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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/rYJIiThjVh8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was nine at that time when the War ended and of course the Russian Army came to the great enthusiasm of the population. And well, the country was believed to be liberated. There was one little incident that I recall and that some people probably wouldn’t like to hear even today in the country: that was still in May ’45 and in the streets we saw a line of people being taken away by the so-called Revolutionary Guards. They were Germans who had been collected before being shipped away. Now, there was a long line of people, and there was an old lady there, who was carrying a little suitcase with all her belongings there. And one of our neighbors in the same building where we lived, a big guy, he ran to this lady and grabbed her suitcase. He took it away and said ‘You are not going to need that.’ So this patriot later became a leading figure in the Communist Party in the neighborhood.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Yd72RVGTMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most people were enthusiastic about them, and so was I. Even my mother who was inherently a skeptic, much more so even than my father, as well as very well educated (including in history), she was enthusiastic as well and said ‘Well, now we’ll all have to start learning Russian.’ And indeed some timid attempts at that were made in the family. Well, the Soviet Union was seen widely as President Beneš at that time saw it – as a great friend – and Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, a bridge slanted slightly to the East.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i8ObziKdjcU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was ugly, because it was a game – a ruthless game – played by the parents, by the teachers, by the students themselves trying to get to this selective school, but moreover to avoid something much worse. Now, some of them played the game in a very imaginative way. I recall one of my classmates who was seriously ill, I think he had leukemia, and his mother who was an ardent Communist, or at least pretended to be, she registered him, or he volunteered actually, to become a miner – a coalminer, whom of course was considered at the time to be a hero, the socialist hero. So this classmate of mine who had leukemia volunteered to be a miner, or rather was volunteered by his scheming mother, knowing full well of course that he would not be accepted, but that he would be rewarded for his readiness to be a miner by being allowed to study, which is exactly what happened.</p><p>“Well my parents, fortunately, were not quite such accomplished intriguers; they argued that since my record was very good in the school, maybe I deserved to continue to study. Well, the record was fully acknowledged and after endless interviews and whatnot, I was indeed accepted to the entering grade of that three-year program at the school at Malá Strana, and was delighted, was elated, so were my parents who said ‘Well, there is still justice, despite all that has been happening in this communist country.’ Well, their joy was premature. When I first turned up at the beginning of the school year, I was called to the director of the school and he said ‘Well, the National Committee made a decision, and as a result of the decision, you are really not starting here at the <em>gymnázium</em>, but you’ll be starting next week as a mechanic in a factory near where you live.”</p><h4>News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i7w33BgbEzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I lived in Prague, I didn’t listen to Radio Free Europe at all, not only because it was jammed, but because it had a very bad reputation, not only among the communists, needless to say, but also among their enemies, which was the majority of the population. The general attitude was ‘Well, what do these people, who were lucky enough to get out of the country… What are they going to tell us about what we should do?’ So once I learned English – and I was working really very hard with Aunt Paula, she was a very good teacher – I was able to listen to the Voice of America in English, rather than in Czech, and to the BBC also in English. Because I wanted to know what they were telling to people in general around the world, rather than what was tailored to the conditions in Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nLQgaFqJ7hQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My interest was always in modern history and increasingly in contemporary affairs, in what we would call today contemporary history, because by that time I was following avidly what was happening in the world, and trying to look at it as a historian. So history was the field, but of course, at Charles University at that time, which prided itself on being the oldest university in Central Europe but was in fact an outfit run by current or former members of the secret services and similar institutions, history was not a field that anybody in his right mind would want to study – that is to say modern or contemporary history. That was politics; that was not any scholarship.</p><p>“The only part of history that could be studied seriously, although in a rather old-fashioned way, was medieval history. So that’s what I studied; I specialized in archival studies. It gave me what one would call a solid background, but it was a very old-fashioned background. It was the way history was studied back in the 19th century when what mattered was, well, as Ranke, the famous German historian said – <em>wie es eigentlich gewesen</em> – how really it was. But not what it meant, not why things happened the way they did, the emphasis was on the facts.</p><p>“So that was the kind of medieval history that I studied, and I think that it prepared me in some way for what I was to do later. Of course, in the Middle Ages, there was a very limited amount of written history, one had to do with fragments, and even what was produced at that time, very little of it has survived. And so I had to deal with fragmentary evidence. And later on when I tried to study contemporary history at the time when the archives were still closed, or most of them, and one had to do with the fragments, the methodology, I realized, was not all that different.”</p><h4>US Visa</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pltqGeRqZ9M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At Christmas time – or after Christmas actually – I decided while waiting for the visa to take another hitch-hiking trip and go down to the desert, all the way to the Sahara as far as I could get, together with the Slovak guy. So the two of us hitch-hiked, and he had the address of some priest at an oasis down in southern Tunisia. So it was quite an adventure and we both loved it, and got quite far south, as south as we could, when the message came faintly on the telephone in the priest’s house that the visa is here and that it really has to be picked up by the end of January if it is to be used this year – otherwise I would have to wait for another year. So I got a taste a little bit for the bureaucracy also, but I wanted to make sure that I would get back quickly.</p><p>“There was no way of flying, but there was one train on the one railroad line that cuts across the country. So I got on the train, not on the first class, not on the second class, not in the third class but in the fourth class on the train, which was sort of a cattle car where the locals were traveling with their chickens and other animals. So, it was another adventurous ride, 24 hours or so, to get to Tunis and pick up the visa.”</p><h4>Re-Entry Permit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pAjrALXd6OA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The only problem, but it really wasn’t a big one – it was more a nuisance than a problem – was that I was stateless, I didn’t have a passport. So when eventually I got fellowships for research abroad, and I was able to travel to Europe, I needed a document, and so what I was traveling on was a so-called re-entry permit, which looks like a passport, but all it says is that the United States allows me to return. Otherwise I had to have a visa for every single country I traveled to, and I also couldn’t afford to be away for too long, because as everybody knows, one had to have certain uninterrupted residence physically in the country before becoming a citizen. So all this had to be taken into account, but I was on course and that was the least thing that bothered me.”</p>
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Title
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Vojtech Mastny
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Education
English language
German language
Letna
Mala Strana
national
Politics
Russians
school
Stredni skola pro pacujici
Teachers
World War II
Zizkov
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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>Jewish Fate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZM3FiOxM8ms?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Most of them ended up in the concentration camps. My best friend and schoolmate and his younger brother and older sister, father and mother perished in the concentration camp. I was about 12 or 13 years old. I came to school one morning and he didn’t come. They day before was the last time I saw him, and they never returned back. Most of them did not return back to my hometown. They perished in the concentration camps, which was a very heartbreaking situation.”</p><h4>Limited News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SgQh2o6s2wo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Listened to BBC London. That was the information during the War for people under the Nazi’s control. They used to come listen at the windows – the Gestapo – [to see] if people are listening to the foreign broadcasting. But that was the only information you could get. Nobody could write to you; they opened the letters. They were interfering with broadcasting. But still, there was a possibility to get some news.”</p><h4>Journey to U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WiCYczcS37c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So I didn’t have some problems getting here. Why? I got an American passport because my parents were American citizens, and I got an American passport in the American embassy in Prague. There were some restrictions and we were worried they won’t let us go out, me and my brother – younger brother – because we were born there [in Czechoslovakia]. And if you were born in that country, you were considered to belong there by them. Luckily we made it through the borders by the train all the way to Paris. We were in Paris for two weeks and Cherbourg one week. Why? There was a strike on the boats, and a couple times they sent us to Cherbourg by the trains and they brought us back to Paris, because they said the strike was over but it wasn’t over. So it took me three weeks in France to wait for the trip.”</p><p>“I came to this country December 5 by boat, which was the nicest trip I ever had in my life. Five and a half days being on the boat, the Queen Elizabeth. As a young man, I met other young people there. We had a good time, excellent food, and the trip in my case was too short. I didn’t want to leave – it was so good.”</p><h4>$0.75/hr.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LgMVnLQfDUY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The people at Garden promised me that after one month I will get $0.80 an hour. I stayed there – a month came, two months came – the raise wasn’t coming. Three months came. Finally I was brave enough to ask what happened to my raise, five cents. I went, on the way home, I didn’t find my punch card at the clock, and I went back to the supervisor. I said ‘Where is my punch card?’ He said ‘You are fired.’ I said ‘Why?’ ‘We can get so many people for $0.75 an hour, why would we pay you $0.80?’ I said ‘I didn’t want to quit, but you promised a five cent increase and that’s all I was asking.’ Nope, I was fired. Despite that I had my cousin in the high position in Garden Electric. But the money was very important to this system.”</p><h4>Major Events</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1PyLxAQKT54?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I met my wife Sunday evening, the day before. I started my business the next day, and I met my wife at the Sunday evening dances in the Sheraton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. So I did two things in my life – met my future wife and start my business. I rented space and I started a very small tannery, and I was making drumheads for musical drums. First batch I made, I went with the samples to the company who were making drums, Ludwig Drum Company. The owner was a gentleman from Germany. He was very nice and knowledgeable, and he liked my product so much he said ‘I will take everything that you make in your place for my drums.’ So I started to produce more and more until I came to the point that he said ‘You are making too many, I can’t use them all.’ So I had to look for new customers for the existing amount of product.”</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
Vlastimil John Surak
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Brezova pod Bradlom
Concentration camp
Family business
marriage
Nazis
Political prisoner
World War II
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ec9afa0b966c5898c3be7941bb44a7d2
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>Munitions Factory</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MJHDcoQSCKU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“After the War, you know, the Germans left, there was no more need for ammunition so the plant was kind of idled. But the electrification was very damaged, we had a lot of work to get this thing under control – to get this thing back into operation. Although we had our own generating plant, but the Germans were smart, they took the exciters. So we could not use the generators. But we had extra exciters buried in the ground. So we got those out and in about five days we had one generator running, so we could provide the power for the city and some of it for the plant. So we were not that much damaged. But the electrification from outside was totally disturbed. You know, the towers were knocked out… were blown out… the poles and stuff like that. So that took time, but we had power about three weeks after the War was over.”</p><h4>Cinema</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/naxmxTsOH60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had several American pictures, but we had them hidden, we couldn’t play them because under the Germans, they wouldn’t let us play them. We had some Czech, we had a couple of Slovak films, but these came from Bratislava, you know, we always got a new film every week. And I don’t know what kind of film we were preparing because we never –played it – the Russians came and they wanted to… First of all, we got new machines, new projectors, Zeiss, from Germany, very good machines. And how they found out, we don’t know. But they wanted to take those machines to Moscow. They wanted to dismantle them and take them. But we got smart. We knew about this thing, that they wanted to come in and take these machines. So we dismantled them and buried them in the ground. So they were looking for them. Well, when they came in there were no machines and we said ‘well, the Germans took them’. They couldn’t believe it that the Germans had the time to dismantle them but we put them away, the Germans didn’t take them. They were brand new machines. We used them about six, seven, months, that’s all we had them, because we’d just put them up. And we had these old Phillips machines and so, while the Russians were over there, we didn’t want to put these new machines, we put these old Phillips machines up and we used those.</p><p>“Well, they didn’t care too much for them, because they were not as good machines as the Zeiss ones were. So, anyway, that was the experience we had with the Russians. Well, you know, the bad problem was we had movies projected on a wide screen, you know, wide and large. So they came drunk and they shot the screen and everything, shot the audio speakers behind the screen – they did that! Oh, how many times they did that! We couldn’t do nothing about it. We just shut it down and that was it! So this is the way it was. So many times we went without a movie three, four, weeks!”</p><h4>Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/StlVSKs0q6E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to Prague by night train, you know, the express night train. I got to Masarykovo Nádraží and I got right away to the consul, and the consul told me ‘We have no time’, he says ‘You better get out of here fast, because they are checking everyone coming in and out of these offices.’ That was the American consul. So, they put me on a train from there and he says ‘Let’s get you out of the country before they close the borders.’ So, when I come to Aš, which was the border town, the officer that came to check the various paperwork, he says ‘Well’ – he says, ‘according to my instructions, you should be held up over here. But…’ he says, ‘you want to go, you go. I didn’t see you. If anybody comes to check on me, I did not see you!’ So I got out, and I went through Germany on a train, all the way to Paris. From Paris, we were going to go to Calais. We got to Calais and we could not get onto the Queen Mary – the Queen Mary was the ship that was going to take us to the United States – because there were too many wrecks in the Channel. They did not have it all cleaned up yet. So they were not going to take a chance with that big boat going through the Channel. So they put us on a small boat and took us to Dover, England.”</p><h4>Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jbjioOHK31c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Father was always a <em>narodovec</em> – he wanted to go back home, he wanted to go back home. Well, at that time, Masaryk came over here and he was kind of soliciting for citizens. He wanted to have them go back home, he said ‘You know, you don’t have to be in America, we can make America at home, you’ve got the opportunity to make America in Czechoslovakia.’ At that time Czechoslovakia was kind of building up, sprouting up. And so he went over there, he went back. Mother was very much against it, she didn’t want to go. But they finally went in 19… I think it was just before the Depression, I don’t know exactly what year it was. So, through the Depression, they were already there. And father brought a lot of money over there and he lost it all. He lost over a million dollars in investments, because he got into politics. And he got on the wrong side of politics. So there were, you know, we were Catholics, and we got into a village where there were a lot of Lutherans. They were wealthy Lutherans, there were a lot of farmers. So, when he got this mill, he was expecting that he was going to get a lot of business from them. Well, they made a point of not giving him the job because they were so against the Catholics at that time. There were only seven Catholics over there in that village. The rest of them were all Lutherans. So he lost everything over there. That’s the time, like I said, that he moved to Považská Bystrica.”</p><h4>Vist to Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/40rcZvS5PR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I came to Považská Bystrica, I heard the PAs, you know, we had a PA system everywhere. And the first thing they said was ‘So-and-so and so-and-so have these working hours. They did not show up and we want to know why.’ This was on the public address system! I said ‘What will they do? What will they do? Put them in jail or what?’ ‘Ah!’ they said, ‘they’re supposed to be in work and they didn’t show up.’ They said ‘They’re looking for them’. How do you like that? This was in 1984 when I came over there. A lot of things surprised me, which were never there before. You know, the Germans were very tough on us as far as working. If you didn’t show up for work they believed that you are sabotaging their process. So you had to have the right excuse why you weren’t there. But this? I thought that things had changed. They actually got worse – because they looked for you. Because they planned on you, that you were going to be working there. How much they worked, I don’t know.”</p><h4>Old House</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VxGo5_zoKFY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, when the communists took over, that mill never got repaired. It was just a shambles, let’s put it that way. There was still machinery that my father built for that mill. It was still there, it was never removed, but it was all cobwebbed and everything and a lot of rats were in the basement and the lower floor. And as a matter of fact there was a generator that we installed for ourselves, for our own electricity for the mill. That was still there but it was all, you know, never used. So for the whole era of the Communists taking over, this was never used. So somebody was living in the upper quarter but the mill was totally destroyed.”</p><h4>Public Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nssuA8euB_c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1984, Public Radio came to life, and they were looking for something to fill the time. Because public radio didn’t have all that many opportunities. They didn’t have any money to pay for the program, and secondly they didn’t have any volunteers either. So finally they came up and said ‘Would you want to originate any ethnic programs on this station?’ So we organized a group and we got 13 nationalities. And we started up.</p><p>“The only problem is now that everything is digital. And we have to do everything ourselves. We have to prepare the program right down to the second. If we don’t, the computer cuts us off. So we’ve got to figure out very well how to do it now. My son, he’s an expert on the computers, I’m not. Anyway, so we cut the program on a Thursday. We’re not getting paid, but we’re producing a lot of money for the station. We had the highest, I believe, this is what they told us, we had the highest turnout of donations for that one hour. Even their programs didn’t turn out that much money!”</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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Vladimir Mlynek
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
American citizenship
Catholics
Engineers
Family life
Journalism
local
Lutherans
Politics
Povazska Bystrica
Public address system
Slovak Language
Slovak-German relations
World War II
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ff7b8f1318a21f44f7e02ffe9011b970
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>Parent's Advice</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BnglI0rI3cY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I went to the Czech Embassy, or Consulate at that time, in Stockholm and talked to a very unpleasant officer. I don’t remember his name, but he said ‘Slečno Broučková, you are starting to speak Czech with an accent’, and I thought, ‘That’s not possible! Even though I haven’t spoken Czech this entire time’ – I still didn’t think I had an accent in Czech. ‘It’s time that you return home’ [he said], and they would not allow me to stay. So, now I had to make a decision, shall I stay or…? So now I did write home. And I did get a letter from my dad, and he said, ‘You left a free Czechoslovakia, I want you to come back to free Czechoslovakia.’ Of course, he never thought that the communists would take all these years. There wouldn’t be a free Czechoslovakia for another 40 years! So, at that time, I had to make a decision, and I went to the Swedish consulate and asked for asylum. So that was one of these major things that I had to really… which changed my entire life, actually.”</p><h4>Cultural Event</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4k3x57a5I_8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Somehow I found there was a Czech group – emigrants – who put on a play. I always liked poetry and reading and theatre and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve got to see this!’ I don’t know who told me or how I came about it. So, I went, and I met this bunch of guys from Czechoslovakia, and they all spoke Czech, obviously and, you know, now it started to hit me. Even though I had Swedish friends and, actually, a Swedish boyfriend, here were these people who could talk about what was in Prague, who is Nezval, who is Seifert. And this guy who then became my husband also wrote poetry and played piano, and all that sort of did it for me. All of a sudden I realized how much I am missing, you know, not being with a Czech, the literature, I mean, the Swedish guy was nice, he was kind, he was okay, but, I couldn’t tell him, you know, ‘Na Václavském náměstí, you know that…’, there was nothing to bind me or bring me back. And then I was helping these guys with Swedish. They did not know the language, they needed help translating or whatever so…”</p><h4>Ellis Island</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D29pENxdsH8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was not as easy as I was expecting it to be, because when we did arrive in New York, I could see the Statue of Liberty and thought ‘Here we are!’, but we were detained. We were not let go off the boat because of my husband’s X-ray, his chest X-ray. He had a couple of pneumonias when he was a younger man and I guess they left some scars on his chest, and the Americans were very careful, even though we had an X-ray done in Sweden, which was clear, we had to go to Ellis Island. They wanted to check him out, so that he was not bringing any illness into the States. So that was sort of a setback, I thought, I mean, I thought when I saw the Statue of Liberty, that I have just a step and hop over to New York, well, it didn’t happen until three days later.</p><p>“Actually, it was scary, I tell you! That was one place I was sort of afraid because I hadn’t expected this, there were many people detained at Ellis Island, and we were separated – there were women in one section, men in another section, and they did have to take him to a hospital, I believe, or a doctor, and have a new X-ray done and have him proclaimed clear of any illness.”</p><h4>Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tiMXdcvxdy8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I really wanted to stay in New York and look for a job at the United Nations, I thought that with my languages, maybe I could get something. However, people were telling me that there is a great large community in Chicago, and import/export companies – even though I thought, for my languages, I would have been better in New York. But, for whatever reason, because of the Czech community, I guess… In New York, I didn’t know anybody. I had no contacts at all. But here we guessed that maybe we would have an easier beginning, so that was the reason.”</p><h4>Financial Hardship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ErDJVdeVkew?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When my husband was sick and I was really hurting for money, because not enough money was coming in and lots of it was going out, I was really, you know how people say ‘You live from paycheck to paycheck’? That’s what I had to do at that time, which was so much against my upbringing, against my thinking. But that is what I had to do. I was praying that I would not get a run in my nylons! At that time nylons could be fixed, you know, but I worked in a downtown office, a very nice office. I couldn’t go to work with a run in my nylons, there was no way!</p><p>“It really was hard at that time. There were organizations – I know for one Christmas that the Czechoslovak National Council of Women in Exile did help me. I mean, I did get some help from the Czech community. And then, after my husband died, actually, financially, it was easier for me. Even though I had to have a babysitter and all that, but somehow I was able to manage better because… It was actually easier for me at that time.”</p><h4> Czech Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/61lJ1_cQwbA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was stripped of my citizenship unfairly. I did not do anything to the Republic causing them to take it away. And, for 50 years it bothered me that it was unfair! Or 40 years – not 50. And then, when it was possible to regain it, I did. So… I am in my heart still Czech and in my existence, I am American.”</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
Vera Roknic
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
1948 emigrant/refugee
Akademie obchodni Dr. Edvarda Benese
American citizenship
Asylum
Brouckova
Communist coup
Czech citizenship
Family life
German
Lysov
marriage
Novy Zizkov
Occupation
Women workers
World War II
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2966e654a29e72eba70f012d38d3cf86
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>Massacre Survivor</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hyqD8HBFXQU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”</p><h4>Opinions Hurt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tlzpSg6Eixc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”</p><h4>Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A3Na8BQnvdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fou0milWM60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.</p><p>“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QkstvhUWd2A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”</p><h4>Mistake</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x71Xtz_qLIQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?</p><p>“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Vera Plesek
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Concentration camp
Discrimination
Divorce
Family life
Healthcare professionals
Kosinova.
Prison
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
-
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b956f4caf5621be92ce75b2924807388
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>Politics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xk4wSnyCAOU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Whenever I would ask those [questions], everybody was kind of afraid to answer them. I remember up in the attic of this railroad station, there were some old pictures of previous presidents and I remember one of them was Masaryk. And I remember asking a group of guys that were fixing the roof about how it was, and they were very neutral about whether he was good or bad. So obviously they didn’t want to get into trouble.</p><p>“I remember they were always teaching us about how great the Soviet system was, but it really did start changing in the mid-’60s and I remember when everybody was saying ‘Oh every guy from the Soviet Union is great,’ and then I remember one teacher – there was this picture with Stalin in it – and she said ‘Well, he is no longer on the good list because he had some of his own people shot.’ And that was kind of shocking because that was like the first instance of the Soviet Union not being so perfect as you were led up to believe in the third or fourth grade.”</p><h4>Inspections</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TcOp92zmsL8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He was a restaurant manager and because of the central planning, all his employees would be rewarded on how much the restaurant would be producing or not producing or how many meals they would be serving. People started leaving him for another restaurant that wasn’t as productive and were getting paid more. Well, he found that out and he went to the central planning commission or where they were directing all these restaurants in his region and he said ‘Listen, how do you expect me to run the business if you don’t support me and you pay these people more somewhere else? Yet, look at what I’m doing.’ That kind of got him into trouble because he stood up and spoke up.</p><p>“Immediately after that they did an in-depth inventory. They tried to find any way to discredit him or throw him out of his position, but it seems like he was always one step ahead. What ended up happening is that he caught one of the inspectors forging a document and he had a back-up. He said he caught him and he said this was between him and the inspector and another guy and he was so mad when he saw what happened that he almost threw him out of a second story window or something like that. Well, that pushed them even further against him, they took him to court, and this started to escalate more and more. This all happened around ’67, ’68, so I think that’s when he knew that he had to leave, because they weren’t going to give up, they were not going to lose. He felt like he was going to end up in jail, so he said he had enough.”</p><h4>Eye-Opening</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AuMT3FkN9Rg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of the first impressions I had of America was taking the New York subway to go to see friends – we made friends in Austria and they left about two months before us so we went to see them – and there was a robbery. It just happened right next to us, and my dad was sitting down and I was holding on to the handle and I saw these three guys push this – I guess there was a blind guy involved in the whole thing – somebody helped the blind guy and the blind guy moved away, they pushed this guy against the other door and they took everything he had and everybody ran away. My parents just weren’t looking at it so they had no clue what was going on, and I was just shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen here, so that was really scary. I told that to my dad, I said ‘We gotta get out of here, we can’t be here, they’ll kill us.’ And he didn’t believe me that something like that had happened.”</p><h4>Atlanta</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0TFLzbHL2oQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a small community in Atlanta of Czechs and Slovaks and it seems like a lot of them were in the restaurant business, and there would be this one pub and everybody, after they finished work on Friday or Saturday, they would go to this pub and we would have guys that would play guitars and sing songs. It was just like camping somewhere outside, and I learned a lot of Czech songs from those guys. It was just like this one small happy island that people could go to and socialize and talk about your troubles or forget your troubles or drink your troubles away. And we had parties as well, every now and then.”</p><h4>American Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNipyOUMIVc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had American history in school, so I had no problems with any of the questions. My father got lucky because he got the same person as I did, so I told him what they asked me and he was asked a lot of the same questions so he had no problem, but boy, my mom flunked. And she was, I mean, she loved it absolutely here, so she studied so hard and made so sure that she made it past the second time. It was a great day for us, that day when we became U.S. citizens.”</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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Vaclav Slovak
Description
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<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>
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
American citizenship
Child emigre
Community Life
Family business
Hanusovice
Sumperk
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985bab0c42174ddbdf9c00ee5bf28e13
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>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKda885FPwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is <em>srazka</em>, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”</p><h4>Cleared</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HFlNKVM3Dm4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p class="wp-caption-text">Tony’s father Antonin in 1946</p><p>“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”</p><h4>The War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Gw6EEIWZBU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”</p><h4>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTltUpQjLKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”</p><h4>Escape into Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHWxyBuqBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”</p><h4>Refugee Camps</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_s8N3S9mQ8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.</p><p>“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”</p><h4>American Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1BbEXNzJ24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Tony Jandacek
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czech language
Education
German
Journalism
Mushrooms
Nazis
Occupation
Prison
Refugee camp
school
Smichov
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
World War II
Zelezna Ruda
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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/Cof-Jjem4-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“The biggest problem was that we had to move from our apartment, because we lived on the main street and Jews were not permitted to live on the main street. That was making the city ugly, if you had Jews living on the main street. So we had to find an apartment in a side street, which we did and it was actually pretty good. But then, of course, we couldn’t visit swimming pools, public places. We couldn’t visit parks, we couldn’t go to the movies, we couldn’t travel without a permit, and we had to wear the Star of David. So you had to be marked. And that was not a very pleasant thing, and not necessarily because of the fact that you had to deliver your sporting equipment. You had to give to the state. You had to donate it to the state. Of course all kinds of jewelry. Your bank accounts were frozen. And finally, my father was prohibited from being an attorney, so he had to find another job. It couldn’t be an attorney; it had to be some clerk, which we finally found. He was a clerk in a shoe factory and he did some clerical job there. But that gave him an exemption that we would not go into an concentration camp – at least not initially.”</p><h4>Labor Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7M4B3Ou6bVM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We all went to Auschwitz together and except for me, everybody perished. There was tremendous famine there. We had practically no food, so I lost – I was never a big guy – but I lost at least 40 pounds. So when I was liberated I weighed about 80 pounds. So if this would have taken a longer time I certainly wouldn’t have survived, because it was not only the lack food, but also hard labor. We had to work – which I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t stand that Auschwitz. I remember that smoke and the fire and the smell of burning bodies. So I reported myself that I am an expert electrician, which of course I was not. But I was taken as an electrician to a neighboring little camp where they had some electrical work; I never did anything electrical because it turned out that was a different camp – they mixed me up. But it doesn’t matter; it was still a labor camp, where the food wasn’t much better but at least we had to work and we were occupied and tired and came home and went to bed and slept. So I didn’t have too much time to think about things. So that’s why I was able to survive, and don’t forget that Auschwitz, and the neighboring camps, was liberated much earlier than the rest of the camps because the Russian front was so close. So actually, Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. I was liberated a little later because I was in a slightly more Western camp, but still it was the beginning of February.”</p><p><em>So which was the camp you were moved to?</em></p><p>“It was called Gleiwitz – Gliwice in Polish. That was an industrial city, as most of them there, in the same area of Auschwitz, maybe 35-40 miles from Auschwitz. Very close. And that was the sister camp because they didn’t have gas chambers in Gleiwitz, only in Auschwitz. So if somebody was too weak to work, then they sent him back to Auschwitz from Gleiwitz. There was no crematorium and no gas chamber, so there was a big difference.”</p><h4>Previerka</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/urb1PQlQVso?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had a <em>prověrka,</em> <em>previerka</em> in Slovak, and I was given a condition that I can study, but I have to finish in the proper term. The fact that there was a <em>previerka</em> is horrible, but they way they acted toward me I would say is reasonable. They gave me a condition. They gave me another condition, which was given not on the university side but on the civilian side, that they suggested to me to be more in touch with the working people. That I was much of a high-nose, snobbish guy who is an intellectual who is studying medicine; that I should go to the folk, to the people, and I did. I immediately reported to become a factory physician for one month, to be close to the workers, and then I became a company physician later at the university, to become more united with the working class.”</p><h4>Communist Party</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YxJNO_Yvbuc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I came back from the [concentration] camp, and it was not a communist state yet, I joined the Czechoslovak youth organization, which very many people joined. But that was good only until I was 27; after 27 it automatically became the Communist Party. So that’s how I became a member of the Party, but for three years I didn’t even pay my dues. But when I had my <em>previerka</em>, I was ordered to be more active as a member and after three years I paid my dues backwards and became more active, meaning I attended Party membership conferences and meetings and that’s it. But I was never a functionary or any office holder. So that was Party membership, which may have helped me a little bit in my difficult life as the son of a bourgeois who was in jail – maybe, I’m not sure.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9sNzXVEXmnk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s an insane system, that communism. That’s why it never worked any place, and it can be maintained only by terror, by secret police and by forbidding this and forbidding that and censoring the mail and censoring the newspaper. That’s why I felt it acutely that I had to go to the evening meeting of the Party, that I had to go on May 1 to manifest for Stalin, which I didn’t want to. So that’s why I was very anxious to get out, and when I did get out, suddenly I had all the possibility for doing research, doing what I wanted to do all my life. I had a laboratory, I had my mice and rats for experiments, I had a professor who took care of me – specifically had several fellows and I was one of them; excellent teacher – and I said ‘For goodness sake, now I’m going back to that Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Lost Angeles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2XKVN5xedNU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Los Angeles is just a chapter, like Miami is a chapter, and we had a very good president who really arranged all kinds of lectures. And at that time we were lucky because, for instance, Milos Forman was there in Los Angeles and he gave a number of lectures. There was another guy who was chair of a filmmaking institute; I forgot his name, but he was a member of SVU. Then we had a painter, quite famous locally; he was a member. So it was interesting company: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professionals, filmmakers. And it was interesting to go to because it was a social club more or less, and it was not only lectures but also parties – beer and wine and some cookies and some good Czech cooking, because we went usually from one house to another – we didn’t have an official meeting place – or we met at the Beseda Sokol. They had one in Los Angeles.”</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
Thomas Gral
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
American citizenship
Communist Party members
Community Life
Concentration camp
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Holocaust
Jews
Kosice
Military service
Slansky
World War II
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89d28da603dc9df945c84db63ba35b34
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>Factory Housing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ENxaxYGGFao?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Life on the <em>kolonie</em> was absolutely wonderful. Everybody lived very sparsely, as most Europeans. We had an entry area and a little storage room. We had a kitchen which was a kitchen, dining, and living area, and a bedroom area, and that was it. Outhouses on the outside. They were attached on one side, and the storage unit on the other side, of this four-plex. There were little gardens in the back and everybody could have a vegetable garden. This whole thing consisted of maybe 80 apartments that were there and in the middle was the common area which contained a social hall and laundry. Although, the washing of clothing was done in what was called the White River next door. That’s where the washing occurred and the rinsing occurred. The water came right out of the mountains, thus it was pure. Then everything was hung to dry and then after that they had a big thing like a mangle [ringer], and that was like a huge trough with stones in it, and they rolled this over the sheets to straighten them out a little bit, iron them, basically. That’s how people existed. We had close friends next door to where we lived. My mother was a weaver. And all this happened because my grandfather, my mother’s father, was a foreman in that factory.”</p><h4>Slovak Uprising</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EwRw8h1j-U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They were informed that the next day all the hunters and everybody should come to the military barracks on the east side of town – we had two military establishments, an Air Force and a military – and bring their weapons so they could train to resist the Russian advance, and they would be told what to do and how to do it. So my dad and uncle, of course they went there, and by noon of that day I thought ‘Well, I’ll just go and check and see what’s happening,’ so I took a bicycle and rode out to that camp and I saw them, behind the camp fence, and they were just milling about and doing nothing, and it was boring, so I got back on my bike and biked back home.</p><p>“Well, as I was biking home – we lived on the street called Liptauerstrasse, Liptovská ulica – what happened is, I looked up and, about a quarter mile or so, maybe more, away, I saw trucks with all kinds of red flags on top, and I rushed home, right inside the door and I told my mom ‘There’s something not right.’ So then we went into a room that faced the street and we watched and then suddenly these people were all walking by with machine guns drawn, and the front guy had a whistle in his mouth, and red banners. Well, these were the partisans who were taking over the town. They had made an arrangement with the military to peacefully take over the town. All the men with guns were in the camp, so they didn’t have anybody to fight, and that’s how it was. That’s how all the peaceful times then ended. Because what happened then is, the next day, the partisans then tried to take over my hometown [Kežmarok]. These people had heard what had happened in Poprad. In Kežmarok, they had gotten ready, taken over the military, and, with the military’s help, had prepared for the partisans and actually fended them off.</p><p>“One of my experiences as a young kid: We had, besides repairing trucks, cars and vulcanizing tires – that’s what my father’s responsibility was – we also had gas pumps outside for regular gas. The second day, after the attacked Kežmarok, one of those tanks came back to the pump station to fill up with gas again, and there was part of a body still on the tank. Somebody had been hit. They didn’t even remove and clean; they pulled it just like that with that on it, so… horrific sights for a kid to be seeing.”</p><h4>Father Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQMQ91T9-qg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We got to Poprad and then we stayed with our neighbors, the Lubajs, and the Lubajs took us in. Of course, people knew my dad as we walked from the train station to our home and, then next day, it was very in common in Europe to have to go to the city hall and to sign papers saying ‘I’m now a resident back here.’ So my dad, having been seen, he went there and was immediately put into detention camp. The Germanic people and Hungarians were all put in detention camps. At night, my neighbors knew this was happening and they arranged for us, overnight, to go to Kežmarok on foot – which was like nine miles – to my grandparents’. So we got to my grandparents’ house and we stayed from June until the end of September inside, so nobody would know where we are hiding.”</p><h4>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6X9PXk2yqVI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the end of July, 1946, on a Sunday morning, the state police came and arrested my mother and my grandparents and took them to the initial camp, a castle in Kežmarok, and that’s where we were, in a castle. My mother had a nervous breakdown there. But things were so badly managed and there was so much disorganization. We were arrested in the morning and there were maybe 100 people or so in this initial detention area. I noticed that by afternoon some of the friends, Slovaks, would come to the gates and try to communicate – this was so sudden and such a horrible thing – and some guards would allow them to come between the two gate doors. They couldn’t arrest my grandmother because she was ill. She was in bed, so they left her there and took my grandfather. So I took my grandfather to the doors and when there was a little lapse of observation, I took him in between and ultimately I said to the guard ‘He’s just visiting.’ So they said ‘Ok’ and let my grandfather out. He got back home and was never re-arrested again, and so that’s how it was. My mother and I were then put on trucks and shipped to that military camp in Poprad, where my dad and uncle went with their guns and all that, and that was a big detention camp then for Germanic and Hungarian people. And from there, then we were shipped out to Germany, in September of 1946.”</p><h4>Deported</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X3o-3QHjnUk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We weren’t really welcome. We were intruders. These people suddenly were asked to take in people that they had never seen before. It’s like you having to take people into your home that you didn’t know, didn’t relate to at all. You were forced to do it. So that wasn’t all that pleasant. And not that they were so unpleasant. They tried to help, but they themselves were… Think about it, 1946 wasn’t all that pleasant. People were on rationing cards. We had milk that you could see through and bread was rationed, margarine was rationed. Everything was rationed. The nutritional conditions were very poor. In 1946 in the winter, I would go to adjacent villages, to the farmers, and ask for a little flour. They’d take a soup spoon of flour and put it in your bag and then you’d go to the next one and he’d put in a soup spoon of flour, and that was it. It was very, very bad. You had to beg for food. That next fall, in 1947, you’d volunteer to work for farmers for food. We would pick potatoes, for instance, and it was all manual, and then you could have a little potatoes afterwards. So things weren’t all that pleasant.”</p><h4>Money</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oJHoadO4FOM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I also worked on a golf course caddying for American soldiers. They were allowed to play golf, and I got paid ten cigarettes for carrying the bag for nine holes or a package for eighteen holes, or five candy bars for nine holes and ten for eighteen holes. On the way home, every time we left the golf course, we’d stop at a little restaurant and there were people that would buy these things from us for the black market. I made more money than my dad did working by selling these American goodies to the black marketers.”</p><h4>Excited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WSMiIa382lg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“To be American was really important, because America had done so much. After we left Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, and crossed the border, there was security and safety. The American zone offered you that kind of lifestyle. You felt safe and comfortable. You may not have had food enough because there was very little food available but, nevertheless, the food wasn’t as important as the freedom. You were secure. There was no uncertainty about your existence, having to worry about who would come and get you the next day or would you be in prison the next day. All that was gone. And then when you saw the luxury – the cigarettes they’d throw away, half candies eaten sometime – then you’d realize ‘Hey these people are really something. They’re wealthy. They’re what everybody’s trying to achieve.’ You kind of became proud to be an American. After losing all of that… Think about that. You lost your previous identity in a way, national identities. It’s important to be an American. My father was absolutely delighted to be an American, and my mother. So too my brother. We really became Americans. Not nationalists. We didn’t think America was always the best, the finest, the strongest. We didn’t need to be the most powerful. But we were good. And that’s important.”</p>
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Title
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Roman Scholtz
Description
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<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Jicin
Kezmarok
Refugee camp
Slovak-German relations
WWII
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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
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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
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Plánice</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5Bhmop2WPRQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“The Czech teachers – at that particular time the country was still very young – their aim was patriotism; in Czech it was called vlastenectví. And the patriotism, the Czech patriotism, became my forte. I would be reciting the poem ‘I am a Czech and I always will be Czech,’ (in Czech it was ‘já jsem Čech a Čechem vždycky zůstanu’). I would be singing all these Czech patriotic songs like ‘Čechy krásné, Čechy mé’ – ‘my Czech land, my Czech land.’ And I became… And somehow people said only ‘that must be his American heritage. That’s something in him that [makes him] so outspoken and take an interest in everything.’ And so they actually shaped very much my character. Because then I had to act as an American without knowing how Americans really act. You know, Americans were supposed to have been daring, so if I did [something] then that’s what Americans would do in the West, you know, so I did get quite a reputation and this American stuck with me, so I was always the American, although I tried to be a Czech.”</p><h4>Political Child</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HJeWR-t9k7o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first Czechoslovak mobilization, when it looked like the Czechs would really go and defend themselves against the Germans’ aggression, happened in May. In that village there were maybe only five radio receivers, so we did not have a radio, I mean the communication was not what it is today, and what it was even 50 years ago. And she took me suddenly one afternoon to a pub, which was called in Czech a hospoda, and lo, there were more than about a dozen people sitting around a table. I was the only child. I was the only child sitting around and listening to President Beneš. We had declared the first mobilization of the Czech Army. And I’ll never forget that moment when it was over and the Czech national anthem was played, everybody stood on his feet, so did I, except one character did not get on his feet, and he was a German. He probably didn’t understand anything that was going on. But when the national anthem was over, the young guys certainly took that poor German and they really shook him up. I won’t talk much about it, but I believe up to today that he didn’t know what was really going on. But I certainly knew that the time, the situation, was changing.”</p><h4>U.S. Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u0pVgih_BCc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Every house had to assemble and present their so-called in Czech kmenový list, which means – it was at that particular time a record of who lived in the house; who was there, when were you born. And they looked of course at our house when they came to our house. My mother was so much concerned with her butter and cream and cheese and whatever was hiding, because she felt that they were coming for that, but they were coming for a control to see who lives in the house and if there is any incriminating evidence which would link that thing to the assassination which took place in Prague. That was the objective of that raid.</p><p>“She forgot that in her best room she had displayed all her knick-knacks from Chicago. And there it was, a pillowcase which probably she bought some place in a dime store with terrific loud, clear colors which Americans love so much: ‘Our Hero, 1927, Charles Lindbergh.’ Then she had another pillow which apparently had the beginning of the Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln. And then she had George Washington, again, our first president. I recognized when I came back to the United States after a couple of years that they were still having souvenirs like that at dime stores. But these souvenirs, as soon as the gentlemen arrived, they were hit by all of that – it was very openly displayed. And then, what is this Robert Budway, born in Oak Park? That brought the show down.</p><p>“She had to produce her travel documents, which were confiscated immediately. Fortunately, somewhere along [the way] she didn’t surrender my birth certificate. So that was a fortunate thing. She was taken then to the city of Klatovy, to the Gestapo, there apparently interrogated for a few hours. She stayed with somebody there for a second day, went to the German so-called Oberlandrat, which was a regional office by which Germans controlled the region. And somewhere along [the way] she came up with new documentation for me.</p><p>“I had a passport. The passport was in German and in French, and it was a passport which declared me without citizenship, without a country. It only listed that formerly I was North American. From that moment I was a marked person. Everything about me began… when I was dealing with the official bureaucracy I was referred to someplace else, my ration cards issues were different, a different amount. I had to every six months apply for permission to stay on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. I was restricted to ever go anyplace else – I could not go anyplace else.”</p><h4>U.S. Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aqBXaIMPv5I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I came home and I never said anything to my mother that I was not successful. I just packed up my suitcase and left again, and wandered through Germany about for three months before my situation became so hopeless. Then suddenly, totally destitute, hungry, [in an] absolutely desperate situation, I was picked up at Frankfurt railroad station by the [American] military police, and when they looked in my pocket and found an American passport, they were shocked. They were shocked, and of course the Germans were shocked too, because the German police were along with.</p><p>“They were shocked that here is an American; [from] a country of plenty, and look – he’s worse off than Germans! My situation changed so fast, so quickly – the Army classification test was postponed and I was used as a poster boy in the Frankfurt headquarters, pictures and publicity which I still have today, and in no time I found myself back again at Marburg for basic training, and it was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had. Everybody was helpful. From the fellow soldiers with whom I had to take basic training – because most of them came from very much the same situation in Europe. They were coming from Norway, from Denmark, from Germany, from Holland, England; they were all expatriate Americans who actually were in the same situation.”</p><h4>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t_H-J7gJ8R4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was then taken to some interrogating place in the city of Plzeň, right in the center, which was formerly Gestapo, I knew it too, where I was. And then subjected to about 78 days continuous interrogation. The sessions were long, and to share and to talk about them – that’s a book by itself. And all my history, all my connections with anyone I have ever met in that country, outside of the country – anyone I met in any country, any place, anything I have said – here was an open book to them. They had an incredible dossier on me, they had confiscated a great deal of mail already. They made a number of house searches in places of my friends and others. So, they had so much evidence which they construed the way they wanted. I simply was the enemy of socialism; I did not deny that I did not support socialism… And then of course, their aim was, they knew very well about my upbringing in the First Czechoslovak Republic. I was what they would today call Czechoslovakist. I believed in the ideals of democracy, Masaryk, Beneš and Štefánik, and I could repeat their quotes left and right. They knew my feeling, and that I was down deep a Czech and not some imperialist American spy. But what incriminated me was of course the Army – that I was in the unit which was actually involved in the gathering of information and intelligence.”</p><h4>Jail Food</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XjELd7M3Dlg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I finally had a cellmate, one of them was very experienced; at first I suspected that he might have been put there to find out something from me, so I was very careful, but anyway, I found out that he was not. You know, the city of Plzeň is known for beer – well known Pilsner beer – and the Czechs say ‘it is because of our good water.’ Well, we did not have a faucet, a water faucet in there; there was only water out of the toilet. And believe it or not, we drank that water from out of the toilet. And he made it palatable, my cellmate, by saying ‘after all, they make beer out of it in Plzeň, you know?’ So that was so-called, Czechs call it šibeniční humor [gallows humor] – it is a humor which you use when you are in jail or things like that. And part of it was educational, and certainly I learned a lot, and at times there were moments of amusement too.”</p><h4>Put to Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qt3ZQYsCboM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I came into some industrial hall, and we were supposed to work on little flags, little paper flags – pasting little paper flags which, when let’s say Leonid Brezhnev visited the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, kids would stand on the sidewalk and wave. But we had a quota of how many flags to do. I believe my quota per day was around 1,500 flags – to paste them up. And somehow along [the way], a few of those prisoners who were around me; they noticed that when they asked me something, I had a little accent. And I made one big mistake: instead of the Czech rádio, I said radio [in an American accent]. And their antennae were up, you know?</p><p>“Well, I said that I am a tourist, and they had incredible fun. ‘We have a tourist! From where?’ From America. ‘Oh! We have an American tourist!’ It was a sensation. It went so quickly through that hall and some gypsies came around and brought me an onion. You know, I don’t know where he got the onion but I took the onion, because by that time I no longer had so much pride. There I said ‘thank you very much.’ But anyway, he was practicing his English on me; he kept saying ‘okay! Hokay!’ It was all very amusing.</p><p>“First of all, it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to meet my quota. But see, the prisoners started to make my quota. It was a sensation, and of course the guard knew immediately that they have to take me out of there, because I created – I stole the situation. ‘We have an American tourist!’ And, of course, there was lots of joking – ‘how’s your hotel room?’ And things like that. If it was two years and nine months of this fun, it would have been fun!”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ijz9vKy7suA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I accomplished education. Something my mother really treasured. And my children have an education, really, and they did not have to beg anybody, you know, to recommend them to the Party. I got an education and I did not have to degrade myself, to the Party, to any line of anybody, you know. And I had the opportunity to travel, to read, to meet people. This I think would have not happened in my time if I lived in Czechoslovakia. It is different now. It is different, but it would be too late for me. I caught everything in time.”</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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Robert Budway
Description
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<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>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Arrest
Heydrich assassination
Hotel Central
Military service
Pankrac
school
Techonice
World War II