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Melania Rakytiak
Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt…
Matt Carnogursky
Matt Carnogursky was born in Bratislava in 1960. His mother Isabella had a job as a chemical engineer and his father Ivan was a mechanical engineer working for a construction company. After the fall of communism, Ivan served in the Slovak parliament…
Martin Holub
Martin Holub was born in Prague in 1938. His father, Ján, was a lawyer who, after the Communist coup in 1948, was not allowed to continue practicing and sent to work at a cement factory. He later worked in a photography lab and then as a librarian at…
Mark Zejdl
Mark Zejdl was born in Petrovice, a village outside Prague, in 1943. His parents owned a butcher shop in Prague; however, Mark lived with his grandparents in Petrovice until he started school due to unrest in the capital brought on by WWII and the…
Ludvik Barta
Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a…
Ladislav Fedorko
Ladislav Fedorko was born in Spišské Tomášovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1946. His father, Jozef, worked as an engineer on the railroad passing through the town (which linked Prague to the Soviet Union), while his mother, Žofia, stayed at home raising…
Kveta Eakin
Kveta Eakin was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1956. When she was 18 months old, however, she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents’ home in Brno, Moravia. Her father, Arnošt, was a successful agricultural engineer, who…
John Jaroslav Kyncl
Jaroslav Kyncl was born in Prague on August 16, 1936. He spent his early childhood in the northern Bohemian town of Liberec, where his father, Jan Kynčl, was the president of the local branch of Živnostenská banka. In 1939, following the Nazi…
Joe Gazdik
Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and…
Jerry Barta
Jerry Barta was born in Prague in 1950. He grew up in the Dejvice district of the city with his parents and two brothers. His mother Dagmar worked as an accountant while his father Josef held a number of jobs, including as a cartographer and a…