Zdenka Novak was born in Prague in July, 1931. She lived there until the outbreak of WWII when her parents (who owned a delicatessen in the capital) decided to return to their native Kokšín in western Bohemia. In Kokšín, Zdenka’s father Václav set up a feather processing business with a Jewish partner, Emil Goldscheider. Zdenka says her family came under scrutiny because of this partnership and that she remembers the day the Goldscheiders were taken away (none of them returned from the concentration camps they were sent to). During the War, Zdenka remembers attending secret dancing lessons, as dancing was outlawed in the Protectorate in 1941. She says young people had to be ‘inventive’ due to shortages in goods, but that on the other hand they had ‘less expectations.’ At the end of the War, Zdenka’s family moved to Tašovice, near the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, where Zdenka started attending ceramic school. She says one of her proudest moments was being selected to paint a vase for President Edvard Beneš on an official visit to the academy. She studied there until one year after the Communist coup in 1949, when she was arrested on charges of helping smuggle secret documents across the border to the CIC in West Germany. She was interrogated and found guilty without a trial. Zdenka spent 18 months in Prague prisons such as Pankrác and Čtyrka (the StB headquarters on Bartolomějská Street). She escaped through a bathroom window en route from one prison to another in 1951 and went on the run – making her way to territory she was familiar with near Karlovy Vary by train and then walking across the border into Bavaria through the woods.
Zdenka reported at a police station in Mehring, Germany, and was sent to Valka Lager refugee camp. She says she was not there long before she was approached by the American government with a job offer. She moved to Oberursel near Frankfurt to work and it was there, in 1953, that she married her husband Frank (a Czech émigré whom she had met at Valka Lager). At the end of 1953, the couple moved to the United States. They settled in New York City. Zdenka first worked as an office hand at an import/export company but soon became a clerk at an insurance firm. She says that she had many Czech friends in the city and that she enjoyed socializing at Sokol New York in particular. In 1956, she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, when her husband gained a job as a mechanical designer at Beloit Corporation – a factory producing papermaking machines. There, Zdenka and Frank started raising their two children before moving to neighboring Rockton, Illinois. While her children were growing up, Zdenka ran a landscaping business. Today, she continues to live in Rockton. She has traveled to the Czech Republic with her children and grandchildren and says she tries to impress the value of her Czech heritage upon them.
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Zdenka Novak was born in Prague in July, 1931. She lived there until the outbreak of WWII when her parents (who owned a delicatessen in the capital) decided to return to their native Kokšín in western Bohemia. In Kokšín, Zdenka’s father Václav set up a feather processing business with a Jewish partner, Emil Goldscheider. Zdenka says her family came under scrutiny because of this partnership and that she remembers the day the Goldscheiders were taken away (none of them returned from the concentration camps they were sent to). During the War, Zdenka remembers attending secret dancing lessons, as dancing was outlawed in the Protectorate in 1941. She says young people had to be ‘inventive’ due to shortages in goods, but that on the other hand they had ‘less expectations.’ At the end of the War, Zdenka’s family moved to Tašovice, near the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, where Zdenka started attending ceramic school. She says one of her proudest moments was being selected to paint a vase for President Edvard Beneš on an official visit to the academy. She studied there until one year after the Communist coup in 1949, when she was arrested on charges of helping smuggle secret documents across the border to the CIC in West Germany. She was interrogated and found guilty without a trial. Zdenka spent 18 months in Prague prisons such as Pankrác and Čtyrka (the StB headquarters on Bartolomějská Street). She escaped through a bathroom window en route from one prison to another in 1951 and went on the run – making her way to territory she was familiar with near Karlovy Vary by train and then walking across the border into Bavaria through the woods.
Zdenka reported at a police station in Mehring, Germany, and was sent to Valka Lager refugee camp. She says she was not there long before she was approached by the American government with a job offer. She moved to Oberursel near Frankfurt to work and it was there, in 1953, that she married her husband Frank (a Czech émigré whom she had met at Valka Lager). At the end of 1953, the couple moved to the United States. They settled in New York City. Zdenka first worked as an office hand at an import/export company but soon became a clerk at an insurance firm. She says that she had many Czech friends in the city and that she enjoyed socializing at Sokol New York in particular. In 1956, she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, when her husband gained a job as a mechanical designer at Beloit Corporation – a factory producing papermaking machines. There, Zdenka and Frank started raising their two children before moving to neighboring Rockton, Illinois. While her children were growing up, Zdenka ran a landscaping business. Today, she continues to live in Rockton. She has traveled to the Czech Republic with her children and grandchildren and says she tries to impress the value of her Czech heritage upon them.
“No dancing. It wasn’t allowed. I know that we had at one family’s house, they knew somebody who was before a dance instructor, so he would come there occasionally and we gathered and we danced, but that was… if we were caught, we would be in trouble. So that was one of those things, and a lot of things were… you know, we were young girls; we would like to have nylon stockings, we couldn’t get them, you know. With a lot of things you had to be very inventive – to make things interesting and fashionable. You know, from old to new.
“But I think otherwise we were happy. Maybe we were even happier young people than they are nowadays. You know, we didn’t have any expectations. We were taught that we have to work, either physically or mentally, to accomplish things – that nothing comes free in life, and that you should deserve it and be proud of anything, whatever you do. It doesn’t matter how important or unimportant the job is, but you should be always proud of the things you are doing and do it at your best.”
“You know, more or less, I think it was a tradition. You know, nobody talked about it, nobody was so aware of what you are or not. You were a neighbor, you were a friend, you were an ‘Oh, terrible! I wouldn’t talk to him or to her!’ And the kids, we didn’t have any way to get in trouble if we went to Sokol, you know, we didn’t get in any trouble. We got [rid of] our energy, you know, that way.”
“Oh, everything was more open and free. There were more goods to buy and you could plan. You know, I think you do not know what freedom means unless you lose it. You know, we are talking about freedom, but nobody knows what it is, really, until you lose it. You don’t have it, you cannot decide things for yourself, you know. There are so many things which you don’t think about if you live in a free world. And so we were enjoying all those things, and I think we were happy, but it didn’t last too long and then the Communists took over.”
“That was a horrible thing, because you were in a tiny little cell and even when I went to the bathroom I had to leave the doors open. I don’t know what they thought that I will do. It was terrible. Then they interrogated me there, of course, and in Čtyrka too. And I think at Čtyrka they were very rude, very rude. Actually, that was when I learned how to smoke. They brought me from the interrogation and I was completely out, and the girls in the cell gave me a cigarette so, that’s how… Then I had to undo that habit.”
“We had a good time in the bad times too. We used the toilet as a telephone, because we found out that if we empty it, then we can talk to the people downstairs. And we were sending letters through the windows on a thread. So we had all kinds of excitement. But you know every day somebody had to go through the interrogation, and that was tough. So you had to make it nice.”
“Once you take that step, you are in the middle, because you miss certain things from the country you came from, and if you are there, you miss the things from where you are: you have comparison. If you live and stay in the same country, you don’t have any comparison. You know, you can see it on TV or whatever, but you have to live it. It’s like if you go for vacation some place, it’s not to live there. It’s different.”
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?”
In February 1948, just days after the Communist coup, Lubomir participated in a student march supporting former president Edvard Beneš which was stopped by police and militia. Lubomir says that because of his participation in the march he knew he would come under the scrutiny of the authorities and decided to leave the country. He obtained false papers and, with a friend, was escorted to the border near Cheb. After being lost in the forest for several days, Lubomir crossed the border. Upon arriving in Bavaria, he says a German soldier attempted to send him back to Czechoslovakia. According to Lubomir, an American soldier intervened and sent him instead to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he stayed for one year. After being told it would take years to receive a visa to the United States, Lubomir decided to immigrate to Brazil where he found employment as a chemist at Pirelli Tyre Company in São Paolo. Lubomir says he was ‘very happy’ in Brazil, as he formed a small brass band and also wrote articles for a sports newspaper.
In 1957 Lubomir received a visa to the United States and moved to Cleveland. He found employment as a research chemist at Gibson-Homans Company where he worked for over 30 years, becoming a chief chemist, manager, and eventually vice-president. Lubomir is especially proud of discovering a method to eliminate the asbestos fiber in industrial products. In 1959, Lubomir married Jarmila Humpal, an American of Czech descent. He became involved in Czech theatre — writing, updating, and directing plays. In 1994, Lubomir’s Old Style Bohemian Brass Band toured the Czech Republic and he was invited to conduct at the Kmoch Festival in Kolín. Now a widower, Lubomir lives in Washington, D.C. with his former classmate from Jičín, Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg.
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Lubomir Hromadka was born in Folvark in 1926, and grew up in Jičín in northeastern Bohemia. His parents František and Julie owned a pub near Jičín, in the area known as Český raj [Bohemian Paradise]. Lubomir’s father had been in the Czechoslovak Legion during WWI, and Lubomir remembers him participating in annual parades that celebrated the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Music was an important part of Lubomir’s life, and at the age of six he began playing the violin. He learned how to play other instruments, including the trumpet, and played in and led several bands throughout his lifetime. Lubomir attended technical school and says that his studies were occasionally interrupted during WWII if students were needed to work for the German war effort. After the War, Lubomir finished high school and studied chemical engineering at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague).
In February 1948, just days after the Communist coup, Lubomir participated in a student march supporting former president Edvard Beneš which was stopped by police and militia. Lubomir says that because of his participation in the march he knew he would come under the scrutiny of the authorities and decided to leave the country. He obtained false papers and, with a friend, was escorted to the border near Cheb. After being lost in the forest for several days, Lubomir crossed the border. Upon arriving in Bavaria, he says a German soldier attempted to send him back to Czechoslovakia. According to Lubomir, an American soldier intervened and sent him instead to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he stayed for one year. After being told it would take years to receive a visa to the United States, Lubomir decided to immigrate to Brazil where he found employment as a chemist at Pirelli Tyre Company in São Paolo. Lubomir says he was ‘very happy’ in Brazil, as he formed a small brass band and also wrote articles for a sports newspaper.
In 1957 Lubomir received a visa to the United States and moved to Cleveland. He found employment as a research chemist at Gibson-Homans Company where he worked for over 30 years, becoming a chief chemist, manager, and eventually vice-president. Lubomir is especially proud of discovering a method to eliminate the asbestos fiber in industrial products. In 1959, Lubomir married Jarmila Humpal, an American of Czech descent. He became involved in Czech theatre — writing, updating, and directing plays. In 1994, Lubomir’s Old Style Bohemian Brass Band toured the Czech Republic and he was invited to conduct at the Kmoch Festival in Kolín. Now a widower, Lubomir lives in Washington, D.C. with his former classmate from Jičín, Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg.
“As a little boy already I started playing violin. I was about six years old or so, and then later on I switched to flugelhorn and trumpet since I heard the army band in Jičín. So I just loved the brass band. This was my love, music.
What style of music?
“This was the military style music. Like over here, John Philip Sousa type. Very nice, and very happy music. Very happy music.”
“I was involved in sport. I used to play ice hockey and football – what they call here soccer – and also handball. So I was very busy, and with music, I already had a band. So I wasn’t crazy, I was just always busy, busy doing something.”
“I was living in the Masaryk dormitory. This was the biggest dormitory in Prague for more than 1,000 students, and there formed the march to support President Beneš. They caught us before the castle where President Beneš lived, and we got a lot of [beatings] from the police and from the – not the military – but they were from the factories, workers who got arms and they beat us really badly.
So you’re standing in front the castle. How many people are marching would you say?
“Oh, thousands and thousands from all the universities. So we joined someplace and went to this castle to support President Beneš. Oh yeah, many, many thousands. And some people from the streets also joined us and they were supporting us. Only the militia and the police stopped us there. We couldn’t talk to the president. We sent there our representatives, but the militia didn’t let them talk to the president. So it was tough.
Were there chants in the streets? Were you saying certain things?
“Well, especially before the castle we were singing the national anthems. So as long as we were singing the national anthem, they let us. But soon we stopped, so they started to clobber us.”
“Right away when we crossed the border when we got into Germany, there was some German guy – big guy – who tried to stop us. He said ‘What are you doing here?’ We said ‘Well, we are refugees.’ ‘Oh we don’t want any refugees’ the German said, and he tried to push us back to Czechoslovakia. So we were yelling at each other, and apparently the GI, the [American] military people heard, so they came with the Jeep and said ‘What’s happening?’ So I told them ‘He’s trying to push us back, which is no-no because we are refugees.’ So they put us in the Jeep, and we had to disrobe and they checked everything, it was ok. And they gave us the ticket to Ludwigsburg.”
“No, no. No way. This was a starting point for us to go further. So we didn’t want to stay in Germany, but we could immigrate to either to Australia, Canada, or Brazil – I selected Brazil – so it was ok. A starting point to something better.”
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.”
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.”
Frank Schwelb was born in Prague in 1932. He and his parents, Caroline and Egon, lived in the center of Prague, and Frank remembers the Nazi troops marching through the city. Caroline was a language teacher and translator, and Egon worked as an attorney. In March 1939, shortly after the German occupation, Egon was arrested and sent to Pankrác prison. Frank says that his father’s clients included German anti-Nazi refugees living in Prague and believes that this, along with his Jewish background, led to his arrest. He was released after two months. Following his release, they were able to secure exit visas, and, in August 1939, took a train through Germany and the Netherlands where they boarded a ship to England. Frank says that most of his family who were unable to leave the country, including his mother’s sister, died in concentration camps.
Frank’s family settled in London where he attended several different schools, including the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Wales; he maintains contact with many of his classmates from there. His father became a member of the legal counsel of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and served in that capacity from 1940 to 1945. Frank says that his parents initially hoped to return to Czechoslovakia following WWII; however, because of his job, his father understood that the country would likely fall under communist rule and decided not to go back. In 1947, Egon was offered the position of the Deputy Director of the UN Human Rights Division; the family moved to New York City to join him several months after he accepted the post. Frank attended Yale University where he played soccer and joined the NAACP. He began Harvard Law School in 1954, but volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in 1955 to gain military naturalization. He served for two years before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1958. Eager to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Frank began working as a lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in October 1962; his work with voter registration discrimination exposed him to the segregated South. He was named to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was later appointed (by President Reagan) to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where he served as a Senior Judge.
Frank enjoyed speaking Czech whenever he got the chance, rooted for Slavia Praha (a Czech soccer team) and returned to the Czech Republic many times. He was involved in the Czech and Slovak legal community, meeting with visiting lawyers, judges, and students, and he presented the inaugural Rosa Parks Memorial Lecture (in Czech) at Charles University in Prague. Frank lived with his wife, Taffy, in Washington, D.C., until his death in 2014.
]]>Frank Schwelb was born in Prague in 1932. He and his parents, Caroline and Egon, lived in the center of Prague, and Frank remembers the Nazi troops marching through the city. Caroline was a language teacher and translator, and Egon worked as an attorney. In March 1939, shortly after the German occupation, Egon was arrested and sent to Pankrác prison. Frank says that his father’s clients included German anti-Nazi refugees living in Prague and believes that this, along with his Jewish background, led to his arrest. He was released after two months. Following his release, they were able to secure exit visas, and, in August 1939, took a train through Germany and the Netherlands where they boarded a ship to England. Frank says that most of his family who were unable to leave the country, including his mother’s sister, died in concentration camps.
Frank’s family settled in London where he attended several different schools, including the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Wales; he maintains contact with many of his classmates from there. His father became a member of the legal counsel of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and served in that capacity from 1940 to 1945. Frank says that his parents initially hoped to return to Czechoslovakia following WWII; however, because of his job, his father understood that the country would likely fall under communist rule and decided not to go back. In 1947, Egon was offered the position of the Deputy Director of the UN Human Rights Division; the family moved to New York City to join him several months after he accepted the post. Frank attended Yale University where he played soccer and joined the NAACP. He began Harvard Law School in 1954, but volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in 1955 to gain military naturalization. He served for two years before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1958. Eager to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Frank began working as a lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in October 1962; his work with voter registration discrimination exposed him to the segregated South. He was named to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was later appointed (by President Reagan) to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where he served as a Senior Judge.
Frank enjoyed speaking Czech whenever he got the chance, rooted for Slavia Praha (a Czech soccer team) and returned to the Czech Republic many times. He was involved in the Czech and Slovak legal community, meeting with visiting lawyers, judges, and students, and he presented the inaugural Rosa Parks Memorial Lecture (in Czech) at Charles University in Prague. Frank lived with his wife, Taffy, in Washington, D.C., until his death in 2014.
“This Gestapo guy came and arrested him, and he said to him – my father’s blonde, my mother was dark-haired, but my dad was blonde – and he said to him, ‘You can’t be Jewish.’ And my father said, ‘Yes I am.’ And oddly enough, and this is just one of those crazy things because I’m not one to find redeeming features about Nazis, but apparently, this man developed some sort of respect for my father because of what he said. So then my mother told me many years after the fact, she told me she would go daily up to Pankrác prison to see if she could see him or bring him something or something like that, and I don’t know to what extent she got to see him, but she was talking to the Gestapo guy one time and she said, ‘Would it be possible for me to bring my husband some clothes?’ And as she told it, and my mother was a bit of a raconteur, but as she told it, the man said something like this: ‘Clothes? What are you thinking? You think this is a hotel? I’ve never heard of such a thing! Clothes? If you come tomorrow at 3:00 in the afternoon, I’ll see what I can do for you.’ So apparently there was some little bit of humanity in this guy. And that’s always a story I’ve remembered.”
“I didn’t want anybody to think I was any German-speaking Czechoslovak. Probably more than anybody else I know, I felt that way. It’s kind of strange, because many of the German-speaking Czechoslovaks were Jewish and certainly were not Nazis, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it, I wanted to be a Czech Czech. Czechoslovak Czechoslovak. Many of my friends came from German-speaking families, and probably objectively, many people would say I come from a German-speaking family, but I wanted to be a Czechoslovak Czech and that remains. A lot of people with a similar background to mine identify with Israel more than with Czechoslovakia, now it never occurred to me that I was more Israeli than Czechoslovak; I was always more Czechoslovak than Israeli.”
“He made it clear to me that he didn’t want me to grow up in an undemocratic country. That one of the reasons was he didn’t want me to grow up in an undemocratic country. My parents were social democrats and all that. The liberties of the citizen were terribly important to them, as they are to me, which generated the career I chose in this country, and so I was very disappointed [that his family ultimately did not return to Czechoslovakia]. Now my father did go back for a visit, either in late 1945 or early 1946, and he came back desolated, sort of, that it wasn’t the same. There was a strong revenge feeling in Czechoslovakia against the Sudeten Germans, and it’s understandable because many of the Sudeten Germans followed Henlein and Hitler, and the so-called Beneš Decrees removed them collectively, took their homes and removed them collectively. And my father, who had served in President Beneš’ cabinet and who was certainly not sympathetic to Henlein and the Nazis and all that, he said that you cannot have a legal democratic state if you have collective punishment of a group of people without distinguishing individual guilt from individual innocence. And the fact that this was done made him even more distrustful of the possibility of democracy.”
“You know, it was such a terrible thing to happen to my country. I’d always grown up with a memory of the Nazis coming in and killing part of my family and all that, and then we were so looking forward to a peaceful, democratic world after the War was going to be over and we weren’t going to have any, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over/The white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow just you wait and see/There’ll be love and laughter/And peace ever after/Tomorrow when the world is free’ and what do you get. You get a dictatorial one-party regime coming after two and a half years of quasi-democracy. So I was very devastated as a boy.”
“I was driving along the street and I saw a woman; I was looking for the Harmony community in Free Trade, Mississippi. I saw this woman picking cotton in a cotton field, which is something new to me anyway, but I wanted some directions so I walked up to her and I said, ‘Excuse me, but I wonder if you could tell me how to find…’ and I gave her the address, and she pointed out and whatnot. And I thought, ‘What the heck.’ So I said, ‘Ma’am,’ and I don’t think anybody had ever called her ma’am before, but I said ‘Have you ever tried to register to vote?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Vote! You isn’t from around here, is you? Vote! Why we can’t vote. That man over there, the owner, he’d skin me alive. My skin is black, and I know my place. Vote! We can’t vote.’ And sort of retreated into the distance. She also mentioned something about a guy being chased; something about a black guy being chased down the street in Carthage by a white gang, and that’s what she said. This was the free world, the lead country in the free world in December of 1962.”
“Oh boy. Well, first of all, I was more concerned in those days as to what it doesn’t mean. And what I’ve told you about Czechoslovakia, it doesn’t mean the Nazis coming in and locking up my father for representing people or for being Jewish. It doesn’t mean the communists coming in there and hanging Mr. Clementis and so on. It doesn’t mean having one party ruling. And it doesn’t mean subjugating people on account of their race or color.”
Dagmar and her mother spent the next three years in Svatobořice internment camp in southern Moravia, where they tilled the land, washed the uniforms of wounded and dead German soldiers, and made grenades. Dagmar’s brother Milan was jailed in Brno, in dormitories which provided law students accommodation in peacetime. Dagmar says that towards the end of the War, many inmates at Svatobořice were released, but that she and her mother were moved north, alongside another 120 or so prisoners, to another camp at Planá nad Lužnicí. On May 5, 1945, partisans freed the prisoners at this camp. At the end of the War, Dagmar moved back to Prague and was reunited with the other members of her family. Her father returned from London as commander of the liberated territories and became transportation minister in the cabinet of President Edvard Beneš. Dagmar attended Charles University in Prague and the Prague Conservatory and trained to become an opera singer. Following the coup in 1948, her family found themselves under surveillance, says Dagmar, and decided to leave. They crossed the border on July 2, 1948, whilst a Sokol slet was taking place in Prague and diverting police attention. Dagmar says the family was helped by the U.S. Army in Germany; they were accommodated in Frankfurt at the IG Farben building (which served as U.S. Army HQ) until a special military plane flew the family to Washington, D.C. Dagmar’s parents settled on Park Road in the capital, while Dagmar went to University of Kansas to continue her studies.
After completing her degree at KU in Lawrence, Dagmar graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and then received a master’s degree in music education from Columbia University. She moved to Bogota, Colombia, for her first academic post and found herself there at a period of great cultural activity, she says. It was in Colombia that she met her husband Lewis White – an American diplomat. The couple married in 1954. As a result of her husband’s job, Dagmar lived subsequently in New Caledonia, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (where she taught at the national conservatories) and Morocco. In each location, she conducted choirs and continued the pursuit of her musical career. She has two children. Today, Dagmar lives with her husband Lewis (Jack) in Vienna, Virginia. A long-time member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), she chairs the organization’s Christmas bazaar. She founded and directed the local Vienna Light Orchestra in which she sang many of the title roles. Dagmar continues to organize musical programs at the Czech Embassy.
]]>Dagmar White was born in Prague in 1926. Her father, Antonín Hasal, was a high-ranking officer in the Czechoslovak Army, and so Dagmar and her siblings grew up between Brno and Prague, depending upon where her father was stationed at the time. When WWII broke out, Dagmar’s father joined the underground resistance group Obrana národa [Defense of the Nation]. Dagmar says that when ‘things got too hot,’ her father escaped and joined the Czechoslovak Army in France and later the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. He served as President Edvard Beneš’s military adviser and chief of the military chancellery. In 1942, following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, Dagmar, her mother, Josefa, and brother, Milan were arrested in their Prague apartment as part of the Gestapo’s Action E. They were taken to internment camps for political prisoners so that they would not, says Dagmar, provide help and shelter to parachutists sent from Great Britain.
Dagmar and her mother spent the next three years in Svatobořice internment camp in southern Moravia, where they tilled the land, washed the uniforms of wounded and dead German soldiers, and made grenades. Dagmar’s brother Milan was jailed in Brno, in dormitories which provided law students accommodation in peacetime. Dagmar says that towards the end of the War, many inmates at Svatobořice were released, but that she and her mother were moved north, alongside another 120 or so prisoners, to another camp at Planá nad Lužnicí. On May 5, 1945, partisans freed the prisoners at this camp. At the end of the War, Dagmar moved back to Prague and was reunited with the other members of her family. Her father returned from London as commander of the liberated territories and became transportation minister in the cabinet of President Edvard Beneš. Dagmar attended Charles University in Prague and the Prague Conservatory and trained to become an opera singer. Following the coup in 1948, her family found themselves under surveillance, says Dagmar, and decided to leave. They crossed the border on July 2, 1948, whilst a Sokol slet was taking place in Prague and diverting police attention. Dagmar says the family was helped by the U.S. Army in Germany; they were accommodated in Frankfurt at the IG Farben building (which served as U.S. Army HQ) until a special military plane flew the family to Washington, D.C. Dagmar’s parents settled on Park Road in the capital, while Dagmar went to University of Kansas to continue her studies.
After completing her degree at KU in Lawrence, Dagmar graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and then received a master’s degree in music education from Columbia University. She moved to Bogota, Colombia, for her first academic post and found herself there at a period of great cultural activity, she says. It was in Colombia that she met her husband Lewis White – an American diplomat. The couple married in 1954. As a result of her husband’s job, Dagmar lived subsequently in New Caledonia, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (where she taught at the national conservatories) and Morocco. In each location, she conducted choirs and continued the pursuit of her musical career. She has two children. Today, Dagmar lives with her husband Lewis (Jack) in Vienna, Virginia. A long-time member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), she chairs the organization’s Christmas bazaar. She founded and directed the local Vienna Light Orchestra in which she sang many of the title roles. Dagmar continues to organize musical programs at the Czech Embassy.
“He was a Russian legionnaire. In Russia, the czar encouraged colonization, especially in Ukraine, and so lots of Czechs went there, and some ancestors of my father’s settled down there. They were very prosperous – they had a hops farm. Before the outbreak of WWI my father went there to work as an accountant on the hops farm of his relatives. And when the War broke out, he immediately joined the Česká družina – the cradle of the Czechoslovak Legions – and those people who joined so early were called the starodružníci (the old joiners). And so he fought from 1914; he went through the ranks, came back as a colonel, brought his regiment home – he was commanding the Second Rifle Regiment of Jiří z Poděbrad (George of Podebrady), and he didn’t come home until 1920 because he fought in what the legionnaires called the anabáze; they fought on the long stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway all the way from Ukraine to Vladivostok. And then he came back. When the legionnaires were demobilizing, he became a regular army officer and from then on he went up through the ranks.”
“He had his officer’s saber and some weaponry from WWI and, as a memento, it was mounted on a board and displayed in the room. And of course, you could not have any arms. Any pretext – any weapons found were punishable by death. [That was the case with a] friend of my father’s on that farm where we were during the mobilization. So, my mother was a tiny little lady, she was short, and she had lots of guts. And one day, she took these arms off, put them in a bundle, and at night – if they would have caught her, it would have been horrible – she went though Prague and dumped them in the Vltava River, because we didn’t want to [give the Nazis any pretext]. Since father was already in hiding, it would have been another pretext.”
“They called it Action E, the Gestapo – E as in exulants [exile]– you know? They rounded up most of the families who had anybody fighting abroad, to hold us as political prisoners to prevent us from giving aid to Czechoslovak parachutists sent from Great Britain to attack and sabotage the German occupation. Somebody had to hide them and they wanted to prevent that. So they arrested us all and put us in the camp.”
Do you remember that day when they came?
“Oh yes, and my sister, Milica, she was tiny. She was six years old – she’s what, six and a half years younger than I am. So, they took Milan, my brother, my mother and myself and then kicked Milica out of the apartment and left her standing with the keys to the apartment on the street. And that was it. They took us, and so some neighbors then contacted my aunt and she took her in.”
“My mother was always so feisty and I don’t remember what she did but I think some of the gendarmes tried to help, and I guess they caught one smuggling out her letter. So, the punishment place was the morgue. When somebody died, they had the tables for dissecting – it was very primitive and filthy. She was put into the morgue for two weeks. She picked up there an infection in her leg which really was very nasty. But it didn’t break her spirit. And every so often, the Gestapo would come to the camp which they controlled from Brno. They would line us up, and these goons would go and touch our heads, and do some sort of a genetic exam of the shape of our heads to see whether we are Slavs or what we are – they were always looking for Jews. It was frightening.
“And finally in 1945, when the front was coming from the east towards Moravia, suddenly they opened the camp and I thought ‘Oh my god, they are going to shoot us!’ But they let most of the camp go except 120 people, among them was I and my mother, and they lugged us further north, again to keep us as hostages in another camp. We were there just a very short time and by May 5, when there was already the uprising in Prague, the partisans came and opened the gates, because sometimes the SS people were shooting people just as revenge. And they didn’t want that to happen to us. So they opened the gate and let us out.”
“My parents lived on Park Road, our first ambassador Hanak (he used to be our ambassador to Turkey) – he bought a house there. And then all the Czechs suddenly started buying houses there. There were so many of them that they started to call it Prague Road. And it is just the sort of tail of Park Road before the bridge, and if you cross the bridge and go through Rock Creek Park, you come to the Czech Embassy. It’s right there. It’s a very beautiful place, and now the town, I mean Washington, D.C., about three years ago started to put historical markers everywhere to show how each section developed and the diversity of people living there. There is a large historical marker with my father’s picture, my daughter in the Czech national costume, and other photographs of all the Czechs living there to show why they started calling Park Road ‘Prague Road.’”
“Culturally at that time Colombia started to develop a wonderful symphony orchestra, as a matter of fact, lots of players came from Germany, the conductor was Estonian, and so they were just building up the momentum there – the cultural momentum – and it was wonderful. And I was sitting right in the middle of it!”
And do you remember what performances you had there?
“Two times I was a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, in one I was singing French impressionistic music, in the second one all Wagner like Elsas Traum and Senta’s aria and so forth. And then we had chamber music groups in the Museo Nacional. I had a television program with another Czech soprano, she was a coloratura and I was a heavy-type soprano, sort of leaning towards more dramatic, more mezzo. We had a television show sponsored by a Colombian tobacco company. The singer was Adela Geber, they ended up in the United States too, and her husband was a painter. So, when the announcer was telling the story, he was sketching the characters as the announcer was talking, and then we were singing the major arias or duets and so forth. And then we had another chamber music group with flute and harp and voice, so I was singing constantly.”
“In a way, the time is sort of passing, I would say. The SVU was so important during the Cold War. It was practically your patriotic duty to get involved and be involved. But now that the republic is open, the travel of the artists and everything comes here unhindered. And we can go there at will whenever we want. I think the point has been taken out of it a little bit, and we just have to try to rope in somehow younger generations. You know, I know it with my children, or any of the children of the [exiles]. At this time, they are building their careers, They are so involved with their living and their careers that they do not have time for SVU. During the Cold War, we worked hard to uphold the good name of Czechoslovakia, we felt it our duty to work on this. We will see how long [SVU] is going to last.”
Bruno crossed into Germany with two friends near Klenčí pod Čerchovem, western Bohemia, on October 20, 1951. His group was escorted by German police to the town of Cham, where they spent several nights in prison. Bruno and his friends were subsequently sent to Straubing for five days and then on to Valka Lager refugee camp near Nuremburg. Bruno remembers the bedbugs in particular at Valka Lager camp and says of the whole experience: ‘You have no idea how bad that was.’ After almost immigrating to Brazil in 1952, Bruno decided to join the U.S. Army. He served between 1952 and 1957, completing basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then traveling to Austria, where he was stationed as a member of the 516th Signal Company. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957, Bruno settled in Cleveland, where he knew some people from his time in German refugee camps. He became an American citizen the following year. Bruno met his future wife Zdenka Necasek on a trip to Czechoslovakia to see his family in 1972. The pair spent a couple of weeks together before deciding they would marry and that Zdenka would come to live in Cleveland. Preparations for their wedding were complicated when Zdenka was refused an exit visa to visit Bruno in the United States, and Bruno was repeatedly refused permission to enter Czechoslovakia. In the end, the process took four years and the pair were married by proxy, with Zdenka’s lawyer standing in for Bruno at the wedding service. Today, Bruno and Zdenka have two children, who both speak Czech. Bruno is now retired from a career in telecommunications and lives with Zdenka in Seven Hills, Ohio.
]]>Bruno Necasek was born in Semily, northern Bohemia, in July 1932. Both of his parents, Marie and Karel, worked as laborers in textile factories in the region. His parents got divorced when Bruno was still very young, and he was assigned to his father’s care, which he says was somewhat unusual at that period. During WWII, Bruno’s father left home to work in Vrchlabí, and so his paternal grandmother took charge of raising him and ‘making ends meet.’ Growing up, Bruno says his home had no electricity, and he remembers completing his homework by carbide lamp-light and making battery-powered radios to listen to at home. In 1949, Bruno moved to Liberec to study at the town’s textile school, where he says he got into trouble for hanging pictures of former Presidents Masaryk and Beneš on his dorm room wall. Upon graduation two years later, he began working as a statistician in a cotton mill, where, among other duties, he was involved in working on the mill’s five year plan. He emigrated in October 1951 when his supervisor at work warned him that, on account of his ‘political unreliability,’ he may be sent to a mine should his employers find someone else to fill his position.
Bruno crossed into Germany with two friends near Klenčí pod Čerchovem, western Bohemia, on October 20, 1951. His group was escorted by German police to the town of Cham, where they spent several nights in prison. Bruno and his friends were subsequently sent to Straubing for five days and then on to Valka Lager refugee camp near Nuremburg. Bruno remembers the bedbugs in particular at Valka Lager camp and says of the whole experience: ‘You have no idea how bad that was.’ After almost immigrating to Brazil in 1952, Bruno decided to join the U.S. Army. He served between 1952 and 1957, completing basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then traveling to Austria, where he was stationed as a member of the 516th Signal Company. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957, Bruno settled in Cleveland, where he knew some people from his time in German refugee camps. He became an American citizen the following year. Bruno met his future wife Zdenka Necasek on a trip to Czechoslovakia to see his family in 1972. The pair spent a couple of weeks together before deciding they would marry and that Zdenka would come to live in Cleveland. Preparations for their wedding were complicated when Zdenka was refused an exit visa to visit Bruno in the United States, and Bruno was repeatedly refused permission to enter Czechoslovakia. In the end, the process took four years and the pair were married by proxy, with Zdenka’s lawyer standing in for Bruno at the wedding service. Today, Bruno and Zdenka have two children, who both speak Czech. Bruno is now retired from a career in telecommunications and lives with Zdenka in Seven Hills, Ohio.
“You know, I always had a knack for it because I built… we called them crystal sets, I guess they had them here too. The place where I grew up, we didn’t have electricity, so crystal doesn’t require electricity. And I built my own battery – you can take a beer bottle and wind a piece of string around it dipped in, it had to be dipped in alcohol, and you burnt it off, after you burn it off you have to pour cold water on it and snap it, and that thing would be perfect, so that’s how I made my own batteries. And from there I could power something a little more powerful than a crystal radio, but yeah, I always monkeyed around with this, it was my forte, so to say, my cup of tea.”
“I do remember bananas before the War came. And I didn’t see bananas again until I got to Germany in 1951. The first thing I bought there was bananas, honest to god! Because I remembered the taste, I remembered what they looked like, but we couldn’t buy them. They were not available during the War and after the War either. So, six years after the War I ended up in Germany and I still remembered the bananas from 1938, before the War.”
“Domažlice is about three or four stops from the border, but we figured that that was what they call the border zone. And we figured we didn’t want to risk it because in order to get in the border zone you had to have a special permit, okay? This is before the border was fortified, the border zone in some places would be pretty wide. In some places it was narrower, but then when they fortified the border, meaning they put the barbed wire fence there and plowed the fields, then they didn’t care, they could let you go up to the border or pretty close. But up til that time, no they wouldn’t. So, in ’51 we were pretty lucky, they didn’t have the barbed wire fence up, they had a guard with a dog, that would be one guard and one dog, but we were lucky that the wind was coming from Germany to us, so the dog didn’t sniff us. Every once in a while they would leave the place, we were sitting there about two hours, right on the border before we crossed. Because then, I think it was about 1:00, 12 or 1:00, I’m not sure which, he left his area of patrol, so to say, where they went through the motions of changing the guard, so right behind their backs we went down, it was just downhill, you know. So we were in Germany.
“But even there, because we had heard stories that sometimes that sometimes they put the border ahead of it or that the Germans would return the escapees back to the Czechs, you know. So we were looking through the paper that was there on the road and it was German. Okay, so we’re in Germany, we knew that. But the Germans when they interviewed us – and that interview, mind you, that took a long time – I remember from, it was dark already when we left the police station. But they were nice, they offered us cigarettes and they fed us, and the guy took us to the restaurant for supper. He had a rifle, and I couldn’t speak German, not that well, but my buddy spoke almost perfect German. Anyway, the guy says ‘You’re not going to go anyplace are you? I would have to shoot.’ ‘No, we’re not.’ So, he put the rifle in the corner, you know, and just sat down with us.”
“The bedbugs, one guy could lie amongst them and they wouldn’t bother him – that was Lukeš, with the glass eye – the other one, Fišera, he would scratch himself so bad he had open sores. And I tell you, they know where to attack, like where your meat is soft over here. My ears in the morning would be like this, except I didn’t scratch myself as much as he did. And we had tepláky, which is like a sweat suit, sweats – we’d tie it here, tie this, and powder our faces and hands with DDT powder. Well yeah, that’s the only thing there was. And bedbugs, it didn’t bother them, they must have been used to it.”
“Well that was funny too, we would talk sometimes on the phone and all of a sudden you could tell the volume going down and… nothing! And letters, there was a couple of letters that got out of the country by a person who was leaving, okay, those letters you could write what you want, otherwise you had to be careful what you wrote.”
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
]]>Barbara Reinfeld was born in Prague in 1935. Her father, Miloslav, was a journalist who had also worked as a parliamentary stenographer for the National Socialist (or Beneš) Party. Her mother, Zdislava, who studied in the United States for two years, taught English and physical education before Barbara and her older brother, Erazim, were born. In 1941, Barbara’s father was arrested for resistance activity and sent to Pankrác prison for one year. He was then sent to Mauthausen concentration camp for the remainder of the War. Barbara’s mother was taken to Terezín in 1944. While both of her parents were imprisoned, Barbara lived with her mother’s brother in Prague. Barbara’s parents survived Nazi detention and returned to Prague at the end of the War. In 1947, Barbara’s father, who was active in the YMCA, was sent to the United States on a goodwill mission. Soon after he returned, the Communist coup occurred and Barbara’s parents decided to leave the country. In March 1948, the family traveled to Kvilda in southern Bohemia where they met a guide and other escapees. They crossed into Germany on foot and were sent to Regensburg refugee camp. Barbara’s father, with his connections through the YMCA, secured an apartment for the family in Munich where they stayed for almost one year while waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States.
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
“What I remember about school is that the first day of schooling, my official first school experience, was that we had to Heil Hitler when we first started the school day. So these teachers who are all Czech patriots would always do it funny. They wouldn’t do it right, and then the principal would walk down the hall and if he saw a teacher doing it wrong, they could be reprimanded. But they’d do that as a gesture of anti-Nazi [sentiment].”
And the principal was a Nazi?
“No, no, just a Czech that was concerned that a Nazi might be looking over or some inspector would come and see this. The other thing we did was we had to learn German, so as a point of patriotism we made sure we didn’t do well. So I could have very good German, but I don’t because of this. We’d come back with a C [grade] and the parents would say ‘Great! You’re doing great.’”
“My mother, at the end of the War, came back first, and I was living with an uncle of mine. I was so happy to see her; I said I wanted to go home immediately, so we went out on the street and we hailed a truck, and this truck took us home and I was so happy. It had to be one of the happiest days of my life. And then from that point on, everyday my mother would go to meet the transports to see if my father was on a transport coming back from Mauthausen, and for days and days she came back with nothing, so I kind of thought ‘Well, that may be it,’ but then one day she found him.”
“My father, in 1947, came to the States on a mission connected with the YMCA, because he was involved with the Y. He went back [to Czechoslovakia] thinking he had done his mission which was to explain to the Americans that Czechoslovakia was going to be the bridge between the two, between East and West. So it might be communist, but it wouldn’t be anti-American, because the Czech communists were different. Bad idea, but at that time he was operating on that idea.”
Did they believe him?
“Well, some people did because Czechoslovakia had been liberated by both, Russians and the Americans, so on that basis there was this thought that it could be the bridge between East and West. And my father believed it at the time. So he made a tour; it was two months or so. And he thought the tour went well as far as getting the idea across, that Czechoslovakia was not part of the Soviet bloc.”
“My father, I think, was very conscious of the fact that he wouldn’t survive another concentration camp or another prison. My mother was aware of that as well. So no, he did not hesitate at all, because other people were already getting arrested. And, actually, when he was being interrogated by the communists, it just happened that this guy came in and he said ‘Oh, you’re here’ and my father said ‘Yes, I was asked to appear at some hearing’ and this guy said ‘You come see me after you’re finished at [a] room’ in this office building. So my father went there and this guy said ‘You remember me?’ and my father said ‘Of course I remember you.’ It turned out that he had been in Mauthausen with my father but he was a big communist now and he told my father ‘Get out as quick as you can,’ so we did. But even if that hadn’t happened, I think he would have gone, because my father felt so strongly that he couldn’t survive another thing like that.”
Well that’s very kind of the communist.
“See the reason he did that is that my father had been very good to him in the camp. He would always give him an extra roll or whatever because he liked him as a human being. He was always very cooperative and very kind. He was a nice guy.”
“There was always that fear that we would get them in trouble, so we never wrote, and I think at some point they must have found out where we were, but there was no contact. Except one time. One time, the uncle that I used to live with during the War – he was a doctor – he did get out for a conference in Munich and my parents were in Munich. He wrote them, or they were somehow able to communicate and he said ‘Is there anything you want that you left behind?’ Even though we hadn’t told anybody, my mother did tell him that we were going to leave, and he said ‘If there’s anything you really want, bring it to our house and we’ll keep it for you.’ So when my parents asked if there was anything we really wanted to have if we ever came back, I decided to pack up my glass menagerie and it was taken to my uncle’s house, where I lived during the War. Then in the early ‘70s he was able to get out of the country to go to a medical conference and he was able to go to Munich. Somehow he was able to communicate with my parents and he asked ‘Is there anything I can bring?’ They said ‘Bring Barbara’s menagerie if you can’ and he did. So this is extremely precious. And now I’ve added to it a little bit since, and now my grandsons adore this menagerie and they’re so good. They just kneel and look and study and gaze at these wonderful blown-glass figurines.”
So these are examples of Czech glass.
“Exactly. Well, now there’s some other things in there now, but mostly they’re Czech blown glass.”
“The general atmosphere, even though it was hopeful, seemed grim to me and the conversations sounded like conversations I remembered after the War, like ‘This person’s coming back from prison;’ ‘This person’s being arrested by the communists;’ ‘This person’s being somehow mistreated.’ It sounded so similar that I decided I wouldn’t go back until things really changed. Then it looked like things were going to change, for the better obviously, but that got completely nixed by the Soviets, so then it was another 20 years. I didn’t go back until 1990 and then I started going back a lot. And then in 2007, I had a wonderful swan song of my career. I took 20 Hofstra students to Prague. I was the director of the whole program.”
What was the program?
“Hofstra University in Prague. They got credit for history, art, architecture… We had about five or six courses, they could choose three and they got nine credits, and we also did a trip to Auschwitz. It was wonderful. These kids were so wonderful. I was so proud of them. They were great.”