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Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
program
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Mantifesto for Free Czechoslovakia program, Cedar Rapids, IA, 1968
Subject
The topic of the resource
Czech-Americans--Cedar Rapids, IA.
Description
An account of the resource
Program for the Manifesto for Free Czechoslovakia program at C.S.P.S. Hall on Sunday, October 27, 1968–English and Czech, 4 pages.
Type
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Text
Format
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pdf
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1968:10:27
Source
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NCSML Archive SC 1.34.4
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Cedar Rapids, IA
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Federation of Czech Groups
Publisher
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Tisk Ferdy Anthony's Press, Cedar Rapids, IA
Contributor
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Rights
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No known restrictions on publication.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SC1344Manifesto1968
Language
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en-us
cs
1968
Cedar Rapids
Federation of Czech Groups
Iowa
program
-
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61dd56fefe574aa5e9d30e6982fdd4a9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Moravia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PpDpAeEaNV4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were always very poor, due to political reasons, so basically my grandparents played a big part in my life. They gave us a place to stay; they supported us, giving us… If the pig was slaughtered we got some of that and otherwise we were just supporting ourselves by planting fruits and vegetables and having the animals at home so we can survive.”</p><h4>Brother Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D446A1mz_xo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My brother is very spontaneous. He decides; he goes. So he very spontaneously on the way to the train, which is a 15 minute walk, he tells me ‘Come with me.’ He’s already packed, he’s going to the train, and he says ‘Come with me.’ I said ‘What do you mean? Like, right now, this minute?’ He says ‘Yeah, why not?’ I said ‘Yeah, but I’m just going to be a burden to you because I don’t know anything. I wouldn’t know how to take care of myself. I’d be just dependent on you; I don’t want to do it. But I am certainly going to try to get out when I become something, when I have a profession to fall back on.’ So he just went. I guess I was quite reasonable then. I’m pretty much down-to-earth, so I was thinking logically that it’s not practical to leave right now, and I should at least finish my studies in the<em>gymnázium</em>.</p><p>“But it certainly planted a bug in my head that I should follow him, and I was certain I could get out. And then I thought ‘Ok, I’ll still try to do the university’ and university didn’t work out; then I really purposefully became a nurse, figuring that I speak German, I’m surrounded by German-speaking countries, Germany and Austria, so I’m going to try to get there and I could work as a nurse. I found out also later on that in Germany there was a shortage of nurses so it would have been great. But there was no way to get out. Absolutely no way for me because we were considered such high-risk that we were not even allowed to go to Yugoslavia, which was the route that many people fled – and I admit, I would be the first one.”</p><p><em>You couldn’t even go on vacation to Yugoslavia?</em></p><p>“No, no.” </p><h4>Voting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rNa-7lojaqs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The voting I went through in Czechoslovakia was absolutely ridiculous. With the age of 18 you had the ‘right’ to vote, and it consisted of you being forced to go and vote. You were handed a paper filled out with the Communist candidates, which you folded and threw in some container. That was the extent of the voting. Absolutely absurd stuff. I don’t know if they were putting up some image for the Western countries because there was no real free election.”<br /></p><h4>Staying in America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/21D2DFIwfKQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With my family, with my husband, with the properties, and emotionally, much more invested here. I love this country, very much so, because it gave me freedom. I was so fascinated when I came here in ’76, switched on the TV and people were bad-mouthing the president, for example. They were saying bad things about him or people high in the government. This was absolutely a no-no in Czechoslovakia. The freedom of speech was just, to me, so refreshing and so amazing. After ’89, I went there almost every year; I still do, so I saw the changes and all that. But you grow apart from these people. You become different, and I don’t think I would be accepted 100 percent back because I am different already.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Anna Balev
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2339 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609072058im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/SQ-Anna-Balev.png" alt="" width="235" height="235" /></p><p>Anna Balev was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, in 1950. She grew up outside the city in the small village of Březce with her parents, three siblings and grandparents. Prior to the Communist coup, Anna’s father, Jaroslav, was a language professor at a nearby <em>gymnázium</em>. Anna describes him as an ‘avid Catholic’ who ‘went out of his way to provoke’ the communist authorities. He was arrested and sent to prison for two years. Anna’s mother, Blažena, returned to school to become a nurse in order to support the family once her father ran into trouble. Anna says that she was the only one in her class who was not a Pioneer and was instead sent to religion classes. Each year Anna spent the summer with her maternal uncle and aunt in Krnov, times she fondly recalls. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Anna’s brother left the country and settled in Canada.</p><p> </p><p>Anna attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Šternberk and hoped to study languages at Charles University (she was taught French, German and Latin by her father), but was not accepted. She instead decided to study nursing, recognizing that a practical profession would make it easier to start a life elsewhere if she left the country. Anna studied for two years in Olomouc and moved to Prague where she worked at a psychiatric hospital. She then took a job in Karlovy Vary, where she was hired because of her German language skills. In 1975 Anna reconnected with her future husband, an American who had emigrated from Ukraine. The pair had met while she was living in Prague and he was visiting the capital city. They decided to marry in order for Anna to legally leave the country. After getting married in Karlovy Vary, Anna immediately set about getting permission to immigrate to the United States. She arrived in New York City in May 1976 and was handed her green card at the airport.</p><p> </p><p>Anna says that she ‘fell in love immediately’ with the city and was astonished at the freedom she now enjoyed. While studying for her RN exam, Anna found a job at a women’s clinic. She subsequently worked at Roosevelt Hospital and for a plastic surgeon. Anna stopped practicing nursing when her first daughter was born in 1980. Her second daughter was born two years later. Anna also attended Hunter College part-time from her first year in New York. In 1985 she received degrees in English and theatre arts. Today Anna is the owner of a rental company and owns property in the Czech Republic as well as New York.</p><p> </p><p>Anna has returned to the Czech Republic nearly every year since she left and has recently become a dual citizen of the Czech Republic and the United States. She is active in the Czech community in New York as a member of Sokol and the local chapter of SVU (Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences). Today, Anna lives in New York City with her husband.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Catholicism
Community Life
Education
Family life
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Machova
marriage
Religion
Sternberk
Warsaw Pact invasion
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9880e91c01350e2ca09f2768dd0b897a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>SS Soldier</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hnZmsadNf2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Because we were closely watched, that’s why. Because Masaryk, as you probably know, was suspect by not only communists, but by fascists. Any kind of dictatorial regime hated President Masaryk and because he was the grandfather of my mother and my aunt and father-in-law of my grandmother, obviously my family was basically in a bad situation, whether it was communism or fascism.”</p><p><em>What was that like, living with an SS man? </em></p><p>“It was not funny obviously, but you have to find ways to survive.”</p><p><em>And what ways did you find?</em></p><p>“We were out in the country a lot where he didn’t accompany us all the time, and you have to find a modus vivendi under any circumstances.”</p><h4>Grandmother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nRTNSMOhMjc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1948, when Jan Masaryk died and we went to the funeral, my grandmother was very upset because she was listening to Klement Gottwald talking about Jan, saying ‘Our friend, Jan’ and all that stuff, and she stood up, because we were in the front row, and she said ‘And now you will just shut up’ – in Czech obviously – ‘because you know that you killed him. And you will not be saying things like this because it’s not true.’ And we all sort of died because we thought ‘Oh my god, this woman is going to be arrested immediately.’ Again, she got away with it, because she always stood up, and she was very tall and very skinny and very monumental in her own way, and she could just tell anybody anything. She was absolutely fearless. Absolutely fearless. And I guess if you are fearless you can do things, because you have the inner power and inner conviction which sort of gets you away from the trouble.”</p><h4>Lineage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NsFMWkv_hac?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was applying for school, for stipends, for travel, for anything, on all the bureaucratic paperwork was always one sentence: ‘Mother of Charlotta Poche (and later Kotík) is Herberta Masaryková!’ and that said it all. So I was not allowed to do anything. I couldn’t find a job, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t join any groups, I was persona non grata, simply. It was as if I had some major disease, if I were a leper. I was totally blacklisted on everything. It was not only the regime or the officials of society; it was people who sometimes were afraid to be friends because they associated me with all these troubles which could spill over on them. So it has been a very difficult situation. It was simply ‘No’ to everything. Every little thing had to be fought for.”</p><h4>Prague Spring</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D2q9M7XE7zI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We wanted to improve the system because there were a lot of good things in the system. The free education, the free medical care. There were a lot of good things and if you could have political freedom and travel and exchange, then I think the system would have been very good. I didn’t understand why anybody would say no to it, because we didn’t want to declare war on Russia or some stupid thing like that. It was just making decent living conditions, so I didn’t understand. But older people, like my mother, they were saying ‘Oh no, this is not going to work. They will come and crush it.’ I said ‘Mom, you are crazy. Why would they do that? We don’t want to do anything against them. We just want to improve what we already have. But I was wrong, because I am slightly naïve. But I really felt it was a great experiment and people were so nice to each other at the time. It was like the society blossomed. People were just so different. They were so hopeful. They were so nice. It was just amazing.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MqxMg5T3N9E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was very difficult for me to make the decision of leaving because I was leaving my mother and my father and my aunt there and I felt I was deserting them, and also I felt that I was deserting a country that was in a really difficult situation. It was a little bit like leaving a sick person, and I felt that’s not the right thing to do, but ultimately I joined my husband. I was also thinking about the future of Tom [her son] – at the time it was only Tom, not Jan – because I had so many difficulties, really. It was very difficult and I didn’t want them to have to go through – Tom at the time, and I was hoping to have another child later – so I didn’t want to prepare for them the same life I had. I felt that it’s not right. Since I had a chance to leave, I ultimately decided to do it.”</p><h4>Mother</h4>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Charlotta Kotik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Charlotta Kotik was born in Prague in 1940. Her father Emanuel was an art historian and her mother Herberta was a musician. Charlotta’s maternal great-grandfather was Tomáš G. Masaryk and, as a result, one of her earliest memories is of an SS soldier living in her family’s house during WWII. She also clearly recalls the funeral of Jan Masaryk, her great-uncle. While growing up, Charlotta often spent time in Rybná nad Zdobnicí in eastern Bohemia where her grandmother lived. Following her graduation from high school, Charlotta says that she found it impossible to continue her education due to her background, but was able to get a job as a curatorial assistant at the Jewish Museum in Prague, thanks to a friend of her mother. She was responsible for the photo archives and also worked with children’s drawings from Terezín. After three years, Charlotta began working in the Asian department of the National Gallery. She enrolled at Charles University as an evening student and, in 1968, graduated with a master’s degree in art history. Charlotta also worked for the National Institute for Preservation and Reconstruction of Architectural Landmarks, where she was involved in monument preservation during the building of the Prague subway. In October 1969, Charlotta’s husband Petr left Czechoslovakia to take a job at the University of Buffalo in New York. Although she had reservations about leaving her family and her country, Charlotta and their son Tom (who had been born in May 1969) followed, and they arrived in Buffalo in January 1970.</p><p> </p><p>Charlotta soon found a job at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo where she worked for 13 years. She and Petr had a second son, Jan, in 1972. In 1983, the Kotiks moved to New York City where Charlotta began working at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She retired from there in 2006 as head of the department of contemporary art. Charlotta says that she did not regularly speak Czech to her sons, which helped her master the English language; however, they both spent one year studying in Prague, and Jan eventually settled there, married, and had two children before his death from cancer in 2007. Today, Charlotta is an independent curator. She visits the Czech Republic several times a year where, in addition to visiting her grandchildren, she works with an organization that supports young artists. She is also a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and is on the advisory board of the Czech Center New York. Now divorced, she lives in Brooklyn.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arts
Community Life
Education
English language
Nazis
Prague Spring
Rybna nad Zdobnici
Secret police
Terezin
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23fa0ab189aeb21288da9275f468efc4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Competitive Swimming</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tE6sbqXEcF4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I was probably 13, they built a team and I started swimming, and that of course, took all of my time. I went to school and we had practice eight, nine times a week, so we went before school. In Kladno we did not have – and this is probably interesting for people, especially these days when they have everything – Kladno didn’t have a pool. They had a ‘city bath’ it was called, where all the people after work, all the steel mill workers and all the coal miners, went to soak themselves. So the water was very thick sometimes. Our pool in there was six by nine meters. It was very, very small. And the water was only – I would have to say, I am 5’8” and I have not grown since grade seven, so I’ve been this tall for a long time – and it was about to here [four feet], was the water. There was no deep end, there was nothing. So when I say thick, [it was] thick. And when people talk about chlorine this and chlorine that, we had a woman that took care of the water come with a bucket of chlorine, powdered chlorine, and just chuck it into the water over our heads.”</p><h4>Journey to the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RRC47MuNcV8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We got into a convoy of Army cars, and then my mother started freaking out, and we of course too, because we didn’t know what was happening. You could look into the woods and there were soldiers dug into dirty, filthy… because they were there for a couple of days. You were getting closer to the border so the woods were there, but they were everywhere. So you could see them and that was a very scary thing. Probably not very much conversation going on in the car, not that I remember. I remember holding a doll and just sitting there, not knowing what was happening.”</p><h4>Refugee School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cwh8ZMJ3OTE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents got a job at Siemens so they started working, and I went to gymnázium. I went to school; the weirdest school I ever went to was in Germany. My sister and I both went to school. The school was – for Germans, when you really think how structured they were and how strict – the school was like a zoo. I remember having a class and having a teacher, and somebody in the first row would start reading a book, tear the page out and send it through the class. They were throwing sneezing powder around so everybody would sneeze. We had an all-girls school across the yard, so the guys had binoculars and they were looking at the girls across the yard during class! Nobody stopped them. It was the weirdest zoo, I have to tell you.”</p><h4>Warsaw Emotions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fTCAHERhtzM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In those days, you would go to the movies and there was a newsreel. There were still newsreels before the movie in the late ‘60s. A lot of the things, I had to get out, because a lot of it was about the occupation of Czechoslovakia and I couldn’t take it. To this day for example, if I watch, from time to time, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the part of the occupation, I have to leave the room because I start crying. And it’s not a bad cry anymore and I don’t know if it ever was, but what I did not realize then and what I realized it much later when I was here and I was older, that it was a death of life, because the life that we knew was gone.”</p><h4>Importance of Heritage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ECDhzH7IVOU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“What changes is, I think, the need to do something with it and to leave something behind and have the younger generation continue with that. But it’s always been important for me. That’s why I learned a lot of the crafts and the specific crafts. When I was in Czech [Republic], I learned the wire work and doing those things. I did the blueprint, the fabric, I made my own clothes. When I was in Tampa, of all places, I did a lot of that because I was part of a program the city had called ‘Artist in the School,’ and they paid people to go and teach underprivileged kids. And that was one of the most satisfying things is to see these little kids and you teach them to weave and they leave you a note and write thank you, you were part of their Thanksgiving Day or whatever. I think that’s what I feel is important. As I grow older, I wish I could teach. As is popular, ‘nobody is really interested in doing this,’ that’s not true. You have to find the ways and teach the old ways.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dagmar Benedik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Dagmar Benedik was born in Kladno, Central Bohemia, in 1952. Her mother, Jarmila, taught at an after-school program and her father, Jiří, was a hockey coach. Dagmar recalls her childhood in Kladno as ‘fantastic.’ She says that many of her friends played on her father’s hockey team and she enjoyed traveling to Prague each week for French lessons and swimming practice and competitions. In the summer of 1968, Dagmar’s family planned to travel to Germany where her younger sister, Zuzana, was going to spend a few weeks with a family studying German. Because of a delay in processing, they received visas just a few days prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21, and Dagmar says her father made the decision to leave Czechoslovakia for good immediately following the invasion. Dagmar’s family drove toward the border at Rozvadov; because they entered the town through a local route instead of the main road from Plzeň, they avoided the barricade that had been set up to prevent travelers from crossing the border. Once across the border, they stayed with Dagmar’s sister’s host family for two weeks before spending six more weeks at Karlsruhe refugee camp.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2609" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609053007im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dagmar-dad.png" alt="" width="250" height="371" /></p><p>In October 1968, Dagmar moved with her family to Toronto. She says that her parents chose to immigrate to Canada because it was a neutral country. Her mother started working as a housekeeper and nanny, and her father found employment as a watch-maker – a trade he had learned in Kladno. Dagmar attended high school and took English lessons in the mornings before school. She continued to swim and, in 1969, won the Toronto Championships. After graduating from high school, Dagmar began working at a bank and married her first husband, Josef Benedík, who was also a Czech émigré. In the late 1970s, then divorced, Dagmar traveled around the United States and says she ‘fell in love’ with the country. In 1986, she had a business opportunity there and moved to Tampa, Florida. She received American citizenship when she married her second husband. In 1995, Dagmar went to Prague with the intention of working as a translator for one month; she stayed in the Czech Republic for six years, where she ran her own business and then worked for Strojexport and Adamovské strojírny.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2610" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609053007im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-53.jpg" alt="Handler-5" width="400" height="254" /></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Dagmar says that she continues to keep Czech traditions at home and has learned several Czech crafts. She refers to herself as a ‘citizen of the world’ and exercises her voting rights in the countries of her citizenship. Today, Dagmar lives in Richmond Hill near Toronto, but is planning on moving back to Tampa, which she considers home.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Child emigre
Cultural Traditions
emigrant
gymnazium
refugee
Refugee camp
Sports
Verflova
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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9df1b7eb045e89b54be660f15621f907
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Warsaw Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gZ8-er7X6G0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I do remember it vividly. I was about four and a half years old, but no matter how much our parents were trying to shield us from it, they just couldn’t quite do that. Litomyšl has a very long square – it’s not a square, really; it’s a main street – and it’s the second longest square in Czechoslovakia, second to Wenceslas Square in Prague, and they were trying to prevent the Russians from invading the middle of the town, so they put a barrier as a bus. And I just remember that there was a bus that was on the main street preventing traffic, and that people tore stones from the paving and stuff like that. The wave of invasion was from Polish [soldiers] and then Russian soldiers, and I remember my father took me to see them in a car, and I remember being scared for my dad. He said ‘Do you want to see the soldiers?’ and then we would just go past them and then he couldn’t back up, so that was a little tense. As little kids, four and a half, five years old, we had some kind of a notion that something was going on.”</p><h4>Father Leaves for U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9Ty0b2N8F8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was written in all my papers. It totally made a difference if I was accepted to any school; it had nothing to do with my student status. I know that my mother tried extremely hard to put on a good face. She was not willing to make a compromise with the socialist state to become a member of the [Communist] Party, but she was trying to be very involved in some social and civic organizations so we could put that on the resume. So I was able to go through a good college prep.”</p><h4>A Trip with Mom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Em-CZoz0CwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We traveled by bus from my hometown, through Hungary, through Romania, and into Bulgaria. It was very interesting in the sense that our bus broke down and we had to stay and camp out in Hungary. But Romania was by far the most startling experience I ever had, because we would stop at the rest area and there were corn fields, and all of the sudden the bus stopped and you have all these children running to you and begging for chewing gum and watches. It was really startling. Even just passing the Hungarian-Romanian border was startling enough, that the children would be sleeping in sleeping bags and you had all your bags and stuff, and they would order all the people to get off the bus and match every parent with each child, because there was a slave trade, and they were just so adamant about having every child to be accounted for. And Bulgaria, it was very interesting. It was interesting how different that was. Lack of working toilets. Lack of toilets, period. Lack of plumbing in the house. There was something that was outside and that was where you were supposed wash. It was like ‘Really? No privacy at all?’ So that was another lesson in being humble.”</p><h4>Unlike her Classmates</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9eX4o24vHBY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Because I had some severe allergies growing up, I was pretty much excused from a lot of this work. We did go picking potatoes a couple of years. When I got my exemption from the doctor that I really shouldn’t be submitted to anything like that, I was put to alternative work at the Litomyšl archives which was a totally cool place, and it started me on my archival experience. We did some really interesting things. We worked on reading through old judgments and old court documents, and everything that was more than ten years old was to be discarded, with the exception of that being political matter. So we got to read through all the court documents and, actually, if you think about it, high school kids deciding which material is going to get retained by local courts, it’s sort of an interesting experience. It was headed by some wonderful people, PhDs, who used it as a learning tool for some of us. There were some interns from Charles University from the philosophy department, and we had little breaks when we had little talks, and that was really very rewarding.”</p><h4>Keeping Heritage Alive</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CD6l5mSwU1c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I came here – and of course my knowledge of English was quite limited – people automatically assumed that I was somehow handicapped or that I came from a part of the world that was behind the Iron Curtain. People asked me, believe it or not, if I ever saw snow, and it’s like ‘Yeah, every winter.’ People asked me if we had cars or flushing toilets, and I just thought that it was a lack of information. So being here with an accent, it automatically put me at a place of being a second-class citizen, which I was already, at the economical level. I knew that I had to embrace being part of America, but I also knew that I wanted to have my own cultural identity – that I didn’t want to succumb to McDonald’s, that I didn’t want to succumb to other things. I felt that there was a good life somewhere else and I wanted people to know about it. That there is something else outside of their little world, and I’d like to be acknowledged for it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dagmar Bradac
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Dagmar Bradac was born in Litomyšl in eastern Bohemia in 1964. Her father Milan was an engineer and her mother Jana was a teacher. Dagmar says that growing up in the small cultural town of Litomyšl has had a lasting impression on her. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21, 1968, Dagmar’s father moved to Vienna where he had relatives, leaving Dagmar and her mother in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, he moved to the United States. As a result, Dagmar says that her and her mother’s lives were made more difficult – her mother had trouble keeping her job and much of their property was reclaimed by the Communist government. After graduating from high school, Dagmar knew that she would not be accepted to university and instead applied to a training program for those interested in working in the cultural sector. When she was not accepted for this program despite excelling at the entrance exams, Dagmar decided to leave the country. She arranged to visit her father in the United States and, in June 1982, flew to Chicago with her high school diploma and jewelry smuggled in her luggage.</p><p> </p><p>Dagmar’s first job in the United States was as a dishwasher at a Czech restaurant. She quickly became involved in the Czech community in Chicago and was particularly active in a tramping group called Dálava. Dagmar enrolled in English language classes and began studying liberal arts at the College of DuPage. She attended evening classes, working in the library at the law firm Baker & MacKenzie during the day. She worked full-time in this job until 1990, when she had a daughter and resigned from this position – although she did stay on at the law firm on a part-time basis for one more year. It was in also 1990 that her mother came to visit the United States for the first time.</p><p> </p><p>In 1991, Dagmar moved to Prague in order to work for a travel agency, but returned within one year. Back in the United States, Dagmar worked as a freelance translator and interpreter before landing a job as the librarian at the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum – an experience which she says was very fulfilling. Today Dagmar works as a cataloger at the law firm Sidley Austin and is pursuing a degree focusing on cross-cultural communication at DePaul University. She has been involved with the Prague Committee of Chicago Sister Cities International for almost 15 years.</p><p> </p><p>Dagmar says that it is important to her to not only keep her Czech heritage alive, but also to educate others about the culture and history of her home country. She visits the Czech Republic every summer. Today, she lives in La Grange, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Community Life
Education
interpreter
Litomysl
Sense of identity
Translator
Vanickova
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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b758a475b327ab953a7e16b6045a7a14
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Enough to Eat</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AbV3N9DjeaE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“They had problems with food, of course, and because we had relatives in a village, he used to take a train – which wasn’t allowed; there were Germans around and, somehow I understand, it was dangerous and they weren’t allowed to do it, but he did it anyway because we had to eat – then he went there, he brought for them what they needed, and exchange they gave him eggs and meat and a goose or whatever we needed to have some food. I mean, we were never hungry, never ever, but that’s what he did. He used to go and exchange what they ordered from Prague, like clothes and materials for dresses because at that time they were sewing everything, and in exchange they gave him a lot. Also because he was always very kind to them and he helped them in the summer a lot. Then he’d always bring fruit and meat and eggs and we had everything all the time. But I understand it was dangerous because the German soldiers were around busses and trains, and I don’t recall how dangerous or why but I know that my mother was always nervous about if my father will come back or if they will catch him; he wasn’t allowed to do it.”</p><h4>First Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qbFahdLbDZc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the beginning, all our class was supposed to go out of Prague. It was mandatory for one year to work somewhere in the outskirts of Czechoslovakia where there was a big shortage of nurses, but somehow – I don’t recall how – I stayed in Prague, but I had to go to psychiatry. Children’s psychiatry [hospital], it’s a big place in Prague; it’s called Bohnice. A lot of people know it; it’s slang, like ‘You will end up in Bohnice’ if you get a little crazy. It was a really interesting experience, very, very interesting experience with the children. The children did like me a lot, because they had these old-fashioned nurses who were cruel and nasty to them.”</p><p>Is that how nurses used to be?</p><p>“No, not in the hospital, but in this institution, the children were disturbed children. They were mentally disturbed, and some of them were there on a trial [basis], if they should go to an institution permanently or be with parents and be treated outside. The children were very, very difficult and they were criminally inclined, some of them; some of them were dangerous. Then there were old nurses, and they had their old methods, like they had seclusion when a child got wild or did something nasty to the nurse. They put him in the seclusion and undressed him, which was so demeaning; I would never do that to anybody, not to ten-year-old boys. It was frightening for him and it was cruel. To me, it was cruel and I never did it. That’s why I had very good interaction with the children, because they knew that I will not do it and I will not tell on them. If they did something bad, I talked to him and I would tell him that wasn’t nice or it wasn’t good to call me some names, but I never put them in isolation or did anything cruel. They loved me.”</p><h4>Denied Promotion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d3PiMcsaINE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had a problem in the hospital because I was a regular nurse when I started and I had a boss, male; he was in charge of me and he wanted to promote me to a supervisory position, because he found out that I was perfect for it, but he wanted me to sign papers for the Communist Party because he was a big Communist. And I said ‘No.’ He said ‘What do you mean, no? You go have more money, you go have a good job, you don’t have to do what you do, you go sit in an office and so on.’ And I said ‘Yes, I would love that, and I think I deserve it, but I don’t need to sign anything. I’m not going to be communist to go sit in an office.’ He said ‘I don’t understand you.’ I said ‘I know you don’t understand me because you are communist, and I will never sign it.’ And that’s how it ended.”</p><h4>Welcomed by New Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tTrQcmZz_Ew?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was very impressed with the Americans because they treated me like everybody else. At work, I was amazed that they would trust me and they were so nice to me. I had my book, translating, and they would go, if I didn’t understand, ‘Give me the book, Eugenie,’ and they would find it and translate the word; they were very kind. The doctors really did appreciate me because I knew actually more than their nurses; because I had two years specialty in newborn babies and premature babies, I had better knowledge than they did. And you don’t need to speak too much. You need to work, and they could see that I know what I am doing.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Eugenie Bocan
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Eugenie Bocan was born in Prague in 1942 and grew up in the Podolí district of the city with her parents and her younger sister. As a young girl, Eugenie recalls swimming in the Vltava and taking trips to the country to visit her father’s relatives. During WWII, it was those same relatives who provided food to Eugenie’s family, as items like meat and eggs were in short supply in the city. Eugenie’s father, Václav, was a bank clerk, while her mother, Milada, worked in a shoe store. Although Eugenie enjoyed chemistry in school, she says she was not allowed to continue those studies in university and, instead, attended nursing school where she specialized in newborn and pediatric nursing. Upon graduating, Eugenie worked for one year at the children’s psychiatric facility in Prague – an experience she calls ‘very interesting.’ She then became a maternity nurse and also worked for a short time in a dentist’s office.</p><p> </p><p>One of Eugenie’s coworkers had relatives living in West Germany who sent Eugenie and her husband, Vladimir, a letter inviting them for a visit. They took advantage of this opportunity several times before deciding to leave Czechoslovakia permanently. In the spring of 1968, Eugenie and Vladimir crossed the border and stayed at a refugee camp near Nuremberg. During their eight month stay, Eugenie worked cleaning floors and in the Grundig factory while her husband worked in a toy factory. The couple had a car (which they had driven across the border) and traveled on weekends.</p><p> </p><p>Eugenie and Vladimir arrived in New York City in December 1968. Sponsored by the Red Cross, they were first put up in the Wolcott Hotel, which Eugenie called ‘terrible.’ They shortly found an apartment in Queens and Eugenie began working at Booth Memorial Hospital. Although she initially had a hard time getting her state nursing license, Eugenie worked for over 30 years as a newborn and pediatric nurse. She and Vladimir raised one daughter, Monica. After receiving her American citizenship, Eugenie began traveling back to Czechoslovakia frequently. Now widowed, Eugenie lives in the house in Queens that she and Vladimir bought not too long after their arrival.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Education
emigrant
Evgenie Jandusova
Health care professionals
refugee
Refugee camp
WWII
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dd30336d65f74f614c181b8db3e755ac
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Holocaust</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5SOvldrw26c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When the Nazi occupation came, in 1942 or 1941 they all had to vacate their premises, their house – they had a beautiful house in one of the nicest parts of Prague – and they were deported to Terezín, where most of the Jews from the Czech Republic, some from other countries as well, lived there. My mom basically survived Terezín, one of just a couple hundred kids, but her entire family, which means parents – my grandparents – her brother, her uncles and aunts and everybody, was deported to Auschwitz almost to the end of the WWII, and upon arrival in Auschwitz they were put right in the chambers. So nobody survived. My mom’s brother was about 18, 19 years old and, according to the German perception, he was still healthy and young, so he was deported and sent on a train from Auschwitz to the east side of Germany to a labor camp. But the train was bombed by the Allied Forces and as the train stopped he jumped out and with friends – this was about February of 1945, so very close to the end of WWII – and they were more or less crawling and walking and freezing through Poland and made it all the way to Prague. From the entire mom’s family, just her and her brother survived.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-WVRgwHljI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was in the military in 1968. Right after I graduated from technical school, I went to the military. On August 21, when the Soviets came around, I don’t know how it even happened, but my dad said I had to come home and so one of the officers called me to his office and said ‘There is a letter from your dad, and you need to come home,’ which under normal circumstances was absolutely unheard of. You know, as a young man you have to go to two years in the military. So he’s reading the letter from my dad to me and then he takes his big stamp and he just puts a stamp on it and says ‘Just go.’ Today I think he probably knew what was happening because it was about two weeks after August 21. Maybe he left too; I don’t know. But I went back to my home town. It took us two days; we packed. One car, five people with five sleeping bags and five pillows and maybe 20 dollars in our pockets, and we left for Austria.”</p><h4>Switzerland</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lvtcKw6qAKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In Vienna we were led into the sports dome, a large sports athletic complex. There were thousands of Czechs and Slovaks, sleeping on the floor and on the bleachers. I mean, thousands. It was a mess. I remember like it was yesterday. And as my mom walks in – again, I see it just like it’s happening right now – she said ‘No other concentration camp.’ And she turned around and walked out. So we were all walking behind her, and I noticed that she was crying, because she didn’t expect that. So we really didn’t know where to go, and then as we were walking out to our car, some people said ‘Go to the Swiss embassy. They are taking Czechs. Go there and they are going to take care of you. I couldn’t speak any German, but both my parents could speak German so I guess they understood what was happening, so that’s where we went. The Swiss just took our information from us and then they found out that my dad’s youngest brother, with his family, already defected a couple says before us to Switzerland.”</p><p><em>And your dad didn’t know?</em></p><p>“I don’t know. But when I recollect all these events and what was happening, I think he really didn’t know, because that’s where we would have gone first. Why even bother to go to the sports hall in Vienna with my mom crying and finding out what’s going to be next? So I assume that he really didn’t know.”</p><h4>Visiting America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3e1WLYDEqWM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My friend and I played semi-professional ice hockey, and it was between the seasons and he said ‘Why don’t we go to America?’ It was [1976 sic.], there were the Olympics in Montreal and, since we were in the Olympic center, we knew many of the Swiss athletes and they said ‘Well, come and visit us. We’ll have a good time.’ It was not as tight security as today. You could walk in the Olympic village and go for a beer with the athletes; today it’s impossible. We said ‘Well, why not?’ Both of us couldn’t speak a word of English. It was in April of ’76.</p><p>“So we flew to New York and in the Bronx we bought a 1968 Cadillac, because we loved this big ship. I mean, gosh, I’d never seen anything that big. You could play ping-pong on the hood. And each of us had a hockey bag with our stuff – you could out four hockey bags in the trunk! I thought that was really cool. So we bought this for 800 dollars, a 1968 Cadillac, and we traveled all around the country. We probably have seen all of the national parks, and we zigzagged the country all over. When we got to Los Angeles, some of my mom’s family was there, so we were with them and there was a lady who could speak Czech, so after several months I could speak Czech; that was great too.</p><p>“And our hockey club president lived in Hawaii in the off-season. So he said ‘When you guys are in Los Angeles, just call me and I’ll buy a ticket for you and I’ll pick you up.’ And we got our tickets and flew to Hawaii and we were his guests for two weeks. We didn’t spend a penny! He fed us; he lived in Waikiki Beach in a penthouse on the top. Especially for me, I was still kind of fresh coming from Czechoslovakia. So it was wonderful. We went to Canada, almost to Alaska, just to the bottom of Alaska. And then on Highway 1 we went all the way to Montreal and were there right when the Olympics started and mingled with the Swiss.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Frank Fristensky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Frank Fristensky was born in Olomouc in Moravia in 1948. He lived with his parents on his paternal grandparents’ farm outside of the city until 1953, when the Frištenskýs moved to Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, close to the Slovak and Polish borders. Frank’s mother was originally from Prague, where her Jewish family was quite wealthy. During the Nazi occupation, her entire family was sent to Terezín. Although she and her brother survived, the rest of her family was deported to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chambers. Frank’s paternal great-uncle, Gustav Frištenský, was a world-famous Greco-Roman wrestler. Frank’s grandfather accompanied Gustav on his tour of the United States in 1913 and 1914, and Frank recalls hearing of his admiration for the country. Many of Frank’s family members were keen sportsmen – and to this day, Frank carries on that tradition.</p><p> </p><p>Frank attended a technical school in Valašské Meziříčí and, upon graduating, began serving his two-year military service. After the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21, 1968, Frank was unexpectedly discharged from the army at the request of his father. Shortly after, he left the country with his parents and two younger brothers. The family settled in Switzerland where, coincidently, Frank’s uncle and his family had traveled just days earlier. Frank attended the Swiss Federal Institute of Sport and received a degree in teaching and coaching sports. After graduating he joined a semipro hockey team.</p><p> </p><p>In 1976, Frank traveled with a friend to the United States. They spent several months driving around the country and visiting Hawaii, and they ultimately traveled to Montreal where they attended the Olympics. Although Frank returned to Switzerland, he hoped to move to the United States. Two years later, after attending a conference in Texas, Frank visited his friend, Arnošt Lustig, who lived in Washington, D.C., and taught at American University. Arnošt helped him to secure a job at American as the women’s volleyball coach, assistant athletic trainer, and assistant physical education professor. Frank says that his first classes were taught with the help of a German translator, as he did not know English.</p><p> </p><p>Frank met his wife, Victoria, while at American University. The couple had a daughter and moved to Michigan when Frank became the head volleyball coach at Eastern Michigan University. When Frank’s father fell ill, he and his family returned to Switzerland for what he thought would be a short time. They remained in Switzerland for nine years, and their two younger children were born there. Frank and his family moved to Durango, Colorado, in 1996. Today, Frank is a personal trainer and fitness consultant. He also runs a tour company that specializes in travel to central Europe. Frank is extremely proud of his Czechoslovak heritage and has taken a particular interest in his family history. He recently organized a Fristensky family reunion, which was held at Bohemian National Hall in New York.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
emigrant
Jews
Military service
refugee
Roznov pod Radhostem
Sports
Terezin
Valasske Mezirici
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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213ccfdb9ca5eee456fc0c1af3ebb600
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DLtje_sYlMM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My family had a very positive view of the Soviets. Number one, when I was born, my father was already in jail. He was jailed in 1942 – in the spring of 1942 – and he was in a labor/concentration camp called Krems an der Donau in Austria until 1945. And the camp, which was a mix between a labor camp and a concentration camp, was actually liberated by the Red Army. So my father had a very favorable view of the Soviets and the Russians because he was liberated by them, and he, quite frankly, escaped with his life. He was lucky to get home in 1945 and he saw me when I was three years old.”</p><h4>Industrial School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iop80fwrN_k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think that it was a very good system, because in this industrial school one day week you actually had to work in a factory. Prague in those days had a lot of industrial productions, basic factories, basic Class A factories manufacturing trucks and railroad cars and streetcars and airplanes. So one day a week we have to go to a factory and physically work with the workers. That, I think, was a great experience to learn what really happens in manufacturing, what really happens in a factory, and I think it was a great experience. Whether it was in a metal working shop or whether it was in a tool making shop, whatever it was, you all of the sudden had an experience with the real world.”</p><h4>Jazz Band</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tz0cegQoR24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“If you had an orchestra or a club – any kind of a social gathering – you had to have, under the communist law, something called provozovatel in the Czech language, meaning like a sponsor. You couldn’t just simply have a knitting club, just people getting together and knit, you couldn’t do that. You could knit, but you had to have a sponsor. And it would have to be an organization approved by the system. So we found a couple places where the organization – a youth organization or municipal organization – would allow us to practice and play under their logo. So one of our logos was Youth Group of Fidel Castro. My orchestra was known as the Storyville Jazz Band – Storyville was a part of New Orleans, we studied New Orleans in detail, including the maps – but we were playing as the Storyville Jazz Band, part of the Youth Group of Fidel Castro. So I have a photograph here somewhere where we’re playing, and above us is a big picture of Fidel Castro.”</p><h4>Trouble</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MYZ6fvEui3w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of the laws in Czechoslovakia was you couldn’t put up a poster, because the police immediately figured out ‘If he puts up a poster, he’s organizing something,’ and that was a no-no. Of course, how do you advertise something all of the dances and all of the stuff, you have to have posters. I was one of the guys who made posters, and in known places in Prague I would go and post the posters. And so twice they basically arrested me for the posters, twice they interrogated me, twice I was in jail because of this poster business. But it wasn’t just the poster, because they always suspected something much more sinister. We weren’t really all that sinister. We just wanted to play jazz and have a good time, but the police and the secret police, they thought ‘Hmm poster.’ So I was in jail. And then I was in jail because I had a gun, which I inherited from my grandfather, and in those days in Czechoslovakia you couldn’t have a gun. I showed it to somebody and he reported it and so they came and jailed me.”</p><p><em>How long were you kept in jail?</em></p><p>“With the gun I was there for two days. In interrogation if you will. You know ‘Where did you get the gun? Who gave you the gun? Is there somebody else who has a gun?’ and that kind of thing.”</p><h4>Computers</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vk9FOLCLapY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were limits on exports and imports of technology. For example, we were not allowed to import Western technology. Czechoslovakia couldn’t do that. So we were relying on Russian computers, Minsk, which were manufactured in Minsk which is today Belarus. That was the main center of the Russian computer industry. So these computers were decimal computers, and we had access already to magazines from the West and literature from the West. We knew that we were ten years behind in technology. So we worked on them, we did our work, but we knew that this was ridiculous, ‘What are we doing here? We’re working with something which is…’ So absolutely it was stifling. You couldn’t really do much. You had to do what you were told, but you couldn’t really innovate. You couldn’t come up with a better idea. The best people who were in the technology business in those days left or emigrated way before me. It was a nice job, put it this way. I got the salary and I had a nice office and I did interesting things. In those days, we wore white coats. The computer guys and gals wore white coats; we looked like physicians. But it wasn’t really motivating.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mm01EbluApA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most of the regiments came from Central Asia. Most of these guys couldn’t speak Czech or Russian. A lot of these guys were Asian folks. I don’t know what they told them, but I think they told them ‘You’re in Germany or some other Western country defending socialism.’ These guys were crazy. Well, they were not only crazy, they were kind of puzzled, they had a puzzled look on them, like ‘Where am I? What’s going on here?’ but many of them were crazy, shooting guns. All of the sudden in the middle of the city you had tanks and guys with the machine guns and bullets flying. It was terrible.”</p><p><em>Did you have any personal encounters with the soldiers?</em></p><p>“Many, many.”</p><p><em>Did you try to talk to them?</em></p><p>“Tried to talk to them. Well, that’s what we did for days and days. We would walk the city, we would sit there with flags and we would try to talk to them, because most of us spoke Russian. So we would approach them, and they were approachable. Not that they were not approachable, because they were village boys from Kazakhstan and they had no idea, so many of them were approachable, and many of them kind of talked. But they really didn’t know where they were. Well, I don’t think they had an idea. The officers did, but I think the staff, I don’t think so.”</p><h4>Next Step</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPQOeDs0eE0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was also applying for work at IBM in Austria, and it turns out that in the same building where the main headquarters of IBM in Austria was the Canadian Consulate. One day I was up with IBM, and I’m on the elevator from the IBM office and some people get on the elevator speaking Czech and they say that they just came from the Canadian Consulate and the Canadian Consulate said they can go to Canada. I’d tried, early on, to get to the United States, but the U.S. Embassy told us that it would be a year and a half in a refugee camp, and I thought ‘Well, what am I going to do in a refugee camp? I mean, I don’t want to be in a refugee camp,’ and Ota, my wife, thought the same thing. So we went to the Canadian Embassy the same day. She was sitting down in the café on the sidewalk and I said ‘Hey listen, let’s go back to the Canadian Consulate,’ filled out the form, and the rest is history. Ten days later we were on the plane.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Frank Safertal
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Frank Safertal was born in the Holešovice district of Prague in 1942. His father, also named František, had been arrested shortly before Frank’s birth because of his participation in an underground resistance group. Frank’s father was sent to a labor camp in Krems an der Donau in Austria for the remainder of WWII and only saw his son for the first time after the War ended in 1945. During the War, Frank and his mother, Milena, lived with her parents in Holešovice. Upon returning home, František became a manager of a dental sales company, but when the business was nationalized in 1948, the family moved to Jablonec nad Nisou in northern Bohemia where he became the quality control manager of a factory. Four years later, the family returned to Prague. Frank says that his father was passionate about sports and passed the hobby on to him. From a young age, he skied and played tennis and soccer. Influenced by one of his teachers, Frank became interested in music and learned to play piano. After grade school, Frank attended an industrial school, and then enrolled at the University of Economics, Prague (VŠE) for industrial engineering. He says that his time at university was ‘eye-opening,’ both intellectually and politically, and that he began to realize ‘how bad the regime was.’ Frank started a jazz band at this time, and was jailed for advertising dances. He says he was also influenced by Western artists in Prague (such as Gene Deitch and Allen Ginsburg), from whom he heard about life in the United States. Frank graduated from university in 1966 and served one year in the military near the German border in Klatovy. In 1967, he began working as a computer engineer at ‘the nationalized IBM.’ The same year, he met and married his wife, <a href="/web/20170710095022/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otakara-safertal/">Otakara Safertal</a>.</p><p> </p><p>Although Frank had been thinking about spending some time abroad, he says that, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, the decision to emigrate was ‘very quick.’ He and Otakara received exit permits and, ten days after the invasion, took the train to Vienna. Frank was encouraged to stay in Austria and even interviewed for a job at IBM, but ultimately, he and Otakara decided to move to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in October 1968, where Frank began taking English classes and became in involved in the Czech theatre group Nové Divadlo with his wife. While working for Hughes Network Systems, Frank lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and Prague for three years (following the Velvet Revolution). In 1998, his employer transferred him to Maryland. While living in the Washington, D.C. area, Frank has been active in the Czech community. He served as the secretary-general of Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) for six years and helped organize numerous congresses. Today, he is a consultant for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Community Life
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Engineers
Holesovice
Nove Divadlo
school
Sports
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vau5kLX1Ew0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It’s the supreme example of highly sophisticated survival skills. You don’t want to jeopardize anything. You don’t want to jeopardize your family; you don’t want to jeopardize the future; you will say everything to everybody just to leave you alone. That was the whole principle. In other words, yes, I disagree maybe inside, but I openly say ‘Yes, of course, you are right.”</p><h4>Rock and Roll</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7EY4N_SYgqM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think that the most incredible period for me personally, for us as a young generation at that time, was the invasion of rock and roll. The music. Rock and roll culture. Radio Luxembourg. For us it was a fascinating world because we thought that if this is possible, something over there must be right. And it’s very difficult to explain to people who don’t understand the impact of culture on young minds or a young outlook. And rock and roll really changed a lot in Czechoslovakia. Bands mushroomed almost instantly. Right after a show on Czechoslovak TV, ‘the decadent West’ and they showed a picture of the Beatles running on the street from <em>A Hard Day’s Night</em>, and that day, those idiots created a mass movement. From day one to the next day, everybody started to look, or attempted to look like the Beatles and play the music.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Opl121kTAQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I managed to arrive [in Humenné] late night; it was already martial law declared, and I didn’t know of course. So I was coming from the train and I’m walking towards my parents’ house, and boom. I come to the square. All these Russian tanks, lorries, trucks, they had this white paint through the body for identification. Every Russian vehicle was painted with a white stripe in the middle. So all I could see were these white stripes in the middle of the night, and here comes the patrol. A Russian officer with two soldiers. In Russian – I understand and speak Russian – he says ‘What are you doing here?’ and I said ‘What are you doing here?’ So this dialogue was happening in the middle of the night, and these two guys are holding their guns against me and he’s holding a handgun. And I start to shout ‘You mother f*****s’ – I was 20 – ‘Wait until the… you will see you are going to be kicked out of here when the Germans and Americans come and kick your ass outta here!’ And when they heard the ‘German’ and ‘American’ because it was ‘Ruskii, Amerikanskii, Nemetskii,’ they unlocked the guns, aimed at me, all three of them aimed their guns at me, and they said ‘Run.’ And I realized that’s it. So I said ‘Please don’t shoot,’ and I was running backwards like this, to the passage – there was a passage in the building which my parents lived around the corner – ‘Please don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ and they let me go. But it was a second. A split second. They could kill me, nobody would find anything about me, they could discard my body, nothing could be done about it, because I was the only one on the square.</p><p>“And the next day, I woke up and I went out, collected money and went to the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship House, I bought Soviet flags. I got all these kids with matches and they were walking around burning Soviet flags walking around the square around the Soviet tanks. I thought ‘Hey, they’re not going to shoot the little kids; they’re going to shoot us, but they’re not going to shoot the kids.”</p><h4>Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TYqE8-GzViQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was young. I was 20, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was my first time in the West. I wasn’t really ready for Israel. I was young, I was naïve. I was also sentimental, I was not ready. I was emotionally drained, I was physically drained.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_b72SBUx3Cw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The police essentially attacked my office. They came to do a search. Plainclothes police. They raided the place with Volgas, [Tatra] 603s and all these other cars and then they left. They took the samples from my type machine. Then my boss, this guy who hired me – he passed away; he was an alcoholic, died a few years ago; he was a very interesting guy – and he came to me and said ‘What was it, a ticket? A speeding ticket?’ And I said ‘No, no, no.’ ‘So what it is it? What happened here?’ ‘Well, nothing really, I just signed Charter 77.’ And he looked at me and said ‘You asshole, now I can’t protect you. Now you are out.’ And in one month I was pink, I was out.”<br /><strong><br /></strong><em>So, why did you sign Charter 77?</em></p><p>“For me, it was a moral imperative. I might sound like an idealist, but the moral imperative was very clear. I’m not supporting the regime. I have a lot to lose – some people had more to lose than me of course – but I’m not going to anymore do it halfway. I’m not going to compromise anymore. I’m just going to make a statement because it’s my responsibility as a citizen of Czechoslovakia to bring up these issues that are destroying the country. That was essentially my argument.”</p><h4>Police File</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XYt0G1sS2q0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I asked them for my files; they brought it to me, and I was going through all the interrogation they did with my relatives, my friends, my ex-girlfriend, my ex-wife, including my letter I sent to Charter 77 reporting on abuses in Slovakia, which never arrived there because they confiscated it. Then I found an interesting section that said ‘350 pages erased’ or destroyed. And I said, ‘What the f*** is that?’ So I asked the guy who worked there, he said ‘Well, that’s what they did in ’89.’ Can you imagine? December 1989, they destroyed 350 pages. Some of them are referring to people who are actually spying on me, but it’s missing, it’s gone. So I asked them ‘What happened to my file? Somebody can access my file?’ Can you imagine, people can actually, for study purposes, can access your file which I think is totally absurd. This is your private file. The police could do anything, they could even imitate the signatures if they wanted, they could manipulate anything they wanted.</p><p>“So what’s the big deal, you can’t bring it back, you can do nothing about it, so what are you gonna do? I don’t dwell on it anymore. I mean, it’s my file ok, of course it’s disturbing, it’s mentally disturbing, and very very threatening because you see how they manipulated people and manipulated interviews.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Gabriel Levicky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Gabriel Levicky was born in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, in 1948. His parents, Hungarian-speaking Slovak Jews, both survived concentration camps during WWII; his mother was in Auschwitz and his father in Sachsenhausen. Gabriel says that they were not forthcoming with their experiences of the Holocaust. Gabriel’s father, a member of the Communist Party, was the director of the <em>Dom kultúry</em> (municipal cultural center) in Humenné. Gabriel says his teenage years were heavily influenced by Western culture, most notably music and literature. He was in a band called The Towers and subscribed to <em>Svetová literatúra</em>, a periodical devoted to world literature. Gabriel’s lifestyle and his involvement in the hippie movement in Czechoslovakia led to conflicts with his father; following his schooling, he left home and traveled around the country.</p><p> </p><p>Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.</p><p> </p><p>His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper <em>Mosty</em>. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Charter 77
Concentration camp
Humenne
Jews
Secret police
Translator/interpreter
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
Zilina
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6OUclz5HeKU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My dad was born in 1921, which made him exactly army age in 1939 when the war broke out; he was 18 years old. So he got drafted into the Slovak army, but being Jewish, they were actually drafted into a special regiment and they were given different uniforms, and instead of given guns they were given brooms, as a means of humiliation. And then they were sent to forced labor in a <em>cihelna</em>, a brick factory, and he was there, I think until about 1941 – I’m not really sure on the dates, my mother would know – and then he and a few friends escaped from there. And for the rest of the war were hiding in the mountains, and towards the end of the war, he joined the partisans and he was fighting with them for maybe the last six months of the war.”</p><h4>Auschwitz</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vtUFlJpidsg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She was shipped out [to Auschwitz] with the first women’s transport, so there were men who had been shipped out earlier. She was shipped out in June of 1942, she and her sister. Her sister perished in the camp; she was killed, and my mom survived. She has a very strong spirit, and you can imagine it was absolutely terrible. She went through at least one, if not two, bouts of typhoid fever. Even with your fever up in the low 40s Celsius – it’s high – she had to go out and they would support each other and show up for the morning roll call. Because as long as you showed up for the roll call, then during the day there was a kind of way where they could hide you, so the rest would kind of walk out and you would creep back – she managed to do this for a few days.</p><p>As she gets older she talks about it more and more. It’s unimaginable torture. That’s really the only word. We say unimaginable this, unimaginable that. This is truly unimaginable, what that meant for three years. And she was there until what we now call the march of death, the death march, which was the evacuation of Auschwitz by the Germans. The sick and dying were left behind; many of them just died, some survived. And this was in January 1945 and with temperatures below 20, 25, 30 below, they would walk, trudge through snow towards Germany. Of course they never made it, many of them died. If you tried to escape you were shot on the spot. After three months of this, so now we’re maybe into late March, it was completely obvious the war was lost and the Germans just scattered and left the prisoners. And then my mom made her way from Auschwitz, which is really not far from the Slovak border to Humenné, and it took her like six weeks, because all the rail lines were disrupted. But she met very good people along the way who helped her and fed her, and so she made it back home.”</p><h4>George's Uncle</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_uWgrSpbWmw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father believed in communism. He thought, after the War – it was the Soviet soldiers that liberated him, it was the Soviet soldiers that liberated Auschwitz, and so, my mother wasn’t involved at all, but my father was a member of the Party. And he believed that this is the right way to go. And now, bang, his brother gets arrested and he says, ‘No, this is not possible, this is wrong.’ So he traveled to Bratislava to see his brother and they wouldn’t let him see him, so he traveled back. Long story short, his brother was imprisoned, well, he wasn’t in prison, he was in custody, for two years without ever being charged with anything. Let go after two years, his health broken, and never being able to regain the same kind of position. So it took him another five to ten years to be able to get a decent job and get back into his career. And at that point, my father says this is just BS, you know, this whole communism thing is crap. And from that point on, he didn’t want anything to do with it. So on paper, yes, he was still a member of the Party, you couldn’t just quit. But, from very early on, I knew that this was not an ideology he believed in because he knew his brother was innocent.”</p><h4>Relatives Help</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLrXz2KSHbw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The people from the United States sent us an occasional check for about 50 bucks. Now, for 50 bucks, you couldn’t do anything with the dollars, but you could take the dollars to the bank – and when I say bank, in all of Prague, with its million inhabitants, were maybe three banks. Right, the banks didn’t exist, you dealt with cash. You got your pay slip with the cash, no checks, no Visa card, nothing. So you would take the 50 dollars, you would go to the bank. For that you would get this special currency called <em>bony</em>. And with the <em>bony</em>, you could go to a Tuzex [store]. And so you went to a special store called Tuzex, and in the Tuzex, you could buy stuff that you couldn’t get anywhere else. So you could get Nestlé chocolate milk – phenomenal, I loved it, like a powdered chocolate. Of course, foreign cigarettes. My parents were both smokers, so Marlboro cigarettes or Dunhills, British cigarettes. What else? Coffee, instant coffee. Later on, Beatles records. So that made us a little bit better off because for the 50 bucks, I think one dollar was four <em>bons</em>, so that was 200 <em>bons</em>, and you could put together a pretty nice shopping basket for that. A packet of cigarettes was about five <em>bons</em>, so you know.”</p><h4>Music</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VX9GUJADQIQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Did I want to leave? Of course I didn’t want to leave; I had my band. It was so exciting, I mean, the time was unbelievable. The amount of music that was happening, the bands that were happening. There was a new, even two new, music publications, there was a new record company that started putting out rock music, I started to write my own tunes. I mean, it was unbelievably exciting. Who wants to leave that?”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NmNpcDHd8iM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I am a Czech-Jewish guy. That’s my origin. Is that my identity? Well, I travel with a Canadian passport. I cannot be just associated with the Czech community. Even if I terribly wanted to – and I don’t – but even if I did, I can’t, because I spent from 15 to 24 in Israel. And that’s a very, very crucial part of your life. So I have to be associated with that as well. I have very, very good friends in Iceland who I correspond with, who I visit, who visit me. Although I’m not Icelandic in any way, but I speak the language, I understand it, and there’s a part of me – through my daughters, through the fact that I got divorced there, I had relationships there with other people – that is also very strong. So that pulls me too.”</p><h4>Musician</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yBxOhA5o9hE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The immigration informs it [my music] a lot, because it really formed me. It is this fundamental sadness that I have that has never left me, even though I love joking and I love life and I’m not a person that goes home and cries every day. But the sadness is there and when I write, it just comes out. And it comes out of this disruption of my life at the age of 15 which will never go away as long as I live. So I may not actually write about it, but it’s there. It’s even there when I even sing to crowds.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
George Grosman
Description
An account of the resource
<p>George Grosman was born in Prague in 1953. During WWII, his father, Ladislav, was drafted into the Slovak army and then sent to a forced labor camp because he was Jewish. His mother, Edith, who was also Jewish, spent most of the War in Auschwitz. After the War, George’s parents moved to Prague where Edith worked as a biology researcher and Ladislav found work in the publishing industry as an editor and writer. George’s father became well-known after writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film <em>The Shop on Main Street</em> [<em>Obchod na korze</em>]. George has early memories of walking the streets of Prague with his nanny and spending his summers in the country. He attended three different schools in Prague where he enjoyed history, grammar, and the humanities. However, George’s main interests lay in music. At the age of nine, he began learning classical guitar, and one of his teachers introduced him to more popular music. George spent many weekends and summers at Dobříš Castle, which was owned by the Czechoslovak Writers Union of which his father was a member. In 1967, it was there that George joined his first band.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3418" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609083637im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-14.jpg" alt="George performing" width="500" height="583" /></p><p>After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, George’s family made plans to leave the country. George himself forged a letter from his grandfather living in Israel requesting that the family come to visit him. They were able to secure exit visas, and left Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1968. After about a month in Vienna, George and his family arrived in Tel Aviv in October 1968. Although at first George had a difficult time adjusting to life in Israel, he says he eventually learned both Hebrew and English, made some good friends, and got involved with local musicians. George studied English literature and linguistics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and spent a short stint in the Israeli army.</p><p> </p><p>In 1977, George moved to London to continue his education. He was there for three years and remembers it as “the best time of his life.” In 1980, George secured a position as a teaching assistant for Slavic languages at the University of Toronto. He got married and had two daughters, and eventually became involved in the Czech community there, specifically joining Nové Divadlo [New Theatre]. In 1989, he moved to Reykjavík, Iceland, for a few years, and recalls hearing about the Velvet Revolution there, listening to a short-wave radio. George first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1991, and says that he was able to enter the country at the same border crossing he had used to leave 23 years earlier. Today, George is a professional musician. He frequently performs for Czech audiences throughout North America. He splits his time between Toronto, Canada, and Orlando, Florida.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arrest
Arts
Child emigre
Community Life
Concentration camp
Dobris Castle
Education
emigrant
English language
Jews
Jiri Grosman
Nove Divadlo
Partisan
refugee
Western/Pop culture