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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>Jewish Fate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZM3FiOxM8ms?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Most of them ended up in the concentration camps. My best friend and schoolmate and his younger brother and older sister, father and mother perished in the concentration camp. I was about 12 or 13 years old. I came to school one morning and he didn’t come. They day before was the last time I saw him, and they never returned back. Most of them did not return back to my hometown. They perished in the concentration camps, which was a very heartbreaking situation.”</p><h4>Limited News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SgQh2o6s2wo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Listened to BBC London. That was the information during the War for people under the Nazi’s control. They used to come listen at the windows – the Gestapo – [to see] if people are listening to the foreign broadcasting. But that was the only information you could get. Nobody could write to you; they opened the letters. They were interfering with broadcasting. But still, there was a possibility to get some news.”</p><h4>Journey to U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WiCYczcS37c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So I didn’t have some problems getting here. Why? I got an American passport because my parents were American citizens, and I got an American passport in the American embassy in Prague. There were some restrictions and we were worried they won’t let us go out, me and my brother – younger brother – because we were born there [in Czechoslovakia]. And if you were born in that country, you were considered to belong there by them. Luckily we made it through the borders by the train all the way to Paris. We were in Paris for two weeks and Cherbourg one week. Why? There was a strike on the boats, and a couple times they sent us to Cherbourg by the trains and they brought us back to Paris, because they said the strike was over but it wasn’t over. So it took me three weeks in France to wait for the trip.”</p><p>“I came to this country December 5 by boat, which was the nicest trip I ever had in my life. Five and a half days being on the boat, the Queen Elizabeth. As a young man, I met other young people there. We had a good time, excellent food, and the trip in my case was too short. I didn’t want to leave – it was so good.”</p><h4>$0.75/hr.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LgMVnLQfDUY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The people at Garden promised me that after one month I will get $0.80 an hour. I stayed there – a month came, two months came – the raise wasn’t coming. Three months came. Finally I was brave enough to ask what happened to my raise, five cents. I went, on the way home, I didn’t find my punch card at the clock, and I went back to the supervisor. I said ‘Where is my punch card?’ He said ‘You are fired.’ I said ‘Why?’ ‘We can get so many people for $0.75 an hour, why would we pay you $0.80?’ I said ‘I didn’t want to quit, but you promised a five cent increase and that’s all I was asking.’ Nope, I was fired. Despite that I had my cousin in the high position in Garden Electric. But the money was very important to this system.”</p><h4>Major Events</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1PyLxAQKT54?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I met my wife Sunday evening, the day before. I started my business the next day, and I met my wife at the Sunday evening dances in the Sheraton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. So I did two things in my life – met my future wife and start my business. I rented space and I started a very small tannery, and I was making drumheads for musical drums. First batch I made, I went with the samples to the company who were making drums, Ludwig Drum Company. The owner was a gentleman from Germany. He was very nice and knowledgeable, and he liked my product so much he said ‘I will take everything that you make in your place for my drums.’ So I started to produce more and more until I came to the point that he said ‘You are making too many, I can’t use them all.’ So I had to look for new customers for the existing amount of product.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vlastimil John Surak
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Vlastimil Surak was born in 1927 in Brezová pod Bradlom in western Slovakia. His father, Matej, had moved to the United States when he was 15, but returned to Slovakia in 1920 and married his mother, Alžbeta. In 1922, the pair went to the United States, but again returned to Slovakia in 1926. Vlastimil’s father owned two tanneries in Brezová pod Bradlom while his mother stayed home raising Vlastimil and his two brothers. During WWII, Vlastimil recalls hiding in forests and small villages whenever Nazis came through his town to avoid being conscripted or sent to work in Germany.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil attended business school in Bratislava and, upon graduating in 1947, returned to Brezová pod Bradlom to work in his father’s tannery. He says that after the Communist coup in 1948 ‘things started going so bad, there was no other thing on my mind, just to leave.’ Vlastimil and his younger brother Slavomil did not have trouble obtaining passports, as their parents were American citizens. They left Czechoslovakia in November 1948 and sailed to the United States three weeks later on the <em>Queen Elizabeth</em>. Vlastimil recalls this trip as a great experience. They took the train to Chicago where they were met by their older brother, Miloslav, who had come to the United States two years earlier. Vlastimil found lodging with a Slovak family, and eventually found a job with an electric company. He says that it was always his plan to have his own business, and in February 1954, following in the footsteps of his father, Vlastimil started the National Rawhide Manufacturing Company (later Surak Leather Company). Initially, his business was making drum covers, but when rawhide was replaced by plastic, he turned to making leather for jackets and gloves; he owned this business until 1995. Vlastimil’s parents arrived in Chicago in 1964, following what he says was years of persecution under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Following the communists’ rise to power, his father lost his business and properties and was sentenced to prison for a number of years. Because of his American citizenship, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey intervened and was able to secure his release.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil has been married to his wife Elizabeth for over 50 years and they have three children. His two daughters were debutantes with the Czechoslovak National Council of America. In 1989, he was shown on television in Daley Plaza, celebrating the Velvet Revolution; however, Vlastimil has not been back to Slovakia because he says he “doesn’t want to change the picture in his mind” of his home. Today, he lives in Lake Forest, Illinois.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Brezova pod Bradlom
Concentration camp
Family business
marriage
Nazis
Political prisoner
World War II
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6fea25b29739baedf40972d0b0841163
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 Restaurant</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oRPCc00h--U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Up to a certain time, I think 8:00 or 9:00 in the evening, the regular soldiers could come in and eat, okay? By 10:00 they had to be in the camp. And after10:00 or 11:00 the big echelons with the stars [came]… And those are the ones, I remember how they used to, how could I say, enjoy themselves. They were dancing on the table and drinking from the glasses, and then they took those glasses and threw them into the corner, there was a pile of glass like this in the morning, you know? Honest to god, I’m telling you! Not only that but some of these guys, they had those long sabers on their side. And so when they got a little tipsy, a little drunk, you know, they’d pull out their sword and there were chairs and this guy, he’d start cutting the chairs and said ‘this is what we’re going to do to the Russians.’ And chips were flying all over the floor. But they didn’t hurt anybody, our people or anything, except they were against the Russians. But these incidents [happened] and when they were going to the washroom outside, the outhouse, my mother had wash-lines stretched across the yard and they were so – poor guys – they were so stupid with alcohol, there was one guy who was hanging his head over the wash-line and vomiting, you know.</p><p>“But they just had a good time, these people knew how to enjoy themselves. Next day, they came in, two of them and ‘Mr Sarvady, how much? What’s the damage that we did?’ And my father, he knew what to do, if it was $300, he said $600 or $700, a chair is so much or so much. And not even one word was said about it. Everything was undercover, undercover, yeah.”</p><h4>Stepfather Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uXIk9e-N8iQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Anybody who sided with the Germans, they rounded them up and they locked them up. My stepfather was locked up for 117 days. But they couldn’t find anything against him. Because he was strictly a businessman and had nothing to do with politics, you know. He never cared for it. So, after 117, they finally released him. But that wasn’t enough, it was a few months later and one of the gendarmes we knew, who used to be in our town, they had to turn Communist too, but they still were friends and one day he came over to our house and told may father, he says ‘Emil, we have orders to lock you up tomorrow.’ He says, ‘it would be the best thing if we wouldn’t find you here, if you know what I mean.’”</p><h4>Soda Truck</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZV52TkZK9_A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were going with this guy who picked us up, and we were going in this small paneled truck to Vienna, all four of us. So we were traveling, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes, it wasn’t too far from Vienna, where we were, and all of a sudden, right in the middle of the road, there was a soldier, a Russian soldier with an automatic [weapon] on his side – a brbka they call it, you know, with the bullets, you know. So anyway, the driver had to stop, because he was right in the middle of the road. So anyway, the way it turned out was actually our luck, you know, that this guy came with us, because he just wanted to get a ride. So he got up on the back of the truck with us and was riding with us all the way to Vienna. So we come into Vienna and they’ve got the whole set-up out there, they’re checking credential and Ausweis and everything, you know. And I say ‘Oh my god! Which way to run?’ you know? ‘What are we going to do?’ you know? And there were about five or seven cars and a couple of trucks, and these guys, they took their time, you know, these Russians checking this and checking this. And so it was only about two or three vehicles ahead of us and this guy who was sitting with us started swearing and saying ‘What the hell is the matter with you? What’s the hold up here?’ And he [the guard] says ‘Okay, davaj! Davaj! Davaj!’ So he let us go without checking our credentials or anything!”</p><h4>Soccer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzgMujKGz0Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He says ‘All three of you are soccer players and I’ve got a place for you, for all three of you to play soccer on the Hungarian team.’ So I remember, it was the Pannonia team and my two brothers and I, we joined them. There were 11 soccer players and seven of them were Slovak. So [there were] only four Hungarians, but they were a Hungarian team. But we were good. We played about a year or so. And then they got us jobs, I found a job working for Simpson, putting little scooters together, and little baby buggies and so on. They came with a shipment from overseas in little boxes and we put them together you know, and so on.”</p><h4>Learning English from the Bible</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/edoOT2KHuWI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I took the Slovak bible and the English bible and said ‘Well this word is this and this is this, and this word is this’ because the bible is usually word for word the same. And then I started reading newspapers and books and got interested in art and went to art schools and academies and other academies; the Chicago Academy, the American Academy and then the Palette and Chisel… And then I became a studio chairman at the Palette and Chisel, and these are my accomplishments right here – a silver medal, another one is a gold medal, another one is a diamond medal. I was judged by fellow artists, not by the public, by fellow artists – those are the tough ones. And then I started, with another friend of mine, he was a famous seascape artist, Charles Vickery, we started another club, I approached him if he would help me, because my problem was that I was foreign, I didn’t know that much English, I said ‘You’re established, you’re one of the top seascape artists and painters,’ I say ‘Would you help me?’ He says ‘Yeah, we will start it, okay.’ So that’s how we started the club Oil Painters of America; I was the original founder right here.”</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
Dusan Ciran
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Dusan Ciran was born in Brezová pod Bradlom, western Slovakia, in 1929. His father Martin died when he was only a few months old and his mother, Darina, subsequently remarried a widower called Emil Sarvady. Around the time that Dusan started school, the family moved to the nearby town of Senica, where his stepfather took over a restaurant which the whole family helped run. Dusan says that WWII was a particularly profitable time for the restaurant with the establishment proving popular amongst the 2,000 German soldiers stationed at the local barracks.</p><p> </p><p>Following the War, Dusan’s stepfather was arrested on charges of collaborating with the Germans, but was released, says Dusan, when such charges could not be proved. In 1949, a family friend who worked for the local police tipped Dusan’s stepfather off that a warrant was again out for his arrest, prompting Dusan’s family to flee the country that very evening. Dusan says he and his family crossed the Morava River into the Soviet Zone of Austria, from which the challenge was still to make it to Vienna and the American Zone of the country. Dusan’s family successfully did so when the truck they were riding in was stopped by a Soviet soldier, who traveled with the family and shouted at his colleagues at the border checkpoint to hurry up and let them through.</p><p> </p><p>From Vienna, the family was sent to Wegsheid refugee camp in Linz where they spent just over eight months. Dusan and his family arrived in Canada in 1950; they were sent first to Lethbridge, Alberta, to pick sugar beets before moving to Toronto, where Dusan and his brothers Emil and Milan played for the local Hungarian football club – Pannonia – and through this found work assembling scooters at Simpson manufacturers. Dusan moved with his family to Chicago in 1952, settling first on the city’s North Side. He quickly found work at the city’s Continental Can Company, where he rose through the ranks to work in the firm’s master plate department, designing and producing labels. Dusan says he made some extra money at this time by playing violin at Chicago Slovak and Czech events. He attended art classes at the Chicago Academy and then the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Together with artist Charles Vickery, Dusan founded the Oil Painters of America club, which to this day attracts a large membership. Dusan currently lives in Cicero, Illinois, with his second wife Anna.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170611035225/http://www.flickr.com/photos/32224489@N04/page2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to some of Dusan’s artworks</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
1948
Arrest
Arts
Brezova pod Bradlom
Education
emigrant
English language
Family business
German occupation
Political prisoner
refugee
Refugee camp
Restaurant/hotel industry
Sports
WWII