Vojtech Mastny
<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Vlastimil John Surak
<p> </p><p>Vlastimil Surak was born in 1927 in Brezová pod Bradlom in western Slovakia. His father, Matej, had moved to the United States when he was 15, but returned to Slovakia in 1920 and married his mother, Alžbeta. In 1922, the pair went to the United States, but again returned to Slovakia in 1926. Vlastimil’s father owned two tanneries in Brezová pod Bradlom while his mother stayed home raising Vlastimil and his two brothers. During WWII, Vlastimil recalls hiding in forests and small villages whenever Nazis came through his town to avoid being conscripted or sent to work in Germany.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil attended business school in Bratislava and, upon graduating in 1947, returned to Brezová pod Bradlom to work in his father’s tannery. He says that after the Communist coup in 1948 ‘things started going so bad, there was no other thing on my mind, just to leave.’ Vlastimil and his younger brother Slavomil did not have trouble obtaining passports, as their parents were American citizens. They left Czechoslovakia in November 1948 and sailed to the United States three weeks later on the <em>Queen Elizabeth</em>. Vlastimil recalls this trip as a great experience. They took the train to Chicago where they were met by their older brother, Miloslav, who had come to the United States two years earlier. Vlastimil found lodging with a Slovak family, and eventually found a job with an electric company. He says that it was always his plan to have his own business, and in February 1954, following in the footsteps of his father, Vlastimil started the National Rawhide Manufacturing Company (later Surak Leather Company). Initially, his business was making drum covers, but when rawhide was replaced by plastic, he turned to making leather for jackets and gloves; he owned this business until 1995. Vlastimil’s parents arrived in Chicago in 1964, following what he says was years of persecution under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Following the communists’ rise to power, his father lost his business and properties and was sentenced to prison for a number of years. Because of his American citizenship, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey intervened and was able to secure his release.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil has been married to his wife Elizabeth for over 50 years and they have three children. His two daughters were debutantes with the Czechoslovak National Council of America. In 1989, he was shown on television in Daley Plaza, celebrating the Velvet Revolution; however, Vlastimil has not been back to Slovakia because he says he “doesn’t want to change the picture in his mind” of his home. Today, he lives in Lake Forest, Illinois.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Vladimir Mlynek
<p>Vladimir Mlynek was born in the small village of Hamry, in northwestern Slovakia, in 1926. His parents, although both Slovak, had met in Cleveland, where they were married and had already raised two children, Vladimir’s brother and sister, Steve and Irene. Just before the Great Depression, the whole family returned to Slovakia. They bought a mill, from which Vladimir’s father, Štefan, operated a cabinet-making business. When they were old enough, just before WWII began, Vladimir’s brother and sister returned to the United States. When the family cabinet business failed towards the end of WWII, Vladimir moved with his parents to the more industrial town of Považská Bystrica. There he trained to become an electrician and started working for the local arms factory, later known as Československá zbrojovka.</p><p> </p><p>After the War, Vladimir’s parents returned to the United States and, in 1947, Vladimir himself followed. He settled in Cleveland, working first as an assistant to his father, who was making cabinets for televisions at the city’s DuMont plant. In 1952, after a number of deferments, Vladimir was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was supposed to be sent to Korea, but in fact spent most of the Korean War stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In 1955, Vladimir married his wife, Clara, an American of Polish extraction. The couple have two children, Gerald and Jeanette. A life-long radio enthusiast, Vladimir has been involved in Slovak-language broadcasting in Cleveland for over half a century. He has hosted the Slovak Radio Hour on Cleveland’s WCPN with his son Gerald every Sunday since 1985.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808010411/http://www.wcpn.org/WCPN/about/personality_bios" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A biography of Vladimir on WCPN’s website</a></p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Vera Roknic
<p>Vera Roknic was born and raised in the Nový Žižkov district of Prague. Her father, Jan, was a manager at the city’s main post office, where he met Vera’s mother, Marie, who worked as a long-distance telephone operator in the building. Vera studied at the capital’s Vyšší Dívčí School on Vodičkova Street and then at the Akademie obchodní Dr. Edvarda Beneše [Benes Business School]. Her studies were interrupted by WWII and she was sent to Lyšov, in southern Bohemia, to work on her relatives’ farm. During the War, Vera lost her younger sister, who fell ill with meningitis and was unable to see a doctor, as the hospitals were so full of soldiers, says Vera. After the War, Vera graduated and began working as a multilingual secretary for an import/export company in Prague.</p><p> </p><p>In January 1947, Vera went to Sweden on what was supposed to be a one-year work exchange. She successfully prolonged her stay once, but when she visited the Czech Consulate to extend her stay a second time in the summer of 1948, she was told it was time she returned home. Vera wrote to her parents who told her to come back only when Czechoslovakia was again ‘free’. On the basis of this letter, Vera applied for asylum in Sweden. Later that year, she started meeting other Czechs and Slovaks who had been taken in by Sweden, having fled Czechoslovakia. One of these immigrants was Vaclav Pavel, who became her first husband. The couple were married in 1950, and, on the insistence of Vaclav – who feared the spread of communism in Europe – the pair left Sweden for America in 1952. They moved to Chicago, where Vera quickly found a job at International Harvester. In 1954, Vera gave birth to a daughter, Jana. It was at this time that Vaclav fell ill with Hodgkin’s disease, for which a cure had still not been found. Vera and Vaclav ran into financial hardship and were helped by the Czechoslovak National Council of Women in Exile, among other organizations. Two years later, Vaclav died.</p><p> </p><p>In 1960, Vera married Sava Roknic, another Czech émigré who had settled in Chicago. He adopted Jana, and in 1962, Vera and Sava had a son, David. Vera took a job in the banking sector, which she still works in to this day. Vera, now widowed, is active in many Czech and Slovak organizations, such as the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and Sokol. She works closely with the Czech Mission in Brookfield, Illinois.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Vera Plesek
<p> </p><p>Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper <em>Hlasatel</em> for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Vaclav Slovak
<p>Vaclav Slovak was born in Šumperk in northern Moravia in 1956. He grew up in Hanušovice where his parents worked in the restaurant at the local train station; his father, Emil, managed the establishment while his mother, Libuše, was the chef. Vaclav remembers attending summer camp organized by the Pioneer youth group and participating in activities such as swimming and soccer. He also enjoyed traveling and joined his father on trips throughout the country. In the late 1960s, Vaclav says his family’s restaurant became subject to intensive searches and inventories, which led his father to decide that the family should emigrate. It was after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 that Vaclav says his father began making plans to leave Czechoslovakia. The Slovaks originally planned to take a vacation to Yugoslavia and ‘see what happened.’ However, the plan changed when Vaclav’s father obtained visas to Austria fairly easily and so, in late summer 1969, Vaclav and his parents traveled to Vienna.</p><p> </p><p>In Vienna, the Slovaks registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. They subsequently went on vacation to Yugoslavia for a couple of weeks before returning to Vienna and living in a tent on the outskirts of the city for a short time. They were then moved to a guest house with other Czechoslovak refugees. On December 10, 1969, the Slovaks arrived in New York City and, after a few days, settled in Atlanta, Georgia. Vaclav’s parents both found employment in local restaurants and Vaclav started eighth grade. He says that his school had an English program for immigrants and that he felt comfortable with the language after six months. He attended Georgia Tech and earned a degree in electrical engineering. Shortly after graduating, in the late 1970s, Vaclav returned to Czechoslovakia for a visit. He says there were only a few people in his hometown who were not scared to talk to him. Vaclav moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983 and joined Sokol Washington almost immediately. He has held several leadership positions in this organization, including the posts of president and vice-president. Today, Vaclav lives in McLean, Virginia, with his Slovak wife, Lucia.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Tony Jandacek
<p>Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.</p><p> </p><p>Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Thomas Gral
<p>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical <em>gymnázium</em> in Nitra.</p><p> </p><p>Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a <em>previerka</em>, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3399" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609054041im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_(WinCE)" width="500" height="488" />In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Roman Scholtz
<p><img class="alignright wp-image-4055" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808051245im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-180.jpg" alt="Handler-1" width="300" height="418" />Roman Scholtz was born in Kežmarok in northern Slovakia in 1934. His father, Ludwig, studied the craft of cabinet-making and was a manager of a cabinet shop. His mother, Adele, worked as a weaver in a factory, and the family lived in factory housing. Roman had one older brother, Ewald. When Roman was eight years old, his family moved to Poprad where Roman’s father opened an auto repair shop with relatives. Roman says that the first years of WWII passed fairly peacefully for his family, until the Slovak Uprising began in August 1944. The partisans quietly took over Poprad and were fought back in Kežmarok, and Roman has memories of seeing the effects of the fighting. His brother, a member of the Slovak Army, was conscripted into the German Army, and it would be several years before Roman saw his brother again. Roman himself spent a few months with relatives near the Moravian border. In January 1945, his family’s equipment and machinery was appropriated for the German war effort. Told they could stay with their possessions, Roman and his family traveled to Jablonec nad Nisou and Jičín in Bohemia before returning home to Poprad at the end of the War. Immediately after returning, Roman’s father was sent to a detention camp for ethnic Germans while Roman and his mother secretly traveled to Kežmarok and stayed with his grandparents. Roman returned to school for one year and then, in July 1946, he and his mother were arrested and sent to a detention center. They reunited with his father and were deported to Germany in September 1946.</p><p> </p><p>For a short time, Roman and his family lived in a refugee camp. They were then sent to live with a German family. Roman attended school and worked at a golf course where he caddied for American soldiers. His father worked in construction. In 1950, they sailed to New York and took a train to Cleveland where several of Roman’s family members had settled decades earlier. Roman’s father worked as a carpenter and his mother found a job as a cleaning lady. They bought a house in Cleveland six months after arriving. Roman graduated from high school in 1952 and attended Ohio University where he studied engineering. He also received a degree in architecture from Case Western Reserve University. In 1971, Roman opened his own architecture firm. Although he visits Slovakia often and raised his children to be aware of their heritage, he says that he and his family ‘took roots’ in the United States and were very proud to become American citizens. Today he lives in Davenport, Iowa, with his wife Mary.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive
Robert Budway
<p>Robert Budway was born to a Czech mother and Canadian father in Oak Park, Illinois in 1928. He became estranged from his father when the latter traveled West to find work during the Great Depression. In 1931, Robert moved to Czechoslovakia with his mother, Marie, who had decided to return to the family farm in Těchonice, western Bohemia. He says that the following year was ‘when his life really began.’ Robert attended school in the village of Plánice. He says his education was intensely patriotic, and that he has been a ‘Czechoslovakist’ ever since, but that at school his accent and American-sounding name marked him out as foreign. Robert refers to his childhood as ‘happier’ than he believes it would have been in Chicago during that era.</p><p> </p><p>Robert remembers the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia during WWII as a traumatic time, and says that his life was greatly complicated following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, as it was then that local authorities realized that he was an American citizen. He was unable to continue with school and was sent to work at the Hotel Centrál in Klatovy. Towards the end of the War, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia, where he worked digging ditches.</p><p> </p><p>Robert returned to the Hotel Centrál after the War, but says that the atmosphere there grew hostile on account of his American citizenship. He says he was warned by local policemen that he was in Czechoslovakia ‘illegally’ and turned to the American Embassy in Prague for advice. In 1947, he was issued an American passport and told to report to Marburg an der Lahn in Germany where he could join the U.S. Army. Robert failed the entrance test and spent a number of months wandering around West Germany destitute. He was picked up by military police in Frankfurt and sent to basic training – this time, his written test was postponed until he had learned more English. Robert subsequently spent four years in the US Army in Germany. He came to the United States in 1951 and settled in Washington, D.C. He worked for the American Red Cross and then George Washington University and the YMCA.</p><p> </p><p>In 1957, Robert visited Czechoslovakia for the first time since leaving. He returned to the country in 1959. On his third visit in 1962, he was arrested on charges of espionage and subversion (three years previously, he had been handed a stone which he was told was uranium, and which he took to the United States for further examination). He was sentenced to four years and nine months imprisonment, though he only spent six months in jail. Robert was released from Pankrác prison in Prague in February 1963.</p><p> </p><p>He returned to Washington, D.C. and there met his Moravian-born wife Maria. The couple had two children, one of whom now lives in Prague. Robert says his experience inside Czechoslovak jail ‘made him more American,’ but that he continues to feel a strong sense of Czechoslovak patriotism.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
NCSML Archive