After two years in Milwaukee, her family moved to Detroit. Susan says she had a very Slovak upbringing and remembers speaking Slovak at school and church. She attended the University of Detroit for her undergraduate degree, and then Syracuse University for her doctorate in East European history. Susan traveled to Bratislava in 1969 while writing her dissertation on Milan Hodža, and remembers the tense atmosphere following the Warsaw Pact invasion. Now, Susan lives in Chicago and is a professor of history at Benedictine University. One of her specialties is Slovak politics. Susan regularly returns to Slovakia and has kept in close contact with her family there. She says she still strongly identifies with her Slovak heritage and has considered retiring in Bratislava.
]]>
Susan Mikula was born in Bratislava in 1943. Her father, Jozef, was very involved in the Tiso government in the First Slovak Republic and, Susan says, left Czechoslovakia following WWII. She moved with her mother, Edita, and sister, Katherine, to her mother’s native Ružomberok at this time. Abroad, Susan’s father worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), gathering information on communist activity in Czechoslovakia. Jozef was also a leading figure in the Slovak resistance, heading the underground group Biela légia [White Legion]. As a result of his activities, in 1949, Susan’s mother was arrested and held in prison for three days. After her release, Susan’s mother decided to escape with her daughters. Aided by the Biela légia, Susan and her family crossed the Morava River into Austria in November 1949. They were reunited with Susan’s father in Vienna. This was the first time that Susan had seen her father in close to five years. They stayed in Salzburg for three months, and then spent one month in a refugee camp at Bremerhaven. Sponsored by the CIC, Susan’s family arrived in Milwaukee in the spring of 1950 where they were warmly welcomed by the Slovak community.
After two years in Milwaukee, her family moved to Detroit. Susan says she had a very Slovak upbringing and remembers speaking Slovak at school and church. She attended the University of Detroit for her undergraduate degree, and then Syracuse University for her doctorate in East European history. Susan traveled to Bratislava in 1969 while writing her dissertation on Milan Hodža, and remembers the tense atmosphere following the Warsaw Pact invasion. Now, Susan lives in Chicago and is a professor of history at Benedictine University. One of her specialties is Slovak politics. Susan regularly returns to Slovakia and has kept in close contact with her family there. She says she still strongly identifies with her Slovak heritage and has considered retiring in Bratislava.
“My father, who by that time had been working with the U.S. Army quite a while, had set up an underground, once the communists took over after ’48, they set up an underground, an organization called the Biela légia – the White Legion, whose purpose was anti-communist activities. They were going to try to broadcast into the Czech and Slovak territories, they were going to try to get people out, they were thinking about writing pamphlets and anti-communist literature to be distributed. So they had this active underground and once the communists took over, the underground kind of kicked in.”
“The Communists then arrested her in the summer of 1949. They took her into prison, they kept her in prison. They didn’t torture her, but they threatened torture. They kept her awake for three nights and three days, they would use sleep deprivation, they would use threats against her children, they would touch her skin with razor blades and say ‘You have to tell us this information.’ They were asking her to actually name some people, and, in her confused state, after a few days – after three days and three nights of this – she did name one man, who then, when they told her stand there and then to turn around, she heard a wheelchair coming in and this man was beaten so badly, but he still looked at my mother and denied that he knew her. But, of course she had identified him and that was enough. Even though she didn’t know politics, it wasn’t political in her mind, nevertheless, the association with us was enough.”
“I teach at a university, and my students believe kind of ‘the American ideal’ that you can come to America and you can make it – anybody can make it. And I use my story to kind of say yes, and no. Yes, because we came with two suitcases, nothing. My father worked in a factory for a while but then got a job in a company, and eventually – we moved to Detroit two years after we came to Milwaukee – and my dad joined Massey Ferguson, an international corporation and he was Chief Financial Officer at the end for Massey Ferguson in the United States, a branch of it. So yes, the adjustment was difficult, but not impossible. On the other hand, when I tell my students that and they think this validates the American myth, I say, “But you might think a couple things.” We didn’t come as poor refugees. We came as educated people. My father was fluent in English, he had a doctor of law degree. So it’s easier to make it, especially if you know the English.
“It was much harder for my mother. When she came to America, she literally did not know how to cook – she had had cooks. She literally did not know how to clean, and she went to become a cleaning lady in a department store. And she owned only two dresses when she came, one of which was hand sewn for her, navy blue with white lace, and she went to clean in that dress because that’s all she had. So it was very hard for her. I’m very proud of my mother that she learned to cook, that she learned to do all these things because she was forced to.”
“I didn’t get a chance to go back until 1965 and for a very short trip, and everyone was really scared. They had me stay in a hotel; nobody wanted me to stay in their house. My older cousin had married an army doctor; he left town so that he wasn’t even anywhere near the fact that this American escapee was in Bratislava, so that his status in the Army wouldn’t be contaminated by being with me.”
“I had a grant from the university to research my dissertation and I arrived in May of 1969, spent five months there. So I experienced not the Prague Spring, but the undoing of the Spring by the following year. I arrived in May, there were still signs of some freedom. On every building in Bratislava was štyri-dve, 4-2, because that was the score that the Czechoslovak team beat the Russians in the World Hockey tournament [1968 Olympics/World Hockey Championships]. And every wall in Bratislava had 4-2, you know, the kind of subtle protest that people were doing. They couldn’t protest anymore, the army was still there, the Soviet tanks were still there, but 4-2 on every wall.
“Over the summer you could see it slowly progressing towards more and more control. I worked in the archives, and we would sit and talk politics in May and June, and by July, as you’re getting closer to the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, every one of the archivists would come up to me and say, ‘It’s ok to talk politics with me, but maybe we better not in a group.’ And the tragedy was that everyone said that. So none of them was a police spy, but they couldn’t be sure. That system totally undermined any sense of trust you had between people. And so you could see that. And as the anniversary approached, two, three days before, you of course had flowers everywhere – a couple of the people had been killed in Bratislava and then some in Prague. And then on the day of the anniversary of the invasion, a huge silent crowd gathered in the main square in Bratislava, and the soldiers were there with guns and tanks. And I was standing to the side and my cousin Igor came up and he grabbed me and he pulled me out of there, and he said ‘They’re broadcasting on Slovak radio that all these demonstrations are the work of foreign students. You’ve got a foreign student passport here, get the hell out of here.’ So he pulled me out of there, because that’s what they were blaming the people’s protests on – foreign students.”
“McDonald’s. Come on, I knew communism ended when there was a McDonald’s in both Praha [Prague] and Bratislava. This had really changed. What particularly impressed me, last summer when I was there, I did an experiment. So sometimes I would pretend I didn’t know Slovak and just try English. Every young person speaks English. There was virtually no place that I went in Prague or in Bratislava where, if I pretended I didn’t know any Slovak, I couldn’t get help in English. If not the actual person who was serving me, then somebody would call over. And so, the presence of a much more international culture, the young people feeling free to go everywhere. The children of my cousins who are in their twenties and thirties, they’ll hop to Barcelona for the weekend. For my cousin’s generation who grew up under communism and couldn’t get to Vienna, the idea of hopping to Barcelona…the young people don’t know that at all. It’s a very cosmopolitan, to me, very European culture now. Very much part of Europe.”
Stan himself was not allowed entrance into university and began working as an electrician at the JAWA factory. After one year there, he began his mandatory two-year military service. He returned to work for JAWA and, as his skills as an engineer were noticed, he was offered the opportunity to study electrical engineering at a technical school. Stan took night classes and received his four-year degree. He then became the assistant to Dr. Tomáš Horňák, the technical director at the computer research institute [Výzkumný ústav matematických strojü – Research Institute of Mathematical Machines] in Prague.
In the fall of 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion, Stan and his then-girlfriend, Wendy, decided to leave the country. They received visas to visit family in Vienna for one week and crossed the border. Dr. Horňák, who had left the country earlier that year, helped them find a place to live and helped Stan secure job at Siemens. In February 1969, Stan and Wendy (who had since married) were sponsored by an aunt and moved to the United States. The pair settled in Mountain View, California (they later moved to Redwood City), and Stan got a job at HP where he worked for 25 years. Among other accomplishments, he received a patent and industry-wide recognition for digital computer circuitry.
Stan and Wendy received American citizenship and had two sons. Stan’s hobby of electric cars turned into a business and he ran an electric car dealership for many years. Stan often visits the Czech Republic and says that he ‘feels at home’ when in Prague; however, he has no plans to return there permanently. Now widowed, Stan lives in Redwood City, California.
Stan Skokan was born in Prague in 1942. His father, Vladislav, worked as the chief technical officer for his grandfather’s HVAC business, while his mother, Zdeňka (who had studied electrical engineering), worked for a lighting company in Prague. In 1947, Stan’s father traveled to the United States for an official business trip. Although the 1948 Communist coup occurred while he was there, Stan says that he decided to return on behalf of his two sons. Stan’s grandfather’s business was nationalized and his father was sent to work in a labor camp at Jáchymov for 18 months. Stan’s mother, who had stopped working when her sons were born, returned to work designing appliances. When Stan’s father was released, he began working on a construction site and eventually made his way back up to designing heating systems.
Stan himself was not allowed entrance into university and began working as an electrician at the JAWA factory. After one year there, he began his mandatory two-year military service. He returned to work for JAWA and, as his skills as an engineer were noticed, he was offered the opportunity to study electrical engineering at a technical school. Stan took night classes and received his four-year degree. He then became the assistant to Dr. Tomáš Horňák, the technical director at the computer research institute [Výzkumný ústav matematických strojü – Research Institute of Mathematical Machines] in Prague.
In the fall of 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion, Stan and his then-girlfriend, Wendy, decided to leave the country. They received visas to visit family in Vienna for one week and crossed the border. Dr. Horňák, who had left the country earlier that year, helped them find a place to live and helped Stan secure job at Siemens. In February 1969, Stan and Wendy (who had since married) were sponsored by an aunt and moved to the United States. The pair settled in Mountain View, California (they later moved to Redwood City), and Stan got a job at HP where he worked for 25 years. Among other accomplishments, he received a patent and industry-wide recognition for digital computer circuitry.
Stan and Wendy received American citizenship and had two sons. Stan’s hobby of electric cars turned into a business and he ran an electric car dealership for many years. Stan often visits the Czech Republic and says that he ‘feels at home’ when in Prague; however, he has no plans to return there permanently. Now widowed, Stan lives in Redwood City, California.
“I have a very interesting memory, which can be pinned down to an exact date, so I know how old I was when I remembered it. I remember sirens, and at that time we lived on Londýnská 81 and we were going from the second story down to the basement, and I remember sitting underground in the cellar with one of the persons being dressed up in military fatigues with a gas mask, and he was the organizer of the safety of the citizens. So that is one. Then I remember, after it was all clear, we walked out of the basement and I ran to the street, and at the beginning of the street there was a barricade which people pulled out the cobblestones to force the tanks to go up so they shoot at the bottom of the tanks and people could hide behind the barricades. So that was the time of the uprising of May 5 through May 9, 1945.”
“In 1947 my father traveled to the United States. He was invited by a Jewish family from New York, and I know very little detail about that trip; again, I was too young. But from what I know, it was some kind of business trip on behalf of the Czech government, because my father was traveling on a diplomatic passport. He visited major corporations, like General Electric where I remember he was telling us that he saw a drawing of a locomotive on a huge wall of the building, and he was impressed by the planning and design here. I don’t know how far west he went; I know that he brought some things from Yellowstone Park and he brought flags of several universities, so I think he was visiting some universities. And that’s about all I know.
“Now, my father was caught by the communist revolution, actually being here in the United States, and he was forced to make a decisions: to stay and hope to get the family here, or come back. Well, my father made a crucial decision that it will be actually better if he returned. So he made a decision on behalf of me and my brother to return and face the consequences. In 1949 all the family property was confiscated, my grandfather’s factory was nationalized and, in 1949, my father was arrested and served 18 months in a labor camp.”
“I was going to enter my military service at the time of the Berlin Crisis [1961] so I was called in one month earlier, and they wanted us to become combat-ready very quickly, so I didn’t go through the normal boot camp that every military starts with. Instead they tried to get us driving as fast as we could. Now, I prepared for the military service a little bit by getting a truck driver’s license before getting to military service hoping that it will help me get a better assignment, and I did.
“But the surprise came about two weeks after the beginning of military service. The [officer] goes by my platoon and asks ‘How many of you have a high school diploma?’ Well, the mix there was that there were a few of us from Prague, and there were many sheepherders from the eastern part of Slovakia, so there were only two of us that raised our hand. So he picked us up and we were given train tickets to go back to Prague, and we were sent to a special course for movie operators, because every military base had their own movie theatre where they were showing the propaganda movies. So they needed two of us as movie operators and I was one of the two, and we were sent to Prague.
“Now, the course was at Prague Castle, and this is something unheard of. In military service, every soldier has to take care of all the chores himself. You have to make your bed, you have to clean your toilet, everything. Now in this special course we were housed together with the presidential guard. We got up in the morning, had breakfast, and had cleaning ladies making our beds and cleaning up after us. So we were sitting in the training courses during the day, we were eating in the cafeteria with the presidential guard, and I was serving my military service in Prague and going home for weekends. Unheard of during boot camp, but that was my luck.”
“During that time when I was finishing up my evening studies, one of the top scientists of the [computer] research institute had one personal assistant and was looking for a second one, and there again is a turn in my life. I was offered a job and I was picked to work with Dr. Tomáš Horňák, and he was the technical director of the institute and he worked independently, not directly on the design of the computer, but on the design of the instrumentation, so the engineers working on the computer can see the progress of their work and debugging and so on. So I worked with Tom for several years. We filed together for some patents, and we liked each other and worked together very well.
“In the meantime, the other top scientists of the computer research institute were slowly disappearing, escaping to the West. Every summertime vacation some of them didn’t come back from a trip to southern Europe and they were slowly making their way to the United States. That started with the founder of the computer research institute, Dusan Svoboda, who happened to be a classmate of both of my parents during their studies in university. So I didn’t know it at that time, but I found out later that that may have been the connection which got me the job at the computer research institute.”
“After one week of having a visa, we went to the Czech Embassy and they gladly extended our visa to one month. After one month, they gladly extended our visa to one year. And that was because the Czech government was hoping that some of the young people will come back and they wanted us to have the opportunity to come back legally. While I was in Vienna I received a letter from the director of the computer research institute [saying] that any time I decide to come back our jobs are guaranteed. Well, six months later, I became an illegal refugee because I left Vienna for the United States.”
“I was quite happy in the job that I had at HP and, again, that’s one of my lucks of life. People in America talk about employment as a job. You are trained to do something, you do your job, and that’s it. I was one of the lucky people [in] that I was rarely given a job. Maybe at the beginning, maybe at the end of my career at HP, but most of the time at HP I was proposing my own ideas; I was implementing my own ideas; I was very respected; and, despite the fact that I had no degree and was surrounded by all PhDs, I did very well. I retired from HP after 25 years with a golden name tag which meant that I can come back anytime and do anything in the company that I want to. At that time, very few people had that privilege.
“During my career there I met most of the HP executives. I had dinners with both Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. I knew them personally. I shared equipment with them occasionally. Bill Hewlett sat on top of my bench during the HP-35 project, which was the first pocket scientific calculator, and I did the largest chips, made by HP at the time, for it. I had a very satisfactory career.”
After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.
Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.
]]>
Savoy Horvath was born in 1933 in Brno, Moravia. Six years later, his family moved to Hradec Králové where his father worked at a German airport as an interpreter and accountant for the Nazis. Savoy’s father was also the leader of a Czech resistance group called 777. Immediately following the War, Savoy’s father was given management of an ESKA bicycle factory in Cheb, a city in the Sudeten region close to the German border. Savoy remembers being active in politics as a young teenager and, as a supporter of the Czech National Socialist (or Beneš) Party, clashing with his peers who held communist views. Savoy went to trade school and began an apprenticeship at his father’s factory, where he became friends with a number of Yugoslav workers. In 1948, he helped a couple of them across the border illegally and, after one escapee changed his mind, Savoy says he was in danger of arrest. Convinced that he must leave the country immediately, Savoy crossed the border into Germany in April 1948.
After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.
Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.
“We were in the woods gathering firewood and a stranger approached us, and he was an escaped Russian major – NKVD political officer – and he wanted to get out to the West. And my father hid him until the war was over, gave him one of his suits and everything, because he was really taken in by the man, and then in May ’45 he delivered him across Czechoslovakia to the American lines and, somehow, he wanted to get to the OSS section and that’s where he ended up, and that’s how my father got the OSS connection with Donovan. And as soon as the Iron Curtain fell he automatically worked for the Americans.”
“For Czechs right after the war, to go live in the former Sudeten area was like moving to the Wild West.”
Why do you say it was like the Wild West?
“Well, because the inland was more peaceful. Over there, with kids, we go out hiking or something, we find an anti-aircraft machine gun, we find piles of ammunition and rifles. I remember we found an abandoned Tiger tank and about 15 of us started carrying ammunition and just dumping it in the open hatch – this was deep in the woods – and then we emptied out big shell casings and made a long path of gunpowder that went about half mile away, and lit it. What a bang. That was the entertainment for after the war for kids.”
“When the Iron Curtain fell in ’48, I got to be real good friends with them because I was the only Czech in town that spoke Yugo, and they knew my political views too, because a lot of them were not Communist. Three of them asked me how to get across the border to Germany. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll take you.’ And I did, and one of them had a change of heart, came back, and turned me in. I was 15 then, and I’m going to school and a couple of my friends said ‘The state secret police is waiting for you. You better not go to school.’ I did go back home. There was nobody at home. I left a note that I’m leaving, that I have to leave. I didn’t have time to go into detail because I was really, really shook up. I had a gold coin collection. I taped it to the soles of my feet with some kind of tape. I took all the money that I had saved up with me, and I took my little briefcase with school books and everything, just in case I got stopped by the border patrol – ‘I’m visiting my friend that lives down over there…’
“So they shanghaied me on a ship. Two days later we’re going through the Suez Canal to Hai Phong. Well, that was French Indochina then. And from Hai Phong we were put on a train to Hanoi to pick up French wounded. I was assigned to one wounded guy that I had to take care of. Back on a train, back to the harbor, back to the ship, and all the way to Marseille, and then I just walked away from it. So my stint, it was a good adventure, because, just stop and think, not 18, I’d seen Africa, North Africa, I’d seen Indochina.”
“And they were poor. I thought I lived much better in Czechoslovakia then he did in America, and once I got there, I knew I did. First thing he says, ‘We got electricity six months ago.’ Outside toilet, phone on the wall with a crank. My uncle, they looked at going to the movies as the devil’s work. They wouldn’t let me listen to popular music, I had to listen to gospel, or…They were fanatical religious.”
In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.
Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.
In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.
Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.
]]>Radek Masin was born in Olomouc, southern Moravia, in 1930. His father, Josef Mašín, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Army who was later executed by the Nazis, while his mother, Zdenka, was a civil engineer, who spent part of WWII in Terezín. Radek and his brother Joseph received bravery medals from Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War. According to Joseph, the brothers attempted to render German fighter planes traveling through their town by train unusable during WWII, and at one point helped a pair of Russian POWs escape.
In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.
Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.
In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.
Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.
“All of a sudden, they yanked me out the cell, brought me to a big room full of people, I did not know… nobody told me what it was about. I was there, there were some people up there on the podium, and I couldn’t make out what it was all about. In about 15 minutes they took me back to the cell. And later on somehow I was told that I was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. That was the whole trial! No defense attorney or anything. Absolutely nothing, nobody asked me nothing, nobody told me anything, you know. That was communist justice.”
“Cleaning the feathers – it came in bags. Goose feathers with chunks of skin on it and all that. All putrid, you know. So lots of dust around and there was a little cell that was meant for probably two people, there were three of us or four of us. It was cold there, you couldn’t… there was a toilet tight next to the door. We had to use the toilet, you know, to relieve yourself, we had to wash ourselves in the toilet and we had to drink out of the toilet because we were not given any water. In the morning you got a little cup of bitter tea, I mean coffee, and that was it. Otherwise showers, maybe they took you into the shower once every two months. We were supposed to be allowed to go out and walk around the yard every other day or so, so maybe once a week, once every 14 days. And the food was completely inadequate. It was so little I got so weak that going, I was on the second floor, I believe, so going up the stairs I couldn’t make it. I was climbing holding onto the railing.
“Once they threw me into the correction… that means in to the solitary…because, they couldn’t prove it of course, they did not have to prove anything, they just said I was communicating in Morse code through the walls. I was, you know, but they couldn’t tell, they just said ‘okay you, you go’ and they put me I think 14 days in that solitary in the basement. Well, that was real pleasant. You did not have your mat there, nothing during the day, not a blanket, just the very light whatever you had on – a shirt and breeches. Otherwise it was ice cold in there. In the morning, they gave you a bucket and you had to scrub the floor, the whole floor. So everything was wet. Then, the rest of the day, you had to stand under the open window at attention. And the snow was coming through the window. At lunchtime they opened the door and threw in a little bowl of red hot soup, or something, you know, you had to gulp it down, you burned your mouth, because in two minutes they were back taking the empty stuff out. And when I came out of it after 14 days, that cold and all that, so every joint I was moving was cracking.”
“We did not have any grandiose plans, you know, like ‘Oh we are going to overthrow the regime.’ That was quite obvious that you cannot do it. You just have to do whatever you can do. Even if it is small stuff, if everybody did a little, that regime could not have lasted six months, you know. But just a little. We tried to do our best under the circumstances. So we did not, we knew something about the second resistance during the War, where people were trying to organize large groups, lots of people, getting ready for big actions. That never worked out, because you have too many people involved, there will be somebody who will blow the whistle, and it is not going to happen. So we decided right from the beginning, knowing what was happening during the War, to keep it small, really tight, really strict security, and just do whatever we could, not trying to contact other people and all that, that was a recipe for disaster.
“There were lots of people, as I could see in the prison, who wanted to do something. They were there, they were connected to some group, big group, then it blew up, they wound up in jail before they could do anything, you know. But they were willing, if they had good leadership, those people would have fought. So, saying that the people did not want to do anything or risk anything, that’s incorrect. There were lots of people who were willing, but the thing is, most people need somebody who tells them ‘do this or do that.”
“The guys, Milan and Joseph, they got off the train at the train station before Berlin – well I thought that was the end of it, the end of them, you know, because I heard shooting and that. So I was under the train and kept going, stopped once or twice more in different stations but now I couldn’t see the names of the stations or anything, so I was thinking to myself ‘Well, I’ve got to get off the train because maybe the train is passing through Berlin, I might wind up in the Communist sector on the other side so, just take a chance…’ I decided the next stop, I’ll just drop and see where I am. That’s all that you could do, you know?
“So I dropped between the rails there and the train left. There was some guy looking through the door there, the glass, and he kind of dropped his jaw, because he saw me there. What he did after that I don’t know, the train was gone and I ran. I got from the railroad yard and I took a hostage there. There were like little shacks or sheds and people living there so I caught a half-drunk guy there and forced him to take me to the American barracks.”
“We had a completely wrong picture of the whole thing – what we thought the army should be like, you know, because the United States Army was something completely different from these national armies, like the Czechoslovak Army. We saw in the Czechoslovakian Army people were very highly motivated, you know, the officers corps and all that. It was the same in most of the… like in Germany, right? Or in France or in England. But here it was a completely different thing. Also, first I thought, prior to – well, it took me a while before I changed my mind but – I thought I would stay in the army. Because I couldn’t imagine being anything except an officer like father. And of course, I thought that was the thing to do. When I saw how it worked here I said ‘No, I don’t want any part of it.’ Because there was also nothing going on, it didn’t look, you see, that was the main thing… because the Korean War was over, nobody knew anything about Vietnam, and our enlistment was up and we said ‘What? We are going to run around here like jerks polishing boots and all this?”
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
]]>Pierre Dobrovolny was born in Brno, Moravia, in October 1933. His father Ferdinand was an artist who worked with, among others, the Czech archeologist Dr. Karel Absolon. Pierre’s mother Růžena was a seamstress. Growing up, Pierre wanted to become a radio mechanic but, he says, this profession was a predominantly feminine one at the time of his graduation, so he went to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study electrical engineering instead. He graduated from technical university in 1958 and says he was ‘lucky’ to do so, given his outspoken nature and his critical view of the Communist government at the time. That same year, Pierre married his partner Vera. His first job upon graduation was at the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where he worked on equipment to measure radiation.
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
“When I was in the dorm I believe they knew everything I was talking about. Because those speakers… Every room had a speaker – like a radio – and the speakers were built two-way. And there was a secret room right at the front of that dorm where nobody was allowed to go, only some students who were Communist Party members. Besides that they had also guns with them. So there was something special going on in that room. And I believe they were listening to people in the dorm. But I didn’t… somehow I didn’t care at that time. It caught up with me later. I mean, somehow I was lucky enough to graduate. Then I got my first job which was with the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where we were building equipment to measure nuclear radiation. I was there for about half a year, and I found out that there was an opportunity to do a PhD – some PhD openings. And since I worked in the ultrasound labs, it was kind of close to what I had been doing before. I applied for that, and they made such a thorough research of my background that they kicked me out, even from my job.”
“There were two parts of the personnel department. One was like here, open where all the files are kept, and there was the other part of it, which was political, which was secret – all your background, even that you had forgotten a long time ago is still recorded. So that guy, who was the head of that department said ‘What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here! You were let go!’”
“You get blamed for it when it is not finished, that thing, but you have what they call responsibility without authority, or something of this kind.”
Vera: “In those days, if something went wrong, he wouldn’t lose his job, but he would go to prison.”
“That’s right, because it could be looked upon as sabotage. So all my colleagues over there, you could see the attitude, they were staying away from it, because the general opinion was – we got all the papers, all the research reports about how things were put together as far as the transmitter is concerned and you could see what they did, how they did it – and the general opinion was ‘It’s an experiment in physics.’ Not something where things have been concluded to the very end. Because some stuff was made really thoroughly, and some other parts were made really in such a way that nobody who was a real engineer would put it together that way.”
Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
]]>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”
“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”
“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”
“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”
“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”
“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of it.’”
Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.
Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.
]]>Pavel Paces was born in the Strašnice district of Prague in 1949. His father, Karel, owned a liquor distillery and his mother, Marie, was the office manager for the business. After the distillery was nationalized following the Communist coup, Pavel’s father became a courier for the anti-communist resistance. In October 1949, (shortly after Pavel’s birth) he was warned by a friend on the local police force of his imminent arrest and left Prague. He spent one month in hiding and then crossed the border into Germany where he stayed in a refugee camp. Pavel’s mother, meanwhile, aided two men who claimed to have met her husband in Germany and said they were traveling to Bratislava. The men were arrested by communist authorities for their illegal cross-border trips, and named Pavel’s mother as an ‘accomplice.’ She was subsequently arrested and held in Pankrác prison for two months. She was released in March 1950 and, one month later, had a guide assist her and her three sons (Pavel and his older brothers Karel and Miloslav) across the border near Cheb. They were reunited with Pavel’s father and lived in Germany for 18 months, first in refugee camps and later in Munich. The family sailed to New York City in November 1951 and settled in the Yorkville neighborhood.
Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.
Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.
“After ’48, he joined the underground and worked through a front firm – it was a French firm, but it was a front for the underground – and he was like a courier. In ’49, October ’49, he received information from a friend of his who was in the local police department that they would be arresting this group of spies in the underground. He left Prague in October after he got word that they were going to arrest him and he spent a month in hiding. Part of that was in Jevany in a mortuary in a cemetery for a week, where he hid out in the mortuary where my uncle would bring him food, until he was able to make his way to [České] Budějovice. [He spent] a total of a month hiding out and then he and a good friend of his made their way into Germany and he was in a camp there, and he tried to get my mother over and the three boys as soon as possible.”
“In January, my mother was visited by two gentlemen who told her that they had met my father at one of the refugee camps in Germany and that my father had sent word through them for my mother to give them money for my father. My mother said ‘I don’t have that kind of money. My husband wouldn’t ever have asked for that money’ and the guy said ‘Well, we had a letter from him but we lost it crossing the border.’ So my mother, being the charitable person that she was, gave him some money because he said he needed money to go and visit his wife in Bratislava. So she gave him some money for the train and she gave him a change of clothing and fed him, and then later that day he returned with another gentleman and again asked her for more money. She said she didn’t have any more and, with that, he said ‘Well, you will regret this decision,’ and he left.
“Next thing you know, my mother was arrested, January 25, and was detained in Pankrác in solitary confinement for two months. At that time, we didn’t know this story – when we were here in the States. My family didn’t really talk about what they went through in Czechoslovakia. My mother never spoke about it and my father very rarely spoke about it. But later, through my brother’s investigations in the archives, he found this story about the two guys who visited my mother and tried to shake her down and blackmail her. Well, instead of going to Bratislava, what they did was they went to the local bar, got drunk, and started bragging about how they go back and forth from Czechoslovakia to Germany and, naturally, there were spies there, communist spies, and they were arrested. When they were arrested, they mentioned my mother giving them aid and, as a result of that, my mother was arrested. All along we thought, prior to this story coming out, that my mother was detained there because of my father, but they had come to arrest my father the morning of October 7 in ’49 – they didn’t find him there – and my mother claimed that she had no knowledge of where my father was. That he left for work that morning and never returned. So in a way, they were not looking for her because of my father; they arrested her because she aided these two guides or blackmailers.”
“[My father] became a machinist. The first few years were rough before he was able to get a machinist job. He painted; he was a waiter; he did handy-man work; he did whatever he could. My mother was home with us; however, the first apartment that we got in New York City, we were janitors, so my mother had to clean the building while my father was at work. So there were many times when my mother would be washing the hallways on her hands and knees with a bucket and a scrub brush; my brothers relate those stories to me. Later on, when I was older, I would go with her cleaning offices, things like that. Much later, my father got my mother a job at the machine shop where he was working, and she worked in the assembly area, putting together the parts that were being manufactured there.
“But my mother worked at Sokol Hall in the kitchen, weddings, making dumplings, whatever they needed, and my father was a porter there at times. My father worked at [Bohemian] National Hall, on 73rd Street, as a waiter during affairs. My brothers did [too]. My father always had two jobs when he was working; the machine shop during the day and a waiter at night. He was a waiter at Vašata’s on 75th between First and Second [Avenues]; he was there for many years. We wound up living in that apartment later on before they retired. We bounced around Yorkville as janitorial jobs became available. We were not janitors at Vašata’s but we moved to 71st Street after 76th and we lived across the street from Sokol Hall. I became very involved there starting at the age of six, and we were the janitors there as well, until we had to move because they renovated and then we lived on Second Avenue between 73rd and 74th around the corner from National Hall. By that time, my father had been working strictly as a machinist and still working nights as a waiter. All my brothers, we all worked. I worked at the restaurants in Yorkville – Vašata, Ruc. My brother Charlie went to school. He became a pharmacist; he worked in a Czech pharmacy in Yorkville.
“Yorkville was a wonderful place to grow up. It was an area where there were ethnic groups. You had your Slovaks, your Czechs, your Hungarians, your Germans. It was like a little Central [Europe sic] there. Czech butchers, Czech bakers, Czech doctors, optometrists. It was like being home away from home for us.”
“I went to Sokol camp in Connecticut. They had a beautiful camp there, and I spent a few summers there, fortunately, to get out of the heat of the city. I had memorable occasions over there. It was a lot of fun [being] amongst other Czech immigrants, and we even had a few Hungarian boys who were there. It was a wonderful experience. Being part of Sokol, the entire organization, was a great experience.”
“My youngest daughter, the schoolteacher, when she was going to school at New Paltz, she decided to study a semester in Prague, at Charles University. So, actually, she’s the first one from my family to go back, because I didn’t go back until she was studying there. That was my first trip there. It was 2005, so that’s going to be seven years ago, and so we went to visit her. Her sister went to visit her before we did, and she came and said ‘I can’t believe you were born there and you didn’t go back yet.’ So I said to my wife ‘Ok, we’re going to go there while Jill’s studying’ and we spent two weeks there, and then I returned there again two years ago. It was an emotional trip for me, naturally.
“I got to visit Strašnice, and I got to go to Kostelec nad Černými Lesy where my cousins live. My father came from a family of butchers, so they’re all butchers. His father was a butcher, his brother was a butcher, my first cousin’s a butcher, his son’s a butcher. Naturally, during the communist years, my uncle was arrested as well. After my father left, my uncle Joe was in the uranium mines for awhile. He suffered a stroke and thank god that they released him early. But being that they were not of the Communist Party, they weren’t allowed to do certain things. [If] you were a butcher, you’re going to be a butcher. You can’t be anything other than that. Educations were stifled; they started school at a later age. So it wasn’t easy for them having stayed back. So I visited them. I went to Tehov where my mother was born. Naturally you visit the cemeteries. I went to Jevany where my father hid out in the mortuary. I saw that little hutch there that’s run down. I couldn’t imagine him spending a week there in the middle of a cemetery waiting to get out of the country.”
In 1964, Michael began traveling outside the country. During several trips to Yugoslavia with his then-wife, Michael became acquaintances with people who lived in Western countries, and eventually garnered an invitation for a visit to Austria. This invitation allowed Michael and his wife to obtain passports and exit visas and, in the summer of 1966, they took the train to Vienna. After a few days there, the pair hitchhiked to Italy, where they claimed asylum and spent seven months in refugee camps in Trieste and Latina.
Aided by the International Rescue Committee, Michael arrived in New York City in February 1967. He quickly found a job and settled into life in the United States. He began taking English classes and, seven months after arriving, started classes at City College, from which he graduated with a degree in math education. Michael spent his career as a junior high and school teacher in the New York City public schools.
Over ten years after leaving, Michael made his first trip back to Czechoslovakia. He has made a point to return often – for many years, Michael made the trip once a year. He is a dual citizen. Since his retirement, Michael has become more involved in the Czech community in New York, enjoying events at the Czech Center and National Bohemian Hall. He also spends his time with the arts, acting, sculpting and attending galleries and exhibitions. Today, Michael continues to make his home in New York City.
]]>Michael Svoboda was born in Prague in 1943. As a young boy, he moved with his family to Komarov in Moravia and then returned to Prague at the age of seven. Michael’s father, Jan, was an engineer who worked as a manager in industrial production factories. His mother, Eva, worked full-time as an office administrator, and Michael and his older sister were often watched by their maternal grandmother. Michael attended gymnázium in Prague; however, he admits that his attitude toward the authoritarian government led to a less than stellar high school record. After graduating, Michael worked as a mechanic for two years before being admitted to university, where he studied engineering.
In 1964, Michael began traveling outside the country. During several trips to Yugoslavia with his then-wife, Michael became acquaintances with people who lived in Western countries, and eventually garnered an invitation for a visit to Austria. This invitation allowed Michael and his wife to obtain passports and exit visas and, in the summer of 1966, they took the train to Vienna. After a few days there, the pair hitchhiked to Italy, where they claimed asylum and spent seven months in refugee camps in Trieste and Latina.
Aided by the International Rescue Committee, Michael arrived in New York City in February 1967. He quickly found a job and settled into life in the United States. He began taking English classes and, seven months after arriving, started classes at City College, from which he graduated with a degree in math education. Michael spent his career as a junior high and school teacher in the New York City public schools.
Over ten years after leaving, Michael made his first trip back to Czechoslovakia. He has made a point to return often – for many years, Michael made the trip once a year. He is a dual citizen. Since his retirement, Michael has become more involved in the Czech community in New York, enjoying events at the Czech Center and National Bohemian Hall. He also spends his time with the arts, acting, sculpting and attending galleries and exhibitions. Today, Michael continues to make his home in New York City.
“My father was a member of the Communist Party and so was my mother, but I never quite believed in the sincerity of his devotion. But, nevertheless, that’s what he was.”
Do you know when they joined?
“1945. Between the Wars, he was a bona fide member of the middle-class bourgeoisie, but I know nothing of his political affiliations then; I just know that he joined the Communist Party after the War. That’s all I know. And he used to talk about being investigated by the Nazis regarding industrial espionage and sabotage. He used to talk about that. But he was never jailed by the Nazis; I guess he passed the investigation.”
That was probably because of his work?
“Yes. Quite, yes. Because he was in management of the factory, so he had some responsibilities. So they were hoping to find some things from him. He used to talk about that quite often.”
“I was beginning to recognize, in my teen years, the nature of the Communist regime, and it somehow made me very negative; I had a negative attitude and of course they [Michael’s parents] knew it. It also reflected in my attitude in high school. As a consequence, I was not a very good student. I saw the school and the school administration as an extension of the regime, and so I was very negative and I didn’t get very good grades at all. I was just muddling through, but I was not a very good student at all. I could have gotten a great education; but I took a chop at that later. I remember when I started going to college eventually – engineering school in Prague first and then America later – I had to literally learn to study because I didn’t form those study habits from high school at all.”
“The next year we were able to travel to Yugoslavia, and we received on the trips to Yugoslavia further world exposure and met people from the West – from Italy, from Germany – and furnished invitations to their countries, which was a requirement for us to get permission to travel West, which was very difficult. But we succeeded in 1966 in getting so-called exit visas to Italy and Austria based on this invitation and based on many earned permissions from various organizations, like school organization, street organization, various neighborly organizations which had to recommend our travel. So it took quite an effort to obtain a passport and this exit visa, but nevertheless we succeeded in that in the summer of ’66.”
“We arrived in Vienna and spent four days in Vienna, staying with a friend. But we didn’t feel safe there to ask for political asylum because Vienna was too close to home and we heard about Communist agents roaming the city. So we proceeded; we got on the road and we hitchhiked to Italy. We arrived in Milan, went to the police, and told them in my very, very primitive Italian that we want political asylum. ‘Ah, well, you have to go to Trieste,’ he explained, which is where the refugee camp was. So we got on Autostrada and hitchhiked to Venice, stopped in Venice, hitchhiked on to Trieste, went to the police, and they took us to the camp.”
“Free country, it was, but still very few changes, relatively, on the surface.”
It was an exciting time.
“Yes it was. It was indeed. People were happy and hopeful.”
Did you have any particular expectations for them?
“I pretty much saw what I expected, which was people were breathing more freely and they were smiling more and they were hopeful and they were looking forward to their future.”
Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.
In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.
]]>Joseph Pritasil was born in Miřetice, eastern Bohemia, in 1925. He was one of seven children raised on a farm by his father, Antonin, and mother, Anežka. Joseph says he had to walk three and a half miles to school on a daily basis and, on Sunday, the family walked the same path to the nearest town to attend church. After receiving his basic education, Joseph attended metal-working school and, from 1942 until the end of WWII, he worked in a local factory as a machinist.
Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.
In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.
“We were drafted into the Army. Three of us [two friends and I] were eligible so we went to the Army. And we went to the Army, which didn’t have any guns, any uniforms or nothing, it was just a joke. There was one sergeant up there, who woke us up in the morning and we ran around – but that was just for one week. Then they told us that they are forming some police force in Prague, and that we would be eligible to join that. So I says ‘okay,’ so I offered to join. But we had to go to Prague and I was the one who passed, the other two didn’t pass, I had the highest education.”
“I – as the officer of a unit – I was immediately suspended and put down among the troops. And there was a new guy who took my place, Fred Kužel, who didn’t know how to write a služební lístek [office memo], if you know what that is. I did all the administrative jobs myself. So, we went around and around, and everything continues. And then one day, one day I got a telephone call from I don’t know where, and a voice says ‘Pepík, is that you?’ I said yes. He said ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 they’re coming to arrest you.’ So that sort of jerked me up a little bit, you know?”
“At night we went on duty. And there was a little hill, and down at the bottom there was a creek and a flour mill. And so I says ‘You know, you guys, I want to go down and see if there is somebody, if I can catch somebody, down by the mill.’ So I went back there, nobody followed me, nobody looked where I was going. Well, I came to the mill, I looked around, nobody was following me, nobody was calling. So I just – being a good Christian – I made my cross on my forehead and crossed the border.”
“When I was in the Army, I also joined the ski troops and I wound up in the 1953 Olympics [sic. International Ski Championships in Garmisch Partenkirchen]. I was not that good, you know. Because I went down the hill, in Garmisch Partenkirchen, and something came into my ski and I flipped over and they carried me out of there.”
So while you were in the Army, you also went to the Olympics?
“Oh yeah, that was in the Army. I was representing the Army there. So they took me to the hospital and there wasn’t anything broken, just a sprain. So they took me in and patched me up, and the next day, there were games going on, so they took me in an ambulance and drove me right to the field where they have the exercises for the Olympics. So, I had a beautiful, beautiful view up there.”
Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.
Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.
In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
]]>Joseph Masin was born in Prague in 1932 and was raised nearby in the Czechoslovak military barracks at Ruzyně, where his father Josef was an army commandant. With the outbreak of WWII, Joseph’s father became a leading figure in an anti-Nazi resistance group called the Tří králové [The Three Kings]; he was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Gestapo one year later. Joseph’s mother, Zdenka, meanwhile, was interned in Terezín concentration camp. Joseph and his brother Radek spent most of the War in the spa town of Poděbrady where, says Joseph, the pair carried out a number of anti-Nazi actions, for which they were decorated by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War.
Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.
Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.
In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
“Our mother, she was jailed twice, and she spent a long time in German jails, and during that time our maid was still with our family and also our grandmother, who came also from a family which was German speaking, so she was looking out for us and actually, it was our grandmother and our maid who saved us when our mother was taken prisoner, when she was in the jail. So, she saved us from going to be reeducated and re-assimilated into the German folks. Our grandmother went to the authorities and she said, when they wanted to take us away, she said ‘look, I am going to look after them, I am German and so I am going to bring them up in the proper frame of mind so don’t worry’ and this is how we were kind of saved.”
“The Russians were very, very friendly, very nice. We just loved them, everybody threw flowers at them, because we were all allies, we just did not recognize… they were our brothers. And as a matter of fact, the first troops which came to Poděbrady, who stayed there, we were so friendly with them. In the evening, they used to dance kozáček and they used to sing and they used to play harmonicas and us kids, we just loved it. And they had the troops… they had women soldiers also and officers were women also and sometimes they even had kids – not their own kids, but somewhere in Ukraine or Poland they were abandoned, orphans, these kids – so they took them with them and they were moving with them. So for us it was all new and they would share their food with us because there was no food, it was a pretty bad situation. So, initially it was all very friendly, it turned 180 degrees later on.”
“When the Germans were emptying some of the concentration camps, they were moving these Jews in open railroad cars during the winter time. And when these people, when they froze, their co-prisoners, they just threw them out of the railroad cars. And these guys, there were two guys, who simulated being dead. They were thrown out and they came through this Colonel Vaněk, they came also to the place where our POW, the Russian guy, came to [a hiding place made by the brothers inside one of the walls of their home].
“And as a matter of fact, before then, I don’t know if you have any experience of this, but kids when they are in their teens, 12, 14, everybody was playing clubs – so we had a club and our club, we dug a hole. Near our village, there was a little patch of woods and a sandpit, and in the sandpit there was a bunch of rabbits and these rabbits, they dig holes, and we enlarged one of the holes and made a kind of cave underneath, and it was our clubhouse. And as a matter of fact, in our clubhouse (because we did not have any place to keep our POWs) after we moved him out of our house, we moved him and these two Jewish ex-German prisoners; they were moved for a certain period to our clubhouse. So we kept them there. We were getting food to them also, because as kids we were not very obvious, we could carry the food and deliver it to them.
“And we have also, at that time through Poděbrady near the place we used to live, German military supply trains used to move and for example, they were moving fighter planes on these supply trains, on flatbed cars. So we went on these flatbed cars with hammers and so on, and we were damaging these fighter planes so that they could not be used elsewhere. But it was not that simple, because when they were moving these military freight supply trains, there was always anti-aircraft… there was the last car and the car right after the steam engine, they had cars with anti-aircraft guns and military guards. But these guys sometimes… either they were drunk or towards the end of the War, the discipline was not what it should have been, so they have not noticed or something and so we were able to do those things. And for these activities after the War we got this medal from Beneš.”
“It was raining, it was freezing, it was snowing. We were wet, our navigation was pretty bad because things in East Germany were not what we thought they would be. We decided… especially Zbyňa [Zbyněk Janata] was nudging us to move quickly, and so we decided to carjack, do carjacking, get a car and move to Berlin on four wheels.
“On that occasion, Radek let his gun… because Zbyněk wanted to have a gun there so just, he let him have the gun and he, for no reason, just to scare people, he fired the gun. And other people traveling on the road, which was the road by Freiburg going up north towards Berlin, other people started stopping, having heard the shotgun. Other cars started to stop and we had to abandon the effort. Because the fellow who was driving the car – it was a Volkswagen, an amphibious Volkswagen, and there was not enough place even in that vehicle for all of us, but when we pulled him out and Radek gave him chloroform, so before then, he pulled the key out of the ignition, and we had no way to start the car. We started to look for the keys, Zbyněk fired the gun and so there were about five, six people all of a sudden, several cars… before then, no cars stopped, but at that time all the cars started to stop and there and they started to chase us through the woods and Zbyněk sprained his ankle real bad.”
“Why we don’t go there? Because it’s not the country we fought for. In the army, in the U.S. Army, we had Slovaks, good Slovaks, there was a fellow; his name was Pokorný – he used to be a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army and he was in Special Forces, there were a couple of other Slovaks. We fought, we wanted to fight for something for Czechoslovakia, united Czechoslovakia, democracy and everything. None of this happened.”
“Democracy is not to drive a Mercedes, svoboda [freedom] is not to go to Cuba on vacation, or to the Caribbean or Mallorca, you know? It takes a little bit more; it’s a frame of mind.”