Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
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Lubomir Chmelar was born in Zlín in 1935. His parents both worked for the Bat’a shoe company, his father, Josef, as an executive and his mother, Anna, as a designer. His mother would eventually start her own fashion design business. At the age of one, Lubomir moved with his parents to Baghdad, where his father was tasked with opening a Bat’a factory. The Chmelars lived in and socialized with the small Czech community there. In March 1939, Lubomir’s father finished his work in Baghdad and planned toreturn to Zlín; however, the day they arrived in Trieste, Italy, and planned to drive to Czechoslovakia was the same day that Hitler occupied the country. They were instead sent to Serbia for a short time before moving to Kenya. Lubomir lived with his parents on the outskirts of Nairobi until he went to boarding school in Britain following the War. He attended Oxford University where he studied civil engineering with the intention of starting an engineering design consultancy in Kenya (where his parents would remain for the rest of their lives). After a two-year apprenticeship in London, Lubomir planned to seek out jobs in Canada and Mexico before returning to Kenya; however, while in Toronto, he met his future wife, Tiree, and, in 1962, the pair married and moved to New York City.
Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
“We were in Baghdad and my father was recalled back to Zlín. He had finished his work in Baghdad, which was the setting up of a factory and he was going back to his new job in Zlín. So we packed up our things, my mother, my father, and I – I being an only child – and set off in this very beautiful car. It’s an old 8-cylinder Packard. It was a lovely ivory color with green leather upholstery. They had bought it for each other as a wedding present way back and had it shipped out from Czechoslovakia to Baghdad. The car was then driven from Baghdad to the port of Beirut. In Beirut, the car was put on a platform, covered in a canvas and hoisted onto the front deck of this boat which was called the S.S. Jerusalem, and off we sailed to go to Trieste. Trieste being the point where we were going to land and then drive the rest of the way through the Balkans and up back to Zlín.
“The journey was uneventful; when we arrived in Trieste, the crane began to unload the car, and as the crane was lowering this car on its wooden platform with a canvas cover, about four feet above the quay, one of the ropes broke and the car slid sideways and fell, sustaining damage. This was terrible for all of us – we weren’t expecting it. My father ran to the telegraph office and cabled back to Zlín saying ‘Looks like I’m going to be quite delayed. Car severely damaged in fall from crane.’ We went off, had coffee, had to plan what we were going to do next, waiting for the telegram. The return telegram came back – and I need to know the timing of this, but I’m going to tell you what I think is right. The telegram came back and said ‘Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what happened at 4:00 this morning?’ And it was Hitler marching into Prague. ‘You stay put until further instructions.’
“Well, it transpired that as a result of our staying put, for whatever it took – I don’t know, a week or so – to repair the car, my father was not taken back into the Czech Republic by the company, but they set him up in Serbia and, from there, Kenya. And as a result of that, our lives were all outside the terrible horror that so many of our relatives and so many of the countrymen of those nations that were first under Nazi rule and then all those years under the totalitarian state suffered. We, by the skin of our teeth, our lives were changed.”
“We first briefly went to a place called Borovo in Serbia where there was a Bat’a factory, and then my father was asked to work with the people in Zlín who were given carte blanche by the Wehrmacht to make shoes for the German Army. They were not going to close that place down. So the Czechs then had to bring in raw materials – rubber from Malaya, various hides, this kind of thing. So there was an import/export business going on between Zlín and various parts of Czech investment, and my father was told ‘Look, you’re going to be an import/export person, but one of the things, but one of the things we’re going to be doing is using you to get certain people out. So you’ll be able to petition for, let’s say, a doctor.’ And many of the doctors were Jewish. Many of the Bat’a doctors, and there were quite a huge number of them, maybe 20 or 30, working exclusively for Bat’a in Zlín. Zlín was an enormous population of Bat’a employees. Many tens of thousands. So he had to be very careful because there were quite a few sympathizers in this Borovo factory with what was going on in the Sudetenland of Czech. So he had to be very careful how he got people out and brought them to Borovo, where he was able to transfer them to various parts of the world. One of the lovely things is that the doctor he brought to Kenya, a man called Sanyi Gellert whose daughter became a doctor, they looked after my parents to their dying day. So in a way, it was a give back for this extraordinary time when the Nazis were already occupying Czechoslovakia, but still people could be brought out.”
“I went to Iraqi school; my first language was actually Arabic. Sadly, it’s gone out of the window supplanted by Swahili which is kind of a coastal Arabic.”
Yet you retained your Czech.
“My Czech, wonderfully, was spoken at home around me all my life and so I’m very grateful for that. That way I was able to go back after the [Velvet] Revolution and spend easy times becoming accepted in the various groups that I had to work with. Had I just come there purely as a Czech in name and not in language, it would have been much more tricky.”
“My first time back, after my very early departure at the age of one, was in 1961, just before I came to the States. I suddenly had an urge to go there, and I borrowed a little Lambretta motorbike and, with virtually no luggage, I went zooming off. It was okay; I was able to go through Čedok, but I had to stay at given designated place, and of course I didn’t, so I went to stay with relatives. I didn’t realize that this was a terribly silly thing to do. So on my way back, I stopped at the front and they said ‘Ok, fine. Let’s see your passport. These are the designated [places]. You never stayed there; I don’t see the stamp.’ I said ‘Well, you know, I have relatives and I was staying with friends.’ So I was held for a day while they verified all this. So I went back and it was very, very dark times. Very gray times.”
“1987 is the time that I saw the possibilities there of a lovely countryside for walking and biking and ecological tourism. So then when ’89 occurred, I’d already been thinking about setting up a trail, but of course, until communism fell it wasn’t practical. And in ’89, I got the idea of bringing the Hudson River Valley Greenway trail concept to a Prague-Vienna greenway trail, as basically a walking and hiking trail from castle to castle, from historic town to historic town, between these two lovely capitals. Got the idea, put it before a lot of funders and they loved it, particularly people like Rockefeller Brothers, German Marshall Fund, American Express Philanthropic. A very important fund was an environmental group called the Hickory Foundation. And so on and so on. We began to work with the World Monuments Fund and they used us and our office in Valtice to start their program. So that kind of snowballed into greenway, restoration of this very important landscape which later became, through World Monuments Fund efforts, a UNESCO designated landscape – the whole thing, 200 square kilometers. And then, from that time, which was about 1992, my wife and I went there and we lived there every year for six months. From 1992 until 2004. That was the period when it really bloomed into a growing thing and spread into neighboring Poland, Slovakia, and it’s now in Bulgaria and Romania. So it’s really a very flourishing concept of biking and hiking trails. But really it’s not so much the tourism, it’s also about community building and supporting heritage, so when you come to a town on the greenway trail, you can go to the local glassblower, artist, meet with them, go behind the scenes, so to speak. And it’s all about that.”
“That’s entirely due to my parents who left when they didn’t want to leave, adored – absolutely adored – their motherland, and if you think of the era of their upbringing, it was immediately after WWI; the first Czech[oslovak] Republic was created; the country was full of hope and vision, and industrious, successful; people were well-educated. What I call First Republic Czechs – a certain type, my father’s contemporaries – they’re wonderful. They have a particular quality to them.”
How would you describe that quality?
“Well, without sounding elitist, they’re very intelligent. They study, they read, they love music, but also they can garden, they can grow turnips. They’re rounded people. And it was a period of little Czechoslovakia industrializing itself. So many industrialists were also very rounded people. Many Czechs that I know of my father’s era had hobbies. Everybody had a koníček, as they call it. My father’s hobby was filming. And they became real experts on geology, anthropology, local law, that sort of thing. So they were very interesting people. Maybe I just hit the mother lode, but other Czechs I’ve spoken to remember this era.
“So then I’m abroad, and there are my parents talking about this place that I come from, over and over again. Showing me photographs; my mother, a lovely cook, teaches our African cooks to do vepřo zelo knedlo [pork, dumplings and sauerkraut], all the local Czech goulashes and stuff. I lived in a funny way in a Czech culture. We spoke a terrible patois at home, of Czech, English and Swahili all mixed up. So it was logical that when this place suddenly got its head above water that something inside me said ‘Come on! See what they were talking about.’”
“I have these ten grandchildren and my mission with them is to demonstrate that life doesn’t end at Montauk Point. So each year I take pairs – never three, you always get a triangle – you take them in pairs and they have to be pushing ten. We go to my place in Mikulov and we spend ten days there, basically meeting little Czech kids, swimming, there’s a little horse riding, bike riding a lot, eating fried cheese which they love (very unhealthy), and then we go to Vienna where I have friends. We stay with friends for three days, and then we go to Venice and stay there for three days. They have to keep a diary and have a little camera and take photographs, and I’ve got through six. This year I’m taking the two boys. I only have two boys, and eight girls. Amazingly, they remember everything.”
Joseph says the War was hard for his family, with his older sister shot dead in a raid on a train carrying her and other commuters to the nearby town of Partizánske (which was known at the time as Šimonovany). Following his sister’s death, Joseph says he was sent to work in her stead at the Bat’a shoe factory in Partizánske as some money was needed by the family, and he was now the oldest child. At the end of the War, the family was reunited and, after some discussion, it was decided that the Kmets would all resettle in Chicago.
Joseph left Czechoslovakia in October 1947. He took a train to Amsterdam, where he boarded a freighter which took him first to Havana, Cuba, and then Florida. Joseph says his family’s first home in Chicago was on Hamlin and 24th Street, which was a very Czech and Slovak neighborhood at the time. Joseph’s first job was at the Kimball Piano Factory; he subsequently worked at Florsheim Shoes and then retrained to become a plumber. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Korea for two years. Upon return, he married his wife Mary, with whom he has four children. Joseph was active in the Slovak League of America and is the former president of the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. He lived in Westchester, Illinois, with his wife Mary until his death in September 2011.
]]>Joseph Kmet was born in Chicago in 1930 but moved back to the family home of Bystričany, northwestern Slovakia, with his parents and siblings before he was one year old. Joseph says his father, Ignác, was worried that the family would not have enough to eat in the United States during the Depression, and so decided to return to Czechoslovakia to farm the land the family owned instead. Joseph’s father returned to Chicago alone to work at Western Felt Works, and found himself cut off from his family with the outbreak of WWII.
Joseph says the War was hard for his family, with his older sister shot dead in a raid on a train carrying her and other commuters to the nearby town of Partizánske (which was known at the time as Šimonovany). Following his sister’s death, Joseph says he was sent to work in her stead at the Bat’a shoe factory in Partizánske as some money was needed by the family, and he was now the oldest child. At the end of the War, the family was reunited and, after some discussion, it was decided that the Kmets would all resettle in Chicago.
Joseph left Czechoslovakia in October 1947. He took a train to Amsterdam, where he boarded a freighter which took him first to Havana, Cuba, and then Florida. Joseph says his family’s first home in Chicago was on Hamlin and 24th Street, which was a very Czech and Slovak neighborhood at the time. Joseph’s first job was at the Kimball Piano Factory; he subsequently worked at Florsheim Shoes and then retrained to become a plumber. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Korea for two years. Upon return, he married his wife Mary, with whom he has four children. Joseph was active in the Slovak League of America and is the former president of the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. He lived in Westchester, Illinois, with his wife Mary until his death in September 2011.
“Well, it was the Depression, and my father – he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to raise the family here, that it would be easier in Slovakia. You know, you’ve got a little farm there, a little garden, so you can grow some of your own stuff. Or maybe, I don’t know, kill a chicken or maybe a rabbit. So, it was easier to be there than here. Here you’ve got to buy everything, so…”
“My sister, she was working in the shoe factory, Bat’a – it was about 12 to 14 kilometers away from our village – they traveled on the train early in the morning (because at 7:00 in the morning they started to work in the factory already). So, my sister she worked there, and the poor, poor girl, she was only 17, and she got killed there, in the village where she was working. Not in the factory, but Russians – airplanes, two of them – came down and the train just pulled in the station and the people were getting off that train, like the workers and they heard a noise… So everybody was ducking wherever they could, so they were running, there was a hospital close-by, maybe about half a block from the train. So most of them were running there, because they had a basement and that’s where most of the people hide. So they were running there and my sister – she was one of the unluckies – there was another one that got killed too. She got shot. They didn’t throw a bomb there, they were just shooting a machine gun from the airplane, so they just came round a couple of time and that was it.”
“Like I said, they started work at 7:00, and you had to make sure you don’t miss the train, because it was pretty far to walk. I had to walk from the factory to our village once, because sometimes the trains were so loaded there was no room to go inside the train. A lot of times, a lot of us climbed up onto the roof and we were there. But you came home and you looked like a chimney sweep.”
“Well, they used to have a good soccer team and most of the time we used to go to the soccer game, because we had to do something before we got to know different things like… They used to have a place in churches, just about every church had some kind of little hall where we could have a stage play and, you know, one time one guy comes from a different place and we hadn’t met yet and we met him, then he had some other friends and he brought those friends over and so… And like I said, even during the winter we used to have indoor soccer, in Chicago Armory.”
“When we first came and joined the club, so we used to rent places here and there, like a storefront. So finally, us younger guys we said ‘Don’t you think that it would be nice if we buy our own joint and have our own club?’ It takes some money, but you can get nothing without money, so anyhow…We talked about it more and more, so we got together and we used to pitch in. One guy would [lend] $100 and another guy $50 and, little by little, we accumulated enough for a down payment. The first club we bought, it was in Chicago on 27th and Hamlin. And like she [my wife] said, we always bought old buildings, no matter what they were – a church or an undertaker’s – and make it into a club! So that’s what we did there too. It used to be an undertaker’s, it used to be [a] church, and we converted it into a club, and so that was the beginning.
“Then finally we sold that too, because the neighborhood changed and so we were mostly living out further west, and so we bought – we started looking for a different joint – so I was in charge of looking for the place to buy. I used to have a plumbing store right next door to this building where there was an undertaker and it was like a double store. And so I went there and I talked to the daughter because I couldn’t talk to the parents, they were both dead already. I talked with her and she said ‘Well, I never thought of that to sell it, where am I going to live?’ I said ‘No problem! You can rent a place, any place you want!’ So that’s what she did, we talked more and talked more and I talked her into it.”
In 1949, Geraldine’s future husband, Boris Kraupner, was worried that he would be arrested and crossed the border. A short time later, he arranged for Geraldine to join him in Germany. With the help of a guide, on the night of July 31, 1949, Geraldine and several other people hid in a farmer’s truck and crossed the border near Aš. She and Boris, who married later that year, spent the next seven years in refugee camps in Germany including Ludwigsburg, Bamburg, and Stuttgart. Geraldine recalls keeping up holiday traditions with other Czech families. While in Germany, Geraldine gave birth to two children, a daughter in 1950 and a son in 1953. In 1956, the Kraupners received an affidavit from their sponsors (a family living near Chicago) and they arrived in Evanston, Illinois, in late November. Soon after, the Kraupners moved to Chicago where they stayed for a few years before buying land and building their own house in Round Lake Beach. Boris began working as a mechanical engineer for Sargent & Lundy, an engineering firm that designed power stations, and Geraldine’s first job was packaging note cards in a shop. She held several jobs over the years, including working in a school cafeteria, selling linens at Carson’s, and sorting mail at Sargent & Lundy. Geraldine and Boris had two more children, a son and a daughter.
The Kraupners met other Czech families and joined the Stefanik branch of the Czechoslovak National Council of America. Geraldine says they continued Czech traditions, especially during the holidays, and brought up their children speaking Czech. Geraldine has been back to the Czech Republic several times, and has participated in Sokol slets while there. Today, she lives in Forest Park, Illinois.
]]>Geraldine Kraupner was born in Roudnice nad Labem, a small town about 40 miles north of Prague. Her father was a chemist while her mother was a seamstress who worked with her grandmother. Geraldine says it was her intention to attend business school, but that most schools were closed as a result of the Nazi occupation when she was old enough to attend. Instead, Geraldine began working at a Bat’a shoe store in Roudnice. Although she remembers little entertainment being available for young adults during WWII, Geraldine enjoyed going to the movies each week. Terezín concentration camp was not too far from Roudnice and, at the end of the War, Geraldine spent two weeks volunteering there for the Red Cross. She says the experience, especially witnessing the state of the survivors, is “something [she] will never forget.”
In 1949, Geraldine’s future husband, Boris Kraupner, was worried that he would be arrested and crossed the border. A short time later, he arranged for Geraldine to join him in Germany. With the help of a guide, on the night of July 31, 1949, Geraldine and several other people hid in a farmer’s truck and crossed the border near Aš. She and Boris, who married later that year, spent the next seven years in refugee camps in Germany including Ludwigsburg, Bamburg, and Stuttgart. Geraldine recalls keeping up holiday traditions with other Czech families. While in Germany, Geraldine gave birth to two children, a daughter in 1950 and a son in 1953. In 1956, the Kraupners received an affidavit from their sponsors (a family living near Chicago) and they arrived in Evanston, Illinois, in late November. Soon after, the Kraupners moved to Chicago where they stayed for a few years before buying land and building their own house in Round Lake Beach. Boris began working as a mechanical engineer for Sargent & Lundy, an engineering firm that designed power stations, and Geraldine’s first job was packaging note cards in a shop. She held several jobs over the years, including working in a school cafeteria, selling linens at Carson’s, and sorting mail at Sargent & Lundy. Geraldine and Boris had two more children, a son and a daughter.
The Kraupners met other Czech families and joined the Stefanik branch of the Czechoslovak National Council of America. Geraldine says they continued Czech traditions, especially during the holidays, and brought up their children speaking Czech. Geraldine has been back to the Czech Republic several times, and has participated in Sokol slets while there. Today, she lives in Forest Park, Illinois.
“The situation got so bad, they asked people to volunteer and go to Theresienstadt and help them over there. So there was a group of us – I was working at Bat’a – there was about four of us girls. We decided we’d go there to see the people – I don’t even want to think about it – how they looked. Skinny, laying outside. It was summertime, it was nice and warm. They let them lay outside, they tried to do as much as they could, our Red Cross, for them to get well. People were sending food, clothes, everything so we had to take care of it, open it, and there were people, nurses, who took the food or the clothing to the people. So we spent about two weeks in Theresienstadt helping them. We were more or less in the kitchen, helping prepare the food, the meals. We didn’t get in direct contact with them because sometimes they had a problem that only nurses could take care of. They worried about us not to get the problem, not to get ill too.”
“Today, the people that went [with me], I’m still in touch. We see each other. They live in Cleveland; we remember those times. When we went to Germany, we lived in Germany in the same town because the U.S. Army built the buildings for us, so we were in one area always together. We tried to keep our holidays, our football [soccer] games like at home. We tried to do the best we can because ‘Oh maybe we might go home soon, we might go home,’ but it never happened.”
“They were selling fabrics – I don’t know if you’ve heard that somebody did this – but there was a guy and he had money, it was a Czech guy, and he had money and he had a car, and he used to go to the factory where they make fabrics, like maybe for suits or coats or whatever. And the remnants, they couldn’t get rid of it, so our people went and they bought it for less money and then they went from one village to another, house to house, and tried to sell the product. They got pretty lucky sometimes. Of course, you put a higher price so you could have money, and another was you had to pay the guy who had the car, you had to pay him for the transportation. So that’s what my husband did for a short time.”
“We always had some program, some entertainment, especially when we had a special occasion happen in the Czech Republic. We celebrated Masaryk or Beneš, or we always had some entertainment to bring us back home. Or, this guy had maybe visited Czech Republic, so they talked about it. It was just culture, we had entertainment too. My husband was very much involved.”