Zuzana and Brona received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated. While in school, Zuzana worked at the deli at Kmart, a job which she says helped improve her English. Upon graduating, Zuzana worked a number of customer service jobs. She then moved into the IT field, working at Motorola and HP. She received a two-year degree from the College of DuPage.
Today Zuzana lives in Downers Grove, Illinois, with her daughter, Emilka. She speaks Slovak to her daughter and the two of them return each year to Slovakia to visit family. Zuzana, along with her extended family, keeps Slovak holiday traditions and loves to cook Slovak food. While she says that she is ‘so glad’ to have grown up in Slovakia, today she calls the United States home and is thankful for her mother to have made the decision to give her daughters a better life.
]]>Zuzana Lanc was was born in Liptovský Mikuláš in central Slovakia and grew up in the nearby village of Liptovské Sliače. She and her twin sister, Brona, lived with their mother, Anna Vesela, and their grandparents. Zuzana speaks fondly of her childhood in Slovakia and says that she was ‘so happy,’ especially compared to children growing up in the United States today. She enjoyed Russian and Slovak classes in school and excelled at recitation and speaking competitions. In 1987, Brona’s mother moved to the United States and married Zdenek Vesely, an American citizen. Although the plan was for the girls to follow shortly after, it took well over one year for Brona and Zuzana to be allowed to leave the country. They arrived in the United States in October 1988 and settled in with their mother and stepfather, who now had their younger sister, Margret, in Aurora, Illinois.
Zuzana and Brona received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated. While in school, Zuzana worked at the deli at Kmart, a job which she says helped improve her English. Upon graduating, Zuzana worked a number of customer service jobs. She then moved into the IT field, working at Motorola and HP. She received a two-year degree from the College of DuPage.
Today Zuzana lives in Downers Grove, Illinois, with her daughter, Emilka. She speaks Slovak to her daughter and the two of them return each year to Slovakia to visit family. Zuzana, along with her extended family, keeps Slovak holiday traditions and loves to cook Slovak food. While she says that she is ‘so glad’ to have grown up in Slovakia, today she calls the United States home and is thankful for her mother to have made the decision to give her daughters a better life.
“Compared to the kids here – my daughter – I think we were so happy. We didn’t have any computers, no TV, no games. We were just happy to go outside and play soccer and badminton and make bunker and just be outdoors. And we were safe; our parents didn’t worry about us. So I think it was a lot easier than kids have right now these days here.”
Do you think it was better to grow up without internet and computers?
“Oh yeah, totally. Big time. I’m so anti-computer, anti-TV. No, no, no. I mean, we had so many adventures. We made up games and we didn’t kill our brain cells with watching TV and passive time. We had wooden blocks and games that we’d play without TV. They just come home from school, sit down, watch TV, [use] the internet. I don’t think they use their brain as much. I’m so glad that I grew up in Slovakia and I had that childhood. I would wish for my daughter to have the same experience, because it was a lot more fun, I think.”
“I remember we were seven years old and my uncle came and it was at Christmas. At that time, it was my uncle, my mom and her sister… So there was like 12 of us and we had 105 Christmas presents. I remember that because we were counting them, and during communism that was like ‘Wow.’ You would have like 30 presents. I remember that after we came from midnight mass, my mom and my uncle and we stayed up and he was telling us about America, how great it is and this and that. As a kid you are like, ‘Oh my gosh, you have bananas every day? You can have oranges? You can have this?’ It was euphoria.”
“My uncle immigrated in 1968 and my mom came to visit him when we were ten, stayed for a year and a half, and she really liked it and she came back home and told us ‘This is the place where I want to raise you up and it’s going to be a better life for you.’ And she was making plans how she was going to come back here again, so then when we were 16 she finally succeeded and she came here. She got married to a Czech with American citizenship, and that was the way she brought us here.”
“I remember when I came and when the other immigrants came it was like a monopoly. If you want to work here – do construction, be a cleaning lady – you always have to go through Polish people. And Polish people, except two that I know, they are firm on speaking only Polish. They would not every learn Slovak or Czech. So we had no other choice but to speak their language.”
Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.
]]>Zdenek David was born in Blatná, South Bohemia, in May 1931. He moved to Prague at age seven, however, when his father Václav (a judge) was appointed to the capital’s circuit court. Zdenek spent most of WWII in Prague and remembers his schooling changing under German occupation. He says students at his gymnázium on Husova Street were taught no history during the War and were expected to learn subjects such as mathematics in German. Zdenek remained in the capital at the time of liberation and remembers ‘chaos’ as reprisals were inflicted upon ethnic Germans and those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Zdenek left Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1947, when he gained a one-year American Field Service scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Putney School in Vermont. When the Communist takeover happened in 1948, his parents urged him not to return home in light of the political climate.
Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.
“We could sort of tell that something very unusual and very unlucky was happening to us. At the beginning of the next school year in 1939, we were asked to cut out the pictures of Presidents Masaryk and Beneš from our textbooks, and we got new students coming in, especially those who were expelled from Slovakia, or [who] left Slovakia in a very difficult position. Among them was a young man who became my good friend, whose father was a dentist in Bratislava and also had to leave.”
“There was that one unfortunate, well, peculiar incident just one year before I went to gymnázium when I was on the street with a couple of my friends and one of them was eating, I think it was plums, and was spitting the pits out into the street. And suddenly a German who had a swastika attached to the fender of his car stopped and seized us, claiming that we were desecrating the German flag. And he called a policeman who then went and took us to the police station. And our parents had to come and take us out. It seems as if the matter was somehow settled without any further consequences, but needless to say we were very scared by the whole event.”
“One of them happened right under our windows where, in 1939, I saw the coming of the German tanks. This time, a large procession of German prisoners was being taken up the street, and occasionally one of the guards would shoot one of these Germans, about four or five during the time we watched, and I remember my mother got very upset about it and thought this was really bestial behavior. And the other one, even more gruesome, event which I witnessed, was the burning of two presumably Germans on Wenceslas Square, about two or three days after the Russians came in. And these two victims were hanging by their feet, with their heads down, in an arch which I think was used for advertising where Vodičkova ulice comes into Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square]. There were Soviet tanks close and it looked like both Soviet soldiers and members of these Revolutionary Guards were pouring gasoline over these bodies, which were still squirming and alive, and setting them on fire. So that was very shocking, but it was kind of in a way overshadowed by the rejoicing over liberation.”
“My mother actually did take on employment after essentially working at home after the Communist seizure of power. Women were supposed to, everyone was supposed to, work. And she found an interesting job for herself with a fashion magazine which also was designing knitting patterns, and that was one of her great hobbies. That was something she got some training in when she was going to the art school. So she continued there, and she enjoyed the people she worked with.”
“My mentor James Billington became the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1973, and a year later he brought me to the center to be on the staff. And it seemed particularly fitting that it should be an institution honoring Woodrow Wilson since Woodrow Wilson was so intimately involved in the creation, independence of Czechoslovakia and therefore also the Czech Republic. So I started working at the center, involved again in building up the library resources and, more importantly, surveying resources for the study of certain foreign areas available in Washington, D.C. And that resulted in a series of some 14 volumes discussing the resources in Washington for the study of various major areas of the world, such as the Soviet Union, China, the Near East, Africa and Latin America.”
“Because of my work on the Bohemian Reformation, especially for my book, I was awarded the Palacký medal for social sciences, which is given, I believe it’s annually, to a scholar who is to be honored for his contribution to Czech history. This happened in [September] 2009.”
Yvette Kaiser Smith was born in Prague in 1958. Her father Karel worked in theatre, and her mother Vlasta was a secretary. Yvette’s sister, Miroslava, was older by 18 months. Yvette recalls having ‘total freedom’ as a child in Prague, walking the city streets alone and taking the tram to extracurricular activities and doctor’s appointments. She participated in what she calls ‘typical’ after-school activities such as swimming and theatre. In January 1968, Yvette’s father traveled to the United States for work; although his visa was valid until 1969, he returned for a brief period following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and made the decision for his family to join him in the United States. He then returned to the United States and Yvette’s mother went about securing passports for the family. In late December 1968, Yvette, her mother and sister left Czechoslovakia for England, where they stayed with a relative. After one month in England, Yvette’s father sent the family money for plane tickets, and they flew to Dallas, Texas.
The Kaisers lived in an apartment in the Highland Park area of Dallas. Yvette’s father worked in construction and her mother found employment as a maid. She began school in March 1969 without knowing how to speak English. Yvette says she learned quickly, thanks to help from her classmates and teachers. She says that although the family spoke Czech at home and her parents kept a Czech household, once she became fluent in English she ‘became American overnight.’ In 1990, she earned a degree in fine arts from Southern Methodist University and married her husband Tim. They moved to Chicago in 1991 and she enrolled in a masters program at the University of Chicago. After receiving her MFA, Yvette began her career as an artist. Although she started out as a sculptor, Yvette says that her first trip back to Prague in 1998 changed her direction as an artist and she now crochets fiberglass. In 1999, Yvette’s parents moved back to Prague to live and she often went to visit them. She says that she has retained a few Czech traditions at home, mainly celebrating Christmas on December 24 and making traditional foods on other holidays. Today, Yvette lives in Chicago with her husband and father.
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Yvette Kaiser Smith was born in Prague in 1958. Her father Karel worked in theatre, and her mother Vlasta was a secretary. Yvette’s sister, Miroslava, was older by 18 months. Yvette recalls having ‘total freedom’ as a child in Prague, walking the city streets alone and taking the tram to extracurricular activities and doctor’s appointments. She participated in what she calls ‘typical’ after-school activities such as swimming and theatre. In January 1968, Yvette’s father traveled to the United States for work; although his visa was valid until 1969, he returned for a brief period following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and made the decision for his family to join him in the United States. He then returned to the United States and Yvette’s mother went about securing passports for the family. In late December 1968, Yvette, her mother and sister left Czechoslovakia for England, where they stayed with a relative. After one month in England, Yvette’s father sent the family money for plane tickets, and they flew to Dallas, Texas.
The Kaisers lived in an apartment in the Highland Park area of Dallas. Yvette’s father worked in construction and her mother found employment as a maid. She began school in March 1969 without knowing how to speak English. Yvette says she learned quickly, thanks to help from her classmates and teachers. She says that although the family spoke Czech at home and her parents kept a Czech household, once she became fluent in English she ‘became American overnight.’ In 1990, she earned a degree in fine arts from Southern Methodist University and married her husband Tim. They moved to Chicago in 1991 and she enrolled in a masters program at the University of Chicago. After receiving her MFA, Yvette began her career as an artist. Although she started out as a sculptor, Yvette says that her first trip back to Prague in 1998 changed her direction as an artist and she now crochets fiberglass. In 1999, Yvette’s parents moved back to Prague to live and she often went to visit them. She says that she has retained a few Czech traditions at home, mainly celebrating Christmas on December 24 and making traditional foods on other holidays. Today, Yvette lives in Chicago with her husband and father.
“I love my mom and I have no complaints about my upbringing, but I think we were just, like, running wild. I remember running around the city when I was really young. Getting on the tram unattended. Going downtown, running around. It’s not like here where you’re worried about what’s going to happen to your children. We’d walk to the doctor on your own. That’s what I remember. It’s a strange thing to say, but I remember total freedom as a kid.”
“We landed at Love Field in Dallas, Texas. I remember that very clearly. Karel made some friends, they picked us up, we drove down Lemmon Avenue, went through my first drive-thru, I had my first hamburger and a Dr. Pepper. I still love Dr. Pepper; the smell has a very specific smell. Because Dallas has the plant where they make Dr. Pepper and, to me, it’s just a feel-good thing. Good drive-thru hamburger – Princess burgers – and a Dr. Pepper. That was my first American joy.”
“I had no English; I started school. Every hour, the teacher took the smartest kid in the class, and that student and I went to the back of the room or in the hallway, used flashcards and first-grade readers and I can tell you this – this is what I remember, I could be exaggerating – but I remember at the end of that school year, what is that? Maybe two months? Two and a half months? I understood and was able to speak probably 90-95% of what I know now. My English was perfect, very heavy accent.”
“If they would have stayed in America, they would have had to work their crap jobs until they died. They were sort of bound to the mortgage; bound to paying for life. Really, their American success story is us, is me. That I have choices. That I can get away with being an artist and not having a ‘real job.’ That I was able to realize who I am. That’s their American dream. I think they didn’t benefit from it they way I clearly did.”
“You know, it’s a funny thing. When I go back there [to Prague], I’m a foreigner. Living here, I’ve been here most of my life, but I’m realizing I don’t actually fit. I’m more of a Czech-American than American. When I go back to Prague, I’m a total foreigner. They don’t recognize me as a Czech person, so it’s funny.”
“When my mom and I went back for three weeks, it was like this emotional roller coaster. When you walk through big streets and little streets and all these places, the park where you grew up. I was like a really dried up sponge and all the sudden I was soaked in water and I just, it was like a wafer that expanded. I was so emotional back then, I couldn’t even tell you. It was crazy. It’s like I was asleep and I woke up. And I can’t even define it. It was like in a big stroke way, not in little details. Literally, that’s the image I get. I was like a little wafer and I just puffed up. That’s the big thing. If you have to sort of identify the Czech-ness and the American-ness, that’s when the Czech-ness sort of woke up. And I thought ‘Oh! Hello.’ Part of it was, it’s that time, there’s like there’s this big, dead, blind gap between then and what was then now. There was no memory. But all of the sudden, going back to those streets, to the smells, to the same stores. Like Bílá labut’, it was just a department store – and it actually finally closed a few years ago – but we went there when I was a shorty. It was still there. Obviously Prague didn’t change a whole lot, but a lot of the places were still there and all of the sudden it woke up all these memories; and it was like dead silence for, what, 30 years, filled up with pictures and smells. It was crazy. So that was sort of the identity awakening.”
When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
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Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.
When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
“I took German but before you… when I went [to school] in the ‘60s… before you could take an elective language you had to do well in Russian. And if you wanted to be a cool kid, you would have As and Bs but you’d have a D in Russian because that was a sign of a little bit of a protest, you know. But if you had a D in Russian, then you couldn’t get in to the other languages. So I ended up having a C or something and just squeezing by, so they let me take some German and some English – I took English for five years. But that didn’t help much when we came to the States – that’s another story. Because, you know, you learned the British English and that was kind of harsh, you know.”
“In eighth grade we started a rock and roll band, of which I was the lead singer and guitarist. And of course we played The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was seen like not only blasphemy but an anti-communist gesture, you know. So… we always had a lot of troubles, because of the long hair and everything else… But somehow it all sort of worked out, we squeezed by, you know. We had good grades, sort of. But my mother was frequently summoned to school by the principal and told ‘Have your son have a haircut!’ And of course I would fight it, and so they would cut a little bit, you know – the usual trials and tribulations of growing up. But for me, being in the music band changed everything because… this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with girls. Because, you know, older girls were interested in me, which is a big thing to a young boy pre-puberty or just when puberty comes in. And we left the country when I was 16, almost 17, so my formative years – I still have the accent, when we came to the States was maybe just a little bit, a year, too late, where it never went away – but, in the school, my self confidence, being surrounded by these fans, was great! And all the politics at those moments went aside, yeah.
“Everybody listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe was only… they had signals so that you couldn’t listen to the news, but they would let it go for the music. So like from two to four everyday you could listen to music on Radio Free Europe. So we would record the music on reel to reel tape recorders, so then we could then learn the music by phonetics. But it was not that difficult, you could buy records, people had collections, it was available for those who were interested, you know. And the quality wasn’t very good, because it was recorded over recordings, you know, there was a lot of hisses and scratches, but you could still listen to The Rolling Stones. So you could do that, yeah.”
“Now, my dad was over six feet tall, he used to play soccer for Sparta, he was an athlete. Up until his late 70s when he passed away he had black hair, he never had grey hair. He was a good looking, good looking guy. And he walked upright, as opposed to… the people in our building signed a petition against his walking. They said ‘He’s walking too arrogant. He’s not saying hello to the neighbors.’ There was like a meeting of all these people who lived in this building, because every building had a caretaker… The caretaker was a member of the Party, they usually lived on the bottom floor. They were snooping around, they were the ones who knew… And this was the woman who made this official complaint that my dad comes home from work and… My dad worked 18 hour shifts, I mean, he worked like a slave to make money. So when he came home, it’s possible he didn’t say hello. But not because he didn’t like her, because he was dead beat tired. But he walked upright, so she thought that he was walking with his nose up. My dad was not. But that’s the kind of environment that we lived in. My dad, of course, when he had to come up and explain himself in front of these morons, you know. So he would never join that group on any level, let alone the Communist Party.”
“They said to my mom ‘Go and apply for a job at Western Electric – a company that makes telephones – on Cicero and Cermak Road, in Cicero basically. They’re hiring.’ They told me ‘Since you’re a guy, go to a steel company called Seaco, and the chances are you’ll get a job there, they’re hiring.’ So my mom took one bus, I had to take like four or five buses to get to this location. So my mom got in, got hired. I walk into this place. I knock on the door, there’s a man who says, again, ‘How have you been?’ If he said ‘How are you?’ I would have said ‘Fine.’ But that phrase ‘How’ve you been’ I’d never heard. So again, there is this exchange, I’m a total idiot, I can’t… He says ‘I have no work for you. Go away.’ Just then, somebody comes in and says ‘I need one guy for my department.’ And the guy says ‘I’ve got no one.’ He says ‘Well, what about this kid here?’ He says, ‘He’s an idiot.’ So he says to me ‘Hey kid, you speak English?’ And I say ‘Yes!’ And he said ‘Well, if he speaks English… So, what’s your name?’ And so, somehow it came out that I am Czech and he says ‘Well, I’m Czech. My name is Ferjencik!’ He never spoke Czech, you know, but he was very proud of his… He said ‘I’ll hire this kid.’ So I got the job.
“So, to this day I don’t know what I was doing, I was in charge of some… some… something, I don’t know. But the footnote to this story is that people would always say ‘Where do you work?’ And I’d say ‘Well, a company called CECO. A sheet metal company.’ Every Friday we would get checks, and outside would come a Brinks truck and you would cash the check and you would come home with cash. One Friday we missed this truck and so I brought the check home. And on the check it said Sears. I went to the wrong place, I took the wrong bus. I thought I was working at CECO, I was working at… So, a true moron you know, but I was hired, I was working for Sears. Then I went to school. I realized that manual labor was not for me.”
“We wanted to appeal to the younger crowd, the people like us. And we were very much influenced by Dadaism and Jára da Cimrman, and we poked serious fun at the establishment. We poked fun at how badly they spoke Czech. How they mixed the English language into the Czech language. And we were ruthless. And little by little the advertisers started to check out. We finally decided to temporarily go off the air. But while it lasted we had a great time. I composed a song called ‘Emigrant’s Cry’… It was introduced by Jan Novak who said ‘Vážení krajané’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”
Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’
“My teachers at the Art Institute… the teachers were pretty much always far left, understandably perhaps and all that stuff. But it bothered me that they would not… that they saw communism as something so distant, something on another planet. A thing that really doesn’t affect us, you know. And there was this residue of McCarthyism – ‘We know what… let’s not stir up another round, you know, look where that got us, you know, just paranoia.’ So, it was troublesome, because my views were pretty much to the right of center when I came. Because I wanted to go to Vietnam and fight the communists. I actually was eligible to be drafted that one year, there was a lottery and they filled the quota two numbers before mine came up. So I came very close, but my mom would not survive it. She would do something not to let me go but it never had to come to that. So, having my American friends being completely oblivious to anything that was happening in Europe was and is still troubling.”
“In 1992, my wife and I and our two daughters go back to Prague, and I’m telling them how I grew up, I’m telling them all the stories, you know. So we go, and we visit the place where I grew up – the apartment building. We walk inside, and in all of these buildings there’ll be like a little plaque on the wall with the names of all the people who live there. Our name was still there. Nobody, this is after communism, and nobody cared to change it. Other people came and went, but ours was never removed or replaced. So that was a freaky thing seeing our name. So then as we go up, I knock on the door and nobody opened so… But I tell my girls the story of when I was little, and I would go down into the cellar to fetch the coal or whatever, right? As you open the door, you walk in the cellar, but you would never see the back of the door, because it was of course this way, right?
“But as a little kid, for some reason, I looked on the back of this door. And there was a poster from the Nazis. It had, you know, the big swastika, and it said in the left column Czech and the right column German, something about not stealing property from this cellar. And finally it said ‘This offense is punishable by death!’ So, I’m telling them this story and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’ So, I take them into the cellar, we open the door and… it was still there! Semi-decayed, you know, barely clinging on, because any time anybody would open the door would go… there was no reason to ever… So that was a kind of interesting experience, you know, how little had changed in all these years.”
In Vienna, the Slovaks registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. They subsequently went on vacation to Yugoslavia for a couple of weeks before returning to Vienna and living in a tent on the outskirts of the city for a short time. They were then moved to a guest house with other Czechoslovak refugees. On December 10, 1969, the Slovaks arrived in New York City and, after a few days, settled in Atlanta, Georgia. Vaclav’s parents both found employment in local restaurants and Vaclav started eighth grade. He says that his school had an English program for immigrants and that he felt comfortable with the language after six months. He attended Georgia Tech and earned a degree in electrical engineering. Shortly after graduating, in the late 1970s, Vaclav returned to Czechoslovakia for a visit. He says there were only a few people in his hometown who were not scared to talk to him. Vaclav moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983 and joined Sokol Washington almost immediately. He has held several leadership positions in this organization, including the posts of president and vice-president. Today, Vaclav lives in McLean, Virginia, with his Slovak wife, Lucia.
]]>Vaclav Slovak was born in Šumperk in northern Moravia in 1956. He grew up in Hanušovice where his parents worked in the restaurant at the local train station; his father, Emil, managed the establishment while his mother, Libuše, was the chef. Vaclav remembers attending summer camp organized by the Pioneer youth group and participating in activities such as swimming and soccer. He also enjoyed traveling and joined his father on trips throughout the country. In the late 1960s, Vaclav says his family’s restaurant became subject to intensive searches and inventories, which led his father to decide that the family should emigrate. It was after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 that Vaclav says his father began making plans to leave Czechoslovakia. The Slovaks originally planned to take a vacation to Yugoslavia and ‘see what happened.’ However, the plan changed when Vaclav’s father obtained visas to Austria fairly easily and so, in late summer 1969, Vaclav and his parents traveled to Vienna.
In Vienna, the Slovaks registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. They subsequently went on vacation to Yugoslavia for a couple of weeks before returning to Vienna and living in a tent on the outskirts of the city for a short time. They were then moved to a guest house with other Czechoslovak refugees. On December 10, 1969, the Slovaks arrived in New York City and, after a few days, settled in Atlanta, Georgia. Vaclav’s parents both found employment in local restaurants and Vaclav started eighth grade. He says that his school had an English program for immigrants and that he felt comfortable with the language after six months. He attended Georgia Tech and earned a degree in electrical engineering. Shortly after graduating, in the late 1970s, Vaclav returned to Czechoslovakia for a visit. He says there were only a few people in his hometown who were not scared to talk to him. Vaclav moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983 and joined Sokol Washington almost immediately. He has held several leadership positions in this organization, including the posts of president and vice-president. Today, Vaclav lives in McLean, Virginia, with his Slovak wife, Lucia.
“Whenever I would ask those [questions], everybody was kind of afraid to answer them. I remember up in the attic of this railroad station, there were some old pictures of previous presidents and I remember one of them was Masaryk. And I remember asking a group of guys that were fixing the roof about how it was, and they were very neutral about whether he was good or bad. So obviously they didn’t want to get into trouble.
“I remember they were always teaching us about how great the Soviet system was, but it really did start changing in the mid-’60s and I remember when everybody was saying ‘Oh every guy from the Soviet Union is great,’ and then I remember one teacher – there was this picture with Stalin in it – and she said ‘Well, he is no longer on the good list because he had some of his own people shot.’ And that was kind of shocking because that was like the first instance of the Soviet Union not being so perfect as you were led up to believe in the third or fourth grade.”
“He was a restaurant manager and because of the central planning, all his employees would be rewarded on how much the restaurant would be producing or not producing or how many meals they would be serving. People started leaving him for another restaurant that wasn’t as productive and were getting paid more. Well, he found that out and he went to the central planning commission or where they were directing all these restaurants in his region and he said ‘Listen, how do you expect me to run the business if you don’t support me and you pay these people more somewhere else? Yet, look at what I’m doing.’ That kind of got him into trouble because he stood up and spoke up.
“Immediately after that they did an in-depth inventory. They tried to find any way to discredit him or throw him out of his position, but it seems like he was always one step ahead. What ended up happening is that he caught one of the inspectors forging a document and he had a back-up. He said he caught him and he said this was between him and the inspector and another guy and he was so mad when he saw what happened that he almost threw him out of a second story window or something like that. Well, that pushed them even further against him, they took him to court, and this started to escalate more and more. This all happened around ’67, ’68, so I think that’s when he knew that he had to leave, because they weren’t going to give up, they were not going to lose. He felt like he was going to end up in jail, so he said he had enough.”
“One of the first impressions I had of America was taking the New York subway to go to see friends – we made friends in Austria and they left about two months before us so we went to see them – and there was a robbery. It just happened right next to us, and my dad was sitting down and I was holding on to the handle and I saw these three guys push this – I guess there was a blind guy involved in the whole thing – somebody helped the blind guy and the blind guy moved away, they pushed this guy against the other door and they took everything he had and everybody ran away. My parents just weren’t looking at it so they had no clue what was going on, and I was just shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen here, so that was really scary. I told that to my dad, I said ‘We gotta get out of here, we can’t be here, they’ll kill us.’ And he didn’t believe me that something like that had happened.”
“There was a small community in Atlanta of Czechs and Slovaks and it seems like a lot of them were in the restaurant business, and there would be this one pub and everybody, after they finished work on Friday or Saturday, they would go to this pub and we would have guys that would play guitars and sing songs. It was just like camping somewhere outside, and I learned a lot of Czech songs from those guys. It was just like this one small happy island that people could go to and socialize and talk about your troubles or forget your troubles or drink your troubles away. And we had parties as well, every now and then.”
“I had American history in school, so I had no problems with any of the questions. My father got lucky because he got the same person as I did, so I told him what they asked me and he was asked a lot of the same questions so he had no problem, but boy, my mom flunked. And she was, I mean, she loved it absolutely here, so she studied so hard and made so sure that she made it past the second time. It was a great day for us, that day when we became U.S. citizens.”
Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.
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Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.
Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.
“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is srazka, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”
“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”
“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”
“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”
“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”
“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.
“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”
“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
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Susan Lucak was born in Teplice in northwestern Bohemia in 1955. Her parents, who were originally from the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, had moved to Teplice when her father Mirolslav became the conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra. When Susan and her older sister were in school, Susan’s mother Jiřina went to work as an after-school teacher. Susan says that her parents had decided to leave Czechoslovakia shortly after the Communist coup in February 1948, but that they had to remain in the country when their plans fell through. In 1967, Susan’s family moved to Prague when her father got a job as the director of a music school there. She says that the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 21, 1968, once again led her parents to the decision to leave the country. In 1969, Susan’s family applied for travel permits to Yugoslavia; she says they were lucky to receive permission to travel through Austria, as one of Susan’s father’s students was performing at the Salzburg Music Festival. They left Czechoslovakia on April 17, 1969, and made their way to Vienna where they lived for over three months while awaiting permission to immigrate to the United States.
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
“My father, when he was a conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra, he had to be present at the Communist meetings that were held in, let’s say, Teplice, and these Communist meetings were very long and in the beginning of the meetings, the orchestra that father conducted played the Czechoslovak national anthem, the Russian national anthem, and then the song ‘Internationale’, and those pieces of music were played at the beginning of those meetings and they were played at the end of the meetings and so the orchestra had to sit there for hours and hours and listen to these discussions that were endless. After some time, my father suggested that perhaps they could get a recording instead of the orchestra being there for so many hours, and what they told my father was that if he did not like doing that, then he may as well pack up and then go and work in coal mines. So he obviously retracted that and continued to sit at these meetings.
“Then there were things that happened in the school where he was a director where people were advanced based upon not their abilities necessarily, but based upon whether they belonged to the Communist Party and so on. So he always felt that in music, one cannot advance people based upon their participation in a party, and so there were certain frustrations that I think that he experienced because he was always interested in having a good quality school and good quality music teachers, and that wasn’t always possible. So I remember him speaking about that.”
“Approximately a week after the invasion, my father and I walked from Nusle to Václavské Náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and things had sort of somehow calmed down a little bit. There was less shooting and we were speaking with the Russian soldiers. People spoke Russian pretty well because it was a language everybody had to learn in school. All of the sudden, the soldiers started to shoot at us, so my father and I hit the ground and we crawled to a nearby street and all the doors to the buildings were closed because people were frightened, so my father and I, we crawled about a block and a half and made a turn and kind of disappeared from the scene on Václavské Náměstí. Then we walked quickly and ran back home. So it was a very, very scary time.”
Those were warning shots?
“They were warning shots. Nobody, to my knowledge, was killed during that time. But they were just sort of very arbitrary about shooting, and it was frightening.”
“The way this kind of worked out was that my father had a student that wanted to perform at the Salzburg Music Festival. So he said that he wanted to go to negotiate the details of the concert, and we wanted to go on vacation, as a family, to Yugoslavia. He applied for permission to go through Austria and stay there for four days, and we didn’t necessarily expect that we were going to get permission as a family to leave and do that, because we could have been told ‘Oh, don’t go through Austria. As a family, go through Hungary,’ and then for my father to go alone and negotiate the concert in Austria. But somehow, for reasons that we still do not understand until today, we got the permission to go for four days to Austria. So on April 17, 1969, we drove down to the southern border and we couldn’t see the signs because the snow was sticking to the signs and so we got lost and I think my father was a little nervous. Then we got through to the Czech-Austrian border and the officials at the border, they kind of had a sense that we were escaping and they made us come out of the car. They searched through, even under the hood of the car, and they searched through everything, and the only thing that we had that would have been suspicious were English textbooks. Because we knew we wanted to come to the United States or go to an English-speaking country and we were not sure that we would be able to find textbooks. So somehow, my father took these textbooks, and we were nervous about that. Why would we have been taking English textbooks to Austria? But they didn’t find the textbooks. My father had sort of hidden them, so they didn’t find the textbooks.
“Then finally when we drove through, which was around 5:00 in the morning on April 18, we then went through the Austrian part of the border, and there the Austrians just basically saluted us, they looked at our papers and then they allowed us to come in, and once we got across the border, we just stopped the car and we just sat and couldn’t believe that we had gotten across the Iron Curtain and that we were in a free country and that we escaped the oppressive communist country. And yet at the same time, I think that there was also a sense of sadness of leaving your homeland, with the idea that we would never be able to return. We thought that this was a step where we would never return to Czechoslovakia because we never thought that communism would ever not be there.”
“I did not go to school. I told my parents that I didn’t want to go to school because we came in April and I felt it was towards the end of the school year and I did not want to start learning German, and so I started studying English on my own using these textbooks that we brought from Czechoslovakia. So I used them during the day and then in the evening when my parents and sister came home, I would give them the textbooks so they would learn them and then I was sort of taking care of other things. So my job in a way – they were working as gardeners – and my job was to kind of take care of the paperwork that was necessary to immigrate to the United States. So my father would write down for me where to go and what to say, and then I would go and actually take care of the paperwork that was required for us to immigrate to the United States.”
“I remember the very first Sunday we went to Central Park thinking that we were going to a park the way one would go in Europe, and we were dressed in our best clothes. I remember I was wearing this white blouse with a navy blue skirt and matching shoes, and expecting that we will be strolling in Central Park. And what we were seeing was this wild scene that you kind of see in the movie Hair, by Milos Forman, where people were barely dressed. Men were topless and wearing no shirts and wearing minimal clothing and jeans with bell-bottoms, and women were not wearing bras and they were very open with one another in terms of expressing their affection publicly. And I was 14 years old and I just didn’t even know where to look, and it was all very embarrassing.”
“It was very hard that first Christmas. We were happy to be in the United States, certainly, but there was a certain harsh reality where my parents had no job. So we bought a Christmas tree for one dollar and we bought very simple decorations. We obviously had no money to buy any presents, but that was kind of not really that important to, and we sat around the Christmas tree. I have to say that we were happy to be in the United States, we were happy to be in a country which was democratic and we had freedoms, but there was also a certain harshness about being in a country and not having a job and having somewhat of an uncertain future.”
“I kind of felt that when I came here at the age of 13 that I, in a sense, lost my childhood because of the responsibility of learning English and trying to make it here. I kind of felt a certain responsibility to my parents for making this step, and I felt that I obviously wanted to succeed in the United States and so I felt that I needed to take advantage of opportunities that were presenting here that I would not have had in Czechoslovakia. So there was a certain kind of heaviness that I felt even at the age of 13 and 14, and I felt that I really needed to succeed in a way for my family, as well as for myself. I worked pretty hard and I have to say that I was a little disappointed in myself after six months of working pretty hard and studying and feeling that I wasn’t speaking the language fluently. It took about two years before I felt comfortable with the language.”
“I became a Dvořák lover when I came to the United States in 1969 and everything was very unfamiliar and the only thing that reminded me of home and Czechoslovakia was Dvořák’s music. I knew it rather well because music was always around my house and, also, I always went with my father, with my parents, to concerts in Czechoslovakia. So when we came here, the only thing that I heard that reminded me of home was Dvořák’s music, and it always sort of warmed my heart. So when his house, where Dvořák lived, on East 17th Street was threatened to be destroyed, I felt that I wanted to get involved and see if we could save the house or somehow honor Antonín Dvořák here in New York City in a way that made it very special for me. I felt a special connection that he was somebody who came from my homeland who had lived here in New York City, and I felt that he deserved to be honored here and so that’s how I got involved in the Dvorak American Heritage Association here in New York.”
Petra Sith was born in Bratislava in September 1979, in Kramáre Hospital where her mother, Anna, worked as a nurse. Her mother married her stepfather, Peter Sith (a mechanical engineer for carmaker Škoda), when Petra was four years old. In 1983, Petra’s brother, Karol Sith, was born.Petra started grade school in Bratislava, of which she says she still has ‘fond memories.’ She did not stay there too long, however, before her family left the country. The Siths went on holiday to Yugoslavia in 1986 and it was there that Petra’s parents told her and her brother they had no intention of returning home.
The family spent about one year in refugee camps in Yugoslavia before moving to Traiskirchen camp in Austria. The Sith family spent another nine months in Traiskirchen before being sponsored by a distant relative in Illinois to come to the United States. They settled first in Chicago before moving to Fox Lake, Illinois, where Petra lived up until three years ago.
Petra says her parents were not able to find jobs at first in the U.S. which reflected their qualifications; her father started sweeping floors at a factory, while her mother worked in a laundromat. Eventually, Petra’s mother became a nursing assistant, while her father became a factory technician. Petra says her parents impressed the value of education upon her; she graduated from Chicago’s Roosevelt University in 2007. She currently works as a billing processor at Robert Half International and is studying for her master’s degree. Petra plays bass in a band called Losing Scarlet, which she describes as making ‘user-friendly, heavier rock music.’ She has a U.S. green card, but still travels on a Slovak passport. She has returned to Slovakia to see her family twice since coming to America; in 1994 and 2007. Today, Petra lives in Ingleside, Illinois, with her husband, Brad.
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Petra Sith was born in Bratislava in September 1979, in Kramáre Hospital where her mother, Anna, worked as a nurse. Her mother married her stepfather, Peter Sith (a mechanical engineer for carmaker Škoda), when Petra was four years old. In 1983, Petra’s brother, Karol Sith, was born.Petra started grade school in Bratislava, of which she says she still has ‘fond memories.’ She did not stay there too long, however, before her family left the country. The Siths went on holiday to Yugoslavia in 1986 and it was there that Petra’s parents told her and her brother they had no intention of returning home.
The family spent about one year in refugee camps in Yugoslavia before moving to Traiskirchen camp in Austria. The Sith family spent another nine months in Traiskirchen before being sponsored by a distant relative in Illinois to come to the United States. They settled first in Chicago before moving to Fox Lake, Illinois, where Petra lived up until three years ago.
Petra says her parents were not able to find jobs at first in the U.S. which reflected their qualifications; her father started sweeping floors at a factory, while her mother worked in a laundromat. Eventually, Petra’s mother became a nursing assistant, while her father became a factory technician. Petra says her parents impressed the value of education upon her; she graduated from Chicago’s Roosevelt University in 2007. She currently works as a billing processor at Robert Half International and is studying for her master’s degree. Petra plays bass in a band called Losing Scarlet, which she describes as making ‘user-friendly, heavier rock music.’ She has a U.S. green card, but still travels on a Slovak passport. She has returned to Slovakia to see her family twice since coming to America; in 1994 and 2007. Today, Petra lives in Ingleside, Illinois, with her husband, Brad.
“I loved school, a lot of learning, dancing. I have a lot of fond memories of growing up in Slovakia – I think because I left when I was so young. I didn’t get to experience what would be the negative aspects of communism, what the adults had to deal with. For me, I was just a kid, I was growing up so… we left when I was only seven.”
“No, unfortunately, me and my brother were both not told – we were little. I was notorious for having a big mouth and I would talk, and my dad could have got into a lot of trouble if anyone were to find out we were defecting. As a matter of fact, my dad started remodeling the apartment we were living in, it seemed like everything was normal and we were just told we were going on vacation to Yugoslavia. So we packed up the car one day and like ‘Oh, we’re going on vacation,’ and I don’t think my parents actually told us until we were in Yugoslavia that we weren’t coming back home.”
“The saddest part about it is that in Austria, the camp Traiskirchen, it was literally 40 minutes away from the border with Slovakia. So our family was right there, and we couldn’t go and see them or talk to them. We were political, you know, in political asylum and we were even told, once we were in the gates of the camp that we were safe, but if we wanted to venture outside the camp in the city, we weren’t necessarily safe – they could come and get us if they wanted to so, it was just really strange.
“When we first got there, we stayed in a building with multiple families in one room – I can’t tell you exactly the number, but it had to be more than 40 people, lots of bunk beds. So once you got there and you were processed, you were then assigned maybe an apartment to live in. So we ended up living in an apartment for quite some time, because I think we were there for about eight to nine months. And so we had our own apartment and I made a lot of friends with different children from around the world, I was with Turkish kids and Hungarian kids and Romanians and at one point, my parents said I was speaking about four or five different languages. I lost that soon after we left there, but when you are a kid, you have the capacity, I guess, to learn that many different languages, so…”
“My dad simply put it that it’s for me and my brother, not so much for my mum and my dad, but he knew… because we left right before the fall of communism. I think the fall of communism happened about a year after we left the country. So, when we got here, I don’t think my dad ever looked back at that and regretted it, because even now, today, all these years later, it’s still hard for all the people who are living there, economically. It’s a new democracy, starting from the beginning and coming here; my dad saw that as a big opportunity for our education, for our work, for our futures.”
“I see where they’re coming from, my nostalgia comes from being a kid, growing up there, drinking Kofola, watching Matko a Kubko, being kids – we were kids at a time when you saw cartoons one hour a week, on the three stations that were available in Bratislava at the time! You come here and kids have so many more opportunities and things to rot their brain and their teeth and everything. So, in a way, I can see it. And I would be lying if I said that it didn’t fascinate me, you know – anything communist related, or movies of anything, because deep down inside, I know that was a part of history that I was a part of, even though it was towards the real last part of it. I can’t say that it doesn’t intrigue me. I don’t know what I’d tell those people. I know a lot of them thought it was better during communist times, and who am I to tell them whether or not it was or not, because now it is harder – it is hard for people out there who are struggling.”
Peter says that there is a good-sized Slovak community in the Milwaukee area, which his mother has been involved in since moving there. He was a member of the Tatra Slovak Dancers of Milwaukee for a number of years. In 2001, Peter met his Slovak-born wife at a Slovak folk festival. The couple married in 2002 and speak Slovak at home to their two young children. They travel to Slovakia once a year to visit family and friends. Peter says that he ‘feels like a Slovak-American’ but does not rule out the possibility of returning to Slovakia on a permanent basis. Today, he lives with his wife and children in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
]]>Peter Esterle was born in Bratislava in 1973 and grew up in a small town called Zohor, located northeast of the capital city. His father was a meteorologist and his mother worked for IBM. Peter has a younger brother and a younger sister. In 1980, Peter and his family received travel visas for a vacation to Yugoslavia; however, instead of returning to Czechoslovakia, they crossed the border to Austria. The Esterles lived in Vienna for over one year; Peter and his sister attended school there and his father found work as a truck driver. Peter’s family had friends who had left Czechoslovakia previously and were able to help Peter’s father find a job selling machine tool equipment. In 1982, the Esterles moved to Milwaukee. Although Peter spoke Slovak at home with his family, he says that he was able to pick up English fairly quickly. In 1984, Peter’s family moved outside of Milwaukee to Franklin, Wisconsin. There Peter finished grade school and attended high school. While in high school, he began working for his father’s company, a machine equipment service and repair business. Upon graduating, Peter worked with his father while studying electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee part-time. In 2002, Peter began working at a foundry where he currently works in maintenance, installation and controls engineering.
Peter says that there is a good-sized Slovak community in the Milwaukee area, which his mother has been involved in since moving there. He was a member of the Tatra Slovak Dancers of Milwaukee for a number of years. In 2001, Peter met his Slovak-born wife at a Slovak folk festival. The couple married in 2002 and speak Slovak at home to their two young children. They travel to Slovakia once a year to visit family and friends. Peter says that he ‘feels like a Slovak-American’ but does not rule out the possibility of returning to Slovakia on a permanent basis. Today, he lives with his wife and children in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
“He was just upset with the lack of freedom, but the details he would know more than I. He actually wanted to escape by flying over the Dunaj (the Danube River) into Austria – there’s a peak above the river – with a hang glider at one point. He wanted to actually do that. So those were some pretty extreme measures that he was planning.”
“I had a lot of friends in Austria and it’s like they’ve been wiped from my memory. I started in a preschool, you could say, in jasle in Zohor and then from there I went to first grade in Austria and had all these friends and it was as if they never existed. So then when we got to the States, I started in second grade at that time and it’s as if Austria didn’t even happen. It was wiped from my memory along with the language. That’s one thing I remember, and I wish I would have kept my German. But if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
“I found out later that after my family didn’t come back, they were basically all questioned. My grandparents were questioned; my aunt and uncle were questioned. They [were asked] ‘Where are they? When are they coming back? Why didn’t they tell us that they were going to stay longer?’ It was actually pretty bad. They, the police or whoever, were trying to pry out of my closest family members – threatening them with prison time and whatnot – trying to pry out where we went and why we hadn’t come back. So that was pretty bad.”
Was anybody arrested?
“Not that I know of, but apparently it got pretty close to where…As I mentioned – and it’s all very vague to me – some of the family was more communist than not and they were under pressure to tell what had happened or where we went. Something transpired, which I didn’t get the full details of, that they did actually say where the family ended up and there were some repercussions, the details of which I’m not too aware.”
“Primarily at home [we sic.] speak Slovak and, interestingly, they speak Slovak very little. They understand absolutely everything in Slovak, but they’re now… because of TV and my son is going to school, he speaks primarily English at home, but he understands everything in Slovak, so it’s strange. But when we do visit Slovakia, he’s able to switch over and speak Slovak. It takes him, I’d say, about three or four days and he’s speaking all Slovak, and then when we come back to the States, he’s speaking Slovak for three or four days and then he’s back to English again.”
Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.
Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.
]]>Pavel Paces was born in the Strašnice district of Prague in 1949. His father, Karel, owned a liquor distillery and his mother, Marie, was the office manager for the business. After the distillery was nationalized following the Communist coup, Pavel’s father became a courier for the anti-communist resistance. In October 1949, (shortly after Pavel’s birth) he was warned by a friend on the local police force of his imminent arrest and left Prague. He spent one month in hiding and then crossed the border into Germany where he stayed in a refugee camp. Pavel’s mother, meanwhile, aided two men who claimed to have met her husband in Germany and said they were traveling to Bratislava. The men were arrested by communist authorities for their illegal cross-border trips, and named Pavel’s mother as an ‘accomplice.’ She was subsequently arrested and held in Pankrác prison for two months. She was released in March 1950 and, one month later, had a guide assist her and her three sons (Pavel and his older brothers Karel and Miloslav) across the border near Cheb. They were reunited with Pavel’s father and lived in Germany for 18 months, first in refugee camps and later in Munich. The family sailed to New York City in November 1951 and settled in the Yorkville neighborhood.
Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.
Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.
“After ’48, he joined the underground and worked through a front firm – it was a French firm, but it was a front for the underground – and he was like a courier. In ’49, October ’49, he received information from a friend of his who was in the local police department that they would be arresting this group of spies in the underground. He left Prague in October after he got word that they were going to arrest him and he spent a month in hiding. Part of that was in Jevany in a mortuary in a cemetery for a week, where he hid out in the mortuary where my uncle would bring him food, until he was able to make his way to [České] Budějovice. [He spent] a total of a month hiding out and then he and a good friend of his made their way into Germany and he was in a camp there, and he tried to get my mother over and the three boys as soon as possible.”
“In January, my mother was visited by two gentlemen who told her that they had met my father at one of the refugee camps in Germany and that my father had sent word through them for my mother to give them money for my father. My mother said ‘I don’t have that kind of money. My husband wouldn’t ever have asked for that money’ and the guy said ‘Well, we had a letter from him but we lost it crossing the border.’ So my mother, being the charitable person that she was, gave him some money because he said he needed money to go and visit his wife in Bratislava. So she gave him some money for the train and she gave him a change of clothing and fed him, and then later that day he returned with another gentleman and again asked her for more money. She said she didn’t have any more and, with that, he said ‘Well, you will regret this decision,’ and he left.
“Next thing you know, my mother was arrested, January 25, and was detained in Pankrác in solitary confinement for two months. At that time, we didn’t know this story – when we were here in the States. My family didn’t really talk about what they went through in Czechoslovakia. My mother never spoke about it and my father very rarely spoke about it. But later, through my brother’s investigations in the archives, he found this story about the two guys who visited my mother and tried to shake her down and blackmail her. Well, instead of going to Bratislava, what they did was they went to the local bar, got drunk, and started bragging about how they go back and forth from Czechoslovakia to Germany and, naturally, there were spies there, communist spies, and they were arrested. When they were arrested, they mentioned my mother giving them aid and, as a result of that, my mother was arrested. All along we thought, prior to this story coming out, that my mother was detained there because of my father, but they had come to arrest my father the morning of October 7 in ’49 – they didn’t find him there – and my mother claimed that she had no knowledge of where my father was. That he left for work that morning and never returned. So in a way, they were not looking for her because of my father; they arrested her because she aided these two guides or blackmailers.”
“[My father] became a machinist. The first few years were rough before he was able to get a machinist job. He painted; he was a waiter; he did handy-man work; he did whatever he could. My mother was home with us; however, the first apartment that we got in New York City, we were janitors, so my mother had to clean the building while my father was at work. So there were many times when my mother would be washing the hallways on her hands and knees with a bucket and a scrub brush; my brothers relate those stories to me. Later on, when I was older, I would go with her cleaning offices, things like that. Much later, my father got my mother a job at the machine shop where he was working, and she worked in the assembly area, putting together the parts that were being manufactured there.
“But my mother worked at Sokol Hall in the kitchen, weddings, making dumplings, whatever they needed, and my father was a porter there at times. My father worked at [Bohemian] National Hall, on 73rd Street, as a waiter during affairs. My brothers did [too]. My father always had two jobs when he was working; the machine shop during the day and a waiter at night. He was a waiter at Vašata’s on 75th between First and Second [Avenues]; he was there for many years. We wound up living in that apartment later on before they retired. We bounced around Yorkville as janitorial jobs became available. We were not janitors at Vašata’s but we moved to 71st Street after 76th and we lived across the street from Sokol Hall. I became very involved there starting at the age of six, and we were the janitors there as well, until we had to move because they renovated and then we lived on Second Avenue between 73rd and 74th around the corner from National Hall. By that time, my father had been working strictly as a machinist and still working nights as a waiter. All my brothers, we all worked. I worked at the restaurants in Yorkville – Vašata, Ruc. My brother Charlie went to school. He became a pharmacist; he worked in a Czech pharmacy in Yorkville.
“Yorkville was a wonderful place to grow up. It was an area where there were ethnic groups. You had your Slovaks, your Czechs, your Hungarians, your Germans. It was like a little Central [Europe sic] there. Czech butchers, Czech bakers, Czech doctors, optometrists. It was like being home away from home for us.”
“I went to Sokol camp in Connecticut. They had a beautiful camp there, and I spent a few summers there, fortunately, to get out of the heat of the city. I had memorable occasions over there. It was a lot of fun [being] amongst other Czech immigrants, and we even had a few Hungarian boys who were there. It was a wonderful experience. Being part of Sokol, the entire organization, was a great experience.”
“My youngest daughter, the schoolteacher, when she was going to school at New Paltz, she decided to study a semester in Prague, at Charles University. So, actually, she’s the first one from my family to go back, because I didn’t go back until she was studying there. That was my first trip there. It was 2005, so that’s going to be seven years ago, and so we went to visit her. Her sister went to visit her before we did, and she came and said ‘I can’t believe you were born there and you didn’t go back yet.’ So I said to my wife ‘Ok, we’re going to go there while Jill’s studying’ and we spent two weeks there, and then I returned there again two years ago. It was an emotional trip for me, naturally.
“I got to visit Strašnice, and I got to go to Kostelec nad Černými Lesy where my cousins live. My father came from a family of butchers, so they’re all butchers. His father was a butcher, his brother was a butcher, my first cousin’s a butcher, his son’s a butcher. Naturally, during the communist years, my uncle was arrested as well. After my father left, my uncle Joe was in the uranium mines for awhile. He suffered a stroke and thank god that they released him early. But being that they were not of the Communist Party, they weren’t allowed to do certain things. [If] you were a butcher, you’re going to be a butcher. You can’t be anything other than that. Educations were stifled; they started school at a later age. So it wasn’t easy for them having stayed back. So I visited them. I went to Tehov where my mother was born. Naturally you visit the cemeteries. I went to Jevany where my father hid out in the mortuary. I saw that little hutch there that’s run down. I couldn’t imagine him spending a week there in the middle of a cemetery waiting to get out of the country.”