used to my grandmother. I also had my other set of grandparents that lived two streets away – my paternal grandparents that were lovely and that I spent a lot of time with as well – so I was a very protected and happy child that felt no deprivation at that time. I do remember babička going and waiting in line for milk for me from 4:00 in the morning and all that. When I speak about my childhood here in America, people are sort of slightly horrified: ‘Really? You didn’t have a bathtub until you were eight years old?’ We had a toilet inside our house, but we didn’t have a bathtub for a long time, and my grandmother cooked on a coal stove; there was no central heating. It was very much turn of the century living.”
“We were taught a lot of Russian propaganda, a lot of Russian songs. We left when I was in third grade, just at the end of third grade, but already by that time I had won a contest in which I recited a Russian poem; I won a Russian pen that never worked. My aspiration of my life was to be a Pioneer and to go and see Lenin’s grave. I thought that was just… That was it. That would have been it for my life. Fortunately that didn’t happen.”
You really felt that you wanted to do this?
“Yes, yes. It was very real to me. The Russians were our best friends. Everything Russian was… It was like a protective older brother. Things red were very good. The sickle and the star were symbols of goodness. Lenin was like a nice old uncle that you wanted to hang out with. I was a child; I believed all this stuff. You didn’t know any better. I was completely indoctrinated. I was a little communist from head to toe.”
“They were sent a letter, somehow, from the Czech government saying that since they had abandoned me, I should be adopted to a suitable Czech family for the proper communist upbringing unless they returned to claim me – which was a bit of a problem since if they returned to claim me they would be put in jail since they were criminals for leaving in the first place, and if they didn’t then I was going to be taken away from my grandmother and given to somebody else, so this was not a good situation in any way. At this point, they had become sort of celebrities in Sweden and they put together this plan, I think with some Swedish journalists that were going to have rights to the story and pictures and they were going to do a documentary and all this stuff, and so they got together two Swedish adventure pilots that were going to fly a plane into the Czech Republic. One of the pilots’ wives sort of looked like my mother, so my mother took her passport, and she had a wig and she glasses to look like this lady. So they decided they were going to fly into Czechoslovakia. They were going to fly into Brno, which was the closest big city to where I lived, they were going to get a car, and they were going to drive to Prostějov; they were going to kidnap me on my from school; they weren’t going to tell anybody, grandparents or anybody, because the grandparents might try to stop them or delay them or something. This was very important that it was all happening very quickly. They were going to kidnap me on my way to or from school, take me to the airport and leave. That was the plan and, like all well-laid plans, it didn’t quite work out that way.
“What happened was they landed fine in Brno, they rented a car, and they were driving on the highway from Brno to Prostějov, and they got caught for speeding. So they were taken to a police station; they started getting interrogated; things weren’t looking right – maybe they’re not who they claim they are, and there was also maybe a question of a possible anonymous letter that had reached the Czechoslovakian police or authorities that said my mother was coming to the country in order to kidnap me. I’m not too sure about this part of the story and I think my parents aren’t either, but I remember it mentioned that it could have been a possibility because it was very quick they way they sort of nabbed them in the car, brought them to the police station and all of the sudden started bringing in my mother’s friends: ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ And most of my mother’s friends looked at my mother and said ‘Never seen her before,’ which screwed them in the long run, but good for them as people. And then of course there’s that one odd uncle that’s like ‘Anna, what are you doing back?!’ So they all got put in jail.”
“Then my mother was under house arrest for a year or more, possibly the entire time she was in the Czech Republic. I’m not sure. I do remember we had police renting an apartment across the street with guys hanging out the windows with binoculars, taking the names of everybody that walked into our house. My mother didn’t have any friends at first for a long time because nobody dared to visit her; they would all lose their jobs. My father this whole time is in Sweden, fueling the fire in Sweden [playing] the devastated father: ‘Oh my god, my wife, my children.’ It worked out well that way; he was stoking the fires in Sweden and my mother was trapped in the Czech Republic with me, and now my baby brother. That took three years of nothing happening. It was sort of a stand-off. My mother there in the house, always being watched, my father over in Sweden, and the Swedes were just going at it. There were journalists coming to the Czech Republic. Of course this is all very illegal, so it had to be very hush-hush that there were Swedish journalists coming over and they would take all these pictures of us.
“For three years, my father kept fighting his battle over there in Sweden, and the Swedes were on-board. God bless all of them; the entire nation of Sweden. I owe it all to them really because the people kept writing letters; the Swedish hockey team wouldn’t play the Czechs in the Olympics because of us. The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was supposed to make a state visit and refused to make a state visit because of us. You know, we were cause célèbre. After three years, I guess the Czechs just went ‘This is more trouble than it’s worth. Passports here. Bye. Don’t come back. You’re no longer Czech; we want nothing to do with you.’ They actually kicked us out.”
“I wasn’t allowed to go back to Czechoslovakia. When we got kicked out, in ’73, we got kicked out. We were not allowed in ever. As long as the communists were in power, that was completely off-limits to us. This means the woman that brought me up, really, was my babička and I wasn’t allowed to see her because now it was the situation that we were in Sweden and, to me, what felt like my real family was in Czechoslovakia and we had no way of seeing each other. Those were some very, very bad years for me, some very sad years, because I felt like I was taken away from my home and I wanted to go back. I’d much rather have been in the Czech Republic because I didn’t know. So, about once a year, my mother would save up enough money and we would go to Poland or Yugoslavia or Romania or Hungary, one of the communist countries, and my relatives would go there, like my mother’s sister and my cousins, my grandmother, and we would meet up with them. For a week or two we would have a holiday together in one of the communist countries to get to see each other.”
“First of all, it wasn’t very pretty. But I was not shown the pretty parts. I was stuck somewhere in Midtown on 56th Street, just concrete buildings all around, all the people. Everything was so rushed and so money-oriented. If you lived in Paris and you don’t know where to go in New York, the food wasn’t overwhelmingly good. To me, it was anti-culture. Nobody cared about books here; nobody cared about classical music; nobody cared about art. It was all money. It just felt like it was not a world that made any sense to me. But of course, being young and arrogant, I just didn’t really want to explore it. I took it at face value of what I saw when I was here, I was having a terrible time, and I thought ‘This place sucks. I can’t wait to get back to Paris.’ So later on, when I started considering actually moving here because of the money – because I wasn’t modeling to get pictures out of it; I was modeling to make money and the proposition was just undownturnable – I started searching out the different areas. The ones that wouldn’t be so what I thought New York was, but that I thought would feel right for me. And I did, of course. New York is a city of all cities. It has a little bit of everything. You can find Tokyo here; you can find France.”
“When you live in a country, when you plant your roots in a country, it’s really about that. It’s about roots. It’s about soaking up the nourishment of your environment. This is children’s songs, children’s stories, pop culture going on around you, and when you move as an adult, as a fully-formed person, to another country to settle, you’re missing all this roots stuff. You’re missing all this basic stuff that everybody else grew up with, all these references that you don’t have. So I got my Czech ones, then I moved to Sweden and I had to re-root my roots and go to the Swedish ones, and then I had to do it in France and then I had to do it in America. Because I did it so early, I think I was conscious that this is what you have to do to live in that country. You can’t just live on the country. You can’t just sit on the surface of a country and pretend you live there. You have to learn everything from the beginning, and I’m the richer person for it, actually having learned four different countries from the ground up. It gets a little confusing sometimes.”
The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.
In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.
]]>Paul Burik was born in the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice in 1954. His father, Nicholas, was a doctor, while his mother, Vlasta, worked as a pharmacist. When Paul was still a toddler, the family moved to Prešov, in eastern Slovakia, which was where Paul’s father (who was ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn) had grown up. After nearly six years, however, the family moved back to Bohemia, first to Prčice and then Sedlčany, where Paul’s father worked as the chief surgeon in the local hospital. When Paul was still a teenager, his mother died of a terminal disease. His father worked long hours so Paul says he grew up fairly independently. In 1967 his father traveled to the United States to visit his brother (Paul’s uncle Alex) who had immigrated to Cleveland shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Paul says his father spoke with a number of American doctors during his visit to the States, but decided to return to Czechoslovakia because, at the time, ‘things were good there.’ Following the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, however, Paul’s father suggested to him that the pair resettle in America. Paul says he looked forward to the ‘adventure’ of emigrating and agreed with his father’s suggestion.
The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.
In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.
“I had to take piano lessons, you know, the parents insisted. And the teacher, the piano teacher, was an old boy scout. That was, of course, that was outlawed. But he had these models of cabins and the little scout things, and so we would spend half the time playing piano, and half the time playing with the scout things. So, my piano is not that good.”
“We had a sort of… Sokol was outlawed, but he [my father] was teaching a little gymnastics class that I and about a dozen boys, we would go into the old Sokol Hall and he made arrangements, he would teach us the stuff, you know, gymnastics: parallel bars, high bar, rings, floor exercises, the sort of typical stuff that the Sokols do – for several years. And I think he always believed in exercise and the whole notion of ‘in a healthy body is a healthy spirit.’ So he was doing it a little bit for himself, because he always liked to exercise and stuff, but at the same time, he put up with a dozen other kids too.”
“We had this meeting on the steps of our house, I was coming down in the morning and he was coming up, he proposed that we go and try to go to the United States, and it’s going to be challenging, but we should go. And of course, I was a 13 year old, for me it was just a big adventure. So I said yes, let’s go. And so that day he went to the hospital to do his rounds and work, and I packed whatever I deemed important, some clothing and a sleeping bag. It was kind of interesting because I still have the sleeping bag; I still have it in the car in case we get stranded in the snow. But it is amazing how that one item was sort of like the security blanket, like a little boy’s nene blanket, because we didn’t know where we were going to be. We could be sleeping on the floor of a gym some place or some kind of a camp. So we were dragging this sleeping blanket all around across the continent.”
“You need to understand that especially as a young boy like that, anything Western, anything forbidden, was idolized. Anything Western was idolized. If somebody gave us chewing gum, because it was from America it was like the hottest thing. So, when we said ‘let’s go to America,’ it was like this great adventure. To me as a young teenager, it was like, why not? Let’s do it – I didn’t have to worry about all those legalities and technicalities and potential… I knew there was danger, I knew that there was danger, that if things don’t work out it could be sort of nasty at least for him [my dad.] I was a child but… So it was sort of a quick decision, sometimes you just have to make those snap decisions.”
“Ironically, travel was complicated because the locals changed the signs. And so if you followed the road signs, you would end up in the wrong place. You really had to go by knowledge of the local area or by map. But if you came to an intersection and it said ‘Prague, this way,’ it would probably point you to the wrong place.”
“Well actually, he [Alex] was more active in the Ukrainian or the Rusyn community, so my first years until college, I was really not involved with the Czech community at all or very little. If anything, there was a Carpatho-Rusyn ski club and he was an officer and we did a lot of traveling, a lot of skiing in the wintertime. And so I was more involved in that culture. It was not until I already was married and had children, and I was taking my daughter to a gymnastics class, and there was a fellow reading a paper, a Czech paper, Nový svět. And so I said, ‘Well, he’s got to be Czech or Slovak or something,’ and he was my age, and so when the opportunity came I said hello to him, ‘Dobrý večer’ [Good evening] or something like that. And he turned out to be a local dentist, Stan Pechan, who is Slovak, Czech – he covers both areas, much like me, and we started talking and he introduced me to, he took me to a meeting of what was then the Krajanský výbor, which now is really defunct, but at the time it was the Czech and Slovak committee for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.”
“One of my colleagues at work, at Cleveland City Hall, approached me one time and said ‘Hey, you are Czech, you know there’s a Czech Cultural Garden and it’s orphaned and you know, somebody should take care of it.’ And I said. ‘What garden?’ I had no clue about the gardens. And he said ‘Come on, I’ll take you there at lunch time.’ So, we did, we took a ride to East Boulevard and MLK and drove through the gardens and saw the Czech garden and I was impressed and said ‘Yeah, well somebody kind of needs to attend to that.’ And before I knew, it kind of became my commitment to the Czech community, taking care of that. And I think we’ve been pretty successful. We’ve got some grants from the Czech Republic, we’ve got some donations from specifically the Ptak family, got some grants from the Holden Parks Trust, which is a trust which takes care of some of the parks, or specifically that park. So, we did a lot of things, restored the statues, planted new shrubs, tuck-pointed the masonry and over the years I think it’s one of the better… [We have] had virtually all of the ambassadors that were stationed in the United States come and visit and walk through the gardens.”
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
]]>Otakara Safertal was born in Kladno, central Bohemia, in 1947. For a number of years, Otakara lived with her grandparents in the village of Velké Přítočno, as both her parents worked in Prague. Her father, Lubomir, was in charge of a bakery, while her mother, Miroslava, managed a small patisserie and also helped at the bakery. Otakara remembers frequent visits from her parents. She attended kindergarten in Velké Přítočno, but upon starting first grade, she joined her parents and sister, Ivana, in Prague. As a young girl, Otakara remembers participating in Sokol and religious classes which were eventually discontinued. She excelled at badminton and as a teenager travelled throughout Czechoslovakia to play. After finishing school, Otakara applied to economics school in Prague; she says she was rejected because she ‘didn’t have a very good background.’ After one year training to be a salesperson in a drugstore, Otakara was accepted to economics school. She graduated in 1967 and began working for Czechoslovak State Airlines (CSA) as a ground hostess. She married her husband, Frank Safertal, that same year. Otakara remembers the Prague Spring, saying that the mood of the country changed and that in particular, the ‘youth was very excited about the future of the country.’ At that time, Otakara and her husband were part of a theatre group that performed poetry and plays around the city.
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
“I remember at one point in time, he wanted to import some Jewish cookies and things that were used for Sabbath and so on from Slovakia, and he did, and he got into trouble selling it, because it was not something on the government list. It was a constant struggle – him trying to improve the business and the government saying ‘These are the regulations and you can’t do that.’”
“The warning signs were there, but I think that people were just optimistic and didn’t want to accept the fact that the Russians would invade. I think that people were ready; their dreams were just great and I don’t think that the people really wanted a drastic change. They just wanted to live in a country that would be more free, and people would be able to travel, which in 1967 it was already happening. Just before the invasion in July, that was the first we left the country to Austria. It was sort of a family holiday. My parents and my husband, we went to Austria and came back. We were looking forward to going back [home], we had no reservations, and it was just a time that everybody was very hopeful, and all of the sudden it just crashed. People’s dreams crashed.”
“At that time, it was Prime Minister Trudeau who was the Canadian prime minister and he, on the intervention of the Czech emigrants, there was a special status for the Czech emigrants, that they could basically leave immediately. He gave us a special status. We went through the immigration process, but they expedited it. So we came to Austria at the end of August, and on October 4th, we were already on a plane to go to Canada.”
“It was the government that basically was taking care of us, the Canadian government. They had an excellent plan how to integrate us, and we were going to school for six months, either to improve or to learn English. For me, it was improving because I spoke English, but for my husband he had to start from scratch. They opened a school, it was called Brooklin High School and we used to go to school from midnight until about 3:00 in the morning. There were about 500 of us in the school, and it was an excellent program, and after six months, almost everybody was able to start looking for a job.”
“We also got involved with some of the people that came and started a new theatre group, and we were part of the theatre group for about 15 years. That theatre group in Toronto still continues. It’s in the 40th year of existence, and it was just an opportunity for us to stay close with our countrymen and promote Czech culture in the city. We put on about four or five plays a year, and it was a good outlet for people to gather friends and also to give something to the community.”
“I took my two daughters, and it was very emotional. I was very happy to see the family, but I was also very anxious to leave because I felt that I was not sure whether they would shut the doors for me and I would not be able to go back. I loved my life outside and did intend to stay in Czech Republic, so I had nightmares when I was there that I won’t be able to go back. It was mixed feelings – feelings that I was glad to see the family, but also a feeling that I did not belong there.”
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
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Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
“He was an avid mushroom picker. He had an eye that would see every mushroom everywhere in the forest, and while he was walking around picking the mushrooms, he started a new hobby. He started picking up pieces of branches of wood and carved them into shapes of animals, like snakes, birds, etc. And that became his sort of profession in his retirement. Then he built little chalets out of wood and pinecones, and then he progressed into carving different statues from folklife in Slovakia. The biggest was larger than life statues that he not carved, but actually chopped out of the big pieces of wood for the festival in Východná. They had a competition of folk artists, and he actually received the official folk artist title. He did many carvings for the museums, and so he became quite famous later in his life.”
“I remember we had to walk across – it had to be about five miles – through the forest and fields to a different church, not the same place where we lived. That’s the way many people went to church also, to different locations where maybe nobody knew them or something. Especially people like teachers, even some policemen, government employees, because they didn’t want people to know that they actually believe and go to church, so they would go to a different town or a different village to attend services.”
“I think the teachers at my age were still the old class of teachers that became teachers before the communist regime, and they didn’t change their style of teaching, just didn’t teach us everything they would like to. Then more and more new teachers came; they were a different style of teachers. What I remember is that those teachers were sort of not teaching as much, but they were trying to catch you doing something wrong, like why didn’t you do your homework, what is this, like punishing and punishing, where the old teachers, they would try to make you understand why you were supposed to do it.”
“There were sports clubs in the communist system. I think that’s probably the only thing, one of the couple of good things in the communist system was that they were supporting the youth, supporting financially all these clubs that my mother or other parents didn’t have to pay any money for us. So everything was paid for, travel and equipment, by the government. I was competing in cross-country skiing. In 1960, I was the second junior in Czechoslovakia, but I wasn’t allowed to go to any outside country to compete. They were always afraid that I would just try to escape and try to get to England where my father was.”
“In ’65 I came back to civilian life and right away I tried to go for vacation to England to visit with my father. When I went to the passport office, the man told me, he looked at the black book again and said ‘Ah, you’re not going anywhere, just don’t even bother.’ So every time I tried again, he told me ‘Get out of here, I told you, you’re not going anywhere,’ until the spring of 1968, when the same man says ‘Please come in and sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ So I thought, ‘Uh oh, something changed, something is brewing.’ So then I got a visa and I was just married for a few months at that time, but I was so afraid that the system was going to change again, that they were going to take the travel permission away from me, that I didn’t even wait until my wife had papers ready. I just wanted to get out and go to England before somebody said ‘No, no that was wrong, you’re not going anywhere.’”
“We did lots of support for young blood coming from Czechoslovakia willing to learn the western system of life and business and politics. They would come out here and didn’t know much, didn’t know anybody so we would help them to make contacts and open the doors for them, help them to attend some internships or schools. After awhile I thought my phone number was written somewhere in Vienna at the airport on the wall ‘When you come to Washington, call Oliver,’ because all of the sudden I had phone calls from complete strangers without any recommendation, calling, ‘Can you help me? Can you give me advice?’ or whatever. And I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it because I was sorry to miss the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so this was my contribution to finally put the final nail in the coffin of communism.”
Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.
]]>Olga Prokop was born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1949. Her father was an officer in the military and her mother stayed at home and raised Olga. Later, her mother would become the director of a nursery school and her father worked for Škoda. Olga’s family moved to České Budějovice when she was two and, a few years after that, to Prague where she started school. Olga says that when she was growing up, her head was ‘full of the West.’ She loved movie stars, music, and fashion, and especially enjoyed borrowing Seventeen magazines from friends. While at gymnázium, Olga says that she wanted to study medicine, but that she was offered a spot in the school of dentistry instead. By the time she was to enroll, however, Olga had decided to move to Britain to marry her high school sweetheart. She arrived in London in the summer of 1968, with her wedding planned for August 28. Her mother arrived on August 19 and, on August 21, they received word of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Olga says that the two did not receive word of her father for several days.
Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.
“I was very lucky. My mother used to make dresses for me and everything so I used to have really nice things. Also, some people had friends or family abroad and the family sent them some dollars or marks or whatever, and they would buy so-called bony and they could buy things in Tuzex. We didn’t have this chance, but we would sometimes borrow a magazine and it was called Seventeen. I have a funny feeling it was an American magazine for teenagers. We would borrow it from these people and we would, with my mother, say ‘Oh look, this is a nice dress. Make me a dress like that.’ So it was nice. In this Tuzex – maybe this will be interesting to say – when I was a teenager, the coolest thing was to have blue jeans and you couldn’t get blue jeans here. You could get them in Tuzex or otherwise you didn’t, so it was a good that was very much in demand.”
“This gymnázium was a very good one, but I remember I went through it like in a dream because I had a head full of the West. I was aware that we can’t travel, we can’t have things that we want. It was the ‘60s, the Beatles. You couldn’t get records and my head was full of it. And then of course when I fell in love, I was just looking out the window, and I don’t know how I managed to have good marks, quite honestly, but I did.”
“I was very much into fashion and all this, so I was very much aware that you couldn’t get cosmetics. There was Twiggy, there was Brigitte Bardot. I had some pocket money and I would either use it to buy one good thing – I’ve always preferred to buy one good quality thing that just anything – or I would spend this money on buying pictures of film stars. I had this scrapbook of Brigitte Bardot – I still have it somewhere – and I would look at her and think ‘I wish I could buy these things. I wish I could wear them. She looks fabulous.’ Then, of course, there was Twiggy, and because I was so skinny I could identify with her because it wasn’t fashionable to be skinny. Then the Beatles, the music. The ‘60s here in Prague I think was a pretty open time. Jazz. My father liked jazz. So there were these cultural things which were seeping through and I was always upset that I couldn’t be part of it and that it was so closed.
“We couldn’t travel and we couldn’t say what you wanted to say. It was just terrible. I remember, actually, when I first visited Greece, I was sitting at the Acropolis and just looking at the sea and I remember I thought ‘This is just so beautiful. If I die now, I don’t mind.’ Because for me, it meant so much to be there and actually experience that beauty because I never thought this would happen.”
“At first I was frightened; I was overwhelmed because it was just too much. The skyscrapers, the people, the noise. At the same time, it was wonderful, but I was scared. I remember I was staying at some Czech’s apartment in the Upper West Side and I decided I had to go to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. I went to through the park [Central Park] and I got to the museum and I thought ‘I wasn’t killed, thank God.’ Because you heard all those stories about Central Park, I thought ‘My God, it’s so dangerous,’ but of course then you realize it’s not. I found the people, people who didn’t even know me, they were so helpful. It was just so different. It took me, I would say, after I returned there with a green card – because I picked up the green card in London – it took me about six months when I got used to New York and I realized that it’s a city where you feel anything can happen. Any minute, anything. Anything good, anything bad. And it was an excitement that kept you on your feet, in a sense.”
“When I first came to New York and I lived there, I felt the ocean. I felt the distance between America and Europe; I really did. When I was in London, I didn’t seek the Czech community, but I did at first when I was in New York. There was this Czech girl who took care of me. I met her in the church somewhere in Astoria, so I was friendly with her and sometimes there used to be some veselka [social gathering], this sort of thing, so I used to meet other Czechs. But to be honest, very often I used to come back quite depressed. After a while I decided that I prefer to be with Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are lots of interesting Czechs there, but you don’t necessarily get to see them. Initially, it was an impulse because you feel so far away from home and really, at least I felt, that Europe was far. I felt a great distance.”
In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.
Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.
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Monica Rokus was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in January 1950. Her father, Jan, worked as an architect for the firm Stavoprojekt and then for the city of Košice, as the assistant to the municipal architect. Monica’s mother, Eudoxia, meanwhile stayed at home raising her and her older brother, Paul. At home the family spoke Hungarian and Slovak. Monica attended the Slovak-language Kováčska Street gymnázium and, as a keen gymnast, competed with the club Lokomotiva Košice in her spare time. Upon graduation in 1968, she had plans to study in Bratislava at Comenius University’s Sports Faculty.
In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.
Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.
“We were speaking Slovak and Hungarian equally. My mum spoke Hungarian to us and my father spoke Slovak to us, and my grandmother spoke German to us, so it seemed like chaos for outsiders, because not everybody had that, but a lot of families in Košice spoke Hungarian and Slovak because that was… So when I was asked ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ I would say ‘Oh, my mother tongue is Hungarian and my father tongue is Slovak and my grandmother tongue is German. It was actually Schwaebisch, so she taught us how to write in that. I forgot all my German as I learned English though.”
“See, my uncle was in Siberia, my mother’s youngest brother was in Siberia for eight years, and I remember when he came home in 1954. And that was, I mean, that was horrendous and I listened to him for hours and hours on end of how they were treated in Siberia. He left as a 17 year old, they took him from the street as a 17 year old, and he came back in 1954, I remember him, I’ll never forget, and he looked like an old man. He had grey hair as a twenty-some year old. So, it was a very painful thing in the family to discuss because you couldn’t discuss it, you couldn’t discuss it, because he was so scared, having lived through it. Not until we were older, when I went back [in 1978] did I talk to him and he was telling us stories that were… just pretty awful.
“He was a 17 year old what was called Levente. They were training with – this is the story I was told – they were training with wooden guns, and the Russians took them, took these, it was an organization of young boys that were not army trained yet, because they were too young. And he was in the archipelago, in Siberia for eight years in captivity. And they let a few of them go and said ‘Here, go,’ and just his trip from Siberia with no means, with one long coat and a bag, you know, getting on trains illegally, and being thrown out of trains… because they were free to go, but they had no means of getting there.”
“It had to have been like ’58 or… ’58-ish. And my father and my mother went for a walk to the park and didn’t come back, like, for hours. And because our aunt lived with us, we weren’t left alone, but we were waiting and waiting and saying ‘Where are they?’ And then my aunt came in and my grandfather came in and you know, they were kind of calming us down and said ‘Well mummy and dad are not coming home’. Well, they were arrested in the park in Košice, my father was taking pictures of my mother. It was a nice spring day – spring or fall day – I know it was. And he had a camera from Germany, a little, tiny, 36mm, you which… we had the big Flexaret 6 x 9. And this was this little new camera which his friend Laco, who was then the head architect, brought from Germany, from East Germany, I’m pretty sure. And it had the kinofilm, the 35mm.
“So he obviously used it, tried to take pictures of my mother whom he obviously loved and thought she was hot. So they arrested them for taking pictures, and later on we found out what happened, but they were not home for like three days. And I mean, within this time, there were these police officers, they were in civil clothing, and raided our apartment. And they took every camera we had, which was this big Flexaret and another 8mm movie camera, because my father loved doing that. They took all of that, all the film, all the negatives, everything that was in the cabinet, they took everything. Because they were spying? I don’t know…
“Well it turned out that they arrested them until they cleared all the films and all the, you know, camera equipment that they weren’t spies and all the pictures on it obviously got destroyed, because they didn’t get them back. So the film from that little camera, however, they pulled that out, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Oh, it was color film too, imagine that, in the ’50s. And they brought out to my dad a 6 x 9 film and said ‘What are these –xs here?’ And he said ‘That is not from my camera! What are you, crazy? This is from a big one, right, it won’t even fit in that!’ Boom! So they got beaten. And my father had bruises and my mother had, you know… they were not allowed to talk. They were sitting together and they were not allowed to talk. And they were jailed for three days, to find out that they were spies, they had nothing on them, obviously. But here was the thing; he was taking pictures in an area that was secret. He said ‘What is secret about this?’ Because there were no signs saying ‘you may not’, you know how you have signs saying ‘No photography’ or something. Nothing was marked. It was unmarked but he should have known that down that park, at the end of the park, in the middle of the park, was the police station. And that was the secret. I don’t think they ever found out what was secret.”
“When I was graduating gymnázium, that was 1968 – June 4, 1968 – the day that Bobby Kennedy got shot, I remember hearing that on the news when I was walking in for my exam. And what had happened in 1968, In January of ’68, you know, The Prague Spring, Russian became non-mandatory to take as an exam in maturita [the school leaver’s certificate].
“So we had Slovak, Russian, history… oh, and Latin, and then a selective, so I took German as a selective. Well, then Russian became non-mandatory and I said ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to graduate? That’s all I know!’ So, I took it as a selective. And I thought, well, there’ll be a bunch of us. No one. No one in the whole gymnázium graduated in Russian as an elective. I was so embarrassed, because there was so much animosity towards Russian. But I did not carry the animosity to the language, because I loved the language, you know, Pushkin and Dostoevsky and all that, I used to read it in Russian. So I loved it, I loved the language. And I loved Hungarian, so the animosities that were, such as they were – I was not affected by them, if you will. A lot of people tried to forget the language, intentionally, they worked on it. And it worked – after a few years, they did forget.”
“She also told me not to tell anyone, just one close friend, and so all my closest 30 friends came to say goodbye to the train station. But, what I may add, everybody was so loose about this, everybody was so bitter about what had happened, everybody was just so upset that even on the borders people knew we were not coming back but they were like ‘Good luck, have a good life.’ That was what they said. But my worst memories were prior to leaving when I knew we were leaving. You know, we were in towns and there were all these tanks and shootings, because we had a curfew, like at 6:00 or 7:00, I’m not sure what it was. But there were all these tanks, and in Kosice with all these tanks the cobblestones, I mean they were all ripped up from the tanks, horrible, horrible, horrible. Rude, the soldiers were pretty rude to us, because we were talking, saying ‘What are you doing here?’ Some of them didn’t even know they were not in their own country, some had children in the tanks. Yeah – because the Russians were taken from wherever they were, they were called in to ‘save Slovakia, or Czechoslovakia, from capitalism’. So they came to save us. It was horrible, it was horrible.”
“I was the women’s, I was the náčelníčka [leader] of the women’s group. We created a Czechoslovak school with a couple of friends and we were teaching, a couple of women were teaching Slovak and Czech to our American children, and I was teaching gymnastics. And I think it was once a week, we dragged our kids there to learn Slovak. But I mean all my kids speak Slovak, but it’s spoken, so they learned to write and read and they hated going there because who wants to go to school after school? But they learned some, and we had these events where they were dancing. There was a very active lady by the name of Lucia Maruska Levandis, very talented, she was making kroje, so we made those for the kids. I mean I helped her, she made most of it. The events that were organized for children, they were like Mikulášska and they were Sokol and SVU and all the organizations so… We were pretty active in all of those.”
At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
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Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.
At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
“I played guitar. When I was about 14, I went to work for a summer in a cinderblock factory. It was hard work, but I made some money and bought my guitar. That’s also a time when I met a lot of people. You look, it’s a cinderblock factory, but everybody was an ex-professor, ex-teacher, ex-accountant, because they lost their job and the only thing they could do was doing manual labor. So that was another thought, ‘Now hold on just a minute, this is not right.”
“My father was always kind of enterprising, and what happened is he was a mechanical engineer taking care of construction machinery. At that point in time, there was a problem. They had a high rate of breakage, and he came up with an invention how to grease and maintain those things. And he was talking to everybody ‘Please start doing this,’ even going to the Ministry somewhere in Prague, but nobody wanted to do it. So he decided ‘Ok, I’m going to do it on my own.’ And he did. Except eventually, he was jailed and sentenced for reintroducing capitalist enterprise. So he spent I think about a year in jail in Jáchymov, in those uranium mines. And he was so good of an engineer that even when he was in jail he tried to make things better, ‘How can you do this better?’ So, as a matter of fact, they even let him out early for good behavior.”
“I went through college and then graduate school in a very good time. I started in ’65. In a couple of years, the Prague Spring started, and you could see it in schools. Suddenly it was open. They taught pretty much a more Western style. I got my undergraduate degree in political economy, graduate degree in business management, and postgraduate in systems engineering, and those were all things they pretty much taught Western style management, and I knew more about the stock market than people in the U.S., and systems engineering as a discipline – it was more related to what I did when I finished university – it was not so well-known even in the U.S. It started to be taught some ten years later, kind of building big systems and things like that. So that’s why I’m saying that it was a good time; because at the same time, the Prague Spring started at that time. There were a lot of new ideas.”
“We were very much in touch with what was going on, and I knew some people who signed it and things like that. But what was happening – I guess it was happening at every company – everybody had an interview and was asked ‘Sign this document that you do not agree with it Charter 77.’ I had a problem, so again I opened my mouth, and I eventually signed it, but I put ‘Signed under duress’ or something like that. That was an additional reason they were kind of saying ‘Well, you’re not going anywhere in your career.’ We had copies distributed. We had a copy of it; it was an underground copy, but yeah, we had it.”
“We were trying to go [to America] on – I don’t know what kind of visa it is – but reunion of family, because my father was already in the U.S. and he was a naturalized citizen at the time. But we needed my birth certificate and all the kids’ certificates to be able to prove that I’m his son and these are really my kids and we didn’t know that, we didn’t have anything. My family sent us photocopies; that was not good enough, it had to be originals. Finally, my family sent it through somebody who went to Greece. Well, the scumbag asked for a lot of money for doing that, but never delivered. My father started threatening that he’s going to put Interpol on it. Eventually, we got the documentation that we needed, but it took close to a year. Other people sometimes left after four months and were on the way to the U.S. or Australia. We’d been there for a year.”
“Those were not easy times, because when we moved in, we didn’t have anything. You wanted to cook dinner, we don’t have a pan, we don’t have any plates and things. So everything you had to buy. We came really with a pair of t-shirts and jeans for each of us. So you had to buy from scratch and start from scratch. Friends of my father gave us some tables. We bought a mattress to sleep on and stuff like that, but it took time until you set yourself up. We didn’t have anything.”
“We went to a few meetings with people, and I didn’t like one aspect of it. You had generations of immigrants – some people came during WWII, some people came after ’48 when it changed, then some people came in between, and then ’68 was another move, and then we came in ’78. Now what I didn’t like much was that people living in the U.S. were trying to tell me how it is, when I just came from there and knew. Their view was totally skewed because they – well, we didn’t like what was happening either – but they knew, ‘We know everything and this is what it should be like,’ and it was more like they were angry at the system, and I didn’t want to deal with that much. Especially, I didn’t want to talk so bad about the country back home, because then I would be talking bad about my family who is still there, about my friends who are still there, so I kind of avoided that for that reason.”
After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.
Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.
]]>Milan Hauner was born in 1940 in Gotha, Germany. His Czech father, Vilém, married his German mother, Gertrud, when she was threatened with sterilization (because of a handicap) by the Nazi government under the Nuremberg Laws. During WWII, Milan’s grandfather and uncle were arrested and executed on charges of anti-Nazi activities. Milan moved to Prague with his parents when he was just over one year old and grew up there. Vilém was a renowned book binder and Gertrud worked as a seamstress. Both Milan’s parents were deaf and, in addition to speaking German and Czech, he and his younger brother Roland learned sign language. From an early age, Milan loved history and says he had access to many older books, including some that were eventually banned by the Communist government. He attended elementary school and gymnázium in Prague, and began studying history and literature at Charles University in 1957. Upon graduation, Milan was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and served for two years. He remembers spending most of his second year in the army in prison as punishment for ‘breaches of discipline’ and his outspoken ways.
After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.
Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.
“My parents, between them, used mostly sign language, but with us they insisted on lip reading and actually an oral communication, because they were both trained. It’s interesting; the schools for the deaf in Germany and the former Czechoslovakia used both methods in educating them. My grandmother, my Czech grandmother, was one of the persons who very much insisted on the education of deaf people. She traveled abroad – was still under the old monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian system – and consulted specialists, purchased literature in German and French, translated it, and she helped to improve the teaching of deaf people in the former Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia. She’s very well remembered.”
“One day there was a knock on the door and I went to open the door, and there was a tall Russian officer standing. He had a brown bag under his arm, which will appear later in the story, and one eye was a glass eye. I had never seen somebody with a glass eye, so I walked around him and tried to see the eye turning after him, but it was all frozen always directly in front of him. When he saw that I was lip reading my mother and we used some signs, gesticulated with hands, he must have realized my mother was deaf. I don’t know what his mission was. I think that later I learned that these last-minute patriots sent this Russian to our apartment and that there’s a German woman there, take her out in the prison, or the camps which were built up around Prague for German civilians. He was a bit embarrassed, so he asked for a glass of water, in Russian вода [voda], in Czech voda, it’s the same, I understood him. So my mother gave him a glass of water and he drank it – it was warm outside – quickly, and he asked for another one, and then she brought a bottle of sweetener which was kind of syrup which we used during the War because there was no sugar, some fruit sweetener, and that broke the ice. He started to play with us, with me and my brother, and after a while he simply gave us this little brown bag he brought in and that was full of cherries. So that is my first lasting impression of the Russian barbarians. He in fact was very humane.”
“I was obsessed with history, it was clear. Everyone in my class knew that I was obsessed with history; I had the best knowledge of history in the classroom, always challenging the teacher and reading history books under the desk. I had a vast library because due to the fate which befell my relatives on my father’s side, my grandfather and uncle, when they were arrested, some of their books – if they were not confiscated – landed in our house. So I had three libraries accumulated by my grandmother, my grandfather, and my uncle. I never managed to read even a fraction of them.”
“When I applied to go to the university and the director refused to give support to my application because he was uneasy to see that I was born in Germany and that my mother was German, and therefore he wanted to speak with both of my parents. He felt rather ashamed when my father told him that he lost his father and uncle during the Nazi occupation. So he immediately apologized. So these are the two sides of my upbringing, if you like.”
“I returned to London and joined an organization which was called Toc H which is a branch of Quakers. And for just some food and shelter I was helping to extract political news from the newspapers that was every morning on the front desk, on the wall, and what we provided was information about jobs and shelter for Czech and Slovak students who were fugitives. And I must say the reaction of the English people was extraordinary. Almost everyone who came to us received an address where he could stay overnight and some little money. I think it was kind of a late reaction to the Munich complex among the English people; they felt the analogy was so striking between the Nazi invasion and the Soviet invasion, so they were helping us.”
In 1976, Mila moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in linguistics at the University of Kansas. She met her future husband, Layne Pierce, in the university library when they discovered both spoke Czech (he had studied the language in college). Mila and Layne married in 1977 and have two daughters. After finishing her PhD, Mila taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for two years. Since 1989, Mila has been a professor of Czech and Russian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mila is active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language. She is also involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. Mila believes that Czech-American culture is integral to the wider Czech culture and she hopes to ‘build a bridge’ between the two. Today Mila lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.
]]>Mila Saskova-Pierce was born in Prague in 1948. Her mother, Miluše, was a high school literature teacher while her father, Vladimír, worked in a factory. She was raised in the Hloubětín district of the city along with her brother and her cousin, whom her parents adopted. After attendinggymnázium, Mila applied to Charles University, but says that her application was rejected because she applied for a course of study that was no longer available. She worked for one year, first at the municipal incinerator and then for the national funeral home. Mila’s second application to Charles University to study medical biochemistry was accepted and she began her studies in 1967. It was at this time, according to Mila, that she really began questioning the system and interacting with dissidents. During the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, a photograph of Mila protesting on Wenceslas Square was published in several Western publications – an event which she says ended her anonymity and threatened her future. Within a few days of the invasion, Mila left Czechoslovakia for Vienna, but returned to Prague that October. When she realized that the situation was not going to get better, she left the country once more. After a short stay in Vienna, Mila moved to Belgium. There she studied Slavic and Russian languages and journalism for one year at the University of Liège before transferring to the Free University of Brussels. She graduated in 1975 and completed a one-year program in language philosophy at the University of Leuven.
In 1976, Mila moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in linguistics at the University of Kansas. She met her future husband, Layne Pierce, in the university library when they discovered both spoke Czech (he had studied the language in college). Mila and Layne married in 1977 and have two daughters. After finishing her PhD, Mila taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for two years. Since 1989, Mila has been a professor of Czech and Russian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mila is active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language. She is also involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. Mila believes that Czech-American culture is integral to the wider Czech culture and she hopes to ‘build a bridge’ between the two. Today Mila lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.
“It was the part of Prague that had domkáři. Those were associations of house owners, and they were quite virulently anti-communist. By the ‘50s, the most vocal people obviously were gone, exiled, sent to prison, and unknown, so it was a kind of underground rumble. But it was obvious people knew about it. People would pay attention to who was talking to whom, and so it was rather instructive to any little kid because, in spite of the propaganda, we knew that there was a sea of discontent, and so I grew up with this. Part of that part of Prague [Hloubětín] was the communist worker’s movement who agreed with the communists, and they would mainly meet in the local pub; in fact, in Předni Hloubětín there were one or two pubs for three streets, and they were well-populated in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening, three times as much. And those people, they would perhaps never put up with discussion about the fault of communists. And if you went into the big Hloubětín, just perhaps a 10 or 15 minute walk away, there you could hear that rumble. People, the underground, discontent, because people who owned the houses, very often what would happen would be that they would lose part of their house and the communists would just quite simply put some family into part of their building or part of their little house, and they wouldn’t ask for any permission essentially and so now you had to share quarters – your own in your own home – with somebody you didn’t know. And then, kind of an evil scheme that was hatched in some of the communist planning minds was to make sídliště – the housing development – and part of it, they destroyed those rodinné domky – family houses – and they would just take away the gardens and put a huge, monstrous panelák [prefabricated high-rise] and so the houses suddenly found themselves without a garden, standing in the middle of the development and they didn’t like it either. So obviously, there was a lot of discontent with which I grew up.”
“Humanistic sciences or history or even language – it was pitiful. It was absolutely pitiful. If I learned anything, it is because my father inherited filled bookcases from his parents and I essentially would read a book or two a day, perhaps four during the weekend. And also, my mom refused to get television, which means we didn’t have television and if you didn’t play volleyball with your friends, there was nothing to do but read, or raid grandma’s garden and eat her radishes, or eat the radishes and read, and so that was how I spent my childhood.
“Sciences, however, perhaps because many well-meaning educators exited and/or retreated in to the fields of science – and that was also my plan – the sciences were well-taught. We had many idealistic teachers and we knew that they were ideologically flawed, if judged by the communist measuring stick, and we loved them even more for that. We really had good scientific preparation.
“But humanistic subjects, boy was it pitiful. It was worse than if they didn’t teach us anything because factually it was not correct and the interpretation and even ways how to study were completely wrong. I didn’t know how to do research because essentially we were told to parrot what we were told, and even the parroting could have been potentially quite lethal, because the official policy was changing. They changed the official policy that we learned by heart and it wasn’t good anymore suddenly, so the first day of our school year, we would get glue and empty pages and we would actually slap empty pages of paper onto a page which we were supposed to erase from the memory of communist humanity. And we did it. We of course read through it very carefully before we did it.”
“By the time I was 19, suddenly I realized that there was a huge depth, a cavern, ready for exploration for me to find out what I was a product of, and I had the opportunity. Then came August 21 [1968] and I went to Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and, because at that time I was good-looking, there was a photo of me which appeared on the front page of Paris Match and in Europe in several Western publications, and obviously I wasn’t anonymous. I met the person who was overseeing the teachers in the school where I was studying, and suddenly she perked up as a communist. She made sure that I knew that she noticed me and so at that time suddenly I realized ‘I want to get out. I want to get out and I need to get out.’
“There were two reasons. One was they wouldn’t let me continue at school, and of course I knew that it was somewhere some farming cooperative that I would have to go to; and/or that I wouldn’t have a chance to grow intellectually and understand what was happening to my whole nation. To the literature, to the music, to the film. To the people, to their relationships. And because we were all raised with this admiration of the national reawakening – národní probuzení – I really felt defensive of whatever was Czech, whatever was Czech culture. The survival of the nation was… we were fed the worries of the survival of the nation, and suddenly I realized that communists were perhaps enemies of the survival of the nation, as far as highly educated, cultured, and democratically-cultured nation. So that was the moment when I decided I had to leave.”
“There was a friend who actually was British who had a car. He came to Prague before the occupation and he gave me a ride to Vienna, and I left with him. It was rather interesting and memorable – and there was another person in the car. We were in the car and there was one Russian tank in front of us and one Russian tank behind us, and I was just thinking ‘Do they have good brakes behind us?’ because there was no space if their brakes failed for us to escape the accident.
“We made it to Vienna and then from Vienna we started to get all kinds of rather optimistic news: students went on strike, professors were supporting students very often, and on and on. I was really homesick and I felt I needed to perhaps go back and reconnect with my friends, and the reconnection really didn’t happen. People were scared. The few people I knew who were straight, they were gone. Nobody knew where they went. They were gone to the West, and so I just then packed up once again and I left. I was able to leave – that was a completely crazy thing. An elderly gentleman provided me with a handwritten letter in which – he was Czech – in which he certified, or wrote, supposedly as a doctor, that my fiancé was dying in a Viennese hospital, and so I went for a výjezdní doložka [exit permit] which I got, and then I flew to Vienna. As I was coming through the airport, there was the guy who opened the list of people [who were not supposed to be allowed out of the country], there were names and names and names, and he goes [down the list] and he stops and I was there – I swear I was there – and he puts his finger by that line and he wishes me good luck. I had výjezdní doložka for four days. To me, it was a message.”
“I realized that culture is not only what we get from our parents; it’s this collective construct. We get something from them, we take it, we transform it, we add to it, we subtract from it whatever is not needed, is not usable, and we hand that new thing that we have lived, whether it was everyday existence and/or literature, music, visual arts, we hand it on to our children. And that culture depends on broad, democratic participation. If you don’t have broad participation, you cannot have the exclusive top, because the exclusive top depends on this growth towards the top of the pyramid, and I realized that if we don’t get engaged in this participation, we impoverish ourselves, we impoverish our neighbors, and we impoverish that part of the Czech culture that is living outside which is part of the diaspora. It’s my kind of quiet fight for the rights of the Czech diaspora to exist and be part of Czech culture, and so I tried also to communicate the achievements of this Czech diaspora to the kernel of the Czech culture, which happens to be in the Czech lands, and to motivate them into the re-acceptance of that part of their history. But not only that, to rebuild the bridge between the American Czech-ness, which was in so many ways instrumental and defining for the existence of modern Czechoslovakia, and build new bridges which would allow Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech lands after ’89, to reach once again the global community. Because after all, we can be the stepping stone.”
“It was really wonderful. It was in Kansas City and during the ceremony of citizenship, the judge was reading the background of the people who applied for citizenship, just two or three sentences, and introduced each one of us. There was a Chinese guy and he says ‘Nuclear physics.’ Then he goes ‘Doctor from India.’ Then he comes to me and says ‘Czech linguist, PhD.’ And he says ‘We are gaining so much. Thank you for wanting to be American citizens.’ In addition to it, there were about 40 families who adopted Korean kids, and they were all girls in ruffles. They were all fidgeting; they were tiny, perhaps two years, three years old, sitting on the laps of their parents. The parents shedding tears and kissing them. Obviously they had been raising them for two or three years; they were their children. So it was a really happy occasion. All those happy, absolutely melting, parents and the few of us who were welcomed and thanked for willing to be American citizens and adding our value to the American nation. It was such an emotional thing.”
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
]]>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from gymnázium, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
“Sport – that was really my hobby. Skiing, and later on I did windsurfing. I built by myself the whole board, so we were doing some windsurfing on the lakes. Other than that, sport was the big escape for people. Camping, going out to the forest, because everybody was leaving the city and going to – they called it a chalupa [cottage]– and going to villages and escaping from the city.”
“In 1962 we went to Vienna and I was nine years old, and when you crossed the border – everything in Czechoslovakia was kind of drab, gray and brown – we went to Austria and it was like a different world. The gas stations with the colorful flags and colors everywhere and new cars. I think that left a huge impression on me. [I thought] ‘I want to live here,’ you know? And Coca-Cola and fries! Eating fries was like ‘Wow.’ It was amazing. That definitely had a big impression on me. It was just once. The funny thing was we had really little pocket money, so we were traveling in Austria by hitchhiking on the highway. It was pretty cool. My dad, he spoke German fluently, because he was born there. Some people let us sleep in their houses. It was great. It was so special.”
“It was amazing. Suddenly you can read. There were new magazines, every month, coming out; new information. People were talking on the radio and on TV about what happened in the ‘50s in the Czech Republic, when they executed any opposition and [had] the show trials. I was 15 years old, but it had a great impression on me; I just hated communists. Then the Russians came in August, and it took like two years to break everybody, and that’s my disappointment with the Czech nation, that we gave up way too easily I think. I’m not saying that we should fight, because we didn’t have a chance, but what happened was people renounced their opinion really quickly. And I think it was much worse in the ‘70s maybe than in the ‘50s, although there were no executions or anything like that. But it was like the dark ages, culturally and morally. Yeah, I think the ‘70s was a really bad time, and when we saw the movie about Milos Forman [What doesn’t kill you…], he was talking about it and he said ‘There was no hope; it will be there forever.’ But 1968 was just amazing. It was so refreshing and everything.”
“We boarded the ship to Venice and we had a big luggage – for a one-day trip to Venice! And everyone was looking at us and, honestly, I was scared. I was really scared. Because you don’t know what to expect, you are leaving everything behind you, and so I didn’t enjoy this sailing across the sea too much. We got to Venice and they said ‘You from Czechoslovakia, there’s one gate and everybody else goes to the other gate,’ and they don’t even open the [other] passports, like Dutch and German; they just went through. And I felt like ‘That’s the reason I have to leave’ because it was so humiliating. I felt justification, like ‘I have to leave this.’ But the Italians told me, ‘You don’t need, for a one-day trip, this huge luggage, so put it back on the ship.’ Another thing, they left our passports on the ship. So I said ‘Ok’ and I took the bag with money and laminated [documents] inside and I went to the toilet, and I had a little pocket knife and I was ripping this bag to get the money and stuff out. I was so scared, but I got it out.
“So we went to Venice and we asked for asylum, and they said ‘No, don’t do it now. Come back when you are coming back and then you can do it.’ So we are wandering across Venice and we went to St. Mark’s Piazza and there were all these tourists having a great time, and we were kind of desperate. So we went back, but we didn’t have our passports, so one Italian guy offered to go to the ship to pick up the passports and some luggage, but he brought the luggage of some other person, so it was a mess; it was complicated. And after that, the Italians took us to the police station, they did a short interview with us, and they gave us tickets to Latina, which was a refugee camp close to Rome.”
“Our sponsors were a group of people from the United Methodist Church in North Carolina, in Raleigh, and it was just a group of fantastic people. Me and Zuzana, my ex, we are not religious people. I wouldn’t say we are atheist; I believe in something spiritual, but I am not necessarily Catholic or Baptist. But these people, they saw one paper with a really bad photo of us, and they decided ‘We want to sponsor these people.’ When we got to the airport, one of them took us to his home; we stayed there for two days; they found an apartment for us. They paid for an apartment for us for six months, they paid for our insurance, they gave us a car, they provided furniture for our whole apartment. Everything. The furniture, every piece was different, but who cares? And when we told this to our friends and relatives in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t believe it. They said ‘What do you they want for it?’ I said ‘Nothing. They want to help.’”
“I know people that went back right away, but I never had any intention to go back because I was so impressed with Americans, with their hospitality, and how they accepted us. That’s the major difference, I feel. And I’ve had big arguments with Czech people about like ‘Be proud that you are Czech,’ and I said ‘You know what, this is my homeland.’ I was treated so well here and when I go back I just don’t feel it. So no, I never had any desire to go back.”