Anna Balev
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2339 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609072058im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/SQ-Anna-Balev.png" alt="" width="235" height="235" /></p><p>Anna Balev was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, in 1950. She grew up outside the city in the small village of Březce with her parents, three siblings and grandparents. Prior to the Communist coup, Anna’s father, Jaroslav, was a language professor at a nearby <em>gymnázium</em>. Anna describes him as an ‘avid Catholic’ who ‘went out of his way to provoke’ the communist authorities. He was arrested and sent to prison for two years. Anna’s mother, Blažena, returned to school to become a nurse in order to support the family once her father ran into trouble. Anna says that she was the only one in her class who was not a Pioneer and was instead sent to religion classes. Each year Anna spent the summer with her maternal uncle and aunt in Krnov, times she fondly recalls. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Anna’s brother left the country and settled in Canada.</p><p> </p><p>Anna attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Šternberk and hoped to study languages at Charles University (she was taught French, German and Latin by her father), but was not accepted. She instead decided to study nursing, recognizing that a practical profession would make it easier to start a life elsewhere if she left the country. Anna studied for two years in Olomouc and moved to Prague where she worked at a psychiatric hospital. She then took a job in Karlovy Vary, where she was hired because of her German language skills. In 1975 Anna reconnected with her future husband, an American who had emigrated from Ukraine. The pair had met while she was living in Prague and he was visiting the capital city. They decided to marry in order for Anna to legally leave the country. After getting married in Karlovy Vary, Anna immediately set about getting permission to immigrate to the United States. She arrived in New York City in May 1976 and was handed her green card at the airport.</p><p> </p><p>Anna says that she ‘fell in love immediately’ with the city and was astonished at the freedom she now enjoyed. While studying for her RN exam, Anna found a job at a women’s clinic. She subsequently worked at Roosevelt Hospital and for a plastic surgeon. Anna stopped practicing nursing when her first daughter was born in 1980. Her second daughter was born two years later. Anna also attended Hunter College part-time from her first year in New York. In 1985 she received degrees in English and theatre arts. Today Anna is the owner of a rental company and owns property in the Czech Republic as well as New York.</p><p> </p><p>Anna has returned to the Czech Republic nearly every year since she left and has recently become a dual citizen of the Czech Republic and the United States. She is active in the Czech community in New York as a member of Sokol and the local chapter of SVU (Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences). Today, Anna lives in New York City with her husband.</p>
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Barbara Skypala
<p>Barbara Skypala was born in Ružomberok, Slovakia, in 1930. She lived there until the age of eight, when she says the family was expelled from Slovakia due to her father’s Czech nationality. The Pellers spent WWII in Brno, where her father worked as a district attorney and her mother made money embroidering. Barbara says she knew the War was coming to an end thanks to the BBC and because ethnic Germans started to leave town before Soviet troops arrived. She remembers stray animals on the street at that time and says her family came to inherit a canary when it flew in through their window and into an open cage they had hanging in the house. The Peller family left Czechoslovakia in April 1948 when a warrant was issued for Barbara’s father’s arrest. They took a bus to Znojmo and crossed the border into Austria, where Barbara says her family was ‘smuggled’ into the American zone with false papers provided by locals. She spent time in St. Johann im Pongau refugee camp near Salzburg before being sent to boarding school in Switzerland with her sister, which she says she disliked, as she was used to much more ‘emancipation.’ Barbara came to America in the fall of 1949.</p><p> </p><p>Upon arrival in the United States, Barbara attended classes at St. Teresa’s College in Kansas, while her family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1950, she gained a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas. She moved to St. Paul upon the death of her father some two years later, and started taking classes at the University of Minnesota in the evenings after work. After a short stint in New York City (where she met her husband Vaclav Skypala), Barbara moved to Chicago with her family in 1953. Her first job in the city was as an administrative assistant at the Container Cooperation of America. In Chicago, Barbara and Vaclav raised two children, Christine and Madeleine. Barbara gained a master’s degree in theology and began to work with the Archdiocese of Chicago, specializing in religious education. Now widowed, Barbara lives in Elmwood Park, Illinois. She enjoys traveling to Europe and has recently visited Tibet and China, but she says that Elmwood Park is now her home.</p>
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Brother Gabriel Balazovic
<p>Brother Gabriel Balazovic was born Julián Balažovič in Dolná Krupá, Slovakia, in 1949. His father worked as a forest ranger and then in a facility for the mentally ill, while his mother stayed at home and raised Julián and his six siblings. Upon finishing school in Dolná Krupá, Julián attended Pol’nohospodárska záhradnícka škola (where he trained to become a gardener) in Rakovice. In 1967, he was invited alongside two of his cousins to visit his aunt Mary who lived in Toronto. He accepted her invitation and came to Canada, where he was impressed by the standard of living and decided to stay. Brother Gabriel says he was handed a ten-month prison sentence in absentia for failing to return to Czechoslovakia. In Toronto, he became a very active member of Sts. Cyril & Methodius Slovak Roman Catholic Church, to which his aunt belonged. He says that he enjoyed a busy social life as a member of the parish, attending dances and soccer matches which were organized by the predominantly Slovak congregation. He began to do a lot of singing and reading within the parish, and he met one nun in particular who spoke with him about the possibility of joining a monastic order. At this time, Brother Gabriel says he also subscribed to the Slovak-American magazine Ave Maria, which was published in Cleveland.</p><p> </p><p>It was during a trip to the United States in the late 1970s that Brother Gabriel says he first thought seriously about becoming a monk. He was traveling to a conference when he stopped at the Czech monastery in Lisle, Illinois. There, he says, he heard the monks sing vespers which had a profound effect on him. He was told by a priest traveling with him that there was a Slovak monastery in Cleveland which he may be able to join. After a number of discussions with members of the Benedictine Monastery at St. Andrew Abbey in Cleveland, Ohio, Brother Gabriel did indeed begin the process of taking his vows in 1980. He has lived there and been a member of the order ever since. He returned to Slovakia for the first time to see his family after the fall of communism in 1989. In more recent years, he has traveled to Slovakia to help with the opening of the Benedictine Transfiguration Monastery in Sampor in 2010. Brother Gabriel still travels on a Canadian passport, but became a dual citizen of Canada and Slovakia following the Velvet Revolution.</p>
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George Mesko
<p>George Mesko was born in Košice in March 1928. His father worked as a senior official on the Košice-Bohumín Railway, while his mother stayed at home and looked after George and his older sisters. With the signing of the First Vienna Arbitration in 1938, the Mesko family found itself living in Hungary as Košice was handed over to Regent Miklós Horthy. The family made plans to move to Vrútky, Slovakia, where they had relatives, but George’s father had a stroke and so the family remained in Košice for the duration of the War. In 1944, George and the other 16-year-old males in Košice were summoned to Germany to man the country’s understaffed factories. George did not end up going as he suffered a serious allergic reaction shortly before being dispatched, which his mother then used as a reason to send him to Slovakia to convalesce with relatives (and therefore avoid enlistment).</p><p> </p><p>Upon graduation shortly after the War, George began his studies in Bratislava at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University, where he remained for six years. He has written a book about the atmosphere he remembers at the medical school in the early 1950s, entitled <em>The Silent Conspiracy</em> (published in both Slovak and English). Following university, George returned to Košice to work at the city’s children’s hospital. This job was followed by stints at the children’s hospital in Sliač and then back in Bratislava. In 1960, George married his wife, Judith; the couple had both a civil ceremony and a church wedding in secret in Budapest, he says. At the time of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, George was on holiday in Yugoslavia with his wife and two children. In light of the invasion, the family decided not to go home.</p><p> </p><p>A leading cardiologist, George accepted an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship in Tübingen, where he and his family subsequently stayed for ten months. In 1969, the Meskos came to Boston, when George was offered a position at Harvard Medical School. Twenty years later, George set up the Heart to Heart Foundation with other members of the Slovak-American Cultural Center – an institution based in New York City. The fund sponsored, among other things, study visits for Slovak healthcare professionals abroad. George retired in 1996. He now lives in McLean, Virginia, and devotes much of his time to writing, primarily about 20th-century Slovak history.</p>
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Jana Fiserova-Dadik
<p>Jana Fiserova-Dadik was born in Prague in 1925. She was raised with her three siblings in the Smíchov district of the city, where her parents, Rudolph and Barbora, owned a restaurant. Jana speaks fondly of her childhood in and around the business; she remembers actors from the National Theatre coming to the restaurant following their performances. After the Communist coup in 1948, Jana’s family lost possession of the business. Jana enrolled in Charles University’s Medical Faculty in 1952. She says that she received a small scholarship throughout her time at university, but that she also had to work as an assistant to one of her pathology professors and teach Czech and Russian in the evenings to pay her way through college. Jana remembers her professors being strict, but says that she received an excellent education at university in Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3363" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170709112242im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-220.jpg" alt="Handler-2" width="400" height="283" />Upon graduation in 1958, Jana’s first job was in a hospital in Kunčice pod Ondřejníkem, Silesia. She worked there for five years until she was became head of the pathology department at a hospital near Mělnik. Following the Communist coup, Jana’s older brother Karel had settled in the United States. In 1963, he came back to Czechoslovakia on his first visit. Jana says that she had repeatedly been denied a passport on account of her brother’s emigration. In 1968, however, she was granted permission to travel to Yugoslavia with her younger sister, Milada, and her sister’s two children.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Jana and Milada found themselves in Yugoslavia when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia took place on August 21, 1968. They decided to travel to Austria and seek asylum. They came to Vienna, where they were helped by a Catholic priest who found the family accommodation and Jana work in a laboratory. Jana’s brother Karel then sent his sisters affidavits and paid for their tickets to the United States. Jana arrived in Vermilion, Ohio, in September 1968. On weekends, she helped her brother at his restaurant, Old Prague. Otherwise, she says she did not see him much, as she lived in Cleveland during the week, where she retrained as a doctor. After an internship at Mary Mount Hospital, Jana worked at St. Luke’s and then for the City of Cleveland. She became an American citizen in 1974. Today, Jana travels to the Czech Republic at least once a year, but says she enjoys the ‘freedom’ of living in America. She lives in Avon Lake, Ohio.</p>
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Joe Gazdik
<p> </p><p>Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Melania Rakytiak
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</p>
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Mila Kyncl
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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, <a href="/web/20170609131424/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/john-jaroslav-kyncl/">Jaroslav Kyncl</a>, 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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p>
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Oliver Gunovsky
<p>Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.</p><p> </p><p>In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.</p><p> </p>
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Paul Brunovsky
<p>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.</p><p> </p><p>The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.</p>
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