In May 1968, Jaroslav was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to deliver some lectures on the work that he was doing. He was urged by one of his hosts, Dr. Hans Heller – himself a Czech émigré – to ‘put his papers in order’ in the event that Soviet troops were to invade Czechoslovakia and put a halt to the Prague Spring. Dr. Kyncl, his wife and two children duly left Czechoslovakia for Austria a week after the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. The family spent a brief period as refugees in Vienna before Jaroslav was offered an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
In 1971, Jaroslav came to America alone, to accept a research position at the Cleveland Clinic. Upon securing a job one year later at Abbott Laboratories in Lake Bluff, Illinois, Jaroslav moved to the Chicago area with his family, where he has lived ever since. Among other professional accomplishments, he is credited with inventing the drug Hytrin, the first medicine to treat BPH (a frequent and serious prostate condition). An art enthusiast, Jaroslav focuses on archiving and promoting the work of Czech exile artists in particular. To this end, he has made a documentary about the late poet and artist Jiří Kolář and operates a small non-commercial exhibition space, called Gallery 500ft².
]]>Jaroslav Kyncl was born in Prague on August 16, 1936. He spent his early childhood in the northern Bohemian town of Liberec, where his father, Jan Kynčl, was the president of the local branch of Živnostenská banka. In 1939, following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, the family was thrown out of Liberec and moved to Německý Brod (nowadays Havlíčkův Brod), where the Kynčls spent the duration of the War. They returned to Liberec in 1945, but moved away again three years later following the Communist coup, when Jaroslav’s father ‘bartered’ his post at the bank in Liberec for a more modest position out of the spotlight in Aš. Jaroslav attended secondary school in Aš, Cheb and then Čáslav before beginning his studies at Masaryk University in Brno in 1954. In 1961, Jaroslav moved to Prague, where he started his pharmacological research, developing new drugs in collaboration with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the company SPOFA. In this same year he married his wife, Mila Kyncl.
In May 1968, Jaroslav was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to deliver some lectures on the work that he was doing. He was urged by one of his hosts, Dr. Hans Heller – himself a Czech émigré – to ‘put his papers in order’ in the event that Soviet troops were to invade Czechoslovakia and put a halt to the Prague Spring. Dr. Kyncl, his wife and two children duly left Czechoslovakia for Austria a week after the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. The family spent a brief period as refugees in Vienna before Jaroslav was offered an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
In 1971, Jaroslav came to America alone, to accept a research position at the Cleveland Clinic. Upon securing a job one year later at Abbott Laboratories in Lake Bluff, Illinois, Jaroslav moved to the Chicago area with his family, where he has lived ever since. Among other professional accomplishments, he is credited with inventing the drug Hytrin, the first medicine to treat BPH (a frequent and serious prostate condition). An art enthusiast, Jaroslav focuses on archiving and promoting the work of Czech exile artists in particular. To this end, he has made a documentary about the late poet and artist Jiří Kolář and operates a small non-commercial exhibition space, called Gallery 500ft².
“After the War yes, both my brother and I were very avid Boy Scouts, and I would say that the Boy Scout aspect in my growing until 1948, ’50 actually, was perhaps one of the most important influences on my life. Both the ideals and… of course, the Boy Scout movement in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia was different than here. It was – in the United States it is a sort of organization of the fathers more than of the boys – in Czechoslovakia, the parents were completely excluded from it. And so the young children would have total autonomy. And I happened to be very fortunate, because my brother was older, I always would have friends that were about four years older or something, and so they were carrying me like a little puppy with them and I benefitted enormously and so I was actually more involved with the older children.
“In 1948, when the Communists took power, that was one of the first organizations that they were trying to eliminate. They didn’t close it overnight, but they made many limitations and eventually they did close it. And, at that time, my father, who was getting old and had only about four years to retirement, determined very smartly that it was time to move the family away from Liberec.
“They did make in Liberec a major trial with the Boy Scouts. They were all jailed and the Boy Scout group of ours was disbanded and that was very unfortunate, but I was not part of it, because we were already away from the city.”
“Although people today like to speak about how horrible it was under the communists and how persecuted they were, often they are exaggerating also. And I was… I must say that, religion was not that persecuted. We were, I was, having my first communion when I was 14 years old at the highest communist time in 1951. I should add when I said that though, that after the communion, which was a beautiful May day in Aš, we came out of the church and the – I don’t want to say priest, I’m not sure what word I should use for the evangelic – pastor was jailed, right away. There were police who brought him to the car and took him away and then they said that he did something criminal, which is probably not true but…So, it was bad, but we were able to have our communion fine and we were going to the church and throughout the whole regime – actually when I was at high school later on in Čáslav, that was the most difficult time of communist rule – there people could voluntarily take Catholic religion in high school, so we all turned into Catholics then and did go to the Catholic lessons just to demonstrate that we were not going to be taking everything as was at that time necessary.”
“There were some – the Russian scientists Michurin or Olga Lepeshinskaya – they were complete crooks, they were claiming they can make life from useless material and all that which was nonsense. But Stalin supported it and it was a dogma that was to be accepted in Czechoslovakia also. So people like this Ferdinand Herčík or Soudek – these people that were teaching me – did have to pay lip-service to it as much as during the War we had to in the schools greet [the teacher] with ‘Heil Hitler!’ But we all somehow, the Czechs learned how to… what is right and what is not, and we were able to read what is correct and what is not.”
“The university that I was going to was the place where the first greatest geneticist Gregor Mendel, who today is considered to be the father of genetics, had been. His teaching was completely forbidden, it was considered by the communists… it was called ‘the reactionary Mendel-Morgan theories.’ Because Stalin didn’t want heritage to be important. They wanted that indoctrination was more important than genetics. So Mendel, whom we all know about, was forbidden at that time. But you know everybody was paying a little bit lip-service, and nobody really took it seriously.”
“I was born and I knew that I was going to the United States, without any communists or anybody else. In fact, my wife’s father was at one point showing movies in this little village that they were living in. And he gave us a private performance of Kazan’s movie America, America – I don’t know if you saw that movie, which is about a little Turkish boy who has it in his fate to go to America and he goes through all sorts of things and he would kill, he would betray his wife to get the money for [his boat] and everything too, and he eventually gets to America and is happy there. And when we went through that movie I told my father-in-law, I said ‘Father you see? The same way I’m going to America with Mila.’ And he was very upset of course, naturally, we already had two little children. But I said that, so I felt.
“But it was also a very natural thing in my work that, at the time what I was working on, I could not do in the Czech Republic, then I couldn’t even do it in Germany anymore, so I went for this Cleveland Clinic in order to be able to continue with my own work. So in order to continue and keep myself in my profession, it is somewhat like with sportspeople – if you want to be a good tennis player you have to play, and so I had to be in those institutions doing those experiments and this, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.
“And the other thing was of course the aspect of the Russians, and with the invasion we really expected that the Russians are really going to impose their… Russify Czechoslovakia. And then, of course, we did expect the same thing in Germany.”
“I saved enough that we would have a vacation together, bought a Chevy Impala convertible for 500 bucks, went to Earl Scheib where they sprayed any color you want for $27.79 – so I painted it gold, to make an impression on my wife and children, and we made a rendezvous in Denver. My wife was flying from Frankfurt with the kids for eight hours, I think, via New York. And I was driving the Chevy Impala convertible for three days to get to Denver at the same hour, which was quite nice. And then we made six weeks’ vacation, I had four weeks and then I made some lectures in the congresses in Kansas City and in New Hampshire. And so we put it into, we incorporated it into the vacation and we made a figure of eight through the United States – coast to coast – in six weeks. It was many, many thousand miles. And this sealed it, that when we came to Kennedy Airport then, the kids said ‘We are not going to some stupid Germany, we are going to stay here!’”
“They considered them German, so their American school-mates called them ‘Krauts,’ and they were even fighting them occasionally, so we had to tell them that they are not German. And on the other hand, there were a lot of Germans here in the community who thought that we were genuine German and they came to us and offered us all sorts of help, and they were very nice people and we have a lot of friendships. And after all we were, at that time, more than one hour driving distance from Chicago, so we didn’t have any communication with the Czech community. Only several years later, we started to go to the Czech places like Cicero and Berwyn, we discovered the Czech bakeries, but we really were not searching for it.”
Well before his graduation from university in 1974, Martin had been thinking seriously about leaving the country. A very close family friend, Litti Manzer, lived in Miesbach, Bavaria, and Martin decided to get a tourist visa to visit her. He did not have any luck obtaining the exit permit until an acquaintance with connections assisted him. In April 1975, Martin arrived in Miesbach and quickly found a job playing, coaching, and teaching lessons at a tennis club. Martin says that his time in Germany ‘exceeded expectations’ and that he lived in ‘extreme luxury;’ however, it was always his desire to go to the United States. He received sponsorship from the International Rescue Committee and arrived in New York in October 1976. Martin was accepted to a doctoral program in economics at Cornell University which he started in January 1977. A summer job at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. led to a full-time job there in 1978, first as a research assistant and later as an economist. Having left Cornell to pursue his career, Martin finished his master’s degree at George Washington University. In 1980, Martin married his wife Eva, a process which he says was made very complicated because she was told she needed permission from the Czechoslovak government to marry a foreigner. They were able to convince a German judge to waive this requirement, and they married at City Hall in Miesbach. Martin traveled a lot for work, but he says he was repeatedly denied requests for a visa to visit Czechoslovakia. After numerous attempts, in 1984, he was able to visit Prague.
Martin’s work at the World Bank put him in touch with leading Czech economists, politicians, and businessmen; upon retiring in 1998, he looked for business opportunities in the Czech Republic. Martin conceived of and is managing the American Fund for Czech and Slovak Leadership Studies’ Young Leaders and Young Talents programs; these programs provide opportunities for young people in the Czech and Slovak Republics to pursue a course of study and/or work in the United States. Today, Martin is an international consultant, and he lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Eva.
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Martin Herman was born in České Budějovice in 1948. He was only a few months old when he moved to Prague, where his father, Karel, had a job at a glass export company. While Martin and his siblings Jana and Peter were growing up, his mother, Jana, stayed at home, and Martin remembers her hosting many parties. Later, Jana had several good jobs, first working in a hotel and then in the Ministry of Finance. As a boy, Martin participated in recreational and competitive sports; he was on a basketball team, and also enjoyed soccer, tennis, and hockey. After elementary school, Martin attended Secondary Agricultural School in Čáslav. He graduated in 1968 and spent one year working, traveling, and studying for the entrance exams for university. Martin was in Vienna during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, and he says that he considered staying in Vienna, but his mother convinced him to return home. In the fall of 1969, he started studying at VŠE (University of Economics, Prague). While in school he worked as a night watchman and wrote summaries of foreign economics articles for the National Academy of Sciences. He also learned English and played tennis regularly.
Well before his graduation from university in 1974, Martin had been thinking seriously about leaving the country. A very close family friend, Litti Manzer, lived in Miesbach, Bavaria, and Martin decided to get a tourist visa to visit her. He did not have any luck obtaining the exit permit until an acquaintance with connections assisted him. In April 1975, Martin arrived in Miesbach and quickly found a job playing, coaching, and teaching lessons at a tennis club. Martin says that his time in Germany ‘exceeded expectations’ and that he lived in ‘extreme luxury;’ however, it was always his desire to go to the United States. He received sponsorship from the International Rescue Committee and arrived in New York in October 1976. Martin was accepted to a doctoral program in economics at Cornell University which he started in January 1977. A summer job at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. led to a full-time job there in 1978, first as a research assistant and later as an economist. Having left Cornell to pursue his career, Martin finished his master’s degree at George Washington University. In 1980, Martin married his wife Eva, a process which he says was made very complicated because she was told she needed permission from the Czechoslovak government to marry a foreigner. They were able to convince a German judge to waive this requirement, and they married at City Hall in Miesbach. Martin traveled a lot for work, but he says he was repeatedly denied requests for a visa to visit Czechoslovakia. After numerous attempts, in 1984, he was able to visit Prague.
Martin’s work at the World Bank put him in touch with leading Czech economists, politicians, and businessmen; upon retiring in 1998, he looked for business opportunities in the Czech Republic. Martin conceived of and is managing the American Fund for Czech and Slovak Leadership Studies’ Young Leaders and Young Talents programs; these programs provide opportunities for young people in the Czech and Slovak Republics to pursue a course of study and/or work in the United States. Today, Martin is an international consultant, and he lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Eva.
“He [my father] always tried convincing me, ‘I know you don’t like the situation in this country, but you’re born here, you should stay here, you should change things here.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can do that,’ and I was telling him ‘Look, if I really get involved, then I’ll be in jail.’ At that time, it was very easy – the communist police were very smart. They would not nail you down on some anti-communist activities. If you worked somewhere they would set up a scheme, let’s say you misappropriated some money and they will nail on that, and there will be no way of getting out of that. So I knew all that and I said, ‘Well, I think I need to really work hard to get out of here as soon as possible.”
“In Vienna, some guy I met said, ‘Well, do you want to make some money?’ I said ‘Sure.’ Right on the 22nd of August, I started selling newspapers – Wiener Express Extra Ausgabe. Everybody was hungry to get papers. I didn’t know Vienna that well, but I thought I need to go somewhere where there’s a lot of traffic, so I put myself right on the corner of Kertnerstrasse and Am Graben – it’s very busy, it’s the center of Vienna. I stood there, I had a little outfit and I put a Czech flag here, and the Viennese were so generous. They’d say ‘You are from Prague and you are already working here. That’s wonderful.’ The newspaper was one shilling and they would give me 100 shillings – ‘Here’s 100 shillings, you will need it.’ And so I made tons of money right there.”
“I remember all the time, I had BBC World Service on the radio all the time, and it worked pretty well. So, very nice British English, and they used to have these sessions for teaching English, and it was wonderful. And I taped it and repeatedly listened to it. I started reading when I was a night watchman. My first book I read was The Graduate. Even though I didn’t understand it really, I understood maybe half of it. I just read it, and reread it again. That’s how I studied. Then I also somehow managed to get some other people interested and we started this English speaking club, and I was a total beginner. Twice a week, sometimes three times a week, we met in the evening, just like a book club or something. Similar set up, dictation, spelling, some discussion on a topical issue, and then at the end, everyone had to say a little story. It was very challenging for me, because I was way down. So I remember, guests in the hotel, they left sometimes Reader’s Digest or some books so my mother brought it home. So from Reader’s Digest at the bottom in the footnote, they had little stories, three or four lines. So I memorized that and used that – ‘This is my story for today’ you know.”
“A couple of times we did a big job, that was in the early ’70s – ‘73,’74,’75 – scientific calculators became a big thing, and there were not really so many in Czechoslovakia. So we had a friend in Berlin. His father was at the embassy there, and somehow they had some permission – they could go to West Berlin. He had a son there that studied and he was a good friend of ours. So what we did is we would get an order list from engineers and people that wanted these calculators. We had a catalog and we got the list. People gave us money up front; we got money on the black market, made a good exchange there, and went to East Germany – that was a very cheap flight, Prague to Berlin – gave our friend the list, in the afternoon he brought us the calculators. Maybe we stayed one day or two days, bought some other things, like good shoes or something they didn’t have, a little different. And then went back to Prague, because people knew us at the airport and we had some friends there. They had very good sausages in Germany, or some pate. So we brought that to some of the airport people and they just let us go through, we had a bag full of calculators.”
“In order to go as a tourist, I needed to get what is called výjezdní doložka, and it’s sort of an obstacle course that you had to take. You had to have a stamp from your supervisor at work, you submit this to the bank, the bank gives you stamps – you get eight dollars a day for ten days, so you get 80 dollars – and then you go to the police and the police will issue an exit visa, and then you go the embassy of that country and they will give you a tourist visa. That sounds very simple, but it was very, very difficult.”
“I got into this hotel, and my god, you know. Coming from extreme luxury, beautiful flowers in the windows and everything, to this hotel which was for welfare recipients on the last leg and drug addicts. So I end up in this room, I want to take a shower because I’m all sweaty, open the shower, and cockroaches all over the place, I thought ‘Oh my god, what is this?’”
Mila attended Masaryk University’s medical school in Brno which she refers to as one of the “best times of her life.” She says she graduated after her father signed his property, which included several businesses, over to the state. Her family was moved into a much smaller building on their property which her father renovated. Mila worked at a hospital in Strakonice for two years, then, in 1961, married her husband, Jaroslav Kyncl, and that same year moved to Prague. They had two children, Marketa and John. Mila found a job in a hospital in Prague, but was not allowed a specialty because of her anti-communist views. However, she says this ultimately worked in her favor as she received training in all departments.
After attempts to leave the country legally by applying for jobs abroad (in places such as Tunis), Mila and her family left Czechoslovakia on August 30, 1968, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion. They lived in Vienna as refugees for a few months before moving to Heidelberg when Jaroslav was offered a Humboldt scholarship. Mila also found work as a physician in Heidelberg and stayed in that position until 1972, when she and her children joined Jaroslav, who had moved to Cleveland a year earlier, in the United States. They settled in Lake Bluff, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Mila retrained as a doctor and eventually opened her own practice. Both of Mila’s children speak Czech, and she and Jaroslav regularly visit the Czech Republic. They are active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), and Mila retains many Czech cultural traditions.
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Mila Kyncl was born in Trhový Štěpánov, Bohemia, in 1935. her father was a businessman and worked the land that their family owned while her mother stayed at home to raise Mila. During WWII, Mila says German troops occupied her home, which was very large. Overall, she recalls having a happy childhood, sprinkled with trips to Prague to attend the ballet or opera with her parents. A student at the village school until the age of ten, Mila then transferred to a larger school in Čáslav. At age 14, Mila was chosen by her teachers to assist the local doctor. She attributes receiving this opportunity to her good student record and her background in math, physics, and chemistry.
Mila attended Masaryk University’s medical school in Brno which she refers to as one of the “best times of her life.” She says she graduated after her father signed his property, which included several businesses, over to the state. Her family was moved into a much smaller building on their property which her father renovated. Mila worked at a hospital in Strakonice for two years, then, in 1961, married her husband, Jaroslav Kyncl, and that same year moved to Prague. They had two children, Marketa and John. Mila found a job in a hospital in Prague, but was not allowed a specialty because of her anti-communist views. However, she says this ultimately worked in her favor as she received training in all departments.
After attempts to leave the country legally by applying for jobs abroad (in places such as Tunis), Mila and her family left Czechoslovakia on August 30, 1968, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion. They lived in Vienna as refugees for a few months before moving to Heidelberg when Jaroslav was offered a Humboldt scholarship. Mila also found work as a physician in Heidelberg and stayed in that position until 1972, when she and her children joined Jaroslav, who had moved to Cleveland a year earlier, in the United States. They settled in Lake Bluff, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Mila retrained as a doctor and eventually opened her own practice. Both of Mila’s children speak Czech, and she and Jaroslav regularly visit the Czech Republic. They are active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), and Mila retains many Czech cultural traditions.
“Well, he [my father] was a few times threatened with the concentration camp, because he wanted to have order in the house. Thank god, he didn’t go, but it was a daily fear for my mom because practically the Germans were coming every day and checking on everything. I remember we had a big band radio, and there was a death sentence if you listened to London, [Radio] Free Europe. Through this, my dad, because it was a very good radio, he was every day listening in the same house where you have Germans, to London, risking his life. But he was able to give all the news and everything to the people they were able to trust. So this was going on during the war.”
“I lived in college housing, and I had very good company with the girl, we studied together. And no one has money, we were all in the same [boat], sharing whoever got something from home, bakery or so, and we are still friends today. And second, the pressure of the communists was not like in Prague. There was much more freedom and we were very lucky in medical school because at the time they believed body and spirit go together. So every year we had a very good exercise program. One year gymnastics, one semester swimming – we had Olympians who trained us. Running, skiing, kayaking. We went every Friday or Saturday with a rucksack on our back and we were in the mountains. It was an incredible six years. I said I wish my kids went through [this]. We were at the opera, because five bucks, five korun [crowns] was a ticket to go to anything for a student. So, you saw every week an opera, you saw every week Janáček. You just lived the life fully.”
“Then my husband was able to get some small apartment and I got a job in Krč, Thomayer Hospital. Because I was not communist, I was going from one department to the other one; wherever they needed help, I was there. No central anesthesiology, surgery. So, thanks to the communists, when I came out of the country, I knew more than my colleagues because they were sitting in one place whereas I was all over – internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases. So I got the best training you can wish to survive. Thanks to the regime, and my belief not to sign ever to become a communist.”
“My husband must have been so frustrated, because I really was depressed and the kids were sick. First John, then Marketa got an earache. We have to go to a hospital, they gave her streptomycin. And when he saw where we lived and what happened to us, he said ‘Go back home and you will come back when I will be more stable.’ And we went on the train and when we were on the train we didn’t have a single penny; he didn’t give me even one dollar, nothing, because we were going home. And the people we met on the train said, ‘This is the most stupid thing you are doing, when you are already here. As a doctor you will have so many opportunities. Stay here.’ And they bought us soap, they bought the children chocolate. So when we came to the line on the Austrian border, I took my luggage, and with the children, we were out. And we didn’t pay the train; we didn’t have a single penny, he had just put us in. We were sitting there and they were calling him, but he was sick too. And he didn’t know what they were saying. So were about three hours sitting outside, we have two luggages, the kids were hungry and not too good. Then finally he came and he said, ‘With God’s blessing, we are together and we will do the best.”
“It was complicated because, first of all, I still speak with an accent today, and I had still a lot of learning to do when I started to work. I didn’t know how to sell all my experience. I didn’t use anybody to help me; I just studied three or four hospitals that I was able to reach in the car, and I said ‘This is what I am, I passed the test if you are interested.’ And I got hired in a residency in one day. It was not the best one – I could go a much, much better one, but I didn’t know how people do it. But the training was very harsh the first year because you have a 36 hour [shift] when you didn’t sleep. You went home at 4:00, you slept, you were half dead, the kids were screaming and my husband didn’t know what to do because it was already two days without anybody. So then my mom came, and second year I was already supervising so it was much easier.
But you know what? I really liked it. I couldn’t complain about it because I was ten years older than the other [residents] and learned so much again, and survived. After my second year, they already gave me recognition; I didn’t need to finish three years, I was already eligible. But I went to endocrinology because I didn’t want to cheat on the training, I wanted to finish like everybody else and learn something different, which I didn’t know. So I finished and then I went to the practice in 1978.”
“Roráty [Advent mass] was 6:00 and as a child I woke up, I was there every single day, the six weeks before Christmas. And it was such a medieval atmosphere, you never saw [anything like] it. The candles, cold, darkness, and the old prayers, the old songs, they are hundreds of years old. I wish somebody could see it. Once I came back after communism was over, and I have a cousin from Vancouver. He couldn’t believe it. He still, until he died, talked about the impression, because it was like two, three hundred years back. Church full of mostly ladies, and praying. Such a strong feeling in the church. And this is until now. When I go over there, it’s unbelievable. The church is full of people, the singing – they sing ‘Svatý Václave’. And when they sing it comes from the heart. It is something you will never see here, never.”