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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Last of WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ISjHw8Q0KXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“For us, it was rather peaceful; we didn’t have too much going on. Some parts of Slovakia had more of a ‘war’ going on, but we didn’t. Actually for us kids, it was a great time. We were running around, our parents were worried, ‘What is going to happen?’ you know, how to feed us, and clothe us, and so on. Us kids, we had a great time.</p><p>“My dad was actually in the army during the War. Slovakia at the time was also a republic, by itself. When the army was disbanded, and was caught by the Germans, he was sent to Germany to work on the farms as forced labor. They needed it; all the German men were in the army, so there was a shortage. So he did work in Germany until the end of the war. Then he came home.”</p><p><em>What sort of years was he away in Germany? One year at the end of the war, or a couple?</em></p><p>“I think it was the last year of the war. I remember him coming home; he got a hold of a bicycle somewhere and peddled home.”</p><h4>Father's Land</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cUe5v59GwaY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1950, they came to our village, or town. They wanted to start collective farms. My father was one of the bigger landowners. So they were pressing on him to become a member of the collective farm. He refused, so he ended up being in jail for six months. And then after six months, they sentenced him to a forced labor in a coal mine. It [the farm] was supporting us very nicely. We had no problem, and we also employed people during harvest. That was one of the things that they threw at us. You were an exploiter of the working class.</p><p>Well, I guess it started little by little. Then I guess the early ‘50s were the most brutal. The regime really took hold and completely dominated. You went with them or else and faced the consequences.”</p><h4>Border Crossing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PE5KeTulxsk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We didn’t take the roads; we went through the fields, and the forest. We walked all night until we came to the border. We knew the border very well because we lived close by. So my dad and my uncle were watching the border guards for a few days to exactly where and when they crossed. And we came to the point where we saw them, they were crossing. And it was on the one at that time they didn’t have the mines yet. They mined the fields, and the one we escaped in had a wire with flares. And we also knew where the flares were so we came to those wires. And they slowly lowered them to the ground. And we walked between them one here and the other there. And my brother, who was only ten at the time, was dragging his feet and he kicked it and the flares went off. And then, night became like day. We were just a couple yards from the border. So we hit the ground and then took off for the border. We came to the border, and the border is divided by a river. We jumped in and crossed into Austria.”</p><p><em>What happened when the flares went off? Did the guards not react?</em></p><p>“We didn’t know. We just hit the ground and we didn’t know. Somebody thought they heard a dog. But later on, somebody else escaped from our hometown. And the captain of the border guard was living in their house. And they told the border guard and they said they saw them, they saw big groups but they didn’t want to engage.”</p><h4>Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tLJSI5xnK3E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had about 18 or 20 suburban newspapers. It was a nice job; actually, it was there where I met… Maybe the name Mr. Murdoch means something to you? [We were his] first acquisition, he was from South Australia, then he came to Sydney, and he bought our string of newspapers. He came to the shop, he talked to us, and I shook his hand. Then a few days later, he bought The Daily Mirror in Sydney. And then, of course, you know where he went from there…”</p><p><em>So, was he a good boss?</em></p><p>“We never saw him, except that one day when he came to introduce himself, so then he was gone!”</p><h4>Return to Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b8nlgjZhHLY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first time I went back was after 15 years, because it was very difficult to go. You know, since we left illegally, you had to apply for a visa and you had to pay and exchange so much money and everybody was watching you. But yeah, we went back quite a few times.”</p><p><em>So the first time was 1967?</em></p><p>“Yes… It was quite an eye-opening experience. I remember growing up as a young boy. In my home town I would get out of the house and I would look the end of the village and I thought that was so far away. And when I came back, Oh my god! That’s like looking at the end of this block! I guess when you are young, and little, everything seems to be a big deal. Especially once you start traveling, and you are exposed to so much in the world, you don’t even realize.”</p><p><em>Had it changed? Or had it remarkably not changed?</em></p><p>“When we were back the first time, it didn’t change that much. It was not a very pleasant experience. It was still under communism, and people were afraid to talk, they would close the doors and put the radio on, and would talk to you so no one would hear you. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But it’s different now of course.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Valentin Turansky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Valentin Turansky was born in Stupava, Slovakia, in 1938. His father, Matuš, worked as a farmer, while his mother, Maria, stayed at home and raised Valentin and his seven siblings, of whom he was the oldest. In 1951, his father was arrested after refusing to incorporate his smallholding into the local co-operative farm. He spent six months in prison, and was then sentenced to a further six months of forced labor, which he spent working in a coal mine. Upon his release in 1952, the Turansky family decided to leave the country. They crossed the Slovak border – as part of a group of 15 people – into Austria. Valentin says the group hit a trip wire on their journey across the border, which detonated a large number of flares but, he says, there was no response from the border guards on duty, which he attributes to the large size of the group.</p><p> </p><p>In Austria, the Turansky family stayed in a refugee camp in Wels for 18 months. Around the time his family immigrated to Australia in 1953, Valentin went to Belgium, where he attended college and gained a qualification in printmaking. A keen soccer player, Valentin played for an amateur team in Brussels upon finishing school and moving to the Belgian capital. He joined his family in Australia at the beginning of 1958 and became an Australian citizen in 1959. There, he started work at the Dunlop shoe factory. He subsequently returned to his trade and worked as a printer for the Cumberland Newspaper Group in Sydney. In 1963, Valentin traveled to America and settled in Chicago. He found a job in a print shop in the city’s Printers Row district. In 1965, he married his wife, Margaret.</p><p> </p><p>Valentin became a U.S. citizen in 1968. He continued to play soccer for the city’s Slovak A.A. (Athletic Association) Soccer Club, which he says enjoyed a good deal of success at that time. Today, Valentin lives with his wife, Margaret, in Prospect Heights, Illinois.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Arrest
Border patrol
Community Life
Forced labor
Refugee camp
Rural life
Sports
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Fascinated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dUVD3cOI42s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was always dreaming about being a cowboy. And I wanted to be in America, because my dad was always talking about being in America and he was singing songs… My dad played guitar and he was singing songs and we used to go out camping, sleeping under the sky and we’d go camping for a vacation and so I was always dreaming of America, and of course the romantic parts about cowboys and Indians, which we read about in the books of Karl May and others, about Winnetou and others – this was really intriguing me. I always wanted to be a cowboy. But because we were living in the town, there was no place to have a horse, and eventually when I got married and had children, we moved to southern Bohemia and I started working on a government farm (JZD) and that gave me a chance to actually purchase a horse, so we had a horse over there and for two years prior to my defection I was living my dream; I was riding a horse across the countryside.”</p><h4>Corral OK</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Bp7wGLxYyrs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Tramping to us was really special, of course you know I was thinking about that when I came to America because the name ‘tramp’ in Czech was somebody who was noble, it was a noble name; it was somebody who was good, a right person, a true patriot, a person who knows nature and loves nature. Of course, in America, tramp is a degrading word, and I didn’t know that until we came over here but the tramping movement was very strong and very big, and like I said, my dad was involved in it, you know, since WWII pretty much. And then of course he lead us that way also.</p><p>“The OK Corral was a group which was my brother, myself and a friend of ours. Of course, we read about the battle of the OK Corral and the shoot out at the OK Corral – again that was a part of American history which we really ate up, which we admired and thought was very interesting. So, we named our group the OK Corral, of course we didn’t do it right, we named our group Corral OK, but that was all that we knew at the time. We didn’t speak English.”</p><h4>Herding</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sAcU9IFhK94?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“No actually it didn’t. It was totally different. The cattle – I was feeling sorry for the animals – because they were chained to the troughs all the time. They were not grazing outside. They grew up chained to the trough until they died. But of course when the calves were young and little, they were separated from their mothers and put in the one building, and when they came to a certain age they moved into different buildings, and when the cows became another age, when they were impregnated for the first time and started having milk, then they were moved to a different place where they were milked. So it wasn’t really the way I was picturing it – the romantic way. There was one time, there was one occasion, when some calves, actually some steer – it was steer – broke out and they ran out. And now somebody has to go and find them. That was my chance, I jumped on my horse and I ran across the countryside until I found them. And I was trying to push them back in, and it didn’t work because they were scared themselves, because they had never been outside. I was trying to push them back in and soon I realized that they were actually trying to follow me. When I was trying to push them they were trying to get behind me, so I ended up just trying to ride my horse back to the village and they actually came with me, they were actually following me all the way to the building. But it was the one occasion when I actually did some cattle herding.”</p><h4>Intercepted</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMJV4uo8k44?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We left that letter in our living room on the coffee table. And we were thinking that if we do defect, if we find a way, we’re going to call them and tell them to go to our apartment, because we gave them keys, and that way they’re going to find more. We didn’t want the government to hear our conversation, so we just told them ‘Go to our apartment and you’re going to find more.’ And if we don’t find a way across the border, we’re going to come back, burn the letter and it’s going to be done and over with. Well, unfortunately what happened is my wife – she had plants, and she was afraid the plants were going to die. So she put the plants in the bathtub and talked to our neighbor, because the apartment was set up that when you open the front door, you walk into the hallway, and when you are in the hallway, you can go into the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and a bedroom. So, she put all the plants in the bathtub, and we locked all the other inside doors and we told her ‘Can you water the plants twice a week’ or whatever they needed. She [my wife] said ‘You don’t need to go anywhere else, I put everything in the bathtub, and all the other doors are locked, so you don’t need to go anywhere else.’</p><p>“Well, the nosy neighbor came in, and she tried the inside keys from her apartment on our apartment doors and of course, they opened. So she walked in the living room and she saw the letter. And she had the news that nobody else had. She felt like a big shot – we were living in a small village – so now she’s walking through the village telling everybody ‘Don’t say anything, but the Vodenkas defected, they are going to America.’ Well, we hadn’t, we were probably just barely across the border. Of course, it came to our employer and our employer had to report it to the police. They immediately called the border crossing and said ‘Arrest these people, stop these people with this license plate, with these passports and with these names.’ Well, luckily for us, we were across the border in Hungary by then, so it didn’t stop us but, again, if we didn’t find our way and we just came back acting like nothing happened, we would have been arrested and sent to prison immediately, so…”</p><h4>Settling</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V5b0ojGRG5I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were not really seeking Czech people, and we also heard in the refugee camp, there were some people who had friends who had actually been sponsored to come to Boston, and they were telling – they were sending letters back to their friends back in Austria and they were saying ‘There’s a Czech community, you don’t even need to speak English over here. There are stores, owners of stores speak Czech, and in the church they speak Czech and in the houses and everywhere, they speak Czech.’ I was actually afraid that we were going to get sent to a place like that, because I wanted to be in America. Because I want to learn English, and the sooner, the better. I knew the sooner we spoke the language, the sooner we could get on with our lives.”</p><h4>NY City 1983</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6LZHndOFdxk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Everybody’s changing their watch to the local time, everybody takes their watch and changes it to the local time. And I took my watch and I want to change it to the local time and I realize, I have the time on my watch already. For the last eight years, my brother one time figured out that in America (of course in America there are a different four zones, time zones, but we didn’t know it then) in America – because America to people who don’t know too much is New York City and pretty much the East Coast – so in America the time is six hours behind our homeland. So he and I changed our watches to the American time. For eight years we had that time on our watches. It kind of helped us get closer to America, because if you look at your watch and know that in America it is 7:00 in the morning, you kind of can picture what people are doing at that time. And if you know that it is 5:00 in the evening, you kind of know that people are coming home, eating dinner and you get a little bit closer a feeling. There were times actually when we celebrated our new years, and then we would wait until 6:00 in the morning in Czech time to celebrate the new year in America, New York City. And we’d celebrate a second new year coming six hours later. So while I was standing over there with those people I just automatically grabbed my watch and I wanted to change it to the time, and I had had that time on it for eight years. And again, I became really emotional because I realized that with my life I had finally caught… I had finally arrived at that right time in which I wanted to be all my life.”</p><h4>Writing a Book</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CnLzajeMbms?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our American friends for 20 years were telling me ‘You need to write a book, you need to write a book. This is an interesting story, people in America need to hear that, they need to know how some people come over here.’ And this is recent also, this is not 100 years ago. People picture this stuff like it was happening decades or maybe even centuries ago. But it’s not, it’s 1983 and people go ‘Oh yeah! My second son was born’ or ‘I got my new job’ or ‘I graduated from high school then.’ So people can relate to it because it’s not a long time ago. And so people were telling me ‘You need to write a book.’ And for 20 years I was saying sure, sure, you know… how am I going to write a book when I don’t even speak proper English? So I was just ignoring it. I didn’t even want to talk about that, I was even getting tired when someone asked me where I was from. Because it was asking too much because of our accent. But then 9/11 came, and suddenly I felt and I was told it was my obligation to talk to people and tell this story. And the idea of the book was brewing in my head. And of course people were pushing us all the time, telling us that. It took 20 years before it actually crystallized, but about two and a half years ago, in the middle of 2007, I started writing that book. I had a helper with me – a lady friend of ours who was doing the grammatical corrections – and I started the book and finished it, so the book is written.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Vodenka
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Peter Vodenka was born in Prague in August 1955, but raised in Mníšek pod Brdy where his father, Stanislav, worked as an industrial designer at an iron ore processing plant. Peter’s mother, Jarmila, worked in the same processing factory. In 1970, Peter moved to Prague to attend trade school, where he trained to become a plumber. He graduated in 1973 and remained in Prague, living in the city’s Vinohrady district. Unhappy with his job three years later, Peter moved back to Mníšek pod Brdy and quit plumbing to become a lumberjack. It was at this time that he met his future wife, Ludmila – the sister-in-law of one of his colleagues. The couple were married at Karlštejn Castle in 1978. A lover of nature and an avid ‘<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Tramping" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tramp</a>,’ Peter moved to rural southern Bohemia to work on a collective farm. It was there, in Hrejkovice, that he and Ludmila started raising their two children. Peter says he moved to southern Bohemia, among other reasons, so that he could have his own horse; he bought a mare and called it Nelly Gray, after an American song he had heard.</p><p> </p><p>Peter says that he has always been fascinated by America: while still living in Czechoslovakia he and his brother Stanislav owned a U.S. military Jeep dating from WWII, set their watches to reflect American Eastern Time and formed a horse-riding, tramping group called the Corral OK. In 1983, Peter decided to immigrate to America with his family. He drove with his wife and two children first to Hungary and then to Yugoslavia, where they left their car at the border and made their way into Austria by foot in the middle of the night. According to Peter, the crossing attracted the attention of patrolling Yugoslav border guards and the family was pursued. They made it, however, into Austria where one of Peter’s cousins, who had emigrated some months previously, picked them up and escorted them to Traiskirchen refugee camp. Peter and his family were there for three days until they were moved to Ramsau. In September 1983, the Vodenkas arrived in America. Peter and his family were sponsored by the First Lutheran Church in Beach, North Dakota, where they settled for a couple of years. Today, the Vodenkas live in Scandia, Minnesota. Peter regularly speaks publicly about coming to America and, in 2007, he wrote a book about his experiences called <em>Journey for Freedom</em>. Today, he runs a construction company and still enjoys outdoor pursuits, such as hunting in the Black Hills.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://www.journeyforfreedom.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peter’s website</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Border patrol
Family life
Karlstejn Castle
Mnisek pod Brdy
Refugee camp
Rural life
Tramping
Western/Pop culture
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73425e41d8ce20316df65c65bceb68d0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Family Farm</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DUF2tmxmQLo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You know, on a farm, you kind of take care of yourself partly and partly the family. So, there was a time – my sister also died fairly young – there was one time when my middle brother Václav and I lived on the farm alone. So we kind of tried to cook. I was only about 12, and so after father passed away [Václav] was a brick-layer, that was his trade and he made good money, but there was nobody to take care of the farm so he came home and I was just school aged. That was about two years we did things like that, and then he got married, because he wasn’t even married at that time, he was about 20 years old. Well, every family goes through some difficult times.”</p><h4>Schoolteacher WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/W86JjlECUGk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Us young teachers were drafted – women teachers were drafted – there were about twenty of us and we were moved, all of us, to a small town, and our job was to repair German uniforms. It was like an assembly line, there were seamstresses who worked on sewing machines, and those of us who didn’t have sewing machines, we just sewed, you know, whatever. And sometimes there was even blood on these uniforms still, because they had taken it off a dead soldier. But then they decided that this was not enough. They sent us women teachers back to school and young men were drafted.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dx1SMxUP1Yc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“On the way, my husband had an idea that it would be good if he loaned part of his uniform to those three civilians who wanted to escape also. So on the way to Karlovy Vary, not too far away, we stopped the car and we got out and the men, one after another, were putting part of the uniform on. When we finally all assembled back in the car it looked like four policemen and me, and I sat on the floor in the back of the car so I wouldn’t be very visible, you know. We were leaving Karlovy Vary, and at the edge of the city, two policemen stopped us – ‘Stop!’ And oh my gosh, now what? That was bad. But my husband was kind of – he was always that way – quick thinking, you know. And he said ‘We’re going to Oldřichov’, because he knew the terrain. He worked there, on the border, you know.”</p><h4>Gunfire at the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/78u_Qb6Cr10?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a creek, and there was the border. And so then the terrain went kind of up. And so we ran and ran through that creek and then we thought ‘Oh, now we are free, we are free!’ But then we heard ‘tat tat tat tat’. They were shooting after us. Czech people were shooting after us! And it was a German policeman, a border patrol man, who saved us. He waved to them to go back, because we were on his land. And so, it is really an irony, that three years before that, Germans were our enemies, and then a German saved us from Czechs!”</p><h4>Husband Expelled</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J8j5GhGwF0Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They told my husband that he has to go to the police station, that they want to talk to him. This was Friday, towards the evening, and my husband didn’t want to do until the following day, but my brother said ‘No, you don’t make your own decision, they wanted you today so you have to go’. So he went. And he was told at the police station that he is not welcome there and that he has to leave in 24 hours. In other words, they threw him out. So, the following day, we had to be at the airport. They took him away and we had to wait. We waited and we waited and they never brought him back.</p><p>“I remember then when we walked away from the airport, somebody was watching us, they walked behind us. We went that Monday, that following Monday, to the American Embassy to tell them what happened, that they had taken my husband away and we didn’t know where he was. They asked if we had seen a plane leaving west or east. We hadn’t seen a plane even, when he left. So that last week we didn’t know where he was, we didn’t have any idea if he was at home. Because at the embassy they told us that cases happened that they took refugees like we were to Russia and nobody ever saw them again. So we were scared, you know. But luckily they just took my husband and kicked him out of the country and sent him home. So he was here when we came home. So that was kind of an experience.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Marie Cada
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Marie Cada was born in the small village of Komorovice, southeastern Bohemia, in 1919. She became an orphan at a young age and spent her early teenage years looking after the family farm with her brother Václav. Marie went to school in nearby Humpolec and then trained to become a teacher at a religious college in Kutná Hora. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1948, she was working at a three-teacher school in Petrohrad, near Prague. Her boss, the school’s principal, had strong anti-communist views. He was let go and Marie was asked whether she would take over his position. Her fiancée, Václav Cada, discouraged her from working for the communists and urged her to escape with him. The pair left Czechoslovakia in March, 1948. They were married in Dieburg refugee camp in Germany in the spring of that year.</p><p> </p><p>Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
American citizenship
Border patrol
Domankova
Education
emigrant
Family life
Forced labor
German
Nazis
Occupation
Oldrichov
refugee
Refugee camp
school
Secret police
Teachers
Women workers
World War II
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eaf578d54c4db3da7108338ab42e6890
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uI7cTwnXzSs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“There were many things, and one thing she did say, which I do remember… occasionally things would come up about Jews and, Jews seemed to have gotten blamed for everything, but he never did though, it wasn’t him specifically, but I think there was always a worry. My father always used to say that Jews unfortunately always picked the line of people that was standing to get a beating. So, I think that had a little to do with it. The system, the communist system had much to do with it. But I think [it was] mostly economics. My aunt… My mother has a wandering soul, she loves to travel, she loves going places, and we were being prevented from doing that, and she wanted to travel, and also my father’s aunts came to visit in 1961. And they started telling him how ‘Oh, an accountant in America! You’ll make a lot of money! That’ll be just great for you!’ So, it was kind of a combination of things. And my father did not want to leave. He really did not want to leave. And my mother kept insisting and said ‘Try! Let’s try it! Let’s try!’ He was 40 and said ‘No, I’m too old.’ Well, no, no, no – try, try, try. So finally, they decided he was going to Vienna on business, and they started ahead of time orchestrating things: having fights, breaking plates in front of friends, all kinds of things so that people would believe there were domestic problems. And part of it was because if he was to escape then the family would be left behind and so there would be no repercussions if he escaped for personal problems – if your problems were political then it was different. So, in 1963, I believe it was March or April, he did stay in Austria.”</p><h4>Hard to Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g8bhZ-_C9Qc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were trying to figure out how to legally emigrate, to reunite the family. I know she wrote to the United Nations, she tried the Red Cross, all kinds of organizations, no one was helping. And we used to go to Prague, she would go to the Foreign Ministry trying to get passports, all kinds of things. At some points she would go and sit on the palace steps of the presidential palace claiming that – at that time it was Antonín Novotný who was the president – he would eventually have to come that way and that she needed to talk to him. She would act up; have hysterical attacks, all kinds of things, hoping that they would release us just to get rid of her because she was an annoyance. But that didn’t happen. Meanwhile, my father was in Israel and he was sent to a kibbutz because Israel was a new country [but] he felt like ‘well, I’ve already built a new country – Czechoslovakia. But now, I really escaped to do better financially, not to get pocket money for cigarettes.’ But he did learn Hebrew and he was working as an accountant there, but his aunts, and again his mother’s sisters and brothers were all here in the United States, so his aunts finally did invite him; they sent an affidavit to invite him, and they sent him money and he went to Detroit. In Detroit, because he didn’t speak English much (my father spoke very good Hungarian and German but not English) he started sweeping factories at night until he learned English.”</p><h4>Exit Permits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4L-XpDBsOlE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Finally she figured out that maybe if she moved to another city… She rented an apartment in Brno, and as soon as she registered at that apartment, she requested in Brno a vacation to Bulgaria. And she never did any paperwork in Bratislava. And it takes at least a week for them to figure out what’s going on. So she was registered in Brno, and within a week we had received a vacation to Bulgaria – a permit to travel to Bulgaria. It was Friday that it came in the mail, she sent me to tell my grandmother (my grandmother didn’t have a telephone) and my grandfather. So, I went to Cífer, my grandmother killed a goose, got it all baked and ready for us, [I] came back on Sunday morning, my mother packed up and on Sunday at midday, I think, we got on the train to travel to Bulgaria. She sewed all the documents we might need, including our report cards and whatever documents we had, birth certificates and marriage certificates; she sewed everything inside our bag. The goose went in there too. And we took damask sheets, because she knew that if we ran out of money we could sell those. And then we took crystal plates, small plates, a desert platter with small plates to go with it – again, so that we could sell that if we ran out of money. But inside the bag were sewn whatever dollars she had collected over the times that she was already beginning to save for this. And she had enough to bribe people if necessary.”</p><h4>Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Vp1NdNtaok?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We walked the hill, there was a little house out there, a man came out to pee and smoke, we had to duck and wait. And of course, in those days, the Karl May movies – Winnetou and all the films about Americans – they were very popular and they were filmed in Yugoslavia. And so we were pretending that maybe they were filmed over here and we weren’t scared for whatever reason. Oh, and just so you know, my mother and I weren’t wearing pants, we only had skirts on, and I guess at that time that I was 13 and my brother was 11. Or, my brother had turned 12 the day we left Slovakia, and I turned 14 when we came to this country. So we walked up the hill, and we walked quite a distance, and down the road we saw the checkpoint, the guard house, was way, way [behind] us, at least a kilometer; there was a small light so you could see it. So we thought ‘Wow! Maybe we’ve…’ And suddenly there were lights, dogs, and people yelling at us, soldiers screaming at us, and the soldiers had machine guns and German shepherds. And luckily my mother yelled, because they yelled ‘Stoj! Ne mrdaj!’ which is in Slovak a very dirty word, but in Slovenian it means ‘Don’t move.’ And I think they must have yelled ‘Kto tam?’ [Who’s there?] or something like that, and my mother answered ‘Women and children.’ And luckily she did, because they did not release the dogs.</p><p>“They had machine guns, but my mother kept yelling ‘Italiano!’ She thought they were Italians, she was hoping they were Italians. They were not, unfortunately. They took us back to that little house, and on the other side of the road they had caught a man who was Polish, trying to escape. And these soldiers were young kids; they were 18 to 21, they were kicking this man, they were beating him on the floor. Yes. And my brother and I, [it was] in front of us. They were being stupid. They were being stupid young kids, basically, but they had the upper hand. They had the power. A car came, they took him immediately, and I believe he went all the way to Poland, that was it, he went to prison. They had no idea what to do with us, they had never had a woman with children try to escape across the border on foot. They apparently had a lot of men trying. So, they kept trying to call the nearby village and figure out what to do. Finally, they said a car will come, nothing came, finally we had to walk back to the village.”</p><h4>Public School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R3jjxRXknDU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were put, it was in an area of Los Angeles that was very, very diverse, and the middle school, or at least the junior high school was at least one third Hispanic and mostly new emigrants, who did not speak English. There were Eastern European immigrants; there were eventually, not immediately, but in ’68, so within a year or so, there were kids that came from Czechoslovakia, there were Russians, because some Russian Jews were getting out, I think. The Russians were letting some Jews emigrate. And so I know I had Russian friends. There were kids from all over. And they had what they called ESL classes, which is English as a Second Language classes. So they put us in those. I think the biggest shock was… I was very novel. I had very short hair. In Slovakia, I was trying to be very fashionable and Mia Farrow who was at that time a big hit, I’m not sure what movie she made, but she had a very short, boyish haircut and I had that. We came to Los Angeles and all the girls had long, blond hair, or were trying to have long blond hair if they didn’t. And in Slovakia, I could pretty much wear anything to school as long as I looked decent. There was a dress code in public school in Los Angeles. And the girls were not allowed to wear pants in those days. Girls had to have stockings, they could not have nylons, they had to be opaque stockings, and we were not allowed to have sandals. Your toes had to be covered. And so there were things that we discovered as one day I came to school in sandals and ended up in the vice-principal’s office – I had no idea why! And I think my ESL teacher saw me in sandals and she knew immediately why, I think she sent a note that I didn’t know etc.</p><p>“But the first thing, when I did come in, because it was such a novelty, the kids took me, and they were trying to be very nice and help me – the first thing that I had to do was ‘I pledge allegiance,’ and that was a shock, because even back in Czechoslovakia, we no longer had to profess our allegiance to the country as much, I mean we did, but we took it as a joke, and suddenly I’m in a country where you’re supposed to be free to do whatever and I am being forced to pledge allegiance. That was difficult, that was difficult to comprehend.”</p><h4>Sweatshop</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CWoX0zuh1WU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She went to sew, and she went into a factory, and she was told she would get one dollar a shirt. And so she was hoping that, apparently, some of these women can make a shirt an hour. She said there was no way that she could make a shirt in an hour. It was a full shirt, it was just unbelievable. She said that some of these women that have been there for a while, they were like machines, I mean, they were just producing and they would not stop, they would not stop to go to the bathroom, they would not stop to talk, to do anything, because they had to make the money. She, after a few days that was it. She tried being a maid in a hotel, That I think lasted a day and a half. She had never worked as hard under communism. She said ‘I never worked! We always had coffee breaks!’ And suddenly she had to do labor. And she went from job to job until she finally found places that were a little less… that were a little more tolerant.”</p><h4>Visiting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LwzjTbaEz-o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Oh now, on my first trip, my grandmother did embroider me a costume because she knew I was interested. So I felt like she embroidered this costume, it was beautiful, and I will wear it to church on Sunday. So I wore it to church, and my grandmother still, and her friends still wore costumes, but the old woman costumes, which were simple. But this was very fancy embroidered, so I wore it to church and got a lot of stares, but on the way back from church, on the street, a car screeches and stops, and a French couple runs out and wants to take my picture. I was laughing, I said ‘If they only knew that I was American wearing this costume!’ But hey, they were just so delighted that they saw costumes, that we were wearing costumes.”</p><h4>Folklore</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8BNwkKkaRls?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We always aim, if there is some event that we need to prepare for, then that’s how we work. We start from that, and they always prepare for St. Nicholas’ feast. There, it’s Czech, Moravian, Slovak carols. Dana Sablik is still helping me and she knows the Czech and Moravian [songs]. She is a professional teacher from the Czech Republic, from Moravia actually. And then I prepare or help out with the Slovak things. The costumes are basically Slovak because that is what I had. I do have some Czech costumes. It is very difficult with a small group for 15 minutes on Friday nights to prepare much, so the other thing we have been asked to do is perform at the European Union Open Doors Day [in May 2011] at the Slovak Embassy, so for that we’ve prepared Slovak dances. I have spoken to Jana Racova about doing something at the Czech Embassy. She was interested, but it is always difficult to work out the time slots. I have Czech dances that I could prepare, and the kids would be interested. But of course, the way it works with the kids is that they want to be very good and perform, but they don’t want to rehearse. And their parents also don’t have the time. And so everyone comes for a little bit on Friday nights. They want to learn. We have language classes from about 7:00 to 7:45, and then we rehearse. Everything is tight, but mainly the kids really want to do the gymnastics. So, by 8:30 they need to be in the gym doing gymnastics, and it is Friday night, they’re tired and they’re antsy. They just want to jump around and have fun.</p><p>“But I think in the long run, kids do appreciate it, I know my children are very heavily interested and involved in Slovakia, they appreciate the folklore and the culture, they enjoy it, and they understand that in today’s society, that’s pretty much the only thing that’s different from culture to culture and that it’s something you treasure and keep, you don’t live it anymore, that’s not how today’s world is, but it identifies you with a group – it’s something that you’re part of, and that has been important for them. I think that those kids who have that, it is good for them, for their soul and actually, it’s just for their mental health.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lucia Maruska
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Lucia Maruska was born in Cífer, a small village not far from Trnava, Slovakia, in 1953. Her father, Alfred, was an accountant at a poultry farm in the village, while her mother, Lydia, was a production manager in the knitting factory there. When Lucia was four, the family moved to Bratislava so that her father could take a job as a comptroller in the city’s municipal services bureau. Lucia says that she and her younger brother, Rastislav, continued to spend every summer in Cífer with her grandparents. Lucia’s father escaped from communist Czechoslovakia when she was nine years old. She says he did so in part because of the bigotry he faced (as he was Jewish), but primarily because her mother persuaded him to go, as she wanted the family to have better economic opportunities and to travel, ‘and we were being prevented from doing that.’ Lucia’s father first went to Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz, before being sponsored by relatives to come to the United States. He started out in Detroit before moving to Los Angeles.</p><p> </p><p>Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.</p><p> </p><p>In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Antonin Novotny
Border patrol
Cifer
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Education
Family life
Fashion
Jews
Maruskova
school
Western/Pop culture
-
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7e1053529fc0b8ec3e250e856199c9a6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Hobbies</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4uBNyVhBfSM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p><em>What style of music?</em></p><p>“This was the military style music. Like over here, John Philip Sousa type. Very nice, and very happy music. Very happy music.”</p><h4>Busy Young Man</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wLDUr-7Nh7c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Participation in March</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7-l4paEKB80?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p><em>So you’re standing in front the castle. How many people are marching would you say?</em></p><p>“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.</p><p><em>Were there chants in the streets? Were you saying certain things?</em></p><p>“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.”</p><h4>German Boarder</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6OCf0B9Duv8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Escaping</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CE4fjnfrin4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lubomir Hromadka
Description
An account of the resource
<p>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).</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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, <a href="/web/20170609084322/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/kveta-gregor-schlosberg/">Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg</a>.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arts
Benes
Border patrol
Cesky raj
Communist coup
emigrant
Jicin
refugee
Refugee camp
Sao Paolo
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6ff2adb99c91282573d5e06a4bc37cef
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Police Officer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jWKsFmlEVE4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were drafted into the Army. Three of us [two friends and I] were eligible so we went to the Army. And we went to the Army, which didn’t have any guns, any uniforms or nothing, it was just a joke. There was one sergeant up there, who woke us up in the morning and we ran around – but that was just for one week. Then they told us that they are forming some police force in Prague, and that we would be eligible to join that. So I says ‘okay,’ so I offered to join. But we had to go to Prague and I was the one who passed, the other two didn’t pass, I had the highest education.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/76L4Wf80-7U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I – as the officer of a unit – I was immediately suspended and put down among the troops. And there was a new guy who took my place, Fred Kužel, who didn’t know how to write a služební lístek [office memo], if you know what that is. I did all the administrative jobs myself. So, we went around and around, and everything continues. And then one day, one day I got a telephone call from I don’t know where, and a voice says ‘Pepík, is that you?’ I said yes. He said ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 they’re coming to arrest you.’ So that sort of jerked me up a little bit, you know?”</p><h4>Guarding the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/533qT7G88xw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At night we went on duty. And there was a little hill, and down at the bottom there was a creek and a flour mill. And so I says ‘You know, you guys, I want to go down and see if there is somebody, if I can catch somebody, down by the mill.’ So I went back there, nobody followed me, nobody looked where I was going. Well, I came to the mill, I looked around, nobody was following me, nobody was calling. So I just – being a good Christian – I made my cross on my forehead and crossed the border.”</p><h4>Ski Event</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PmMviCqxBeE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in the Army, I also joined the ski troops and I wound up in the 1953 Olympics [sic. International Ski Championships in Garmisch Partenkirchen]. I was not that good, you know. Because I went down the hill, in Garmisch Partenkirchen, and something came into my ski and I flipped over and they carried me out of there.”</p><p><em>So while you were in the Army, you also went to the Olympics?</em></p><p>“Oh yeah, that was in the Army. I was representing the Army there. So they took me to the hospital and there wasn’t anything broken, just a sprain. So they took me in and patched me up, and the next day, there were games going on, so they took me in an ambulance and drove me right to the field where they have the exercises for the Olympics. So, I had a beautiful, beautiful view up there.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Joseph Pritasil
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Joseph Pritasil was born in Miřetice, eastern Bohemia, in 1925. He was one of seven children raised on a farm by his father, Antonin, and mother, Anežka. Joseph says he had to walk three and a half miles to school on a daily basis and, on Sunday, the family walked the same path to the nearest town to attend church. After receiving his basic education, Joseph attended metal-working school and, from 1942 until the end of WWII, he worked in a local factory as a machinist.</p><p> </p><p>Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Anti-communist
Border patrol
Community Life
Domazlice
Family life
marriage
Military service
Miretice
Refugee camp
Religion
Sports
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aab3fc3d8e90a8f89f1e0577bf6e2e9c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pzDvWdU_79Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He managed to find this place in FNB Manufacturing – it’s a company which still exists, though now they do different things. He would actually bring me home components which had been rejected to play with. And so I had switches and transformers and things of this sort which I could take apart and unwind and string the wire all over the place. It was actually a bit of a hazard in the apartment.”</p><h4>Elementary</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZRxO2smO0DQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was a school that my grandfather had helped to build. He came to the opening of the school in 1938, it was named in his honor. So I went to my grandfather’s school, so to speak, for the second half of first grade. That was a very bad experience, because the students there were way ahead of anything we had done in the Chicago public schools. And most particularly, they were all writing in cursive, and they were using quill pens that you had to dip into the ink, and I only knew how to write in pencil, and I only knew how to print – I didn’t know how to write cursive. And I had never gone to school in Slovak, and it was a much more formal attitude and when I walked in I had no idea that you were supposed to stand when the teacher came into the room and all those kinds of traditional ways of being in the classroom – that was all new to me. So I was not very happy in that school.”</p><h4>Escape 1949</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lTpwqCNo2Vs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The idea was to move when there was no light in our sector and then drop to the ground as the light started to come closer. And of course it had a fairly regular rotation and so you could be sort of out of reach of the light. I remember very distinctly that this was a heavily ploughed field and so there were big, big chunks of earth and it was not easy walking, especially for little feet. We were held together by a rope, a light string, that we all held onto. And so the leader would go, he had made the crossing a number of times, and he would go when it was safe, he would drop when it wasn’t safe, and the rest of us did the same. And then we came to the barbed wire fence and, in my memory, the wires were either spread, or one was lifted, anyhow – a crawling space was made for me at any rate. And we crossed over to the other side, which was just as dangerous, because it was still ploughed, and it was still within reach of the searchlights, and it was the Russian zone of Austria. So this was not a complete escape by any means. But we did make it across safely and we did end up in another safe house.”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ed0kXN8NmHs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother tried her best to assimilate. My father I don’t think ever really tried to assimilate. He tried to make a living, but that’s different than really assimilating. He didn’t do that, but it wasn’t because he was resentful or because he thought it wasn’t appropriate, he just… I think the energy had gone out of him. By the time of one escape, and then another escape and being jailed in between, and having sort of come from very elevated circumstances and having had to do this really menial work during the war, and trying to run a business and that failing – it was just a tremendous amount of discouragement. And how much the imprisonment had to do with it, I don’t know. We certainly never talked about it, but my cousin in Bratislava… my closest cousin says that he remembers his mother saying that when she saw my father after he’d been released from prison, her first reaction was ‘this is a beaten man.’”</p><h4>Revisit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aR8WZGyH9o4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You just had to be really careful and basically stay out of trouble and find ways of not yielding to the system completely. That was particularly difficult with children, because children went to school, and at school they might repeat anything that was said at home. And so parents were faced with this horrible dilemma of either not saying anything and having their children brainwashed, or saying what they saw was the truth and then risking that everybody would be severely penalized if this ever came out into the open – and this easily could through the children. It was… Not only was it dangerous, but it confronted everybody with the problem of how to live within the regime and not sell out to it completely.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Palka
Description
An account of the resource
<p>John Palka is the grandson of Milan Hodža, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1938. He was born in exile in Paris in 1939, without his father present. His father, Ján Pálka, joined the family some months later, after playing an active role in the anti-Nazi resistance back home. The family spent most of WWII in Chicago, with John attending kindergarten and elementary school there. In 1946, the Palka family returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Liptovský Mikuláš (today found in northern Slovakia), which had for generations been the home of the Palkas. Following the Communist takeover in 1948, John Palka’s father spent four months in jail, and the family eventually fled in 1949, when it was suggested that he may again face arrest. John was nine when the family escaped.</p><p> </p><p>The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Border patrol
Communist coup
Czechoslovak resistance during WW II
Education
Hodza
Lutherans
national
Politics
Prison
school
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2e6b8f5d1e212157d45e567579496822
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Radio Technician</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PfDg9UqL9x4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Bananas</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aWz84uHLncw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Crossing into W. Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/51AhtZaa3Ac?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>DDT</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3RvYCCEYnOY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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 <em>tepláky</em>, 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.”</p><h4>Communication</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dwrgLmvnhM0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Bruno Necasek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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 <a href="/web/20170808010802/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/zdenka-necasek/">Zdenka Necasek</a> 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.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Benes
Border patrol
Divorce
Domazlice
Klenci pod Cerchovem
marriage
Military service
Refugee camp
Vrchlabi
World War II