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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Boy Scout</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hybyyIWuyGY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“After the War yes, both my brother and I were very avid Boy Scouts, and I would say that the Boy Scout aspect in my growing until 1948, ’50 actually, was perhaps one of the most important influences on my life. Both the ideals and… of course, the Boy Scout movement in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia was different than here. It was – in the United States it is a sort of organization of the fathers more than of the boys – in Czechoslovakia, the parents were completely excluded from it. And so the young children would have total autonomy. And I happened to be very fortunate, because my brother was older, I always would have friends that were about four years older or something, and so they were carrying me like a little puppy with them and I benefitted enormously and so I was actually more involved with the older children.</p><p>“In 1948, when the Communists took power, that was one of the first organizations that they were trying to eliminate. They didn’t close it overnight, but they made many limitations and eventually they did close it. And, at that time, my father, who was getting old and had only about four years to retirement, determined very smartly that it was time to move the family away from Liberec.</p><p>“They did make in Liberec a major trial with the Boy Scouts. They were all jailed and the Boy Scout group of ours was disbanded and that was very unfortunate, but I was not part of it, because we were already away from the city.”</p><h4>Tradition</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YdD7U17mWeY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Although people today like to speak about how horrible it was under the communists and how persecuted they were, often they are exaggerating also. And I was… I must say that, religion was not that persecuted. We were, I was, having my first communion when I was 14 years old at the highest communist time in 1951. I should add when I said that though, that after the communion, which was a beautiful May day in Aš, we came out of the church and the – I don’t want to say priest, I’m not sure what word I should use for the evangelic – pastor was jailed, right away. There were police who brought him to the car and took him away and then they said that he did something criminal, which is probably not true but…So, it was bad, but we were able to have our communion fine and we were going to the church and throughout the whole regime – actually when I was at high school later on in Čáslav, that was the most difficult time of communist rule – there people could voluntarily take Catholic religion in high school, so we all turned into Catholics then and did go to the Catholic lessons just to demonstrate that we were not going to be taking everything as was at that time necessary.”</p><h4>Soviet Dogma</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8CIZub-KvCY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were some – the Russian scientists Michurin or Olga Lepeshinskaya – they were complete crooks, they were claiming they can make life from useless material and all that which was nonsense. But Stalin supported it and it was a dogma that was to be accepted in Czechoslovakia also. So people like this Ferdinand Herčík or Soudek – these people that were teaching me – did have to pay lip-service to it as much as during the War we had to in the schools greet [the teacher] with ‘Heil Hitler!’ But we all somehow, the Czechs learned how to… what is right and what is not, and we were able to read what is correct and what is not.”</p><h4>Blocked Science</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3UniOtaAfF8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The university that I was going to was the place where the first greatest geneticist Gregor Mendel, who today is considered to be the father of genetics, had been. His teaching was completely forbidden, it was considered by the communists… it was called ‘the reactionary Mendel-Morgan theories.’ Because Stalin didn’t want heritage to be important. They wanted that indoctrination was more important than genetics. So Mendel, whom we all know about, was forbidden at that time. But you know everybody was paying a little bit lip-service, and nobody really took it seriously.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1rjw0FD_bX8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was born and I knew that I was going to the United States, without any communists or anybody else. In fact, my wife’s father was at one point showing movies in this little village that they were living in. And he gave us a private performance of Kazan’s movie <em>America, America</em> – I don’t know if you saw that movie, which is about a little Turkish boy who has it in his fate to go to America and he goes through all sorts of things and he would kill, he would betray his wife to get the money for [his boat] and everything too, and he eventually gets to America and is happy there. And when we went through that movie I told my father-in-law, I said ‘Father you see? The same way I’m going to America with Mila.’ And he was very upset of course, naturally, we already had two little children. But I said that, so I felt.</p><p>“But it was also a very natural thing in my work that, at the time what I was working on, I could not do in the Czech Republic, then I couldn’t even do it in Germany anymore, so I went for this Cleveland Clinic in order to be able to continue with my own work. So in order to continue and keep myself in my profession, it is somewhat like with sportspeople – if you want to be a good tennis player you have to play, and so I had to be in those institutions doing those experiments and this, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.</p><p>“And the other thing was of course the aspect of the Russians, and with the invasion we really expected that the Russians are really going to impose their… Russify Czechoslovakia. And then, of course, we did expect the same thing in Germany.”</p><h4>Family</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2OZOTGyeFpo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I saved enough that we would have a vacation together, bought a Chevy Impala convertible for 500 bucks, went to Earl Scheib where they sprayed any color you want for $27.79 – so I painted it gold, to make an impression on my wife and children, and we made a rendezvous in Denver. My wife was flying from Frankfurt with the kids for eight hours, I think, via New York. And I was driving the Chevy Impala convertible for three days to get to Denver at the same hour, which was quite nice. And then we made six weeks’ vacation, I had four weeks and then I made some lectures in the congresses in Kansas City and in New Hampshire. And so we put it into, we incorporated it into the vacation and we made a figure of eight through the United States – coast to coast – in six weeks. It was many, many thousand miles. And this sealed it, that when we came to Kennedy Airport then, the kids said ‘We are not going to some stupid Germany, we are going to stay here!’”</p><h4>Considered German</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/anxZYqWx5FQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They considered them German, so their American school-mates called them ‘Krauts,’ and they were even fighting them occasionally, so we had to tell them that they are not German. And on the other hand, there were a lot of Germans here in the community who thought that we were genuine German and they came to us and offered us all sorts of help, and they were very nice people and we have a lot of friendships. And after all we were, at that time, more than one hour driving distance from Chicago, so we didn’t have any communication with the Czech community. Only several years later, we started to go to the Czech places like Cicero and Berwyn, we discovered the Czech bakeries, but we really were not searching for it.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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John Jaroslav Kyncl
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jaroslav Kyncl was born in Prague on August 16, 1936. He spent his early childhood in the northern Bohemian town of Liberec, where his father, Jan Kynčl, was the president of the local branch of Živnostenská banka. In 1939, following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, the family was thrown out of Liberec and moved to Německý Brod (nowadays Havlíčkův Brod), where the Kynčls spent the duration of the War. They returned to Liberec in 1945, but moved away again three years later following the Communist coup, when Jaroslav’s father ‘bartered’ his post at the bank in Liberec for a more modest position out of the spotlight in Aš. Jaroslav attended secondary school in Aš, Cheb and then Čáslav before beginning his studies at Masaryk University in Brno in 1954. In 1961, Jaroslav moved to Prague, where he started his pharmacological research, developing new drugs in collaboration with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the company SPOFA. In this same year he married his wife, <a href="/web/20170609132740/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/mila-kyncl/">Mila Kyncl</a>.</p><p> </p><p>In May 1968, Jaroslav was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to deliver some lectures on the work that he was doing. He was urged by one of his hosts, Dr. Hans Heller – himself a Czech émigré – to ‘put his papers in order’ in the event that Soviet troops were to invade Czechoslovakia and put a halt to the Prague Spring. Dr. Kyncl, his wife and two children duly left Czechoslovakia for Austria a week after the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. The family spent a brief period as refugees in Vienna before Jaroslav was offered an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.</p><p> </p><p>In 1971, Jaroslav came to America alone, to accept a research position at the Cleveland Clinic. Upon securing a job one year later at Abbott Laboratories in Lake Bluff, Illinois, Jaroslav moved to the Chicago area with his family, where he has lived ever since. Among other professional accomplishments, he is credited with inventing the drug Hytrin, the first medicine to treat BPH (a frequent and serious prostate condition). An art enthusiast, Jaroslav focuses on archiving and promoting the work of Czech exile artists in particular. To this end, he has made a documentary about the late poet and artist Jiří Kolář and operates a small non-commercial exhibition space, called Gallery 500ft².</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
Arts
Caslav
Education
Healthcare professionals
Jiri Kolar
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Zivnostenka banka
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Relatives</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F-DCuTG_Iv4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My maternal grandfather was a very famous scientist, a close personal friend of Albert Einstein in Switzerland. Then my grandmother, a Russian lady, went during WWI as a volunteer to the Serbian Army as a doctor and fell into Austrian [hands] and was taken as a POW. So then grandfather left Switzerland and went to work as a volunteer in a military hospital in Pardubice, and then came the end of WWI and they stayed in Czechoslovakia. And then my uncle, my father’s older brother, was sort of a hero of the WWII resistance. He was a professional soldier. He was in this Obrana národa, Defense of the Nation, resistance group and he was executed in Berlin.</p><p>“My grandparents were physicians. Both my parents were physicians, actually very famous ones. Both of them… They are both dead now, but they are considered to be founders of their specific science field in the former Czechoslovakia. My father’s name was Karel Raška and he was world-class, one of the best epidemiologists in the world of the last century. His main achievement was preparing the program for the eradication of smallpox for the world, which was successfully completed in 1978. And my mother is a founder of modern Czechoslovak pharmacology. All the chairmen throughout the country were her graduate students – that means Czech Republic and Slovakia.”</p><h4>Schooling</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KSZO_12vYXU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had favorite teachers when I was in high school and middle school because, at that time, a significant portion were the types of pre-War gymnázium professors, very well educated, people with doctorates and excellent ones. Not all of them. There were some losers among them too. But it’s very interesting that in high school we had several very young teachers who were relatively fresh graduates of the universities and they were outstanding, and, although it is now more than 55 years since we graduated, we are getting together at least once a year in Prague and some of those teachers come to all these meetings. Now they are in their mid-80s or so and it’s very interesting. They’re still coming.”</p><h4>Yale University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zjfh8LCVk18?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I spent two very busy and very enjoyable years in America and then I came back. It was the Prague Spring; it was extremely interesting; however, from early March, I was 100 percent sure that I knew that it will not end well. I had exit permits for the members of my family – my oldest son and my wife and myself.”</p><p><em>How did you get those?</em></p><p>“I got invited to lecture in Italy. It was free travel. In 1968 it was completely free travel. One just had to pay a few crowns for an exit permit, but it was free at that time. So when the liberation occurred on August 21, I emigrated that day. I waited till the late afternoon [to see] if there would be mobilization; when it was not, I drove to Austria with my wife and son.”</p><h4>Many Returned</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3AzS0w7tB6E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Emigration is not a panacea. Culture shock, particularly if you live somewhere outside of a major metropolitan area, ladies often were not that happy here – everybody has different reasons. Somebody feels here at home; I happened to be one of those. From the very beginning here, I felt like it’s somewhere I belong. But I was always very proud of being Czech and I didn’t change my name. I use the háček on my surname and I didn’t become Charlie, but somehow I clicked. I actually fit very well into the American academia and into American medicine – for whatever reason. That could be entirely coincidental. But I always felt very well and I was lucky enough that my work was going well, so I actually was not being taken as an alien. I was one of them from almost the beginning and that was very good.”</p><h4>Progressing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ndw8WF_Vhl4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I am very positive about the future there. I am, because you see the change. Before, when one crossed the border [into Czechoslovakia], because I was always flying to Munich, I rented a car and you crossed the border and it was like somebody hitting you with a two-by-four. It was horrible. And now you see how festive it is. You don’t see any more of these Vietnamese flea markets. It’s festive; it’s beautiful. The villages are in order; houses are in order; you see the gigantic fields; all crops are harvested. There is nothing wrong with it. So I am very optimistic about the Czech Republic.</p><p>“I am particularly happy about young people, because young people today, the Czechs and the Slovaks, are just like anybody else. They are indistinguishable. They are proud, they are prosperous, they carry [themselves] well, they behave well, they are learning the languages, and it’s a pleasure to meet with them. They still remain cultural and I’m very happy. The saddest is my own generation because lots of people complain and they feel how great we had it in America while they really suffered and saved the nation. But the young people are wonderful. And look how they are doing! Look at the number of young Czech scientists worldwide in absolutely leading laboratories, and they do very well. They get offers to stay. And now, already, there are Americans who are going to work in the sciences and live in Prague. It was a dream. Now, I say, when Germans start coming to be waiters in Prague, then the Czech Republic has arrived.”</p><p><em>Have you seen any yet?</em></p><p>“Yes I did. Not very many, but I did. And the numbers are growing.”</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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Karel Jr. Raška
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Karel Raška Jr. was born in Prague in 1939. His parents, Karel and Helena, were renowned physicians who made lasting contributions to their fields. He has one younger brother, Ivan. Karel remembers the waning months of WWII and, in particular, the bombing of Prague during which the house next door to his was hit. He attended an English-language elementary school until 1948, when it closed following the Communist coup. He continued to study English through high school and enjoyed science classes; Karel says that his education was ‘excellent.’ He studied medicine at Charles University and, upon graduating in 1962, served in the Czech Air Force as a flight surgeon. Karel then worked in research at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.</p><p> </p><p>In 1965, Karel was awarded a two-year fellowship at Yale University. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1967, at a time when major changes were happening in the country. Karel says that he was aware of the reforms Alexander Dubček was introducing rather early as his mother was a non-voting member of the Central Committee and privy to policy decisions. However, Karel also says that he knew the Prague Spring would ‘not end well.’ He had exit permits for himself, his wife, Jana, and his son, Karel, as he was due to give a lecture in Italy and, on August 21, 1968, following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led troops, Karel and his family drove to Austria. They stayed for a few months in Switzerland, where Karel’s father and brother were working at the time. Karel sailed to the United States on October 14, 1968. His wife and son followed two weeks later. In the wake of the invasion, Karel’s parents were both fired from their jobs. His mother would work in agriculture for the next 20 years.</p><p> </p><p>Karel secured a job as an assistant professor at Rutgers Medical School (now the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School – University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey). He and his wife, Jana, also a physician, have stayed with the institution for their entire careers, and Karel is now the chair of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. He and Jana are both visiting professors at Charles University Faculty of Medicine. Karel and Jana’s younger son, Francis, was born in the United States. Both their sons speak fluent Czech, and Karel III, a cardiologist, studied at Charles University, while Francis, a historian, is a professor in the American Studies department at Charles University. Karel’s grandchildren also speak Czech fluently and hold Czech citizenship. Karel became involved with the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in the 1990s. He was a board member for several years and served as president of the organization from 2006 to 2012. Today, Karel and Jana split their time between Highland Park, New Jersey, and Prague, where they own an apartment.</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/refugee
Community Life
gymnazium
Healthcare professional
Raska
school
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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>Theatre in Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZMwqb6ZSymE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“All this time, 40 years, theatre was a hiding place for people like Havel. Matter of fact, I worked with Havel. We worked together in a little theatre called Na zábradlí.”</p><p><em>What kind of work did you do together?<strong><br /></strong></em><br />
“We did everything, because this was a little theatre and it was funny, this theatre was founded as a co-op. They didn’t get any money from the state or the government. We did all the manual [labor]. Actors did it. Everybody worked at what had to be done.”</p><h4>Josef Svoboda</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f0evfHXEKWY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started working in the D 34 theatre [today’s Divadlo Archa] which was a Communist theatre, highly Communist – the repertoire, but not people. I met architect [Josef] Svoboda. He was the main designer for the National Theatre and he created Laterna Magika. So he asked me if I wanted to go work with him; this was ’59. I was probably the first technical employee practically in Laterna. I worked with the directors [Alfred] Radok, Miloš Forman. After a few years, theatre was popular, so State Film took over, new management, new Communist management. So Radok got fired, Miloš Forman got fired…”</p><h4>Adapting to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EPAsGuLo9c8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For me it wasn’t too bad because I was traveling. I spent with theatre, from ’58 to ’68 – I was most of the time out of the country. I was in Poland twice, in Russia twice. In Russia, I was there a year and a half. To Bulgaria; I was in Hungary twice. Paris, one month in ’67. Paris was a jump to Miami.”</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
Karel Kaiser
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Karel Kaiser was born in Domažlice in 1932 and grew up in nearby Kdyně. In 1938, he moved to Prague with his father and two older sisters – Karel’s mother had died shortly prior to the move. Upon graduation from high school, he studied architecture at Charles University for one year, but was then expelled because of his father’s position as a self-employed tailor. During a <em>brigáda</em> [work brigade] in Ostrava, where he was employed as a builder, Karel met his future wife, Vlasta, who was working as a secretary. The couple moved back to Prague, married and had two daughters, Miroslava and Iveta (who later Americanized her name to <a href="/web/20170609131421/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/yvette-kaiser-smith/">Yvette</a>). Karel began his career in theatre as a writer, but soon transitioned into the technical arts, working on sound, lighting, and set design. At Divadlo Na zábradlí he worked with Václav Havel and, while at D 34 (now known as Divadlo Archa), Karel met Josef Svoboda, a renowned architect and scenographer. In 1959, Svoboda invited Karel to join his Laterna Magika project, a non-verbal theatre which had enjoyed great international success the previous year at Expo ’58 in Brussels. Working as a theatre technician for Laterna Magika’s eastern touring company, Karel traveled extensively throughout the Eastern Bloc, visiting Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union.</p><p> </p><p>Karel says that the idea to leave Czechoslovakia had been germinating for a while, due to his treatment at university and his hope for his daughters to have a better life. But, he says, he was waiting for a ‘safe chance’ to move his family. In January 1968, he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, with the western touring company of Laterna Magika for HemisFair ’68. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Karel traveled back to Prague for a short visit, during which time he and his wife made a ‘quick decision’ that the family would leave the country. After he returned to the United States, Karel sent his wife an affidavit and she began securing visas and passports. In late December 1968, his wife and daughters traveled to England to stay with his sister for one month. They arrived in Dallas, Texas, on January 25, 1969. The family found a small apartment in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas and Karel found a job in construction. In 1971, he found employment at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel as a light and sound designer, while also working nights as a janitor. After 12 years, he became head electrician at the Hotel Anatole, also in Dallas. In 1999, Karel and his wife retired and moved back to Prague. Vlasta died in 2005 and Karel returned to the United States. He currently lives in Chicago with his daughter Yvette and her husband, Tim.</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/refugee
Arts
Divadlo Na zabradli
Domazlice
Kdyne
marriage
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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>Jewish in WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wtNyFyw03NI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Of course, ’39 was the time when Nazis took over completely, but we did not feel it until ’40, ’41. We only felt it by the everyday happenings in our school where the children would chase us around because we were Jewish and they were not. And we first didn’t understand what happened, we had no idea that we were any different. So my father had another task to explain – how you are different. And he had a great theory; that’s the first time he mentioned that ‘It is not our fault that we are Jewish. Actually, it is not a fault. It’s just something that one is and one isn’t, and these children are to be pitied because they’re just uninformed, obviously their parents are uninformed , and, you know, we just have to try to ignore the best we can.’”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hB12poJltNg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were washing dishes and the soldiers showed up and told my mother and my father that we need to pack up something that we can carry on our backs and we are going to leave. So we were taken to the camp in – the concentration camp – in Žilina. You know the difference, there is a concentration camp and there is an extermination camp, so we were just taken to the first place. So we left our house. That was the last time I saw my house. I don’t really want to go into the whole thing because you probably heard many stories like that, you saw many movies like that, every story is a little bit different. To us, as children, it was a completely unexpected experience. We were city girls and we had no idea that things like that, like you sleep on straw, existed. And that you eat when you are supposed to line up to eat and you eat what you get and not what your mother has for you. Special things, everything disappears, in one moment.”</p><h4>Release</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XhwYkfhJn9o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, with all the other men, he went out from the camp every morning. They marched out to work on the roads – break up the stones for the road making. And he was always obviously thinking about how to get us out of there. But he couldn’t come up with anything, because once you’re there you hardly ever…But then he had still a brother in Banská Bystrica, which is one of the bigger towns in Slovakia, who was still out. I don’t know how come they didn’t pick them up yet, but he was still out there. So he chanced it and he wrote a little note and packed it up and wrote on the note that whoever finds it, please send it to such-and-such address, please. That was all. And he wrote to his brother where we are, and do something. Because my father immediately knew what it meant. He was more informed than other people because he was very observant, and he also, with his friends, listened to the radio – that we are not supposed to have anymore. No radios, no jewelry, no purse, no nothing. And he knew that from London that things are really heading to the Final Solution.”</p><p>“And his brother got it. So somebody picked it up. I think it was the first miracle that I ever saw. And my uncle went, and I don’t know to this day how he got a small village past Banská Bystrica, persuaded – they needed a dentist of course – that they should vouch for us, and if they do that, if the commander of the local – it was called Hlinkova garda [Hlinka Guard]. That was a fascist Slovak organization – if he will say that he will watch out for us, and if they need us, we are there and will be handed over. So, they did it. They took our family, and we moved there.”</p><h4>Priest Help</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3efFrs4asnU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Slovak state had a president who was a Catholic bishop. And he of course was under the command of Hitler, and at the time they were negotiating how many Jews he was going to send him and how much money they’re going to get for it. And the Slovak priest in that village decided that he absolutely doesn’t listen to that kind of…that’s not his boss, his boss is a little bit higher up and that’s the only boss that he listens to. So he told his flock that the pope thinks this way but God doesn’t think that way. God thinks that we don’t hand over innocent people to be slaughtered. Why? And so that’s how we basically got saved.”</p><h4>Discovered</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J89ahwolBqQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had sentries, when someone in the village down there saw somebody coming, they would send a kid up to tell us, and then I was sent up there to tell those, but once it didn’t work out, and when I was going up to the last house, there was not a German troop, but the Hungarian troop; which was Hungarian Fascist, which were really, really, hateful. And they had a German commander with them, but the German already knew that they were losing, so he was thinking about the future and how’s he going to get out of this. But it was too late for us…we knew that if they catch so many people in one house they know they are hiding, these people are hiding. And they see the families, the children, and old people and middle-aged people. So they came up there and there we were. It was very unpleasant. And the German commander talked to my aunt who spoke German and he said ‘I know. It’s over, it’s over.’ But the Hungarians said ‘We need to take the guys with us,’ because they had to go through a partisan… the guerilla fighters’ territory. ‘We are going to take the men with us so they lead us through the territory and then we get over where we can join our forces. And the women and the children we need to shoot because, you know, what are we going to do with them?’”</p><p>“So they stood us up against the wall, and my little cousin, who was about six, she saw her father. She was an only child and her father’s little girl. Oh, she didn’t want her father to go anywhere, of course. She jumped off and went to him, and this guy said ‘We are ready to shoot, what is this, the kid?’ So the German commander said ‘Oh for heavens’ sakes guys, they’re just children and women, so why are we going to shoot them? What’s the sense of it? Let’s go.’ So they started leaving, and after they left and led my father and uncle and all the other guys down. And then we got very lucky, because in two days they were back. So they led them through the territory and decided to let them go. So they all came back. Including my father. So there was no better end to the story than this.”</p><h4>Censorship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w9DcjPmGlH4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I worked for the radio – I’ll just tell you a short story – in the section for young people and small children, so at night [we broadcast] fairy tales. So there is a French fairy tale called ‘The Red Balloon,’ everybody knows. So we had nothing to play so I said to my boss ‘Why don’t you reprise ‘The Red Balloon,’ we haven’t seen it in a long time, new children didn’t hear it.’ But you always have to, even if it’s old, you have to send it up to the advisor. That was not a Russian yet, that was our own NKVD [secret police] advisor. And he reads everything and then when he signs under it and you can put the tape on. I get a call: ‘Comrade Sever.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ I said ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ ‘What is this Red Balloon?’ I said ‘It’s a fairy tale.’ ‘I know that. But did you read to the end?’ ‘Yeah, I read to the end. The red balloon flies too high and it pops.’ ‘What’s the red balloon and it pops?’ I said ‘Well comrade,’ I don’t know what we called him. Tlačový dozor are press overseers. ‘I’m so sorry that you have such terrible thoughts. I didn’t think of it, but you did. I don’t know about you.’ He said ‘Stop being silly and change it to another color.’ I said ‘Ok, like what?’ ‘Like yellow.’ I said ok. Ok, no tragedy, but imagine that you are a writer and every word that you have in your book you have to cross out.”</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
Klara Sever
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Klara Sever was born into a Jewish family in 1935 in Trebišov, Slovakia. With the outbreak of WWII and the founding of the First Slovak Republic, Klara and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Žilina. While in the camp, Klara’s father was able to get a note to his brother living in Banská Bystrica, who, in turn, persuaded a local official to vouch for the family and get them released from the camp under his supervision. The family lived in several locations until they were forced to go into hiding in 1942. Klara remembers being discovered by a troop of Hungarian soldiers who wanted to capture the men and shoot the women and children. At the last minute, however, the commander stepped in and saved their lives. Although the men were forced to march with the soldiers, they all returned in a few days. After the War, Klara and her family traveled to Lučenec to look for the rest of her family. They were only reunited with two of her uncles.</p><p> </p><p>In 1951, Klara attended the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Upon graduation, Klara wanted to pursue her studies further, but says she was blacklisted due to her marriage to her husband, whom she refers to as “an enemy of the state.” She recalls having difficulty finding a job as an artist, but eventually found employment restoring castles throughout Czechoslovakia. Working in restoration for five years classified her as a laborer, and she finally received her degree in art history from Comenius University. Klara then began working as a radio reporter and editor of art programming. She supplied material and reports for underground radio broadcasts during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.</p><p> </p><p>It was at this time that Klara and her husband decided to leave Czechoslovakia and, about two weeks after the invasion, they crossed the border into Austria. Klara says the border was patrolled by both Soviet and Slovak soldiers, and the Slovak soldier who inspected their car told them to leave ‘quickly.’ Her husband had connections with Western journalists he had met in Prague not long before, and he met one of these at the French embassy in Vienna. The French ambassador personally handed them visas, and they traveled to Paris. In 1969, they arrived in New York City. Although she did not know yet any English, Klara worked a series of jobs reproducing sculptures. In the Washington, D.C. area, Klara has worked as a sculptor, preparing commissions and heading her own company. She speaks Slovak with her family, and has maintained Slovak traditions at Christmas and Easter.</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/refugee
Arts
Banska Bystrica
Concentration camp
Cultural Traditions
Education
Jews
Journalism
Lucenec
Trebisov
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
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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>Devoted</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mgYHJpfQnwc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe>
<p>“In 1948, when the communists finally took over in Czechoslovakia, people were not accepting it very well, they didn’t want it. Because first of all, people were losing their own property, they didn’t own anything. And my father thought everything belongs to everybody – you couldn’t be having more than I do, or I shouldn’t be having more than you do – we all should have the same. And his own sisters, who lived in a different village, Dubovany, by Piešťany, his own sisters didn’t want to accept that people have to leave their property or something and let Communists run it. And he went over there to talk to his sisters to sign, they had some farmland. My aunt had a small amount of farmland, and my other aunt, and he didn’t feel that they should own that – they should all own it and all together work. So he was very, very strict about it, he would talk and say ‘No, you have to agree, it’s going to be a better life for you, I guarantee you’.</p>
<p>“He had really good ideas, and those ideas which I heard, which he told me, I liked them, because I felt yeah, everybody should… there shouldn’t be hungry people, there shouldn’t be poor people, everybody should have a little piece of something, everybody should have free school, free health program. And that’s what communists promised. So that’s how he believed it.</p>
<p>“Until, I believe, after we left, in the late seventies – he died in 1976. After 1968, it was that Prague Spring and everything, and things were changing. And he went outside, in the city, in Bratislava, and he sees these big shots, these communist leaders talking and being rich, suddenly they were rich, loaded with money and he would say – later on I found out, he never said anything to me, because we were over here – ‘Now something is wrong! Because this is not how I wanted. I wanted to have everything equal, this is not equal.’”</p>
<h4>Communist</h4>
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<p>“It was a small village, farmland, there were about 300 population, that’s it. And that teacher who was working with me – her name was Rosie, Ružena, Rosie – she got me involved with the people. We had a drama club, we had the kids involved in pionieri, that was kids… I was a Pioneer when I was in sixth or fifth grade or something! And sväzáci, that was a teenagers’ club, they wore blue shirts, so we were involved with them. With the drama club we put on some play, that was a teacher’s job in the farmland or villages, the teacher has to do that. And because of that, somebody came up with the idea of ‘Why don’t you become a Communist?’ So that woman, that Rosie said ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want to be!’ She was single, 36 years old, she didn’t want to be. I wanted to be because, I think it was something I wanted to prove to my father, or I wanted him to be proud of me or whatever. I thought that he would be proud.</p>
<p>“And when I told him I was asked to be a Communist Party member, first you are on a waiting list for about a year, and then you are promoted, a full-blown… He looked at me and he says to me ‘Wait a minute! Do you want to go because you believe it, or do you just want to go because you think it’s not time to do it?’ I said ‘No, I want to believe it.’ He said ‘Alright then, you have to live by that!’</p>
<p>“So, I lived by that except one thing: I never claimed that I don’t believe in God. That was my private thing. When somebody asked me the question ‘How are you doing with your view on God and religion?’ I said ‘I’m still working on it.’ That was my answer. That was the only thing that I kept with me, I always believed in God. Because I thought, that has nothing to do with it, communism and God. God is taking care of even communist people.”</p>
<h4>Radio Free</h4>
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<p>“I know my husband one time brought some radio, it was about midnight, we were listening to something, but we called it propaganda. I didn’t believe that. I said ‘Yeah, they tell you anything they want to.’ We say in Slovak ‘keď vtáčka lapajú, pekne mu spievajú’ – did you ever hear that? ‘If you want to catch the bird then sing to him.’ So I thought, this is a nice, nice, speech, but that’s not my idea… When my husband brought up the idea of leaving Czechoslovakia, I said to him ‘You know what, why don’t you go, because I know some people, older people, men went to the United States and made money and then supported their wives, sent for their wives. Why don’t you go?’ And he says ‘Well, I think I have some place a marriage license, and on the marriage license you’re in my name. So, that makes no sense, me going without you. We all go, or nobody goes.’”</p>
<h4>Army</h4>
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<p>“My father, because he had contact with everything, he knew what was going on. He said to my husband, ‘You know what, probably you are going to be called to service, because Cuba is happening, and a lot of soldiers are being called and sent to protect the country. Probably you are going to be called too.’ And my husband says ‘Dad, why me? I already did my… I am not like a regular soldier!’ And my father says ‘Well, it can happen.’ We got home and about 10:00 in the evening somebody knocked on the door, a man, in a uniform, and he says to my husband ‘You have to report at the airport tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning.’ And that’s when reality hit me. I had a two year-old daughter, and he left in the morning, he went to the airport, and then, at the end of the day I didn’t hear from him, and it wasn’t like here where everybody has phones. We didn’t have a phone, I was living with my mother in law, she didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a phone. So, the following day, I went to a phone booth, and I called the army reserve or somebody, and I asked about my husband, and they said to me ‘Oh, you know what, súdružka, you don’t have to worry about it, but we can’t tell you where he is, it’s a secret.’ And I didn’t know anything. So, a week went by, I didn’t know anything, and then about maybe ten days later, he called me and he said that he is in Trenčín – I don’t know how many miles it is from Bratislava – he’s in Trenčín, he’s with the army, he is safe, and he is working as a driver. He was driving some big surgeon or big shot in the army, driving him from one place to another. That’s about it. And I said ‘Are you coming to visit or something?’ And he said ‘No, I can’t even talk to you for long, I have ten minutes only.’”</p>
<h4>1968 Invasion</h4>
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<p>“It was a beautiful day and I took my kids to play outside. We had an apartment building with a little kind of playground; there was a sandbox, trees and a line for hanging your laundry. And I used to, in those days, I used to wash diapers by hand, we didn’t have disposable ones, it wasn’t that good a time like now. So I took those diapers and I hung them on a line and my youngest one was in a stroller sleeping, his afternoon nap. And a helicopter was flying. I was in the building already, and then I heard people, I went on the balcony and I saw people on the other balcony screaming ‘Take the children in! Take the children in!’ So, the helicopter was shooting, I don’t know at whom. So I ran downstairs, a couple of people helped me get the kids inside, and then we find in a couple of diapers holes. I wish I saved those diapers those days!</p>
<p>“I’m sure they were not shooting at the children, probably because it was the center of the city, probably some commotion was going on on one of those streets and one little bullet got lost or something. So I had another reason, I’m not going stay here, I’m moving out of here, I’m going to live with grandma. Because I thought in a village, it’s nice and quiet, what is the city offering you? Nothing!</p>
<p>“Then, later on that afternoon, my husband – I sent him to get the bread, he came home without bread – he says ‘The stores are empty, no bread!’ I said ‘I need milk for my youngest one.’ Over there for babies, you need a prescription for baby milk, you can’t buy it just like that. And it’s also only in drugstores or pharmacies, they were equipped with the milk for babies. So I said, ‘I’m going to get milk for Lubo,’ so I went down the street, I lined up in front of the pharmacy, I’m standing in line, and they say to me ‘We need a birth certificate, we are not giving you this milk, because anybody can come with a prescription. And we have a shortage, look at the shelves, they are empty.’ So I went back home, walked about ten minutes, meantime helicopters were flying and shooting, we were hiding in one house, in a building, we ran. The whole street, everybody ran into the building. They were shooting, nobody got hurt. I got home, I got the birth certificate, I went back to the pharmacy. No more milk.”</p>
<h4>Departure</h4>
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<p>“In 1969, when we left Slovakia, it was secret, nobody knew about it, not even my father, because my father would call the police and lock us up. He wouldn’t allow it – he said it later on. He said if he knew we wanted to leave, he would have taken precautions so that we won’t leave, even if we went to jail. Yes, he was very upset. Because he was a devoted communist, and he thought he had raised me the same way, and how can I leave my country?</p>
<p>“And he wrote us letters, kind of mean letters, and in those letters he said ‘I don’t think you have an idea what is waiting for you, life out of your country is very hard. I remember my life, it wasn’t easy, and it’s not going to be easy for you, especially because you have four children.’ And ‘Why did you do that? Did I raise you the wrong way, or did I make a mistake raising you? You left this country, you left your family! You shouldn’t do that.’ And he was very upset, and my husband wrote him a letter and apologized to him for me, saying he shouldn’t be mad at me, because it was not me who was doing that, it was my husband who wanted to leave, and I just followed him because I was his wife. So I don’t think my father ever made peace with me leaving.”</p>
<h4>English</h4>
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<p>“The language was really tough, my husband went to Berlitz, so he picked up quick, he was talking all day. The kids, they didn’t have problems at all. My daughter, she was a fourth grader when we left Czechoslovakia, when we got over here they put her in second grade, because they said that’s where she should pick up English. About three months later, she went to the principal, that was a nun, and she said to her ‘I think I speak good enough English, I want to go to fourth grade.’ And they transferred her to fourth grade. So she picked up really good, she didn’t have problems, my boys didn’t have problems. My problem was I didn’t want to talk to anybody, when we were living in that town house, I would go outside, my kids were playing and the next door neighbor would talk to me, I turned I went inside because I didn’t understand her. So, I watched TV, there were soaps, and I would watch them and I said ‘Every day it’s the same people!’ I didn’t understand what was said, I didn’t understand when is the story and when is the advertising, the commercials! I didn’t know, I couldn’t.</p>
<p>“Then my kids were watching a lot of kids’ shows and I would watch with them. And you know what show? Sesame Street! Sesame Street helped me… I watched Big Bird ‘one, two…’ and that’s how I learned English from the TV.”</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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Melania Rakytiak
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Catholicism
Catholics
Cierna Voda
Communist coup
Communist Party members
Divorce
Education
Family life
local
Lutherans
marriage
Marxism
Politics
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Strecanska
Stredna pedagogicka skola
Surovce
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j2AVCTYbBBA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Well, he [my father] was a few times threatened with the concentration camp, because he wanted to have order in the house. Thank god, he didn’t go, but it was a daily fear for my mom because practically the Germans were coming every day and checking on everything. I remember we had a big band radio, and there was a death sentence if you listened to London, [Radio] Free Europe. Through this, my dad, because it was a very good radio, he was every day listening in the same house where you have Germans, to London, risking his life. But he was able to give all the news and everything to the people they were able to trust. So this was going on during the war.”</p><h4>Medical School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vl-jAz648J0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I lived in college housing, and I had very good company with the girl, we studied together. And no one has money, we were all in the same [boat], sharing whoever got something from home, bakery or so, and we are still friends today. And second, the pressure of the communists was not like in Prague. There was much more freedom and we were very lucky in medical school because at the time they believed body and spirit go together. So every year we had a very good exercise program. One year gymnastics, one semester swimming – we had Olympians who trained us. Running, skiing, kayaking. We went every Friday or Saturday with a rucksack on our back and we were in the mountains. It was an incredible six years. I said I wish my kids went through [this]. We were at the opera, because five bucks, five <em>korun </em>[crowns] was a ticket to go to anything for a student. So, you saw every week an opera, you saw every week Janáček. You just lived the life fully.”</p><h4>Anti-Communist Views</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UGihodfOt18?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then my husband was able to get some small apartment and I got a job in Krč, Thomayer Hospital. Because I was not communist, I was going from one department to the other one; wherever they needed help, I was there. No central anesthesiology, surgery. So, thanks to the communists, when I came out of the country, I knew more than my colleagues because they were sitting in one place whereas I was all over – internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases. So I got the best training you can wish to survive. Thanks to the regime, and my belief not to sign ever to become a communist.”</p><h4>Returning Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qJJ_xvDZJdg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My husband must have been so frustrated, because I really was depressed and the kids were sick. First John, then Marketa got an earache. We have to go to a hospital, they gave her streptomycin. And when he saw where we lived and what happened to us, he said ‘Go back home and you will come back when I will be more stable.’ And we went on the train and when we were on the train we didn’t have a single penny; he didn’t give me even one dollar, nothing, because we were going home. And the people we met on the train said, ‘This is the most stupid thing you are doing, when you are already here. As a doctor you will have so many opportunities. Stay here.’ And they bought us soap, they bought the children chocolate. So when we came to the line on the Austrian border, I took my luggage, and with the children, we were out. And we didn’t pay the train; we didn’t have a single penny, he had just put us in. We were sitting there and they were calling him, but he was sick too. And he didn’t know what they were saying. So were about three hours sitting outside, we have two luggages, the kids were hungry and not too good. Then finally he came and he said, ‘With God’s blessing, we are together and we will do the best.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xKOw0YZS0qo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was complicated because, first of all, I still speak with an accent today, and I had still a lot of learning to do when I started to work. I didn’t know how to sell all my experience. I didn’t use anybody to help me; I just studied three or four hospitals that I was able to reach in the car, and I said ‘This is what I am, I passed the test if you are interested.’ And I got hired in a residency in one day. It was not the best one – I could go a much, much better one, but I didn’t know how people do it. But the training was very harsh the first year because you have a 36 hour [shift] when you didn’t sleep. You went home at 4:00, you slept, you were half dead, the kids were screaming and my husband didn’t know what to do because it was already two days without anybody. So then my mom came, and second year I was already supervising so it was much easier.</p><p>But you know what? I really liked it. I couldn’t complain about it because I was ten years older than the other [residents] and learned so much again, and survived. After my second year, they already gave me recognition; I didn’t need to finish three years, I was already eligible. But I went to endocrinology because I didn’t want to cheat on the training, I wanted to finish like everybody else and learn something different, which I didn’t know. So I finished and then I went to the practice in 1978.”</p><h4>Church</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dX7pjBgHSZ4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“<em>Roráty</em> [Advent mass] was 6:00 and as a child I woke up, I was there every single day, the six weeks before Christmas. And it was such a medieval atmosphere, you never saw [anything like] it. The candles, cold, darkness, and the old prayers, the old songs, they are hundreds of years old. I wish somebody could see it. Once I came back after communism was over, and I have a cousin from Vancouver. He couldn’t believe it. He still, until he died, talked about the impression, because it was like two, three hundred years back. Church full of mostly ladies, and praying. Such a strong feeling in the church. And this is until now. When I go over there, it’s unbelievable. The church is full of people, the singing – they sing ‘Svatý Václave’. And when they sing it comes from the heart. It is something you will never see here, never.”</p>
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Mila Kyncl
Description
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<p>Mila Kyncl was born in Trhový Štěpánov, Bohemia, in 1935. her father was a businessman and worked the land that their family owned while her mother stayed at home to raise Mila. During WWII, Mila says German troops occupied her home, which was very large. Overall, she recalls having a happy childhood, sprinkled with trips to Prague to attend the ballet or opera with her parents. A student at the village school until the age of ten, Mila then transferred to a larger school in Čáslav. At age 14, Mila was chosen by her teachers to assist the local doctor. She attributes receiving this opportunity to her good student record and her background in math, physics, and chemistry.</p><p> </p><p>Mila attended Masaryk University’s medical school in Brno which she refers to as one of the “best times of her life.” She says she graduated after her father signed his property, which included several businesses, over to the state. Her family was moved into a much smaller building on their property which her father renovated. Mila worked at a hospital in Strakonice for two years, then, in 1961, married her husband, <a href="/web/20170609131424/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/john-jaroslav-kyncl/">Jaroslav Kyncl</a>, and that same year moved to Prague. They had two children, Marketa and John. Mila found a job in a hospital in Prague, but was not allowed a specialty because of her anti-communist views. However, she says this ultimately worked in her favor as she received training in all departments.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After attempts to leave the country legally by applying for jobs abroad (in places such as Tunis), Mila and her family left Czechoslovakia on August 30, 1968, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion. They lived in Vienna as refugees for a few months before moving to Heidelberg when Jaroslav was offered a Humboldt scholarship. Mila also found work as a physician in Heidelberg and stayed in that position until 1972, when she and her children joined Jaroslav, who had moved to Cleveland a year earlier, in the United States. They settled in Lake Bluff, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Mila retrained as a doctor and eventually opened her own practice. Both of Mila’s children speak Czech, and she and Jaroslav regularly visit the Czech Republic. They are active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), and Mila retains many Czech cultural traditions.</p><p> </p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
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NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Caslav
Catholicism
Community Life
Education
German
Healthcare professionals
Janacek
Krc
marriage
Occupation
Roraty
Svaty Vaclave
Tomaidesova
Trhovy Stepanov
Women workers
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a40efed19b43096db4e0b84259ade82f
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>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3i6pZyDnwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It was the part of Prague that had domkáři. Those were associations of house owners, and they were quite virulently anti-communist. By the ‘50s, the most vocal people obviously were gone, exiled, sent to prison, and unknown, so it was a kind of underground rumble. But it was obvious people knew about it. People would pay attention to who was talking to whom, and so it was rather instructive to any little kid because, in spite of the propaganda, we knew that there was a sea of discontent, and so I grew up with this. Part of that part of Prague [Hloubětín] was the communist worker’s movement who agreed with the communists, and they would mainly meet in the local pub; in fact, in Předni Hloubětín there were one or two pubs for three streets, and they were well-populated in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening, three times as much. And those people, they would perhaps never put up with discussion about the fault of communists. And if you went into the big Hloubětín, just perhaps a 10 or 15 minute walk away, there you could hear that rumble. People, the underground, discontent, because people who owned the houses, very often what would happen would be that they would lose part of their house and the communists would just quite simply put some family into part of their building or part of their little house, and they wouldn’t ask for any permission essentially and so now you had to share quarters – your own in your own home – with somebody you didn’t know. And then, kind of an evil scheme that was hatched in some of the communist planning minds was to make sídliště – the housing development – and part of it, they destroyed those rodinné domky – family houses – and they would just take away the gardens and put a huge, monstrous panelák [prefabricated high-rise] and so the houses suddenly found themselves without a garden, standing in the middle of the development and they didn’t like it either. So obviously, there was a lot of discontent with which I grew up.”</p><h4>Education Lacking</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BJugMUJOXTI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Humanistic sciences or history or even language – it was pitiful. It was absolutely pitiful. If I learned anything, it is because my father inherited filled bookcases from his parents and I essentially would read a book or two a day, perhaps four during the weekend. And also, my mom refused to get television, which means we didn’t have television and if you didn’t play volleyball with your friends, there was nothing to do but read, or raid grandma’s garden and eat her radishes, or eat the radishes and read, and so that was how I spent my childhood.</p><p>“Sciences, however, perhaps because many well-meaning educators exited and/or retreated in to the fields of science – and that was also my plan – the sciences were well-taught. We had many idealistic teachers and we knew that they were ideologically flawed, if judged by the communist measuring stick, and we loved them even more for that. We really had good scientific preparation.</p><p>“But humanistic subjects, boy was it pitiful. It was worse than if they didn’t teach us anything because factually it was not correct and the interpretation and even ways how to study were completely wrong. I didn’t know how to do research because essentially we were told to parrot what we were told, and even the parroting could have been potentially quite lethal, because the official policy was changing. They changed the official policy that we learned by heart and it wasn’t good anymore suddenly, so the first day of our school year, we would get glue and empty pages and we would actually slap empty pages of paper onto a page which we were supposed to erase from the memory of communist humanity. And we did it. We of course read through it very carefully before we did it.”</p><h4>Reasons for Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6w-6iLDsINk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“By the time I was 19, suddenly I realized that there was a huge depth, a cavern, ready for exploration for me to find out what I was a product of, and I had the opportunity. Then came August 21 [1968] and I went to Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and, because at that time I was good-looking, there was a photo of me which appeared on the front page of Paris Match and in Europe in several Western publications, and obviously I wasn’t anonymous. I met the person who was overseeing the teachers in the school where I was studying, and suddenly she perked up as a communist. She made sure that I knew that she noticed me and so at that time suddenly I realized ‘I want to get out. I want to get out and I need to get out.’</p><p>“There were two reasons. One was they wouldn’t let me continue at school, and of course I knew that it was somewhere some farming cooperative that I would have to go to; and/or that I wouldn’t have a chance to grow intellectually and understand what was happening to my whole nation. To the literature, to the music, to the film. To the people, to their relationships. And because we were all raised with this admiration of the national reawakening – národní probuzení – I really felt defensive of whatever was Czech, whatever was Czech culture. The survival of the nation was… we were fed the worries of the survival of the nation, and suddenly I realized that communists were perhaps enemies of the survival of the nation, as far as highly educated, cultured, and democratically-cultured nation. So that was the moment when I decided I had to leave.”</p><h4>Twice to Vienna</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oE9PcNrMh2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a friend who actually was British who had a car. He came to Prague before the occupation and he gave me a ride to Vienna, and I left with him. It was rather interesting and memorable – and there was another person in the car. We were in the car and there was one Russian tank in front of us and one Russian tank behind us, and I was just thinking ‘Do they have good brakes behind us?’ because there was no space if their brakes failed for us to escape the accident.</p><p>“We made it to Vienna and then from Vienna we started to get all kinds of rather optimistic news: students went on strike, professors were supporting students very often, and on and on. I was really homesick and I felt I needed to perhaps go back and reconnect with my friends, and the reconnection really didn’t happen. People were scared. The few people I knew who were straight, they were gone. Nobody knew where they went. They were gone to the West, and so I just then packed up once again and I left. I was able to leave – that was a completely crazy thing. An elderly gentleman provided me with a handwritten letter in which – he was Czech – in which he certified, or wrote, supposedly as a doctor, that my fiancé was dying in a Viennese hospital, and so I went for a výjezdní doložka [exit permit] which I got, and then I flew to Vienna. As I was coming through the airport, there was the guy who opened the list of people [who were not supposed to be allowed out of the country], there were names and names and names, and he goes [down the list] and he stops and I was there – I swear I was there – and he puts his finger by that line and he wishes me good luck. I had výjezdní doložka for four days. To me, it was a message.”</p><h4>Involved</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t7APo4Twqu4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I realized that culture is not only what we get from our parents; it’s this collective construct. We get something from them, we take it, we transform it, we add to it, we subtract from it whatever is not needed, is not usable, and we hand that new thing that we have lived, whether it was everyday existence and/or literature, music, visual arts, we hand it on to our children. And that culture depends on broad, democratic participation. If you don’t have broad participation, you cannot have the exclusive top, because the exclusive top depends on this growth towards the top of the pyramid, and I realized that if we don’t get engaged in this participation, we impoverish ourselves, we impoverish our neighbors, and we impoverish that part of the Czech culture that is living outside which is part of the diaspora. It’s my kind of quiet fight for the rights of the Czech diaspora to exist and be part of Czech culture, and so I tried also to communicate the achievements of this Czech diaspora to the kernel of the Czech culture, which happens to be in the Czech lands, and to motivate them into the re-acceptance of that part of their history. But not only that, to rebuild the bridge between the American Czech-ness, which was in so many ways instrumental and defining for the existence of modern Czechoslovakia, and build new bridges which would allow Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech lands after ’89, to reach once again the global community. Because after all, we can be the stepping stone.”</p><h4>American Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oBt6ykSk5x0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was really wonderful. It was in Kansas City and during the ceremony of citizenship, the judge was reading the background of the people who applied for citizenship, just two or three sentences, and introduced each one of us. There was a Chinese guy and he says ‘Nuclear physics.’ Then he goes ‘Doctor from India.’ Then he comes to me and says ‘Czech linguist, PhD.’ And he says ‘We are gaining so much. Thank you for wanting to be American citizens.’ In addition to it, there were about 40 families who adopted Korean kids, and they were all girls in ruffles. They were all fidgeting; they were tiny, perhaps two years, three years old, sitting on the laps of their parents. The parents shedding tears and kissing them. Obviously they had been raising them for two or three years; they were their children. So it was a really happy occasion. All those happy, absolutely melting, parents and the few of us who were welcomed and thanked for willing to be American citizens and adding our value to the American nation. It was such an emotional thing.”</p>
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Mila Saskova-Pierce
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Mila Saskova-Pierce was born in Prague in 1948. Her mother, Miluše, was a high school literature teacher while her father, Vladimír, worked in a factory. She was raised in the Hloubětín district of the city along with her brother and her cousin, whom her parents adopted. After attending<em>gymnázium</em>, Mila applied to Charles University, but says that her application was rejected because she applied for a course of study that was no longer available. She worked for one year, first at the municipal incinerator and then for the national funeral home. Mila’s second application to Charles University to study medical biochemistry was accepted and she began her studies in 1967. It was at this time, according to Mila, that she really began questioning the system and interacting with dissidents. During the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, a photograph of Mila protesting on Wenceslas Square was published in several Western publications – an event which she says ended her anonymity and threatened her future. Within a few days of the invasion, Mila left Czechoslovakia for Vienna, but returned to Prague that October. When she realized that the situation was not going to get better, she left the country once more. After a short stay in Vienna, Mila moved to Belgium. There she studied Slavic and Russian languages and journalism for one year at the University of Liège before transferring to the Free University of Brussels. She graduated in 1975 and completed a one-year program in language philosophy at the University of Leuven.</p><p> </p><p>In 1976, Mila moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in linguistics at the University of Kansas. She met her future husband, Layne Pierce, in the university library when they discovered both spoke Czech (he had studied the language in college). Mila and Layne married in 1977 and have two daughters. After finishing her PhD, Mila taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for two years. Since 1989, Mila has been a professor of Czech and Russian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mila is active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language. She is also involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. Mila believes that Czech-American culture is integral to the wider Czech culture and she hopes to ‘build a bridge’ between the two. Today Mila lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.</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
American citizenship
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Education
gymnazium
Hloubetin
Miluse Saskova
Russian studies/speaker
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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bcba8548571cd04e87a86c4ef5ba36f4
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>Liberated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/56wIMqRlnnM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were actually lucky that Plzeň was liberated by the American Army. General Patton was there, and General Harmon actually lived in the little village that my parents had a country villa. That’s where his headquarters were, near Plzeň. It was about 40 kilometers from Plzeň. We as children – I was barely two years old and my brother was six years old – we were welcoming the American Army there in our national costumes. I have a picture with one of the soldiers, one of the black soldiers because it was something very unusual for us. We’d never seen a black man before, so this was really something unusual. I have a picture which was printed in <em>Americkè Listy</em> later on. It was a big celebration. All the people were really happy and we were hoping that the American Army would be allowed to go all the way to Prague and liberate Prague, and if they had been able to liberate Prague, the whole Czech Republic would have been liberated. But, of course, according to the treaty and Stalin’s orders in those years, they were ordered to stop right before [Prague sic.]. So our destiny would have been very different if the American Army would have been allowed to go all the way to Prague.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qY1fiKlLENc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, as a doctor, wanted one of us, me or my brother, to follow in his footsteps and study in a medical school, but we wouldn’t have been accepted in a medical school because we were not children of working-class parents. We were so-called ‘bourgeois’ because our parents were intelligentsia. My father was a doctor and my mother was a lawyer, so it was not desirable by the Communist Party for us to have a higher education. The only way for me to get a university degree was to study in the physical education field because they wanted to have well-qualified professionals in the sports. To the communists, sports were actually a means of showing to the world that they are a strong system. They wanted to show the world ‘We have the best athletes in this and that field, so we are the best system…’ That was part of their plan. So actually, I was only allowed to study sports to be a qualified professional in that field later on. So that was my only possibility to go on to higher education.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8zT0xYkN50E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After four years, I interrupted studying and joined the Vienna Ice Show (a professional skating show) which was the only way to be able to travel throughout Europe, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to leave the country. So I traveled with the Vienna Ice Show in many European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, so it was really valuable experience for me. After the two years’ contract, I went back to graduate, to do my last fifth year and graduate. But after the two years, it was the summer of 1968 and there was the Russian invasion on August 21, and that left me actually stranded in northern Germany and I was thinking if I should return to the country or shouldn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen because it was totally unexpected and none of us knew what to do, so I waited almost until the end of September to figure out if I should go back to finish my fifth year and graduate or stay in the West. I really didn’t want to back to the dark ages of the communist regime of the 1950s and that’s actually what happened later on.</p><p>“I did return; I finished my fifth year; I graduated. But during that fifth year, from September of 1968 until June of 1969, it was clear to me that the country was returning to the so-called normalization process which was returning to the bad time of the dark ages of communism. So I said ‘If I ever marry and have children, I don’t want them to grow up in this regime.’ I said ‘I have to get out of the country. If I marry and have children, I want them to live in a free country.’ So after I graduated, I first looked for a job in Czechoslovakia. I wanted to teach skating in one of the larger cities that had skating rinks, but of course the jobs in the larger cities went to the kids of communist parents, so everybody from those families got a better job. And to us, to the remaining people, we would have to take a job somewhere, maybe in the border villages or something like that. So I decided to join the Vienna Ice Revue again, to sign another contract and went with them on a tour of Belgium and Holland, and afterward there was a tour of American and Canada, and at that point I decided that I’m going to stay in the United States and I asked for political asylum.”</p><h4>Ice Show</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqCwhTGFaD4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in the Vienna Ice Show and he [Milada’s brother Jaroslav] joined the Skala Ice Revue, we joined these professional ice shows officially. We got a contract through an organization which was called Pragosport, and there was also Pragokoncert. Those were two organizations that negotiated contracts with Western companies. But for that, we had to pay the government a pretty large amount of our salary in Western currency. That was the only way we were able to travel to the Western countries.”</p><p><em>How did they justify that?</em></p><p>“Because nobody else was allowed to travel outside, so for the privilege of negotiating contracts with Western companies, we had to pay them quite a large amount of our salary, quite a large percentage of our salary.”</p><h4>First Job in America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oei0F0a3QTg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first place I lived in was LeFrak City in Queens, which is near the Long Island Expressway, and the nearest rink to it was the World’s Fair skating rink, which doesn’t exist anymore, but in those days was the closest rink to the apartment where we lived. I used to travel to that rink on a bicycle before I had a car. They knew about my international skating background, my competitive background, so they gave me a job right away. I started teaching there; I had some nice kids there. Actually, in those first days I didn’t know much of the skating terminology and I was just learning from the students I was teaching. So I was showing them a move, a jump or spin and I said ‘What do you call this? What do you call that?’ That’s how I learned the terminology, so that was interesting.”</p><h4>New York Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kXVp6iR3xUE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think it was almost immediately, because I had some friends who brought me to the Bohemian Hall and [Beer] Garden in Astoria, and I went to the celebration of Czech and Slovak Day which was usually during Memorial Day weekend. At first it was Sunday and Monday and now we are celebrating it every Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. I met a lot more friends there. I started to get involved in Czech theatre in Queens, which was led by Mrs. Božena Snížková. The theatre’s name was the Theatre of Jan Snížek who was her husband who died just before I met her. She was continuing his work and brought to the Czech and Slovak community a lot of beautiful performances, and I even acted in some of those performances. She talked me into it and it was a great time. My kids were little at the time and they started attending Czech school in Winfield, which is also in Queens, and their teacher was Mrs. Marie Miladova who was a wonderful lady. She always put on a show of the Winfield school at Czech and Slovak Day, so my children were reciting Czech poetry at that time, they were singing Czech songs and they were dancing Beseda, and I even danced Beseda with them once when one of the girls was missing. So it was really a happy time. And that’s how I developed my relationship to BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria) and, this past March, I even became a president of that society.”</p>
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Title
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Milada Kubikova-Stastny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Milada Kubikova-Stastny was born in Plzeň in 1943. Her father, Jaroslav, was a doctor and her mother, also named Milada, was a lawyer. When Plzeň was liberated by American troops at the end of WWII, Milada (then two years old) and her brother were dressed in Czech folk costumes to welcome the soldiers. Milada began ice skating at the age of seven and for several years skated pairs with her older brother Jaroslav. Along with her later pairs partner, Jaroslav Votruba, Milada became a national champion, competed in the European and World Championships, and placed tenth at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck.</p><p> </p><p>Milada moved to Prague to study physical education and Russian at Charles University. One year before graduating, however, she joined the Vienna Ice Revue and toured for two years throughout Western Europe. She was in West Germany at the time of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and although she considered not returning to Czechoslovakia, Milada did return and finished her degree. Upon graduating, Milada again joined the Vienna Ice Revue which was undertaking a tour of North America. In the fall of 1969, as the ice show was ending in New York City, Milada decided to stay in the United States and claimed asylum. She settled in the borough of Queens where she had two children with her first husband and worked as a skating instructor. Milada says that she became involved in the Czech community ‘almost immediately,’ where she became a member of the BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria), participated in Czech theatre and enrolled her children in Czech school. Milada married her second husband, Bretislav Stastny, who was a jeweler in Manhattan, and moved to Long Island. The pair had a son in 1976. Milada continued to teach skating and became the director of a large skate school in Great Neck, New York.</p><p> </p><p>In 2001, Milada, along with her pairs partner Votruba, was honored as one of ten ‘Sports Stars of the Twentieth Century’ in Plzeň for her international success. She travels to the Czech Republic yearly, in part to visit her brother Jaroslav who also left the country as part of a touring ice show. He returned to Plzeň in 1991 and now runs three skating rinks in the city. Today, Milada is active in the Czech community in the United States. She is a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, and in March 2012 she was named president of the BCBSA. Milada lives in Roslyn, New York.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Education
Plzen
Snizek
Sports
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GRseQV9xF08?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were living in our house in the cellar, or basement, which had metal plates on the windows, and because there was a sign of ‘Doctor’ in front of the house, soldiers would be bringing their wounded colleagues to the house, and as a little boy I would be mingling around and I would see the blood dripping from the stretchers and stuff like that. My father had to attend to them, even though it might have been dangerous. It might have been German soldiers; it might have been Russians and Bulgarians later toward the end of the War. I vividly remember when, before the end of the War, Germans put gas on the Kroměříž castle – it was a big tower – and they set it on fire, and my parents woke me up around 3:00 in the morning and they said ‘This is the end of the War, but look what they did to us.’”</p><h4>Bike Trip</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fyV1O2bxk7c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our school had a friendly relationship with one high school in Slovakia and people who were interested in bicycles and tourism, they would ride on bicycles every summer to this university and stay with Slovak students for three weeks in the summer, and then the Slovak students would come back to Moravia. So I was part of that activity; I was actually carrying the first-aid box and if somebody had a scratch on their knee I would attend to them. And my brother, the second one, was the official reporter. He was making a movie about the trip. It was really enjoyable and we learned to speak Slovak, and that was the highlight of the year, always.”</p><p><em>Whereabouts was the school in Slovakia?</em></p><p>“The school was in Liptovský Mikuláš, which I think is Fatra, Malá Fatra. It would take two or three days to get there, so you would have to sleep overnight in some kind of barn on the hay or on the straw, among cows sometime, and we would have to look for some food. It was very exciting. If the weather was nice, it was great. If it was raining it wasn’t so fine, because we had to dry off somewhere, but I have good memories of those trips.”</p><h4>Medical School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H2VZm5Xj7Xo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was top of the class and basically, I passed the admitting exam, but I was hanging in the air. Somehow, luckily, that was the only way you could do certain things at the time, my father had a patient who had some connection to the Secretariat of the Communist Party, and I’m sure there was some money involved, that the guy actually issued that I was accepted on a special permit. It was only four days before the university started, so it was quite a nervous summer. But by the same token, because there was already a way established how to get to university, my brother, who was two years younger, by this way also got to technical school in Brno.”</p><h4>Politics in School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LIiRuo24KP4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Interestingly enough, some of the teachers – especially in Olomouc because they didn’t have enough teachers educated in Marxism ideology and who would be good – there were some teachers who were not members of the Party and who were actually on the blacklist, and they were very good. It was the brother of Jan Zrzavý, the painter; there was a professor in anatomy, and we as students, we knew that, so their lectures were really attended 100%.</p><p>“The first two years we had Russian, even at the university level and then of course, first year, we had political economy I believe, and then second year we had Marxism-Leninism. You basically had this nonsense and you had to sort of say ‘Yes, yes’ and you had to study something for exams. I just barely passed this Marxism-Leninism because the teachers knew your background and they really wanted to let you fail, so that was very unpleasant. But Czechs are <em>Švejks</em> and we made fun from it too, even if it was almost impossible. But you had to do it. But we were not forced to join the Party or anything like that. We were students; we still had fun.”</p><h4>Profession</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WDMj5HsCY7s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think in Czechoslovakia – like in all Europe – that the thing was prestige and, because doctors had such low salaries, they would be getting some presents from the patients; it was a normal thing. Because actually, the workers and miners had a salary three or four times higher, and I think the doctors were even below teachers’ salaries. But then three years after I graduated, they started suddenly paying you for night calls which were free before. So with the night calls, if you would do two, three a week, you could make some extra money, so there had been some improvement, and every year you would get two percent more or something.</p><p>“Medicine in Czechoslovakia was actually on a very high level. Maybe technologically not so much – that was before the time of computers – so certain technical things were not there, but Czechs were very good diagnosticians just with simple things and techniques, and I read some foreign literature so I could compare; I know we had very good medicine.”</p><h4>Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BMIBn6QBLWc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents were told, when they wanted to visit, they were told they would never be allowed to visit. And then after Helsinki [Accords] was signed, my father completely refused to go back for permission, but my mother asked the city hall and they told her that one of the conditions would be that she would talk us into returning. She said ‘Well, you know, I can tell them, I can try.’ So they allowed my mother for the first time in 1979. Quite late. She came for a few weeks and when she was going back, my brother in Germany had a son born about six months before, and I said ‘Why don’t you stop in Germany?’ She didn’t have a visa, so I asked for a visa for her at the German Consulate and they wanted to put it in her passport and I argued. I said ‘You can’t put it in her passport because when the poor woman goes back to Czechoslovakia she will be punished!’ So after long interviews, they gave her special papers, and she stopped at my brother’s place for about four days, saw her grandson, and came home. And only after 1989, when we looked at our dossiers, we figured out that she was followed. They knew everything about her.”</p><h4>Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nzbsz7nBM_s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started to visit the Czech theatre and, of course, concerts. If there were some Czech musicians, we would be involved. Then later on I joined a chamber music organization and was on the board of directors for many years downtown, and always tried to bring Czech musicians.”</p><p><em>Did you do this even before 1989 and was that a fairly straightforward process? How did that work?</em></p><p>“Well, before 1989 there were still some Czech groups that were allowed abroad because they were bringing money back. So if you knew who was coming, you could get them to Toronto. Because we were in contact with agents in New York, and I had my brother involved with music back in Prague, we could bring people here. Of course, it was in limited numbers; it wasn’t so free like now. But it was a little different. Everything was cheaper, so that was one way, but then, it wasn’t so free.”</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
Milos Krajny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Milos Krajny was born in Kroměříž, eastern Moravia in 1941. His father, a doctor who practiced internal medicine, changed the family name from the German-sounding Kreuziger to Krajny following WWII. His mother, who had studied philosophy and spent one year at the Sorbonne, stayed home to raise him and his two younger brothers, and later taught music lessons. Milos has early memories of WWII, including the burning of the town’s castle at the close of the War. In 1953, Milos’s father’s practice was nationalized, and he was placed in a factory as the company doctor, caring for thousands of employees. Milos enjoyed school and extracurricular activities; he especially looked forward to a cycling trip that he made each summer to a school in Slovakia. Although he was an excellent student, Milos says that his ‘bourgeois upbringing’ hindered his acceptance to medical school. He was accepted to Palacký University in Olomouc four days before the start of the term after a patient of his father’s intervened on his behalf. After graduating in 1964, Milos practiced internal medicine in Přerov, and then, the next year, he returned to Olomouc where he began training as an allergist.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos was urged by a former professor to apply for a fellowship in Montreal. He was awarded the position in 1968 and says that he almost did not accept it because the stipend was so low; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year changed his mind. He left for Montreal in September 1968. Two months later, his wife and young daughter joined him. After completing the two-year fellowship, Milos started his internship at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. He was also in constant correspondence with his parents back in Czechoslovakia, and they often sent him LPs of classical Czech music. He says that although music was always an integral part of his life, these records inspired his love for classical music. Milos began attending Czech concerts and theatre in Toronto which brought him contact with the Czech community there. As a member of the board of directors of a chamber music group, he was instrumental in bringing Czech groups to the city. Recently, Milos has started a series of classical music concerts called ‘Nocturnes in the City,’ which aim to bring Czech music and musicians to a Toronto audience.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos currently holds dual citizenship and travels to the Czech Republic twice a year. He has made a habit of reading Czech-language newspapers and stays on top of Czech current events. His son and daughter are both fluent in Czech and he says that his son is especially enamored with his Czech heritage. Today, in addition to his work as an allergist, Milos is the president of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Education
German language
Healthcare professionals
Kromeriz
Liptovsky Mikulas
Palacky
Prerov
Sports
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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
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Transcription
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<h4>Multilingual Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bYX-lIkfFkI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were speaking Slovak and Hungarian equally. My mum spoke Hungarian to us and my father spoke Slovak to us, and my grandmother spoke German to us, so it seemed like chaos for outsiders, because not everybody had that, but a lot of families in Košice spoke Hungarian and Slovak because that was… So when I was asked ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ I would say ‘Oh, my mother tongue is Hungarian and my father tongue is Slovak and my grandmother tongue is German. It was actually Schwaebisch, so she taught us how to write in that. I forgot all my German as I learned English though.”</p><h4>Gulag</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NP6ogMP5cnc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“See, my uncle was in Siberia, my mother’s youngest brother was in Siberia for eight years, and I remember when he came home in 1954. And that was, I mean, that was horrendous and I listened to him for hours and hours on end of how they were treated in Siberia. He left as a 17 year old, they took him from the street as a 17 year old, and he came back in 1954, I remember him, I’ll never forget, and he looked like an old man. He had grey hair as a twenty-some year old. So, it was a very painful thing in the family to discuss because you couldn’t discuss it, you couldn’t discuss it, because he was so scared, having lived through it. Not until we were older, when I went back [in 1978] did I talk to him and he was telling us stories that were… just pretty awful.</p><p>“He was a 17 year old what was called Levente. They were training with – this is the story I was told – they were training with wooden guns, and the Russians took them, took these, it was an organization of young boys that were not army trained yet, because they were too young. And he was in the archipelago, in Siberia for eight years in captivity. And they let a few of them go and said ‘Here, go,’ and just his trip from Siberia with no means, with one long coat and a bag, you know, getting on trains illegally, and being thrown out of trains… because they were free to go, but they had no means of getting there.”</p><h4>Secret Photos</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/16R98y_F9KE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It had to have been like ’58 or… ’58-ish. And my father and my mother went for a walk to the park and didn’t come back, like, for hours. And because our aunt lived with us, we weren’t left alone, but we were waiting and waiting and saying ‘Where are they?’ And then my aunt came in and my grandfather came in and you know, they were kind of calming us down and said ‘Well mummy and dad are not coming home’. Well, they were arrested in the park in Košice, my father was taking pictures of my mother. It was a nice spring day – spring or fall day – I know it was. And he had a camera from Germany, a little, tiny, 36mm, you which… we had the big Flexaret 6 x 9. And this was this little new camera which his friend Laco, who was then the head architect, brought from Germany, from East Germany, I’m pretty sure. And it had the kinofilm, the 35mm.</p><p>“So he obviously used it, tried to take pictures of my mother whom he obviously loved and thought she was hot. So they arrested them for taking pictures, and later on we found out what happened, but they were not home for like three days. And I mean, within this time, there were these police officers, they were in civil clothing, and raided our apartment. And they took every camera we had, which was this big Flexaret and another 8mm movie camera, because my father loved doing that. They took all of that, all the film, all the negatives, everything that was in the cabinet, they took everything. Because they were spying? I don’t know…</p><p>“Well it turned out that they arrested them until they cleared all the films and all the, you know, camera equipment that they weren’t spies and all the pictures on it obviously got destroyed, because they didn’t get them back. So the film from that little camera, however, they pulled that out, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Oh, it was color film too, imagine that, in the ’50s. And they brought out to my dad a 6 x 9 film and said ‘What are these –xs here?’ And he said ‘That is not from my camera! What are you, crazy? This is from a big one, right, it won’t even fit in that!’ Boom! So they got beaten. And my father had bruises and my mother had, you know… they were not allowed to talk. They were sitting together and they were not allowed to talk. And they were jailed for three days, to find out that they were spies, they had nothing on them, obviously. But here was the thing; he was taking pictures in an area that was secret. He said ‘What is secret about this?’ Because there were no signs saying ‘you may not’, you know how you have signs saying ‘No photography’ or something. Nothing was marked. It was unmarked but he should have known that down that park, at the end of the park, in the middle of the park, was the police station. And that was the secret. I don’t think they ever found out what was secret.”</p><h4>Russian</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mtOosxOjciw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was graduating gymnázium, that was 1968 – June 4, 1968 – the day that Bobby Kennedy got shot, I remember hearing that on the news when I was walking in for my exam. And what had happened in 1968, In January of ’68, you know, The Prague Spring, Russian became non-mandatory to take as an exam in maturita [the school leaver’s certificate].</p><p>“So we had Slovak, Russian, history… oh, and Latin, and then a selective, so I took German as a selective. Well, then Russian became non-mandatory and I said ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to graduate? That’s all I know!’ So, I took it as a selective. And I thought, well, there’ll be a bunch of us. No one. No one in the whole gymnázium graduated in Russian as an elective. I was so embarrassed, because there was so much animosity towards Russian. But I did not carry the animosity to the language, because I loved the language, you know, Pushkin and Dostoevsky and all that, I used to read it in Russian. So I loved it, I loved the language. And I loved Hungarian, so the animosities that were, such as they were – I was not affected by them, if you will. A lot of people tried to forget the language, intentionally, they worked on it. And it worked – after a few years, they did forget.”</p><h4>Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_QJpKBjWBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She also told me not to tell anyone, just one close friend, and so all my closest 30 friends came to say goodbye to the train station. But, what I may add, everybody was so loose about this, everybody was so bitter about what had happened, everybody was just so upset that even on the borders people knew we were not coming back but they were like ‘Good luck, have a good life.’ That was what they said. But my worst memories were prior to leaving when I knew we were leaving. You know, we were in towns and there were all these tanks and shootings, because we had a curfew, like at 6:00 or 7:00, I’m not sure what it was. But there were all these tanks, and in Kosice with all these tanks the cobblestones, I mean they were all ripped up from the tanks, horrible, horrible, horrible. Rude, the soldiers were pretty rude to us, because we were talking, saying ‘What are you doing here?’ Some of them didn’t even know they were not in their own country, some had children in the tanks. Yeah – because the Russians were taken from wherever they were, they were called in to ‘save Slovakia, or Czechoslovakia, from capitalism’. So they came to save us. It was horrible, it was horrible.”</p><h4>Sokol Washington</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Iv75nXESRuY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was the women’s, I was the náčelníčka [leader] of the women’s group. We created a Czechoslovak school with a couple of friends and we were teaching, a couple of women were teaching Slovak and Czech to our American children, and I was teaching gymnastics. And I think it was once a week, we dragged our kids there to learn Slovak. But I mean all my kids speak Slovak, but it’s spoken, so they learned to write and read and they hated going there because who wants to go to school after school? But they learned some, and we had these events where they were dancing. There was a very active lady by the name of Lucia Maruska Levandis, very talented, she was making kroje, so we made those for the kids. I mean I helped her, she made most of it. The events that were organized for children, they were like Mikulášska and they were Sokol and SVU and all the organizations so… We were pretty active in all of those.”</p>
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Title
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Monica Rokus
Description
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<p>Monica Rokus was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in January 1950. Her father, Jan, worked as an architect for the firm Stavoprojekt and then for the city of Košice, as the assistant to the municipal architect. Monica’s mother, Eudoxia, meanwhile stayed at home raising her and her older brother, Paul. At home the family spoke Hungarian and Slovak. Monica attended the Slovak-language Kováčska Street <em>gymnázium</em> and, as a keen gymnast, competed with the club Lokomotiva Košice in her spare time. Upon graduation in 1968, she had plans to study in Bratislava at Comenius University’s Sports Faculty.</p><p> </p><p>In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.</p><p> </p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Gabrinyova
gymnazium
Hungarian language
Kosice
Kovacska Street
Mikulasska
Political prisoner
Russian studies/speaker
Slovak Language
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion