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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>Labor Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-QpAi6WD7Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When the Communists came to power, nobody believed that it would last. It was very unusual; it actually had never happened before. So when they confiscated all our property, my grandma – being a smart woman – decided that since this wouldn’t last she would save some of the stock somewhere else. Save it. Just believing that one year or two years after she could resume the business. Well, they found it. So she was charged with all kinds of things: subversive activity, resisting the will of the working people – as if she wasn’t working! And she was sentenced to go to prison. My father, being a good son, volunteered to go instead of her. So he did. So he went to prison on behalf of her. But when he came back, he couldn’t find any job either. So for the rest of his life he was working as a menial worker in different factories. The lowest of the lowest jobs. Just oiling different machines and wandering around.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/byrM81d3b4s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was assuming that wouldn’t be any problem because I was a very good student. I was winning all mathematical competitions and didn’t have a B in my life, but surprise, surprise, it didn’t turn out that way. Not only they didn’t accept me to any high school, they wanted to prevent me from even entering to an apprenticeship. The communists didn’t want any education for me whatsoever. But at that time, my mother divorced. She found another gentlemen who started working as a miner in Ostrava and, since he was a premier representative of the working-class in Czechoslovakia, he somehow managed to get me into a mining school in Ostrava. So instead of going to high school, I started digging coal underground and going to school during the day, which I was doing for the next four years. Actually, not for the first two years, I must say. I got underground for the first time when I was 16. But for the next two years, between 16 and 18, every other Saturday and Sunday I was working underground. Sometimes 16 hours without interruption.</p><p>“Believe it or not, the most interesting part of that school was the practice and the work I was actually doing after school, on Sundays and Saturdays. That was fascinating for somebody who is 16 years old, or 17, going down half a kilometer and spending, let’s say, six hours lying on the ground, being sandwiched between the floor and the ceiling in a space which is between 40 and 60 centimeters high, and touching something that has been lying there for millions and millions of years. So this was an unforgettable experience. Especially when you experience things like part of the ceiling falling down next to you completely and severely injuring your co-workers.”</p><h4>CVUT Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jILhdHAYd5A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The director of the mining school was a very good guy. He knew how to play the game. He probably was a member of the Communist Party, but he had to. He very soon recognized that I really didn’t belong there. So when I applied for admission to ČVUT, he gave me such a good recommendation that they accepted me without the admission process. I just bypassed the admission process. Good for me, because I don’t think I would have been able to do it, having gone through this bad education in the mining school.”</p><h4>Apartment</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y_wVGN61HQ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Every day in the evening, using public transportation, I’d be going to the other side of Prague, find some building in progress, stole some malta [mortar], put it into a bucket and, using public transportation again, bring it back to my apartment, and bring it all the way up 144 steps and start building. So that’s how I did it. I just brick by brick – I didn’t build much, just one short wall – but I actually installed gas, I installed electricity, water, plumbing. I built a small shower in the hall because there was a small place in the hall, and when it was finished we moved in to this one room, 16 square meters.”</p><h4>Why Leave?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3QoCLIV0uVI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was not just my very private, professional career, because your being a human being doesn’t consist of your work alone. It is just a role that you play in your life. Your have other roles that you play in your life, and then you have yourself apart from your roles. I felt that all the other roles and myself were violated. Like if you don’t water a plant enough, the plant doesn’t grow. So all the other aspects of my life were not growing. That’s probably the answer.”</p><p>What other aspects of your life?</p><p>“Basic freedom of speech. It may not be important for some people, but it is an important part of feeling free. Freedom of movement. When somebody tells you that you cannot cross this line and if you try, there is a bunch of machine guns that could be activated, that somehow puts a really heavy damper on your feeling free. Information, also. Maybe some people don’t need it. But the quest for knowledge, in my view, is an innate feature of human beings – at least, in me. I cannot talk about other people, but I certainly have it. In addition to a very dreadful material life.”</p><h4>Munich & Asylum</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mcvFDvCrjdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We ended up in January in London, having an exit visa and entry visa for about two weeks. The next day, we showed up at the Home Office in London and tried to apply for asylum. I thought it was a slam dunk, no problem, because I had this history of discrimination – my father, I couldn’t study, all these things. No, no. They sent us home and told us to come next week. So we came next week and the answer was no. Not only no, but they explicitly told us that if we don’t leave England as planned, they would put us on the nearest plane and ship us to Prague by force. It didn’t matter to them that I already talked to the Canadian Embassy and they promised they would accept me if I could stay in England two months. It didn’t matter to them that we were willing to go to South Africa if England permitted us to stay for a few weeks. None of these things were of an importance to the great guys in the Home Office in London. They wanted us to go home. We didn’t want to go home. So we did something else.</p><p>“Not having any money – I mean, any – we borrowed 200 pounds from a remote friend of a remote friend of ours, but he was gracious enough to lend us 200 pounds. And with this 200 pounds, we went to the German Embassy and asked for a transit visa. Just a 24-hour visa going home, claiming that we wanted to see some countryside before we ended up back in prison. We bought two tickets for 200 pounds on a train to Prague, and 4:00 in the morning, two days later, maybe a week, we stepped out of the train in Munich and let the train continue.”</p><h4>Changing Opinions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8rSP_LXNo5k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s not quite fair, because while forming my opinion, I was too young and inexperienced and also influenced by the circumstances I was living in and the conditions I was living under. But when you leave a country where most of the people seem to be, at least on the surface, content with everything that’s around you, you start developing a certain contempt for the people. If you cannot do anything about it, at least talk about it or at least admit or at least express some dissatisfaction. Don’t behave like sheep all the time, 24/7. Consequently, when I left I didn’t have a chance to improve this opinion, but I must admit that I changed. The events in ’89 obviously changed something, and having lived in several countries after that, and having acquired experience with other nationalities, I realize that the Czechs are not that bad after all.”</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
Vladmir Pochop
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2533 size-full" title="Vladimir in 2012" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609195344im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/vladmir-pochop.png" alt="Vladimir in 2012" width="283" height="283" /></p><p>Vladimir Pochop was born in Lázně Bělohrad in northeastern Bohemia in 1946. He grew up in the town of Nová Paka where his grandmother owned a fabric shop. When her shop was nationalized following the Communist coup in 1948, she hid part of the stock so that it would not be confiscated; however, she was found out and arrested. Vladimir’s father offered to take the punishment for her and was sent to a labor camp in the uranium mines of Jáchymov. Vladimir (who was not told where his father was) says that once he was released, he had trouble finding work and ended up working menial factory jobs for the rest of his life. Vladimir himself had trouble getting into high school and, at the age of 14, moved with his mother and stepfather to Ostrava where he attended mining school. In addition to classroom studies, Vladimir worked in the mines on the weekends. On the recommendation of the school director, he was admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and began studying electrical engineering. After two years, however, Vladimir was put into a special program for computer science. He graduated in 1969 and, the following year, married Jana Pochop, whom he knew from his home town.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir worked for a technical consulting company which he said allowed him free reign to focus on his research in geometric modeling. In 1974, he was invited to spend one year at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Charles University in 1977. Although Vladimir was satisfied with his professional life, he says that living under communism was a struggle, as he and Jana had had trouble finding a place to live in Prague and he felt stifled by the lack of certain freedoms. In January 1980, the pair received visas to London for two weeks and, on their way home to Prague, got off the train in Munich and made their way to the American Embassy. Vladimir was questioned by U.S. military intelligence for four months. They were given asylum in Germany, Vladimir found a job at BMW and they moved into an apartment.</p><p> </p><p>In 1981, the Pochops received permission to immigrate to the United States, but they had to wait eight months as Jana was pregnant. Their son Jan was born in September 1981 and, in April 1982, the Pochops flew to Atlanta, Georgia. Two weeks later, Vladimir went to California in search of a job. When he found one at a start-up tech company in Silicon Valley, his wife and son joined him and the family settled in Mountain View. Vladimir and Jana had another son, Martin, in 1984. That same year, Vladimir joined the company Autodesk and, as a chief scientist there, helped to develop AutoCAD and other products. He became an American citizen in 1989 and today holds dual citizenship. As both of their sons now live in Prague, Vladimir says that he and Jana have considered returning to the Czech Republic. Today, they live in Concord, California.</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
Arrest
CVUT
Education
Engineers
Family life
Forced labor
Jachymov
Lazne Belohrad
Nova Paka
school
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5855846c0fc102e7a00dc70f3db05b67
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>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IbozicnWFdM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I guess, as a kid, one doesn’t necessarily see all of the suppressiveness of the regime, but one example I can give you is that in 1968, when I was about to go to first grade, of course in August 1968, the Russians and the Warsaw Pact army marched in and it was obviously very stressful. Tanks everywhere, soldiers everywhere, nobody knew what was happening. My father, with a stoic calm, told me ‘Well, I went to school when the Nazis were here and so you go to school when there’s another occupation. So just keep your mouth [shut], don’t tell anybody what we talk about at home, don’t make any contacts with people that you don’t know, and be very careful.’ For a seven-year old kid, that’s kind of a harsh lesson to learn.”</p><h4>No Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ywW0D5D1Qto?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“That was one thing I can tell you about the presence of the regime, or the omnipresence of the regime. As an athlete, I wanted to go to the Academic World Championship in windsurfing in Malta in the Mediterranean. I think it was probably the early ‘80s, ’83 or ’84. So I went to the dean of the faculty and I asked him to sign my paper so I could travel abroad to represent the socialist Czechoslovakia in the Academic World Championship, which I thought was great for the country – and of course I would have enjoyed it very much. And he wouldn’t sign the paper. He thought that it was not appropriate for me to travel abroad. One thing I remember that he said [was] ‘Well, do you want to be an architect or do you want to be an athlete?’ but I saw it as curbing my freedom to decide what I wanted to be. Why was it his decision to decide what I wanted to be? And I could have been either, I guess, or both. But who was he to tell me what I wanted to be? But he didn’t give me the opportunity to do that.”</p><h4>Chernobyl</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SvbyAFdRXzo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We experienced Chernobyl in 1985 and we didn’t know about it for I don’t know how many days after it happened; after the press was forced to admit that something happened. They were denying [it]. Of course, it was all over the world, everybody was talking about it. If you listened to Radio Free Europe or any other station from abroad, it was discussed or talked about it, and the official line was nothing happened. When you find out things like that, how do you feel about living in a state that is hiding such important facts from you and expects you to just accept it on face value?”</p><p><em>How did you experience Chernobyl?</em></p><p>“I think it was late spring in 1985 and I was in a windsurfing camp, because I was on the official Czechoslovak national team, and we were at a lake in western Bohemia – Nechranice, near Chomutov – and so we were practicing and surfing and having a good time, actually. It was beautiful weather; it was clear days and very nice weather, and then we heard this rumor about the nuclear disaster, but nobody could verify anything, so I don’t know how much radiation we received or not. When we came back to Prague, and of course rumors spread very quickly, we found out that this horrible thing happened and there was a discussion about prevailing winds and which way they blew, and whether it was north across Poland and Sweden and back down to Czechoslovakia, or how much radiation was possibly in the air. Nobody knew anything. There was no testing to be checked. It was very upsetting. You feel like you’re being nuked and you don’t even know about it.”</p><h4>Family Reaction</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nifAC951dBk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They encouraged us. We told them that we were planning on leaving and we asked them sort of for their approval. We asked them how they felt it was going to affect their lives, because they’ll be staying behind. In my case, I was also concerned for my sister who had a job. She was young and starting out in her position and the concern was that if she had a brother who emigrated, it would have an effect on her ability to get jobs or work where she was working. But she felt that she had a good enough position to stay where she was and her work would not be greatly affected. My parents didn’t feel that that would affect them tremendously. My wife had the same discussion with her parents. Of course they said how sorely they would miss her, and both of us, but they would certainly encourage us to seek a better life elsewhere.”</p><h4>Surprise Fall</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a5Xq_HXnajI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the early ‘80s, Solidarity in Poland was gaining a lot of interest and was becoming well-known as an opposition, but it seemed to be moving in small steps. Then, in ’85, I went to the Soviet Union and Gorbachev was then president, and there were some signs of glasnost, they called it, and certain liberties that were allowed to people much more than the Stalinist tight regime allowed before. It felt like it might loosen up a little bit, but it never felt like the whole thing is going to collapse. Of course by the time in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, we were already here and we were watching it in disbelief. It was something we could never envision or imagine. We were in Berlin not long before that, before we escaped, and you couldn’t even get close to the wall on the Eastern German side. There were police everywhere; there was no-man’s land, all these barbed wires. Everything was so well protected that one could never imagine that it could come down so fast. Unbelievable.”</p><h4>Immigrant Spirit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v-ccKhAYvlU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Here, everybody has an immigrant story. Everybody’s grandmother or grandfather or great-great-grandparents came from some place, and so everybody relates to the immigration story. I think the story can be told a million times and every time it’s slightly different, but every time it’s the story of people coming here, looking for new life, and then making it better for themselves. I think on a certain level it makes this country better because people have the spirit to succeed and do something better and something with their lives.”</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
Viktor Solarik
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Viktor Solarik was born in Prague in 1961. He lived in the Smíchov district of the city with his parents (who were both chemists) and his older sister, Helena, who still lives in the family home in Prague. Viktor began elementary school in 1968, right after the Warsaw Pact invasion, which occurred in August of that year. He says that it was apparent that the Communist Party had an ‘arm in every organization,’ including sport activities and youth organizations. After graduating from high school, Viktor attended ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied architecture. An avid windsurfer, he asked permission to travel to Malta to represent Czechoslovakia in a global competition, but the dean of architecture refused to sign for him. Shortly after graduating from ČVUT, Viktor married his wife, Eva, whom he had known since high school, and they decided to emigrate. Viktor says that the pair had the full support of their families who, even though there was a chance they would encounter repercussions, felt fairly secure in their professional lives. They signed up for a tour going to Austria and Germany and, in August 1987, left the country. When the bus stopped in Munich, Viktor and Eva went to the police station where they claimed asylum. After two months in a refugee camp, Viktor found work with a surveyor and the couple were able to move into a small apartment while waiting for their paperwork to clear. They were granted immigration visas to the United States after 18 months and arrived in New York City in March 1989.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Viktor and Eva’s sponsors were friends of their parents who had emigrated in 1968 and lived in New Jersey. They stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks while looking for a job. Viktor was offered a position at the architectural firm Kaeyer, Parker and Garment in Mount Kisco, and the pair moved to Westchester County. In 1998, Viktor started his own firm (VKS Architects) which focuses on residential design and construction. Viktor and Eva have two daughters who are now in college. They both speak Czech and, when they were younger, spent summers with their grandparents and cousins in the Czech Republic. Viktor tries to visit his home country every year to spend time with family and friends. Today he lives in Carmel, New York, with his wife Eva.</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
CVUT
marriage
school
Sense of identity
Sports
Tours
Warsaw Pact invasion
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5e057cf2e8a18f6b89018a966ba120a3
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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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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>Lucky Graduate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MPFqQXt-Kao?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I was in the dorm I believe they knew everything I was talking about. Because those speakers… Every room had a speaker – like a radio – and the speakers were built two-way. And there was a secret room right at the front of that dorm where nobody was allowed to go, only some students who were Communist Party members. Besides that they had also guns with them. So there was something special going on in that room. And I believe they were listening to people in the dorm. But I didn’t… somehow I didn’t care at that time. It caught up with me later. I mean, somehow I was lucky enough to graduate. Then I got my first job which was with the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where we were building equipment to measure nuclear radiation. I was there for about half a year, and I found out that there was an opportunity to do a PhD – some PhD openings. And since I worked in the ultrasound labs, it was kind of close to what I had been doing before. I applied for that, and they made such a thorough research of my background that they kicked me out, even from my job.”</p><h4>Two Parts of HR</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2kugpfzTv84?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were two parts of the personnel department. One was like here, open where all the files are kept, and there was the other part of it, which was political, which was secret – all your background, even that you had forgotten a long time ago is still recorded. So that guy, who was the head of that department said ‘What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here! You were let go!’”</p><h4>Poisoned Chalice</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JUO5b4PZBgc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You get blamed for it when it is not finished, that thing, but you have what they call responsibility without authority, or something of this kind.”</p><p>Vera: “In those days, if something went wrong, he wouldn’t lose his job, but he would go to prison.”</p><p>“That’s right, because it could be looked upon as sabotage. So all my colleagues over there, you could see the attitude, they were staying away from it, because the general opinion was – we got all the papers, all the research reports about how things were put together as far as the transmitter is concerned and you could see what they did, how they did it – and the general opinion was ‘It’s an experiment in physics.’ Not something where things have been concluded to the very end. Because some stuff was made really thoroughly, and some other parts were made really in such a way that nobody who was a real engineer would put it together that way.”</p>
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Title
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Pierre Dobrovolny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Pierre Dobrovolny was born in Brno, Moravia, in October 1933. His father Ferdinand was an artist who worked with, among others, the Czech archeologist Dr. Karel Absolon. Pierre’s mother Růžena was a seamstress. Growing up, Pierre wanted to become a radio mechanic but, he says, this profession was a predominantly feminine one at the time of his graduation, so he went to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study electrical engineering instead. He graduated from technical university in 1958 and says he was ‘lucky’ to do so, given his outspoken nature and his critical view of the Communist government at the time. That same year, Pierre married his partner <a title="Vera Dobrovolny" href="/web/20170609055449/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/vera-dobrovolny/">Vera</a>. His first job upon graduation was at the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where he worked on equipment to measure radiation.</p><p> </p><p>When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
Anti-communist
CVUT
Education
emigrant
Engineers
Hloubetin
marriage
Military service
refugee
Refugee camp
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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
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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>Divorce</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xW3k77OfBg0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”</p><h4>Bombing of Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Cq9f43kjWE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”</p><h4>Prison Visit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mY-k8GtjGEw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”</p><h4>Barely Graduated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cXz1EFXTab4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”</p><h4>Business Principles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F2DMGMCo6A4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”</p><h4>Student Trade Union</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Rr0WO4C8cc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of it.’”</p>
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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 Palecek
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2531" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler1.jpg" alt="Peter Palecek 2012" width="250" height="417" /></p><p>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437/http://recordingvoices.blogspot.com/2012/06/peter-palecek-on-his-father-general.html">Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.</a></p><p> </p><p>As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2530" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-16.jpg" alt="Handler-1" width="350" height="584" />Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.</p><p> </p><p>Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.</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
1968
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Catholics
CKD
CVUT
Divorce
Education
German
gymnazium
Occupation
Political prisoner
Prison
Svatoborice
Terezin
Vertel
VSE
Warsaw Pact invasion
World War II
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1eb4fceaac2135a9fc43d067fcd1b16a
Dublin Core
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Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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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>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxPl2FH-SYg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Things seemed right; not entirely right, but somewhat right. Things were far worse in Poland, where a person who was a Polish politician who lived on our street in London by the name of Mikołajczyk – they settled accounts with him by machine gun. Assassinations and so on. Things in Prague seemed to be ok, but not exactly right. And the bottom dropped out of things completely in February 1948.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HE6qoS0rpII?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Things were getting progressively worse at the university. I kept my head down, I did not collaborate with anybody with anything. I was not a member of the quite standard communist youth organization, kept that quiet. They sent me to a labor camp for one summer after the first year at university, where things were bad. Really bad. We were guarded by armed guards, work was very heavy, food was terrible, hygiene was unbelievable – there was an epidemic of typhus and essentially everybody got it. I don’t know why I was sent there. I think it was a sort of general warning, or a matter of principle; ‘Let the guy work his way.’”</p><h4>Communist Effect</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZKXvlvo03SU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Essentially, immediately after the Communist takeover, we destroyed all our address books and diaries. We started avoiding all people who weren’t extremely close friends, because we would endanger them or they would endanger us once they were arrested. Whoever didn’t do that caused havoc among people. We didn’t read newspapers. We didn’t read magazines because there were very few of them. Books, new ones, weren’t very interesting. We borrowed books, one from the other; these in time became tattered and we still have a couple of those here. Social life was very circumscribed. One did not want to endanger others and be endangered by them. So if someone was your friend, he was really a close friend.”</p><h4>Research</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y9LtD-WQcn8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were supposed to come up with Czech computers. We started out about six years behind the world situation, state of knowledge of computer design, manufacturing, and so on, and ended up about thirty years later [behind] because it was so slow. No contact with the outside world; occasionally we got a magazine, a professional magazine. Complete isolation, even from the Russians and the Poles.”</p><p><em>Do you think the nature of coming into a brand new industry, like creating computers allowed for a certain leeway?</em></p><p>“Yes, very much so. Very much so.”</p><p><em>That you didn’t have the bureaucracy that didn’t understand…</em></p><p>“They didn’t understand. There’s a standard story of a minister coming to inspect and learning about semiconductors and saying, ‘Socialist engineering needs conductors. Not semiconductors. Complete conductors.’”</p><h4>Limited Access to Information</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JEl_hH_zOFU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“What was very unpleasant for anyone in the sciences was access to periodical literature. That was almost non-existent. One thing that is curious and somewhat funny – we got Russian books. I soon learned that we had no textbooks and I learned Russian at university, not in high school where I was supposed to learn it. Technically, I was extremely proficient in Russian. The Russians produced a lot of books themselves and sold them extremely cheaply. A poor university student could acquire a reasonable library. There was a shop in almost all larger cities, which on Friday mornings, showed new acquisitions and we rushed there. And they also then started translating American, good American textbooks. So with a couple of years delay, one could see what was happening. But, otherwise, no contact with world science. This probably hurt physicists far more than mathematicians who needed this, and publications, and occasional contact with other colleagues. They [physicists] need labs, apparatus, extremely expensive things. So a number of people who otherwise would have gone into physics and into medicine went into mathematics.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nbmKJ6kp3nA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our impression when we first came to the U.S., Olga and me – Olga had not been out of the country before, I had spent the War outside and so on. We felt – we agreed that both of us got this impression individually, not by osmosis – as if we had come home. As if we had come back to pre-War Czechoslovakia or something. People were normal, in a sense. As if we were beginning a normal life again. Our son was born here. He prides himself on being the first American. He was the first one who had a passport. We had re-entry permits and he had a passport.”</p><p><em>So do you think the system was what turned the people into something different?</em></p><p>“Yes. There was social engineering. There was even the phrase ‘an engineer of human souls.’ Definitely. There was an explicit attempt to do that, to change people’s natures, to change the nature of a human family. Not only society and community, but even a family.”</p>
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Title
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Otomar Hájek
Description
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<p>Otomar Hájek was born in 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, where his father, František, a military officer and diplomat in the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, was stationed. When his father became head of military intelligence in 1935, Otomar’s family moved back to Prague, but then left again four years later when his father was appointed military attaché to the Netherlands. Following demobilization of the Czechoslovak military, Otomar’s father became an officer in the French Foreign Legion, and the family moved to Algeria. The Hájeks subsequently spent time in Southern France before they were evacuated to London in 1940. After his father died in a car accident in 1941, Otomar’s mother Ružena, despite having no work experience, found a job as a radio announcer at the BBC. During WWII, Otomar attended the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain. Otomar, his mother, and his brother moved back to Czechoslovakia after the War, and he says they were very happy to be back.</p><p> </p><p>Otomar completed high school in 1949 and says he was lucky to be able to continue his studies in mathematics at Charles University, as many of his classmates were not given that opportunity. Otomar says that his university years passed relatively quietly because he was not politically active. He says he is proud of the fact that he was never asked to join the Communist Party, because officials knew he was a ‘hopeless’ cause. He remembers in particular being sent to a labor camp for one summer while still a student. Upon finishing his degree, Otomar applied for postgraduate studies, but, because of his father’s intelligence background, he was rejected. He was placed as a junior assistant at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), in the faculty of electrical engineering. Otomar says he was fired about six years later as a result of ‘political changes’ and had a very hard time finding a job, again because of his father’s previous intelligence position. He finally found work at a computer research institute where he and his colleagues were tasked with creating Czech computers. Otomar remembers this being very difficult, as they had little to no access to equipment and scientific knowledge from outside of the country. He was later able to return to research at Charles University, where he received his doctorate in 1963.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Otomar attempted unsuccessfully to leave the country several times, both legally and illegally. He finally had the opportunity in 1966 when he was permitted to accept a job at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for one year and bring his wife, Olga. Otomar says that he felt obligated to return to Czechoslovakia after the year, but his brother convinced him otherwise. In Cleveland, Otomar and Olga had their son, Michael, and became involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). They became American citizens in 1974. Otomar is well known in his field of applied mathematics and was a Humboldt scholar at TU Darmstadt in the mid-1970s. His son Michael speaks Czech, and his wife Olga cooks traditional Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian food. Otomar and Olga frequently visit the Czech Republic and are in regular contact with their families there, thanks to Skype. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><a href="/web/20170609072102/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Hajek_Final.pdf">Full transcript of Otomar Hájek’s interview:</a></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Americanization
Communist coup
Cultural Traditions
CVUT
Diplomatic service
Education
Engineers
Hajek
Mikolajczyk
Military service
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Dublin Core
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Title
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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>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zPyfIWWV2wY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Born on the wrong side of the tracks. Capitalists. Enemy of the people. That’s enough. The ostensible charge was that she helped one of her cousins to emigrate. But nothing was proved and 18 months later, after the trial, she was released. She considered herself very lucky. So all this was actually pre-trial custody. She was held in pre-trial custody for 18 months, from 1950 until late of 1951.”</p><p><em>Well, at least she had a trial.</em></p><p>“There was a trial, yes, and there was some semblance of legality because the charge was not proven and she was released.”</p><h4>Finding a Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LhHkYJFkRPM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Even though nothing was proven to her, to have been in prison was kind of a black stain on her reputation and she had difficulty finding a job. So we really struggled, but it’s one interesting proof of how resilient a child is, because I have no memories of hardship. I mean, she made it seem like fun. I remember, a week before the end of the month, she would just empty her wallet on the table and say ‘This is what we have to live on until the end of the month.’ And for me it was fun. I budgeted money per day, and I have no memory of any struggle or hardship because a child has no reference. Everything is normal.”</p><h4>Education</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/avrLbJG3SzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was pretty rigorous training. I had an opportunity to compare myself with others when I came to England, and we grew up as a complex. We grew up thinking we are in a cage, we are separated from civilization by this Iron Curtain and we don’t really know what it’s all about; we are just sort of cut off in the boondocks down here. And that made us… I spent hours in the technical library because, interestingly, even though there was censorship of course and the Western newspapers, Western magazines were not allowed to come in, the technical literature was. We couldn’t take it home, but the library of the technical museum had all the architectural magazines in the world – French, English, Italian, American magazines. So that’s where I was spending my time, familiarizing myself with the architecture in the West. So that, when I arrived in London, to the astonishment of my English colleagues, I knew more about contemporary English architecture than they knew. They started explaining to me about James Sterling, and I said ‘Oh yeah, I know about James Sterling. He did the Lester school and he did that and he did that,’ and they were totally flabbergasted. ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Magazines. Magazines.’”</p><h4>London</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xasv21ntWp0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring, but not even Dubček knew it was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring. But what we knew was that suddenly things started to be a little looser and the main witness was that I was allowed for the first time to leave – I couldn’t go even to East Germany; I never could go beyond the Iron Curtain – suddenly not just for a trip but for a year! It was unheard of. Unheard of. I thought it was a mistake, so I did not question. With my friend, I jumped into a car and drove to London. I thought I would be back in a year. At the time, I had no intention of emigrating for the rest of my life. If I let my fantasy run wild I thought ‘Well, if the first year would go well I might try to extend it for another year,’ and, at the time, to spend two years in London, it was the ultimate to think. Well, as it happened, at the end of the first year almost to the day Russians moved in. I didn’t take much imagination not to return when I saw tanks in Wenceslas Square.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7pjKIQlsaXQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I arrived from London in January of 1970, again thinking this would be a temporary stay in America. Having lived in London for three years, the Brits kind of condition you into thinking that America is this cultural wasteland where everybody’s chasing money and no gentle soul could survive, and I bought it. American tourists on Oxford Street are doing a very good job to support this philosophy. So I truly thought that this would be another three or four years to get the taste of America, test myself professionally here, and then I would come back to civilization – civilization being London. I felt very comfortable in London. I had a good job, apartment. There was really no reason for me to leave, except this curiosity. I considered myself a citizen of the world and you cannot be a citizen of the world unless you’ve experienced America. Professionally it attracted me. When I opened architecture magazines in 1969 I liked what I saw better than what I saw in London. So I had this professional curiosity plus sort of the world curiosity. And very quickly, New York and I clicked and I had no second thoughts about ever returning to London.”</p><h4>No Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SwuZgeTl6kM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I no longer fit in. It’s a very strange feeling, which cannot be unique among emigrants, that when I walk in Prague I feel like a tourist. It’s the town I was born in, I spent the first 28 years of my life, and still I don’t know really how it works now, having been out of there for 45 years. Life develops and the language changes and there are expressions I don’t know what they mean – Czech expressions. And the same thing, I don’t know which way the busses go and which way the streetcars go and I don’t know the names of the streets, so I am a tourist.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8C4fY8CVQX4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I feel Czech-American. This is, I think, the only country you can feel that. Having lived three years in London before I came to America, I think even if I lived 50 years in England I would not be an English Czech, or Czech-English. I mean, that category does not exist. I’d be a Czech living in England, yes, but I don’t think I’d ever feel English. I’d be phony; whereas, legitimately here I feel American, but I am also a Czech. Again, it’s nothing unique about it. This country is composed of German-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, French-Americans and so forth. That’s what I think makes America different from other countries.”</p>
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Title
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Martin Holub
Description
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<p>Martin Holub was born in Prague in 1938. His father, Ján, was a lawyer who, after the Communist coup in 1948, was not allowed to continue practicing and sent to work at a cement factory. He later worked in a photography lab and then as a librarian at the Architectural Institute in Prague. His mother, Miloslava, has also studied law and went on to become a rather well-known art historian. During WWII, Martin spent a lot of time in Moravia where his mother’s parents lived. He says that rather than feeling afraid during the War, he recalls events such as air raids as ‘fun’ due to the excitement.</p><p> </p><p>In 1950, Martin’s mother was arrested on charges that she helped a relative illegally cross the border. After 18 months in prison, she was put on trial and released of all charges. While she was in prison, Martin was sent to a boarding school in Poděbrady, where he was a classmate of Václav Havel. Martin returned to Prague, graduated from high school and studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and worked for a state-owned building contractor.</p><p> </p><p>Martin says that since graduating from university he had been hoping to travel to the West, applying for work abroad. Although he was frequently offered opportunities (particularly in Great Britain), he was repeatedly denied a visa. In 1967, Martin had applied for and been offered a job with the Greater London Council. To his surprise, he was given a visa and he left Czechoslovakia in August 1967. Although Martin planned to return to Prague after one year, he was still in London when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and decided to stay in the West. In January 1970, Martin took a job with an architecture firm in New York City and moved to the United States. He settled in Manhattan and opened his own private firm in 1971.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Martin first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and then again following the fall of communism. With a friend living in Prague, he opened a branch of his company there and continued to visit his hometown yearly. Initially reluctant to seek out his fellow émigrés, in recent years Martin has become active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, including assisting in the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall. Today, Martin continues his architecture practice and lives in Manhattan.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arrest
Arts
Charter 77
CVUT
Education
emigrant
refugee
Sense of identity
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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
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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>Avoiding Communism</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xQpI_jrHSoQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Until 1968, there was even a Scout movement throughout the country. It was not an officially sanctioned movement; it was more what people privately would adhere to. I remember that for a couple of years I was a part of this young group – maybe I was a six, seven, eight year old – and we would gather once every two weeks at someone’s house and they would teach us to make knots with rope, and we were recognizing birds. Once a year, during the summer, I would go for about ten days or two weeks to a summer camp that was organized by this group of loosely-connected parents. So I never became a member of the Pioneer movement. I know that in every school across the country, it was mandatory that the kids participated in some of these things, but I don’t remember that much. I know later on, when I was at the Institute of Technology, that there was recruitment for the Communist Party and for the army, obviously, and things like that, but I managed not to participate in these things.”</p><h4>Emigrating</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BwJ8VFoKavY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><span style="line-height:1.5;">“In general I was unhappy with the political situation in the country. It obviously bothered me that I couldn’t travel. It bothered me tremendously, even at the technical university, the ridiculousness of the whole setup. Even a simple textbook dealing with concrete and concrete mixtures would start with some proclamation that ‘Comrades in the Soviet Union invented the best mixture’ and nonsense like that. So I felt that it was a sad, strange dictatorship where I lived and I had a keen sense of something out there that fascinated me, and that was the draw. It was definitely this quest for a different life, obviously for some adventure, and also as a young guy you have a certain tolerance to the unknown and the silliness of some of these decisions based on just an emotion or something like that.” </span></p><p></p><h4>Leaving Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d7Pp4BV6-b8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><span style="line-height:1.5;">“We managed to take part in this skiing trip to Austria which was organized by this association… sanctioned by the universities. I know that we somehow discovered that this trip to Austria was going to take place in a couple of months, essentially in February [1982], and we were already too late to formally to apply for it. So what we did was we actually took a very individual approach and we started going to all these individual offices that needed to give us an approval. We started with the school; we went to the police and, in my case, the army also. I think that all together we needed close to 12 approvals so that we could participate. Because we were approaching these decision-makers, these bureaucrats, individually, face to face, and obviously we adjusted the truth a little bit, sort of saying that everybody else promised an approval and it’s now just up to you to okay it as well, these people kind of did it, went along with it. Then we were able to go.” </span></p><p></p><h4>Emotional Impact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/92igP2U0QOg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“[My mother] knew that if I had the opportunity that I would leave. She actually supported it and the most traumatic thing was that the day I was leaving I couldn’t tell her. The only member of my family who knew that I was actually leaving was my cousin, who was a buddy and older, and I couldn’t tell my mom; I couldn’t tell anybody. That was most difficult. For me, it was actually quite difficult to leave. The week prior to the trip where I knew I was going to attempt to escape – emotionally, that was the most taxing time frame. What’s interesting is that the friend of mine that I escaped with was extremely upbeat at the time, because he was just planning the trip. He was expecting his wife would join us later on and he was carefree and upbeat, so he helped me tremendously during this time. After we escaped, a couple of weeks later when we were already in Bonn, he was actually down for weeks. Completely devastated, and he was thinking about going back, returning to Czechoslovakia. But at that time, I completely turned around and I was extremely upbeat about the fact that we made it, and it made sense for us to stay. He claims that I helped him, that I kept him there. What’s interesting is that if it didn’t work that way, maybe we would never leave, or he would have returned, or something like that. So it worked out well that we could support each other.”</p><h4>Edmonton, Alberta</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MmF-7UkTzwU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I actually wanted to return to Germany, because I spoke German; I was fluent. I didn’t speak English whatsoever. Also, Bonn was this sophisticated, extremely clean, colorful city and Edmonton was this strange outpost. I didn’t want to unpack my suitcase for a couple of months. But then, as it goes, I met some young people and we became friends, and they took me to the Rocky Mountains. And there, somehow, I discovered that this continent has something absolutely magnificent. I mean obviously there are some magnificent areas in Europe as well, and all over the place. I got somehow attached to it and I decided that this continent offers something else as well and I decided to stay.”</p><h4>Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/npNVegn7U20?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My intent has been not to turn the building into a Czech social club, because I think that’s wrong. It’s sort of enclosing a group of people. On the contrary, I believe that the function of today’s groups, and especially our association and also the cultural center and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is to showcase Czech culture. Not only the past – I mean, we have to talk about the past because it’s also fascinating – but current, today’s Czech Republic. Democratic Czech Republic. And it cannot be just a showcase for art. It needs to be a showcase for science; also business. So I’m taking a lot of steps to make sure that we have Czech scientific groups or even companies showcasing their things here. So it has to be a platform showcasing Czech things to the U.S., not just New York.”</p>
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Title
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Joseph Balaz
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<p>Joseph Balaz was born in Prague in 1960. His father Ladislav worked for the national railway system. Prior to Joseph’s birth, his father was arrested and worked in the uranium mines at Jáchymov for seven years as a result of his being abroad for several years following WWII. Joseph’s mother Milada, who still lives in Prague, was an office manager for a company that manufactured paint. Joseph often went to his mother’s home town in southern Moravia to visit his grandparents and other relatives. He says that immediately following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, his mother sent Joseph to live with his grandparents for several months, and he went to school while there. Joseph attended the Institute of Technology and then began studying civil engineering at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). In February 1982, while on a university ski trip in Austria, Joseph and a friend left the group and hitchhiked to Salzburg. When advised, they traveled to West Germany to seek asylum. Joseph stayed in Bonn for one year and a half while being debriefed (as he had been in the Czechoslovak Army before leaving) and waiting for permission to immigrate to Canada.</p><p> </p><p>In 1983, Joseph flew to Edmonton, Alberta. Five months later, he moved to Montreal where he began working in construction and development. Joseph’s first visit to New York was in 1985 and he spent a few years traveling between Manhattan and Montreal. He eventually settled in New York where he started his own construction business. Today, his successful company specializes in high-end residential development.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3246" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609053011im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-56.jpg" alt="Handler-5" width="400" height="339" /></p><p> </p><p>When Joseph first arrived in New York he says that he only knew two other Czech immigrants; however, almost 20 years later, he provided consultation for the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall (BNH) in Manhattan which began his involvement with the Czech community in New York. Joseph is on the board of the American Fund for Czech and Slovak Leadership Studies and the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR). Currently, he is the president of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), an organization which operates out of and administers Bohemian National Hall and promotes Czech and Slovak culture in New York. Joseph frequently returns to Prague to visit his mother. He lives in Manhattan with Stephanie, his wife of 17 years.</p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Arrest
Community leadership
Community Life
CVUT
Engineers
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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
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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>Secret Plans</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_3f7mmCvi7Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My parents were on vacation at that time, and I was supposed to go – well actually I did – to a Sokol camp down in southern Bohemia, so they thought I was at Sokol camp. And the reason I didn’t tell them was, I said, ‘Well, if I get caught and they interrogate my parents, my parents can honestly say ‘We didn’t know about it.’’ So it was obviously a great shock when they came back from vacation, and they didn’t hear from me for about six weeks. Of course my mother was [thinking] ‘Is he killed somewhere?’ or ‘Where is he?’ Because the mail at that time… There was no Germany; there was a U.S. occupation zone, French, English. So we had to write to a guy in Switzerland and he had to write to somebody in Czechoslovakia [to say] that we are okay. So that took six weeks, seven weeks for the mail and so finally they got [notice] that ‘Oh yeah, they are okay.’”</p><h4>Border Crossing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m98bn_TOdXk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We tried several places. Well, we inquired; we didn’t try. Šumava was one of them, and we knew some people and they said ‘Well, there were some people that crossed here, but there were some people who got caught over there,’ and then finally a friend’s friend said ‘Well there’s people crossing over at Bor u Tachova.’ I had never been there before. I didn’t know the countryside, but I had a map and a compass and it was a chance we took. The border guard came five minutes after we crossed; as a matter of fact, when we were crossing, I heard somebody hollering, some dog barking, and what sounded like shots. But we said ‘Oh the heck with it’ and we just kept going.”</p><p><em>And there was no barbed wire? It wasn’t like it got later?</em></p><p>“No. There was a meadow and a granite marker, and one side was ČS and the other was D, Deutschland. That was it. And there were Germans drying hay on the other side.”</p><h4>Letters of Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DamH_djQLXg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a Czech newspaper, České slovo, that was issued in Munich which I subscribed to, so we were pretty well informed of what was going on. My parents and people that I knew didn’t write anything political because a lot of the letters were censored. My father said they got [letters] that the envelope was cut and [said] ‘This is officially censored’ so we never talked about politics. When I was in England and there was, not a girlfriend, but a girl I was interested in at one time. Her father was actually a general in the Czech Army. I sent her a letter and she sent me a postcard written in English that said ‘There’s a lot of problems’ and this and that. I didn’t realize it, but I sent another letter, and she sent me a postcard that said ‘I forbid you to write to this address,’ her father being in the Army. And he was fairly high up – Armádní generál or something. She said ‘If you want to write, write through a friend of mine.’”</p><h4>Large Community in NY</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WT_ey7EbGq8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We went to the Sokol to exercise once or twice a week, but that was about the only thing. I don’t know if you know, but at that time there was a large Czech community in New York and it was between First and Third Avenue and something like from 62nd Street to 75th Street. There were Czech butchers and Czech bakers. A lot of these people immigrated to the United States in 1922, ’23, ’24, ’25… As a matter of fact, I lived with a family whose name was Koch – he was a carpenter – and he immigrated to the United States in 1924, so there were old, what they call, usedlíci [settlers]. It was interesting; these people immigrated to the United States for economic reasons. The new wave that came in, we escaped for political reasons, and they just couldn’t quite get it. There was, not a friction, but a lot of misunderstanding.”</p><h4>Meaning of Freedom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4vRwyy3CdI4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Freedom is a word that’s a lot of little things, and some big things. Freedom of expression. I mean, you can talk over here and you can say that the president is an idiot or not and people either agree with you or don’t agree with you, but nothing happens to you. Over there, under the communists, you ended up in a concentration camp. That’s one thing. Freedom of press. Over there, there was no freedom of press. Freedom of where you can live, how you can live. Freedom of where you want to go to school or don’t go to school. It’s a lot of these little things that are the difference. Under the communist regime; of course, the German regime too was much more regimented and controlled. So it’s not one big thing; it’s a lot of little things that make it happen.”</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
George Skoda
Description
An account of the resource
<p>George Skoda was born in Prague in 1927. His father, Josef, studied accounting and held several jobs in that field, and also owned a business in the city. His mother, Louisa, worked as a stenographer before getting married and later stayed home to raise George. After elementary school, George began studying at an English gymnázium, which was closed down by the Nazis in 1941. He then transferred to a Czech school, which was also closed, and entered an industrial school. In the waning months of WWII, George was recruited to dig ditches near Olomouc for the German war effort. After a short time, with the end of the War imminent, George escaped from his work detail and returned to Prague. After liberation, he finished school and, in 1947, entered ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2551" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609141525im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-41.jpg" alt="Handler-4" width="400" height="580" /></p><p>Following the Communist coup in February 1948, George decided that he didn’t want to ‘live under another occupation’ and left the country. After visiting a Sokol camp in southern Bohemia that July, George and a friend crossed the border into Germany. He spent several months in Regensburg and Schwäbisch Gmünd refugee camps; he then signed up with the European Volunteer Workers group and traveled to Britain where he was assigned to work in a brickyard in Peterborough. George worked there for over two years waiting for a visa to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>After receiving a visa, George sailed to New York in February 1951. He began working in a plastics factory before being drafted into the U.S. Army in July. George served in the Army for two years, one of which was spent in Germany working as a cartographer. After his discharge, George worked as a draftsman for an engineering company in New Jersey for one year and then moved to Malden, Massachusetts. In 1955, George married his wife, Ludmila, also a Czechoslovak émigré, whom he had met in New York. They had two children, Peter and Sandy, whom they raised speaking Czech.</p><p> </p><p>In 1962, George – who says he had always wanted to move to California – found a job at Stanford University working on a linear particle accelerator, the longest in the world. After five years there and a short stint in Philadelphia, George returned to California to work for GE’s nuclear energy division. In 1992, he retired from full-time work, but continued to act as a consultant until 2011. George also continued his education in the United States, earning a degree in engineering and management from Northeastern University and an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University. Now a widower, George enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He lives in Santa Clara, California.</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
Community Life
CVUT
Engineers
gymnazium
Military service
school
World War II
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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>CVUT</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dc8QEqHQXAA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I first did computers, those were Russian computers with vacuum tubes. So the full room of vacuum tubes was about as powerful as my little laptop, or even less powerful. Then professor [Antonín] Svoboda – who I knew personally – he left the country and he essentially designed the first family of IBM computers. So, judging from that, we were not that much behind, if a professor of computers from Czech Republic could come here and start a century of revolution in modern computers. Then of course, silicon came, integrated circuits came, and it just kept rolling.”</p><p><em>Were you able to read journals being written in America and Britain? Was that possible at that time?</em></p><p>“If it was strictly technical information, I could get my hands on it. It wasn’t easy, and it was censored.”</p><p><em>So how could you do this? Through the university library?</em></p><p>“Mostly through the university library. And between guys, sometimes, we would distribute things that we’d obtain in a somewhat questionable way and we would distribute it among ourselves.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6qdDWD1vsyE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We saw it as just the beginning. We thought that Dubček is just a temporary figure that will help us get to where we want to get, but then he would have to go because he was still a communist after all.”</p><p><em>So what did you do on August 21?</em></p><p>“We went to the streets, we talked to them [the soldiers], and it essentially was pretty much hopeless. There were some guys who would throw the Molotov cocktails at the tanks, but it was pretty much useless. You cannot fight the tanks and an armed army with bare hands and with stones. And if you do, they will shoot you. So then I went home.”</p><p><em>Was it scary? How scary was it?</em></p><p>“It was scary, but it was extremely frustrating. Extremely frustrating that a big country like them can come and do this and there is zilch you can do. You just shut up and pretend it didn’t happen. That was the worst part of it.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ZJNeAgJ2o4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, he had a lot of connections, so he found a so-called uncle in Vienna that sent me an invitation. You had to have an invitation, so I got an invitation from the imaginary uncle in Vienna to visit Vienna for five days. So we could take with us only what was for five days. At the time, my son was four years old. I had my university papers and everything and I put it in his teddy bear. I sewed it inside and he was holding it. Then we stopped on the border and the Czech army people with Russian soldiers were going through the train and checking your papers. So I showed him my papers and he knows that I am escaping. He talked to the Russian guy and then the Czech guy said to my son ‘Hey, where are you going?’ He said ‘No, I won’t tell you,’ and holding his teddy. And then I looked at the Czech guy and I said ‘Please, let us go’ and he looked at the Russian guy and said ‘Oh, they’re ok. Let them go.’ People in the next compartment, they took them out, they lined them up in the railway station, and they took them to prison, so it was this close.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qdK7G65YKOw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, there were two reasons. One reason was, I wanted to do something for the Czech Republic. I wanted to set up a company there; I wanted to get Czech people and pay them good salaries and help the country in some way, and this is a good way to help. The second reason was, quite frankly, Czech programmers are extremely good, but still pretty reasonable. I studied at university; I have a lot of contacts there; I knew people. The guy who is leading my company in the Czech Republic, he is one of the leading figures at university, so he could find me people who were the best of the best. I treated them well; they come to the U.S. for one year or so for a visit and for training, and I did something for country this way.”</p><h4>World Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ZTHtkMgaQk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I like Czech food. I cook it whenever I can. We like Czech music. We like music in general. We like Czech composers. Smetana is one of my favorite composers; Dvořák, of course. But so is Bach, so is Vivaldi. I don’t really see myself as being a citizen of some specific country. I see myself as a world citizen. Wherever I am, I am happy as long as they treat me well and I return the favor.”</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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George Malek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>George Malek was born in Tábor in southern Bohemia. His father, Jan, owned a factory that produced auto parts while his mother, Marie, stayed home to raise George and his two brothers. Shortly after the Communist coup in 1948, George’s father’s business was nationalized and he was sent to prison for over one year. In the meantime, George’s mother began working at a co-op making stuffed animals. As a child, George was especially interested in woodworking and mathematics. He attended a technical school in Tábor where he studied building construction and equipment. Although he hoped to study at university, George was not initially admitted and, instead, joined the military. After training for one year as a paratrooper, he was stationed in Aš where he was tasked with manning a radio system and intercepting German military conversations and transmissions. George was then admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied computer engineering. He began to think about leaving the country to improve his job prospects and, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, crossed the border into Austria with his wife and young son, Robert. George’s father had helped them to secure visas under the pretense of visiting an uncle in Vienna.</p><p> </p><p>George and his family stayed in Vienna for just over a month while awaiting immigration paperwork. They arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, and settled in Toronto in 1968. After taking English classes for six weeks, George began working and was admitted to the University of Toronto where he earned his doctorate. It was in 1976 that George first returned to Czechoslovakia to visit his parents. That same year, his company transferred him to California. By 1981, George had switched jobs and was sent to work on a software project in Japan. There, he met his second wife, Yuko. The couple married in 1983, returned to the United States, and had a son, Alan. In 1988, George set up a company in California’s Silicon Valley called Apogee Software Inc; he remains the firm’s president and CEO. Ten years later, he set up Apogee.cz in Prague as an out-sourcing partner of Apogee Software. He and his wife Yuko (the firm’s CFO) often visit Prague, both for business purposes and to enjoy the opera, ballet, and concerts that the Czech capital has to offer. The couple are proud of an apartment they own in a 14th-century historical building in Prague’s Old Town. George and Yuko are planning to ‘retire partially’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. They are in the process of reconstructing an old hunting lodge in Mirovice in southern Bohemia, which was owned by the Schwarzenberg family until 1938. George and Yuko currently live in Los Gatos, California.</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
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
As
CVUT
Dubcek
Dvorak
Education
Engineers
Military service
Prague Spring
Prison
Sense of identity
Tabor
Warsaw Pact invasion
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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>Parents Political Ideology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dWsSb_8H6eY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My mom, being born and growing up in this village I named [Kasejovice, in southern Bohemia], was liberated by the American army, so she was more oriented towards Americans, freedom, and I think that she quite early realized what the other side of the token will be one day. With my father it was a little bit opposite because he came up from a quite poor family and, I guess after the War, he believed in the new world, the new system, which was brought from the East, so he joined the Party until 1980. So it was a little bit of a contrast of opinions in our family.”</p><h4>High School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r6WmKbCgKKA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In high school, I think it was quite quality and, again, a combination of the ideology and then the real subjects. We were lucky because our last year of high school was ’68, so it was very liberal and many changes took place, even in our education and the information provided. Like reading <em>Literární noviny</em> was mandatory, and it was quite exciting. Then we graduated and enjoyed this happy time for a few more days and it was over.”</p><h4>Career</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HUcJQ1YMBJ4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I would say not at the beginning, because at the beginning I could care less about architecture; I was more into sports in high school, at the end of high school when we had to make a decision where to go, what to study. But later, certainly it was a big influence and a great feeling living in Prague, and then I had the opportunity to travel abroad and visit a few other places around Europe. I was always saying ‘It’s a very, very nice place we live in, compared with other places.’”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fR0f2feufg8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Like a theater stage. Some quite exciting, interesting theater stage. And lately, I’ve just realized that there is not such a place anywhere in the world. It’s so special and one has to think really hard to describe why it’s so different. I like the compactness; it’s a very prominent place in the world, being in New York City, going back or from New York City, working opportunities, quality of the offices here. And everything else: culture, people, restaurants. Just name it.”</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
George Hauner
Description
An account of the resource
<p>George Hauner was born in Prague in 1949 and grew up in the Dejvice neighborhood with his parents and younger sister. His father, originally from Prague, studied architecture but worked in the finance department of the science ministry. His mother grew up in southern Bohemia and worked in a personnel department. George has fond memories of traveling to visit his maternal grandparents as a young boy. He says that because his mother’s village, Kasejovice, was liberated by American soldiers during WWII, she was sympathetic to the West and the United States in particular.</p><p> </p><p>George attended high school in the years during the Prague Spring and says that the liberalization of the times made school ‘quite exciting,’ as he and his classmates were exposed to new publications and information. He graduated a few months before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and, although he considered leaving the country in the wake of the invasion, he decided against it as he was to begin university. George studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and graduated in 1975. He served one year in the military and began working at an architecture firm.</p><p> </p><p>On February 7, 1981, George and his then-wife left the country shortly after marrying. They obtained passports and visas for a trip to Austria and eventually made their way to the United States. Although they intended to move to Los Angeles, their plans fell through and they settled in New York City. George, who had visited New York twice before on short trips, describes the city as ‘a theater stage.’ Aided by a friend, he quickly started working at an architecture firm and has worked in the industry ever since. Starting in the late 1980s, George returned to Prague each year to visit family and friends. Although he lived in Wyoming for three years and, for a short time, returned to Prague to work, he considers New York City his home. Today, George works for Grimshaw Architects and lives in Manhattan.</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
CVUT
Education
Prague Spring