Duke and his family arrived in Chicago in July 1949. They had been sponsored by some of Duke’s mother’s relatives, who had settled in the United States before WWI and owned a Czech bakery in Berwyn. Duke says that the family stayed in Berwyn for less than a month, with his mother and father quickly deciding to take jobs as a maid and a gardener in one household in Winnetka, just north of Chicago. There Duke began his schooling at Hubbard Woods School. He gained his degree at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and was in the middle of studying at DePaul Law School when a friend told him about the work he was doing in the investment banking sector. Duke was impressed and applied for a job at Hornblower & Weeks, which he got. He has worked in the industry since and is now partner at William Blair & Company, which is based in downtown Chicago. Duke says he is ‘incredibly proud’ of his Czech background. Today, he is active as chairman of the Chicago Prague Sister Cities Committee. He is also on the Czech-North American Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
]]>Edward (Duke) Dellin was born in Prague in 1940. His father, Eduard, had studied agricultural engineering and, after a time spent at the helm of the Sugar Beet Growers’ Association, became involved in politics as the Secretary of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party. Duke lived with his parents and older sister Jane in Prague’s Nové Město (New Town) until he was eight years old, attending a French-language school run by nuns in the center of the city. Following the Communist coup in 1948, a warrant was issued for Duke’s father’s arrest, leading Eduard Dellin to flee Czechoslovakia for Paris, where he joined a number of other former Czechoslovak politicians. Duke says that his mother, Marie, was not sure at first what she should do and, in a bid to curb mounting pressure placed on the family by the authorities, took the first steps towards divorcing Duke’s father. After a short while, however, she was approached by a number of Western agents, says Duke, who gave her instructions on how to get out of Czechoslovakia with her two children. In July 1948, Duke arrived in Regensburg, West Germany with his mother and sister. They remained there for one week before being transferred to Ludwigsburg refugee camp. There, Duke’s father joined the family and the Dellins applied to come to the United States.
Duke and his family arrived in Chicago in July 1949. They had been sponsored by some of Duke’s mother’s relatives, who had settled in the United States before WWI and owned a Czech bakery in Berwyn. Duke says that the family stayed in Berwyn for less than a month, with his mother and father quickly deciding to take jobs as a maid and a gardener in one household in Winnetka, just north of Chicago. There Duke began his schooling at Hubbard Woods School. He gained his degree at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and was in the middle of studying at DePaul Law School when a friend told him about the work he was doing in the investment banking sector. Duke was impressed and applied for a job at Hornblower & Weeks, which he got. He has worked in the industry since and is now partner at William Blair & Company, which is based in downtown Chicago. Duke says he is ‘incredibly proud’ of his Czech background. Today, he is active as chairman of the Chicago Prague Sister Cities Committee. He is also on the Czech-North American Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
“We lived, we lived in one room. And I believe, off and on, there were either two or three families sharing one room. It was a relatively large room. The bath was actually down the hall, so that was shared by several other families. It was an old army barracks, it was an old kásarna that had been bombed during the War. And so it was not in the greatest shape. There was a lot of rubble all around it. So it was not a very pleasant place for children to play. I remember parts of it were bombed out and they were just sort of leveled, almost to the ground, except the basements. And playing in those little warrens underground almost – that was awful. I mean it had to be, I guess, tremendously dangerous, you know there could have been bombs down there that hadn’t exploded or something. I mean, I do remember that whole experience and I just found it to be fairly difficult. Sharing the room with other families, I remember… trying to go to sleep, let’s say at 8:00 or whenever a child goes to sleep, but of course the parents and the other families would be up ‘til 10:00, 11:00 or midnight, smoking, probably, I remember my mother smoked quite a bit. And so I remember the smell of smoke, conversation and so on, well, the children are trying to sleep in a little cot in the corner somewhere so, I remember that as being a fairly difficult time.”
“I remember very much looking forward to receiving packages from America at that time, and it would be a CARE package. There was an organization called CARE and I think it’s still, I think it’s still… because I have given CARE some money in the past and getting these packages, it was truly like Christmas. It was a very exciting time. I remember getting a package that had some peanut butter in it. And I had never tasted peanut butter and it was so good, I remember my father would keep this jar of peanut butter way up on a high dresser somewhere and only if we were good, if we did something that was very good, we would get one spoonful of peanut butter. And that was a reward, and I don’t know how long that jar of peanut butter lasted, because I wasn’t that good – so it was up there a long time probably but… Anyway, so the food I think was absolutely terrible at the time, because I do recall getting these Care packages and what a great treat they really were.”
“Well actually I think, I think it was primarily for the children. I think they saw the fact that maybe living in the Czech part… well, I think they wanted sort of more opportunity for us, I mean I, I didn’t know that at the time, I was told that later. That’s why, that’s why they did it, because I had questioned them also, you know, about this years later, and they stated simply that they had been introduced to someone who worked as a domestic servant in the town of Winnetka, which is just north of Chicago. And she had heard that another family was looking for someone who would work as a maid and as a gardener and so I think they thought that this was probably a good opportunity, and I think they did it just because they realized that this would be a good opportunity for us, for the children.”
“I was deposited in the back of the room and I simply sat there. I was introduced of course, ‘Okay class, here we have with us little Eddie Dellin’, and there he is, this weird looking little kid who had some funny clothes on and so… and anyway, so I just kind of sat there and class went on, and people were raising their hands, and the teacher was writing on the blackboard and the kids went up to the blackboard to write things down and I just kind of sat there. Anyway, but sooner or later, I started to realize that I’m kind of catching on, and I remember fairly distinctly the teacher asking a question and she was asking, I guess they were studying history, and she asked the question of who had been the prime minister of England during the War. And… ‘Yes Eddie?’ ‘Veenston Churchill,’ ‘Yes! Ok!’ I remember getting a round of applause the first time that I raised my hand to be able to answer a question. And from there it was relatively simple.”
“I certainly felt this great desire to go back and it was… the feeling was absolutely incredible. I flew to Frankfurt and rented a car and drove it and as soon as I got to the border I almost started to weep. Oh, I know, I was able to catch a Czech station on the radio and somehow I found this station that was playing some of these songs that I had learned and that I knew and I mean, I got terribly emotional, I started driving and crying and stuff, just as I was driving across the border. Anyway, it was very emotional and very nice.”
“When I was growing up, I was sort of ashamed of it, I mean, the Czechs were just like any other Eastern European behind the Curtain, behind the Iron Curtain countries, and there was not much to distinguish them – at least from what I could see over here – and in fact they would have… there was a television show here called Saturday Night Live which is still on and they had this skit, with John Belushi or Dan Ackroyd, and it was a comedy, and they had one skit about the two wild and crazy guys from Czechoslovakia. And they were sort of painted to be the buffoons who said silly things and so on. So that was the image of the, of the… and so I never made a point of the fact that I was Czech. It was not until a little bit later that I realized how stupid I was for denying this heritage and then I really started to embrace it entirely, and now I’m just incredibly proud to be a Czech. Because you know, so many people have been to Prague once and I think almost everyone says ‘my goodness, what a wonderful city, and what wonderful people’ and they can’t believe this incredible history that they see. And so, of course, I have become extremely, extremely proud and so I have gotten involved in, you know, quite a few things Czech.”
Frank Schwelb was born in Prague in 1932. He and his parents, Caroline and Egon, lived in the center of Prague, and Frank remembers the Nazi troops marching through the city. Caroline was a language teacher and translator, and Egon worked as an attorney. In March 1939, shortly after the German occupation, Egon was arrested and sent to Pankrác prison. Frank says that his father’s clients included German anti-Nazi refugees living in Prague and believes that this, along with his Jewish background, led to his arrest. He was released after two months. Following his release, they were able to secure exit visas, and, in August 1939, took a train through Germany and the Netherlands where they boarded a ship to England. Frank says that most of his family who were unable to leave the country, including his mother’s sister, died in concentration camps.
Frank’s family settled in London where he attended several different schools, including the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Wales; he maintains contact with many of his classmates from there. His father became a member of the legal counsel of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and served in that capacity from 1940 to 1945. Frank says that his parents initially hoped to return to Czechoslovakia following WWII; however, because of his job, his father understood that the country would likely fall under communist rule and decided not to go back. In 1947, Egon was offered the position of the Deputy Director of the UN Human Rights Division; the family moved to New York City to join him several months after he accepted the post. Frank attended Yale University where he played soccer and joined the NAACP. He began Harvard Law School in 1954, but volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in 1955 to gain military naturalization. He served for two years before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1958. Eager to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Frank began working as a lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in October 1962; his work with voter registration discrimination exposed him to the segregated South. He was named to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was later appointed (by President Reagan) to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where he served as a Senior Judge.
Frank enjoyed speaking Czech whenever he got the chance, rooted for Slavia Praha (a Czech soccer team) and returned to the Czech Republic many times. He was involved in the Czech and Slovak legal community, meeting with visiting lawyers, judges, and students, and he presented the inaugural Rosa Parks Memorial Lecture (in Czech) at Charles University in Prague. Frank lived with his wife, Taffy, in Washington, D.C., until his death in 2014.
]]>Frank Schwelb was born in Prague in 1932. He and his parents, Caroline and Egon, lived in the center of Prague, and Frank remembers the Nazi troops marching through the city. Caroline was a language teacher and translator, and Egon worked as an attorney. In March 1939, shortly after the German occupation, Egon was arrested and sent to Pankrác prison. Frank says that his father’s clients included German anti-Nazi refugees living in Prague and believes that this, along with his Jewish background, led to his arrest. He was released after two months. Following his release, they were able to secure exit visas, and, in August 1939, took a train through Germany and the Netherlands where they boarded a ship to England. Frank says that most of his family who were unable to leave the country, including his mother’s sister, died in concentration camps.
Frank’s family settled in London where he attended several different schools, including the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Wales; he maintains contact with many of his classmates from there. His father became a member of the legal counsel of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and served in that capacity from 1940 to 1945. Frank says that his parents initially hoped to return to Czechoslovakia following WWII; however, because of his job, his father understood that the country would likely fall under communist rule and decided not to go back. In 1947, Egon was offered the position of the Deputy Director of the UN Human Rights Division; the family moved to New York City to join him several months after he accepted the post. Frank attended Yale University where he played soccer and joined the NAACP. He began Harvard Law School in 1954, but volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in 1955 to gain military naturalization. He served for two years before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1958. Eager to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Frank began working as a lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in October 1962; his work with voter registration discrimination exposed him to the segregated South. He was named to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was later appointed (by President Reagan) to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where he served as a Senior Judge.
Frank enjoyed speaking Czech whenever he got the chance, rooted for Slavia Praha (a Czech soccer team) and returned to the Czech Republic many times. He was involved in the Czech and Slovak legal community, meeting with visiting lawyers, judges, and students, and he presented the inaugural Rosa Parks Memorial Lecture (in Czech) at Charles University in Prague. Frank lived with his wife, Taffy, in Washington, D.C., until his death in 2014.
“This Gestapo guy came and arrested him, and he said to him – my father’s blonde, my mother was dark-haired, but my dad was blonde – and he said to him, ‘You can’t be Jewish.’ And my father said, ‘Yes I am.’ And oddly enough, and this is just one of those crazy things because I’m not one to find redeeming features about Nazis, but apparently, this man developed some sort of respect for my father because of what he said. So then my mother told me many years after the fact, she told me she would go daily up to Pankrác prison to see if she could see him or bring him something or something like that, and I don’t know to what extent she got to see him, but she was talking to the Gestapo guy one time and she said, ‘Would it be possible for me to bring my husband some clothes?’ And as she told it, and my mother was a bit of a raconteur, but as she told it, the man said something like this: ‘Clothes? What are you thinking? You think this is a hotel? I’ve never heard of such a thing! Clothes? If you come tomorrow at 3:00 in the afternoon, I’ll see what I can do for you.’ So apparently there was some little bit of humanity in this guy. And that’s always a story I’ve remembered.”
“I didn’t want anybody to think I was any German-speaking Czechoslovak. Probably more than anybody else I know, I felt that way. It’s kind of strange, because many of the German-speaking Czechoslovaks were Jewish and certainly were not Nazis, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it, I wanted to be a Czech Czech. Czechoslovak Czechoslovak. Many of my friends came from German-speaking families, and probably objectively, many people would say I come from a German-speaking family, but I wanted to be a Czechoslovak Czech and that remains. A lot of people with a similar background to mine identify with Israel more than with Czechoslovakia, now it never occurred to me that I was more Israeli than Czechoslovak; I was always more Czechoslovak than Israeli.”
“He made it clear to me that he didn’t want me to grow up in an undemocratic country. That one of the reasons was he didn’t want me to grow up in an undemocratic country. My parents were social democrats and all that. The liberties of the citizen were terribly important to them, as they are to me, which generated the career I chose in this country, and so I was very disappointed [that his family ultimately did not return to Czechoslovakia]. Now my father did go back for a visit, either in late 1945 or early 1946, and he came back desolated, sort of, that it wasn’t the same. There was a strong revenge feeling in Czechoslovakia against the Sudeten Germans, and it’s understandable because many of the Sudeten Germans followed Henlein and Hitler, and the so-called Beneš Decrees removed them collectively, took their homes and removed them collectively. And my father, who had served in President Beneš’ cabinet and who was certainly not sympathetic to Henlein and the Nazis and all that, he said that you cannot have a legal democratic state if you have collective punishment of a group of people without distinguishing individual guilt from individual innocence. And the fact that this was done made him even more distrustful of the possibility of democracy.”
“You know, it was such a terrible thing to happen to my country. I’d always grown up with a memory of the Nazis coming in and killing part of my family and all that, and then we were so looking forward to a peaceful, democratic world after the War was going to be over and we weren’t going to have any, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over/The white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow just you wait and see/There’ll be love and laughter/And peace ever after/Tomorrow when the world is free’ and what do you get. You get a dictatorial one-party regime coming after two and a half years of quasi-democracy. So I was very devastated as a boy.”
“I was driving along the street and I saw a woman; I was looking for the Harmony community in Free Trade, Mississippi. I saw this woman picking cotton in a cotton field, which is something new to me anyway, but I wanted some directions so I walked up to her and I said, ‘Excuse me, but I wonder if you could tell me how to find…’ and I gave her the address, and she pointed out and whatnot. And I thought, ‘What the heck.’ So I said, ‘Ma’am,’ and I don’t think anybody had ever called her ma’am before, but I said ‘Have you ever tried to register to vote?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Vote! You isn’t from around here, is you? Vote! Why we can’t vote. That man over there, the owner, he’d skin me alive. My skin is black, and I know my place. Vote! We can’t vote.’ And sort of retreated into the distance. She also mentioned something about a guy being chased; something about a black guy being chased down the street in Carthage by a white gang, and that’s what she said. This was the free world, the lead country in the free world in December of 1962.”
“Oh boy. Well, first of all, I was more concerned in those days as to what it doesn’t mean. And what I’ve told you about Czechoslovakia, it doesn’t mean the Nazis coming in and locking up my father for representing people or for being Jewish. It doesn’t mean the communists coming in there and hanging Mr. Clementis and so on. It doesn’t mean having one party ruling. And it doesn’t mean subjugating people on account of their race or color.”
After the Communist coup in 1948, George was not happy with the new government and says that there was ‘nothing to hold him’ in Czechoslovakia. In September of that year, he took a train to southwest Bohemia and attempted to cross the border with an acquaintance from Prague. He says the two were chased by border guards and dogs, and were lost in the forest for a few days. Once in Germany, George spent eight months in refugee camps. He says that his plan was to go to America but ‘the door was closed’ for him. In the spring of 1949, George traveled to Birmingham, England, where a friend he had met in Prague assisted him in finding a job and a place to live. While in Britain, George applied for a visa to the United States; however, he had an opportunity to immigrate to Australia and in 1950, sailed to Sydney. He found employment selling carpets and stayed in Australia for two years before receiving a visa to the United States. His trip to America in 1952 took about two months, including a two week stop in Fiji.
George settled in Cleveland where his second cousin lived. Shortly after arriving, George joined the U.S. Army, attended military intelligence school, and was sent to Korea and Okinawa. He was granted citizenship as a result of his military service. After his stint in the military, George returned to Cleveland and worked evening shifts as a tool and die maker while attending classes during the day. He eventually earned a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1969, his parents were able to visit him in the United States; he says that they had been punished because of his escape, as his father lost his job and they were forced to move from their apartment in Pankrác. George has been back to Prague several times since the fall of communism, but considers America home. Today he lives in Fairview Park, Ohio, with his wife Martha.
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George Havranek was born in Prague in 1927. He grew up in the city’s Pankrác district where his father Josef worked as a head guard at Pankrác prison. George’s mother Sylva, meanwhile, stayed at home raising him and his sister Marta. He attended elementary and high school in Pankrác with the intention of pursuing a career in mechanical engineering. George remembers the end of WWII, in particular the Prague Uprising, which occurred several days before the liberation of the city. He says there was heavy fighting in Pankrác in which several of his friends were killed. Following the War, George graduated from high school and worked at Českomoravská zbrojovka for one year, during which he built cars and tanks and learned to be an auto mechanic. He then enrolled inprůmyslová škola [technical college], but did not finish his studies, going instead to work at Barrandov film studios. George says he lost his job there for speaking out about the production of Soviet films in the facility.
After the Communist coup in 1948, George was not happy with the new government and says that there was ‘nothing to hold him’ in Czechoslovakia. In September of that year, he took a train to southwest Bohemia and attempted to cross the border with an acquaintance from Prague. He says the two were chased by border guards and dogs, and were lost in the forest for a few days. Once in Germany, George spent eight months in refugee camps. He says that his plan was to go to America but ‘the door was closed’ for him. In the spring of 1949, George traveled to Birmingham, England, where a friend he had met in Prague assisted him in finding a job and a place to live. While in Britain, George applied for a visa to the United States; however, he had an opportunity to immigrate to Australia and in 1950, sailed to Sydney. He found employment selling carpets and stayed in Australia for two years before receiving a visa to the United States. His trip to America in 1952 took about two months, including a two week stop in Fiji.
George settled in Cleveland where his second cousin lived. Shortly after arriving, George joined the U.S. Army, attended military intelligence school, and was sent to Korea and Okinawa. He was granted citizenship as a result of his military service. After his stint in the military, George returned to Cleveland and worked evening shifts as a tool and die maker while attending classes during the day. He eventually earned a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1969, his parents were able to visit him in the United States; he says that they had been punished because of his escape, as his father lost his job and they were forced to move from their apartment in Pankrác. George has been back to Prague several times since the fall of communism, but considers America home. Today he lives in Fairview Park, Ohio, with his wife Martha.
“There was propaganda night and day. Night and day. Communists have the same thing. Night and day propaganda. Propaganda, that’s all they can do, propaganda, because they have nothing else to give. Radio, movies, or news. Propaganda on a streetcar. They write ‘Victory.’ Stuff like that.”
“A lot of the people went on the streets – revolution – and they have not much of anything. I lost ten friends of mine. Ten of them were killed by Germans. That was the biggest fighting, up in Pankrác. I was there. I went up there and I was hungry. I went home. When I came back, the other guys were dead. Killed by fighting the SS with tanks. With what? With brooms?”
“They sent us – people who were born in 1927 – they made us to take care of horses and stuff like that. What the heck, we were in Prague, we don’t know nothing about horses. They kicked the Germans out – the farming Germans, they sent them away, they deported them – who will do the job? They expected us. There were a lot of guys that were well-educated men up there my age. Well, it was completely disastrous, economical disaster. Everything they did was a disaster. I figured out that this is no place to live in this country like that. I have to get the hell out from there. This is impossible to live like that.”
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the government, what they did, what they were doing. It was chaos. I had nothing to hold me. They kicked me out of work from the movies. They country started getting good between 1945 and 1948, but after 1948 when the revolution was, I figured that that’s the end of the story. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I like to be dressed up like an American with good clothes. I don’t like to dress like the Bolsheviks. Little leather pants and shoes and work for nothing. I don’t want to live like that.”
“There were nice people, but I didn’t feel comfortable, and I thought there would be much future and better to go to overseas to Australia, and I think Australia was a good way to go. And I took a ship, Orion. It took five weeks, and I went to Australia. I had five pounds in my pocket, that’s all. Five pounds, traveled to the whole world with five pounds. We took the Orion, I had five pounds in my pocket. Well, you take [the ship] from England, you go to the Mediterranean, you go to the Suez Canal, you go to India, Ceylon, Arabia – Aden – you stop in Arabia. It was Aden, now they call it Yemen. We stopped up there, and after you go to Freemantle, from Freemantle to Adelaide, Adelaide to Sydney. It took five weeks.”
“They gave me citizenship right away, because they made a law. When I went to the army, the school up there, they decided to give us citizenship. I was over here for a few months, and I was an American citizen. I don’t know what is the difference between George Washington and anybody else over here – Lincoln. I don’t know the difference. I never studied American history. I studied all about Hitler or Czech, European history. I don’t know about these guys. I know now, but I didn’t know before.”
Helena stayed on at Svobodné slovo, though was no longer able to write. She became involved in underground efforts to destabilize the new Communist government, encrypting and deciphering messages. In the summer of 1948, she was told that one accomplice had been arrested and that she should leave the country immediately. A guide told her to pack one suitcase with clothes meant for a week on a farm and meet him at a designated place in Prague at a certain time. Helena traveled with a small group and this guide to Sušice by train; from Sušice, they walked until they crossed the border, which in this instance took several days. The group got ‘hopelessly lost’ on their journey but, says Helena, they were able to find their way west eventually by using the stars to navigate.
Helena spent just under two years in Germany, primarily in refugee camps in Dieburg and Ludwigsburg. There, she met and married her husband, Milan Fabry (a Slovak economist who had been the political secretary of Transport Minister Ivan Pietor prior to the coup). The couple sailed to America on the General Blatchford in May 1950. Their first job was helping an elderly couple cook and maintain their summer home in Heath, Massachusetts. Later that year, the Fabrys moved to Washington, D.C., where they stayed for a short time before Milan found civilian employment with the U.S. Army, leading the couple to move back to Germany. In 1958, Helena’s husband took a job at Sears Roebuck and so the couple lived briefly in Chicago, before moving to Vienna, Austria, where he established a buying office for the firm. There, the couple’s son was born. The Fabrys returned to Chicago in 1968 and lived there for a further 15 years until Milan was transferred to Washington, D.C. There, Helena found a job at the Center for Hellenic Studies and played an active role in Czech and Slovak organizations such as the SVU (Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences). Today, Helena lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
]]>Helena Fabry was born in Hradec Králové, Bohemia, in 1925. Her father was a cabinet maker who, among other commissions, restored the interior of the town’s cathedral, while her mother stayed at home and raised Helena and her younger sister Věra. Helena says that around the time of the Depression, business dried up for her father and so he went to work in the carpentry department of the local Škoda factory. Helena graduated from business school in Hradec Králové during WWII and was assigned a job at the local zásobovací úřad [supplies bureau]. She remembers WWII as being ‘uneasy’ and ‘disquieting’ and says that it was her involvement in amateur theatre in Hradec Králové which helped her during this time. Following the end of the War in 1945, Helena moved to Prague to learn English, which she did for one year before taking a job atSvobodné slovo, a newspaper allied with the Beneš Party. She says she loved working as a reporter in the capital. In 1947, Helena was posted to Louny to gain more experience as a local reporter for the newspaper. There, she reported on the trials of local farmers before lidové soudy [people’s courts], which she refers to as ‘a terrible experience.’ She says her reports sparked the ire of the local Communist administration, and when the coup took place in Prague on February 25, 1948, she was told to leave Louny immediately, and expelled from the association of journalists.
Helena stayed on at Svobodné slovo, though was no longer able to write. She became involved in underground efforts to destabilize the new Communist government, encrypting and deciphering messages. In the summer of 1948, she was told that one accomplice had been arrested and that she should leave the country immediately. A guide told her to pack one suitcase with clothes meant for a week on a farm and meet him at a designated place in Prague at a certain time. Helena traveled with a small group and this guide to Sušice by train; from Sušice, they walked until they crossed the border, which in this instance took several days. The group got ‘hopelessly lost’ on their journey but, says Helena, they were able to find their way west eventually by using the stars to navigate.
Helena spent just under two years in Germany, primarily in refugee camps in Dieburg and Ludwigsburg. There, she met and married her husband, Milan Fabry (a Slovak economist who had been the political secretary of Transport Minister Ivan Pietor prior to the coup). The couple sailed to America on the General Blatchford in May 1950. Their first job was helping an elderly couple cook and maintain their summer home in Heath, Massachusetts. Later that year, the Fabrys moved to Washington, D.C., where they stayed for a short time before Milan found civilian employment with the U.S. Army, leading the couple to move back to Germany. In 1958, Helena’s husband took a job at Sears Roebuck and so the couple lived briefly in Chicago, before moving to Vienna, Austria, where he established a buying office for the firm. There, the couple’s son was born. The Fabrys returned to Chicago in 1968 and lived there for a further 15 years until Milan was transferred to Washington, D.C. There, Helena found a job at the Center for Hellenic Studies and played an active role in Czech and Slovak organizations such as the SVU (Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences). Today, Helena lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Yes, very much so, because that was in the ‘30s, the high ‘30s, and I remember that at that time my grandmother died, my grandfather died, work became less and less and the firm had to be sold, and my father went to work at the Škodové závody in the woodworking department, and that life was quite different afterwards. He never complained, but of course it was different work than what he was used to and what he liked. And it was shortly before the war, I remember that in ’37, ’38 especially, people were talking and afraid of the war. We in school for instance, as little girls – I was 12 years old – we were learning about first aid, and the Morse alphabet even. It was sort of a preparation for the war. And then it of course happened in ’38 that Czechoslovakia was stripped of the border areas, of the Sudety, and in ’39 we were occupied by the Nazis and became a Protektorat of the German Reich. That was bad.
“I remember my father, who was a member of the Czechoslovak legions during WWI and worshiped President Masaryk, volunteered to go and defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. I saw him, he was past 50 years old. But he volunteered, I remember him marching in Hradec with other people going to the borders. Of course, the Munich Dictate changed everything. Czechoslovakia was stripped of this part. My father, he returned, and then I saw him cry. It was bad.”
“Well, we had a group of friends in Hradec which was very nice, which sort of saved us all. And one thing which we did – well, we were for instance reading poetry or singing – but then the most interesting thing which we liked very much, and I liked very much, was amateur theatre. The group of us formed this amateur theatre group, we were reading lots of plays and rehearsing very, very, very sincerely and carefully, making our own sets. And we staged or produced [in] several theatres several performances, first on a little stage in Slezské předměstí – that was the part of Hradec where I was living – and then even in the famed Klicperovo divadlo in the Old Town of Hradec. And that was very nice, that was really wonderful. We enjoyed that very much. We were doing that for a long time.”
“In Louny, I experienced some awful thing. Well, of course, the news was fine, but it was a terrible experience. There were so-called Lidové soudy – a soud [court] which didn’t have an elected judge or a prosecutor with a law degree, or a jury, or defending lawyers. It was people, this so-called soud, normal people selected by the communists in Louny to judge, the defendant usually was a farmer. It was a farming area around Louny. [They] judged and sentenced the farmer immediately for so-called ‘crime against the republic,’ meaning they were accused, for instance, of having for example just an extra goose more than they were supposed to have, or that they didn’t return the proper amount of grain which they were supposed to give to the state, to this supply office. It didn’t need to be true. It was strictly political abuse, and a political way of making the people afraid. And the judgment was swift and fast, and the sentences were harsh and immediate. Even prison terms, the confiscation of property, or at least harsh fines. I could not believe that something like that, that such abuse of power, is possible! And abuse of people! So, of course, I wrote article after article about that, and that didn’t please the communists very well at all. To this day, I think that was something that was terribly hard to take.”
Were the Communists in power in the local government?
“Yes. That’s why it was possible for these things to go on. Well, in ’48 of course everything changed. I was still in Louny on February 25, ’48, when the Communists staged a putsch in Prague. I was told by the city to leave immediately and never to return. So I went to Prague to the newspaper, where it was very gloomy, nobody knew what was happening, what will be happening. And in a few days I received a notification that I was expelled from the association of journalists, that I couldn’t be a reporter anymore.”
“We walked for several hours and came to a meadow where there were huts with hay, you know, just for hay. And there we hid for the rest of the night and the whole day. I was very afraid, I couldn’t understand that, I thought that we would be surely discovered, hiding there for the whole day. But the guide said ‘No, don’t worry, nobody comes. I do it always the same, it’s alright.’ Well it was, nobody came. So then in the evening, at night, we were supposed to continue and cross the border that same night. The moon was shining and this big meadow in front of us which we had to cross to the woods – the woods were on the other side. So we waited until the clouds came, little clouds which would make it not so clear to see. And we quickly ran across the meadow and into the woods and started to walk and walk, and walked and walked. It’s mountains, so we went up the hill. And I was very glad that I don’t have a heavier suitcase to carry. And I know it was late at night, but all of a sudden we heard dogs barking, and some voices yelling in the direction that we were going, ahead of us.
“So we stopped and turned around and went sideways and walked away from that until we knew that we were in the distance; we didn’t hear any more barking or any voices. So we walked and walked and at one point we rested. We sat down under a tree and I know that I fell asleep and when I woke up it was raining and raining and pitch dark. So we walked, but in the morning we found out that we are hopelessly lost. The woods were terribly deep. And it still was raining and raining and an absolutely dark sky – you couldn’t even see which way is west, because we knew we have to go west, but which was the west? So I remember from nature studies we knew that lichen grows on the north side of the trees, but lichen grew all around the trees because it was such an old, old woods. So we were simply lost, and the guide didn’t have a compass because he was so sure about it – he always was doing the same route so he knew that. And he didn’t have a compass, and of course we didn’t have a compass. So we didn’t know where the west is. The whole day it rained, the evening it rained, we walked a bit, we rested a bit hoping that we will somehow find the way, which we didn’t. But then at night the stars came out. And the Big Dipper came out, with the North Star. And we knew where is the west.”
“We were extremely lucky. My husband met in ’48, in Frankfurt, an American officer – Army officer – of Slovak origin who was very kind and very good, and he took care of Slovaks and so on. And he offered us an affidavit of support, because without that assurance you couldn’t get to the United States. And that was an extremely valuable and kind thing to do, because the sponsor – he – was assuring the United States that we won’t become a burden on the States. Well, you know, what did he know? It was an extremely kind thing to do. But he did that. He and his wife did that, so we had this assurance and then through the process we emigrated in May, we left Germany in May 1950.”
“I thought after Vienna… You know, Chicago was quite different in 1968. But I grew to love Chicago. It became a beautiful, beautiful city. Do you know Chicago? The [lakefront] is beautiful. You could bicycle for miles, to Wisconsin practically, on the flat land. The architecture was wonderful there. Of course, Frank Lloyd Wright to start with, but then Helmut Jahn built these fabulous buildings on Wacker Drive. It was beautiful!
“When we came the lake was not clean, but they cleaned it up and it was absolutely gorgeous. The architecture on the lake and the beaches – it looked like you could be in Rio de Janeiro! It was just marvelous, and then underground, it simply was just a very beautiful city. I liked it there very much, and I liked the theaters. And we were going a lot to the theater, also to the little theaters – Steppenwolf I remember, of course Goodman but also Steppenwolf which became very famous. We started to go to Steppenwolf theater when they were playing in a church in Highland Park, you know, in the suburbs. Well they were wonderful. Northern Lights was another one, there were a lot of small theaters which we liked very, very much. Museums, and I used to go on Fridays to the concerts, to the Chicago Symphony. The Art Institute was an excellent, excellent place to be, and the opera. I liked it there very much. So then we came to Washington and I said ‘well, Washington is a nice city.’ And I came to love Washington too – again theaters, operas, the symphony. I continue doing that.”
She then started a degree in philosophy and English at Charles University in Prague, but was expelled following the Communist takeover in 1948 when she failed her prověrka – a test asking each student about his/her political views. She decided to leave the country and, in March 1949, a relative who worked as a border guard helped her cross into Germany near Kvilda, not far from where Jarmila grew up. Jarmila spent a year and a half in Murnau refugee camp in Bavaria before being granted a visa to Canada. She lived there for one year until some of her relatives who were already in the United States successfully petitioned for her to come to New York City. In New York, Jarmila attended Hunter College, before receiving a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. It was there she met her husband, Zdenek Hruban. She became an American citizen in 1957. Now widowed, Jarmila lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park district and is particularly active in the local Unitarian Church.
]]>Jarmila Hruban was born in Radešov, on the Czechoslovak border with Bavaria, in 1926. Her father was the mayor of nearby Boubská, the principal of the local school, and a regional administrator of a national cooperative bank called Kampelička. After attending elementary school in Boubská, Jarmila traveled to nearby Strakonice every day to attend gymnázium. When the Sudetenland was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, she found herself passing through Nazi Germany on her daily train ride to school. Jarmila’s schooling was disrupted by the war; in 1944, she was sent to work in a box-making factory in Bohumilice for a year, and so finished gymnázium one year late, in 1946.
She then started a degree in philosophy and English at Charles University in Prague, but was expelled following the Communist takeover in 1948 when she failed her prověrka – a test asking each student about his/her political views. She decided to leave the country and, in March 1949, a relative who worked as a border guard helped her cross into Germany near Kvilda, not far from where Jarmila grew up. Jarmila spent a year and a half in Murnau refugee camp in Bavaria before being granted a visa to Canada. She lived there for one year until some of her relatives who were already in the United States successfully petitioned for her to come to New York City. In New York, Jarmila attended Hunter College, before receiving a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. It was there she met her husband, Zdenek Hruban. She became an American citizen in 1957. Now widowed, Jarmila lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park district and is particularly active in the local Unitarian Church.
“At home we spoke Czech, of course, if we went to Vimperk to the dentist we spoke German. But the family doctor was Czech, but you know, it depended what store you went to. And I think it was always who had the biggest selection or whatever which decided how one shopped. I spent one month, four times, during the summer, in a German family learning German, and these German kids – during that time, one of their kids was with my family. We met in Pilsen at the second class or first class restaurant and there was me and my father, this judge with his son or his daughter – we switched the children and that was it! And we did it again one month later, that’s how people trusted each other!”
“We would hear bombing from whatever was the nearest German town, and all of a sudden one Sunday ‘Americans! They’re coming!’ you know, and so we went to the road, it was a state road which went between Vimperk and Strakonice, and we waved and there were kids, you know, that’s what you see in Afghanistan, that’s what the kids did. And then they actually occupied the village where we lived, and the house which we rented was one of the nicest houses, and so the Americans took it over. For example, they occupied our bedroom. So, in the morning we would ask for a dress and they would bring something from the closet or say ‘Come on in’ or something. And this went on for about ten days, and of course, they gave us coffee, and whatever, some crackers.”
“As a child in Boubská, I went twice a week to a Sokol in Vimperk. And so this stayed with me a little bit, and so then when I was in New York City, I joined Sokol Fugner and then nothing, and then about ten years ago, I joined a Sokol group in one of the suburbs [Sokol Spirit, formerly Sokol Brookfield] but simply this later years’ business means sending the membership fee and when they have basement sales helping with that, but no gymnastics!”
“I had such luck that I left the way I did in 1949, I am sure that I would have been involved in somebody trying to get across the border and I would have been in jail – number one. Then this business of pretending I am something I’m not? See, all these people were not in the heart communists, they pretended, they pretended! And then, with my background, to teach philosophy? I would have had to have taught Marxism – it just was not for me.
“I have to say though, that coming from that poor region, these poor people were pulled up, and so that you have there now what you have here. The middle class is much, much bigger. And so in the village you see a car. My father died because the doctor didn’t want to drive to that village, right? And when the doctor would come, kids would run after that car – it was something new! What was more common when somebody was sick was that the priest came and prayed, and of course that was the end – that person died, you know. People were dying like that.”
The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.
]]>John Palka is the grandson of Milan Hodža, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1938. He was born in exile in Paris in 1939, without his father present. His father, Ján Pálka, joined the family some months later, after playing an active role in the anti-Nazi resistance back home. The family spent most of WWII in Chicago, with John attending kindergarten and elementary school there. In 1946, the Palka family returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Liptovský Mikuláš (today found in northern Slovakia), which had for generations been the home of the Palkas. Following the Communist takeover in 1948, John Palka’s father spent four months in jail, and the family eventually fled in 1949, when it was suggested that he may again face arrest. John was nine when the family escaped.
The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.
“He managed to find this place in FNB Manufacturing – it’s a company which still exists, though now they do different things. He would actually bring me home components which had been rejected to play with. And so I had switches and transformers and things of this sort which I could take apart and unwind and string the wire all over the place. It was actually a bit of a hazard in the apartment.”
“It was a school that my grandfather had helped to build. He came to the opening of the school in 1938, it was named in his honor. So I went to my grandfather’s school, so to speak, for the second half of first grade. That was a very bad experience, because the students there were way ahead of anything we had done in the Chicago public schools. And most particularly, they were all writing in cursive, and they were using quill pens that you had to dip into the ink, and I only knew how to write in pencil, and I only knew how to print – I didn’t know how to write cursive. And I had never gone to school in Slovak, and it was a much more formal attitude and when I walked in I had no idea that you were supposed to stand when the teacher came into the room and all those kinds of traditional ways of being in the classroom – that was all new to me. So I was not very happy in that school.”
“The idea was to move when there was no light in our sector and then drop to the ground as the light started to come closer. And of course it had a fairly regular rotation and so you could be sort of out of reach of the light. I remember very distinctly that this was a heavily ploughed field and so there were big, big chunks of earth and it was not easy walking, especially for little feet. We were held together by a rope, a light string, that we all held onto. And so the leader would go, he had made the crossing a number of times, and he would go when it was safe, he would drop when it wasn’t safe, and the rest of us did the same. And then we came to the barbed wire fence and, in my memory, the wires were either spread, or one was lifted, anyhow – a crawling space was made for me at any rate. And we crossed over to the other side, which was just as dangerous, because it was still ploughed, and it was still within reach of the searchlights, and it was the Russian zone of Austria. So this was not a complete escape by any means. But we did make it across safely and we did end up in another safe house.”
“My mother tried her best to assimilate. My father I don’t think ever really tried to assimilate. He tried to make a living, but that’s different than really assimilating. He didn’t do that, but it wasn’t because he was resentful or because he thought it wasn’t appropriate, he just… I think the energy had gone out of him. By the time of one escape, and then another escape and being jailed in between, and having sort of come from very elevated circumstances and having had to do this really menial work during the war, and trying to run a business and that failing – it was just a tremendous amount of discouragement. And how much the imprisonment had to do with it, I don’t know. We certainly never talked about it, but my cousin in Bratislava… my closest cousin says that he remembers his mother saying that when she saw my father after he’d been released from prison, her first reaction was ‘this is a beaten man.’”
“You just had to be really careful and basically stay out of trouble and find ways of not yielding to the system completely. That was particularly difficult with children, because children went to school, and at school they might repeat anything that was said at home. And so parents were faced with this horrible dilemma of either not saying anything and having their children brainwashed, or saying what they saw was the truth and then risking that everybody would be severely penalized if this ever came out into the open – and this easily could through the children. It was… Not only was it dangerous, but it confronted everybody with the problem of how to live within the regime and not sell out to it completely.”
Juraj Slavik was born in Prague in October 1929, son of the then-minister of the interior, Juraj Slávik. In 1936, Juraj’s father was sent to head the Czechoslovak diplomatic mission in Poland, with whom relations were strained because of both countries’ claims to parts of Upper Silesia. Juraj attended the Lycée Français de Varsovie [the French School in Warsaw] but, in light of heightening tensions, was sent to school in Switzerland just before the outbreak of WWII. After a brief spell in Belgium, Juraj spent the War in Britain, first with his parents in London (where his father was a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) and then as a boarder at Magdalen College School in Oxford and the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales.
Juraj returned with his parents to Czechoslovakia in 1945. One year later, however, Juraj’s father was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States and so the family left for America. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Juraj’s father resigned from his post and the family decided to stay in the United States. Juraj’s siblings Dušan and Taňa remained in Czechoslovakia, where Dušan was subsequently arrested and spent 11 years in jail.
Juraj studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and then volunteered for the draft, serving in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1956 as a translator debriefing Czech and Slovak refugees after they crossed the border into West Germany. In 1960, Juraj married his wife, Julie Bres Slavik. The couple have two children. After a successful career working for the U.S. government’s cultural exchange Program, Juraj, now retired, devotes much of his time to Slovak and Czech organizations, including Friends of Slovakia and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1990, Juraj returned his father’s ashes to his native Slovakia. He has worked with Slovak and Czech historians to have his father’s letters published. In 2006, a book about Juraj’s father, titled Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.
Juraj Slavik was born in Prague in October 1929, son of the then-minister of the interior, Juraj Slávik. In 1936, Juraj’s father was sent to head the Czechoslovak diplomatic mission in Poland, with whom relations were strained because of both countries’ claims to parts of Upper Silesia. Juraj attended the Lycée Français de Varsovie [the French School in Warsaw] but, in light of heightening tensions, was sent to school in Switzerland just before the outbreak of WWII. After a brief spell in Belgium, Juraj spent the War in Britain, first with his parents in London (where his father was a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) and then as a boarder at Magdalen College School in Oxford and the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales.
Juraj returned with his parents to Czechoslovakia in 1945. One year later, however, Juraj’s father was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States and so the family left for America. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Juraj’s father resigned from his post and the family decided to stay in the United States. Juraj’s siblings Dušan and Taňa remained in Czechoslovakia, where Dušan was subsequently arrested and spent 11 years in jail.
Juraj studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and then volunteered for the draft, serving in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1956 as a translator debriefing Czech and Slovak refugees after they crossed the border into West Germany. In 1960, Juraj married his wife, Julie Bres Slavik. The couple have two children. After a successful career working for the U.S. government’s cultural exchange Program, Juraj, now retired, devotes much of his time to Slovak and Czech organizations, including Friends of Slovakia and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1990, Juraj returned his father’s ashes to his native Slovakia. He has worked with Slovak and Czech historians to have his father’s letters published. In 2006, a book about Juraj’s father, titled Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.
“Being minister of the interior, he was in charge of police issues. And the commissioner of police for Prague was, I don’t remember his title, but it was Doležal. And Doležal came to my father and said that they had a report that there was going to be an attempt to assassinate the president, Masaryk, but that they had no real solid information about it, it was just hearsay. But what should they do? Masaryk was supposed to speak at the Obecní dům in Prague…
“The bottom line was that they decided to flood the place with secret police, or tajní, as they used to call them – mufti – in civilian clothes. And the way they identified where they were was to put potted palms in this meeting hall so, beside every potted palm was a policeman out of uniform. And the guy who came to assassinate Masaryk must have sensed this police presence and decided he wasn’t going to try it, it was too much of a chance… So the president was saved and so this guy, whose name was Gorguloff, a Russian terrorist – today, you would call him a terrorist – decided who was to blame and he said ‘Slávik’s to blame, because he is the head of the police system!’ So he came after my father in Schnirchova – that was the name of the street in Prague.
“And he came to our apartment in Schnirchova on the pretext of presenting a book to my father. And so my father – in those days you didn’t think about these things or security – so he agreed that he would meet. It was easier to meet at the apartment than at the office. So, this man Gorguloff came to the apartment. It was fairly recently after my birth. My mother didn’t know that he had a guest. In the deposition that came out later, he said that he had this book for my father to initial or sign, and under the book he had the pistol. And he was going to wait until my father looked down into the book to sign, and he was going to shoot him. And at that point my mother happened to, not knowing that there was a guest, open the sliding doors, somehow she had me in her arms. The guy took one look at her and ran out. Later he said that he had seen the Madonna – so that became a family joke, because they said ‘Who do you think you are?’ And I said ‘I don’t know!’ The bottom line was that later he settled in France and shot the French president, Paul Doumer.”
“The instructions came from the minister of foreign affairs, Chvalkovský, to the embassy – to the mission, because it was not an embassy, it was the mission, the legation, or whatever its titles were – to turn over the legation to the Germans, since they were now the new Protectorate and they had the right… With the exception, probably, of one individual, the embassy staff said no. It was decided that it would not be turned over. The Poles by this time were beginning to be a little worried. They said, you know, it’s an extra-territorial problem, we really can’t get involved in the middle of this. My father at one point had a phone call, which he says was a muffled voice, which he thought he recognized as being Ambassador von Moltke, who was the German ambassador, who was a good friend.
“The warning was that the German Gestapo had gained keys to the Czechoslovak legation and were coming to take over. Do something about the locks… so they put sand and paper and junk into the locks and so the German keys did not work and the Poles had insisted that the takeover be without violence. So the German Gestapo departed the scene, you know, and left without the embassy. And it was used as a focal point for all the Czechoslovaks who were escaping across the border from Czechoslovakia and Slovakia into Poland and where perhaps the nucleus of this potential legion, which took a while to get approved, and so by the time they were approved, it was too late.”
“Tony Mach packed up some papers of my father’s and took them back to his father’s farm in Volhynia, including a suitcase full of my father’s dressier things like the smoking, the dinner jacket, the white tie, tails, you know – the formal dresses, his decorations, his sashes – you know, ambassadors used to wear these formal decorations. And he took them all to his father and mother’s farm in Volhynia, where he spent the war working in a German factory, going back to his parents on weekends, taking out the clothes, brushing them to get rid of the moths, cleaning them up, and keeping them safe, including the papers. Had the Germans found the papers on that farm, it would have been the death of all of them, I mean, it was just that kind of situation.
“Many years later, my father has just learned that he is going to be ambassador to the United States, and about a day or so later, there was this movement of the Volhynian Czechs – they had been brought back into the German Sudeten areas. And the people in Volhynia were told ‘You can opt, you can stay here and become a citizen of the Soviet Union,’ which was expanding into Poland, ‘or you can go back to Czechoslovakia which is no longer subject to counter-reformation practices.’ So, they opted to go back to Czechoslovakia after 300-odd years of emigration.
“And so Tony… they put everything onto horse carts and ox carts and whatever, and the doorkeeper at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Černín Palace, comes up to my father’s office and says ‘Mr. Minister, umm, there’s a man here with a horse cart, and he says he knows you, he’s got some things of yours.’ And so my father says ‘Oh my God!’ So he goes downstairs and there’s Tony Mach, our butler, with all these things of my father’s! And he had brought them on his way from Poland to wherever they were going in the Sudeten area. And so, of course, the irony of it was that my father’s shape had changed over time. Most of the things didn’t fit anymore. But the papers… so half the papers were saved this way – that’s why my father was able to write his memoirs!”
“Rosslyn House had a phenomenal view of London. So of course we watched the Battle of Britain from our windows, when we were not in the air-raid shelter. Although I tended to sneak out and try and watch, because I could see the fires and the German bombers, you know, illuminated in the searchlights. That was real heady stuff, you know! Later, or actually not later – earlier – there was one day that I remember I was in the garden, and there was this roar, and I looked up and a German Heinkel was coming and I could see the pilot with his goggles and his head, looking out, and he was obviously trying to get his bearings, because I thought he was going to hit the hill, I mean, it was just round… And about 30, no it couldn’t have been 30, about 10 or 15 seconds later, two Spitfires were barreling exactly on the same path! That was all the noise! And of course they started, I could hear them shooting, and eventually there was a plume of smoke, so you know they got him. So this would go on, you know, and it was watching the dog fights during the day, because you were wondering, was it one of ours or one of theirs? You know, they’d come plummeting down with smoke trailing and stuff like that. And that was, as I say, very heady stuff.
“And then going to school was fascinating, because there was a lot of shrapnel on the road, and it was suggested that it would be helpful to collect the shrapnel, so we had bags or buckets or whatever, putting the pieces of shells in to collect so that they could melt it and shoot it back. And the prize collection was always the fuse – the shell fuse, which was the settings for the explosion at a certain altitude – so that was, those were real collector’s items, those you could trade, and so it was great fun collecting. Of course it also meant, because the air-raids would come in the morning, we always hoped it would be in time to slow us down on going to school! Because then we could do the collecting of the shells, the ammunition, the spent shells, the shrapnel and be late at school, so that was a benefit – and do a good deed by turning it in, and then in the evening, we’d spend the night in the shelters, because they would do some bombing at night.”
“There were some cases that were pretty horrendous. I don’t think it’s a classified one – one border guard shot the other border guard who was patrolling with him, they were covering the border security, you know the mined area and stuff like that, the barbed-wire fences and the machine gun sectors and stuff like that. And this guy was on the border, was on a patrol with his buddy, and he shot him in the back, killed him, and then escaped. He said the reason he shot him was it was the only way he could feel secure to effect his own escape; the Czech authorities said he was a murderer and had escaped in order to escape punishment for his crime. Two different stories – one the government’s, one this ordinary border, pohraniční stráž guy’s – we were hard put, because obviously, if it was murder and escape from the penalties of murder, he should be returned. If he had in effect gotten out because he had killed a guy in order to effectuate a successful escape, that was another question. The question of course immediately comes to mind ‘Why didn’t he just knock him in the head and pass him out, and then make his way out?’ The question there was ‘How long would it have taken him to get out?’ He had no way of knowing how long it would take to effect his escape, whether the guy would recover and call the alarm before he could… you know, so there was a real judgment… I had to take him to Frankfurt for a lie-detector test that we did, and the lie-detector operator said ‘I believe his story checks out, his escape rationale, however, I would not like to be his mother and tell him no about having a cookie!’ So, we sort of knew how amoral this individual was.”
“At one point he says he was visited by a couple of secrets, tajní, you know, and they said ‘Would you write a letter to your father to tell him it’s okay to come back to this country?’ You know, ‘Everything will be forgiven’, and Dušan said ‘What do you mean, forgiven?’ And they sort of negotiated this. And he said ‘Look, I can’t see my wife, I can’t see my child, I don’t have anything to read, I can’t write, everything is forbidden. Forget it!’ And they said, ‘Well, if we were to give you some of these benefits, would you consider writing a letter?’ And he said ‘Consider? Of course! Sure!’ And so of course then he did write a letter, and he obviously put in little references which they didn’t like. So they never sent the letter, but they did give him the freedom, and they asked him what did he want to read? And he said ‘I want to read Karl Marx, Das Kapital.’ They said, ‘Why do you want to read that?’ And he says ‘To learn how you think so I know how to fight you!’ So, he said ‘I figured I was in for a beating’, but he said they only tried to do it once. He was big, much bigger than I am, heftier, and he said the interrogator came at him, and he said he took the chair he was sitting on and pinned the guy against the wall and he said ‘You try and do that again and I’ll kill you, I have nothing to lose!’ And they never beat him after that.”
Karel says it is through his good references from the army that he was allowed to travel to Iceland in 1961, to become head oboist with the National Symphony Orchestra there. It was during a visit to Norway the following year that Karel says he decided not to return. He set out for Belgium, where he wanted to train with the organist Gabriel Verschraegen, but he was detained in Denmark for traveling without a visa and had to spend months in Copenhagen waiting for an affidavit from the organist. Karel spent two years in Ghent before arriving in America in 1964. He studied for a doctorate in St Louis, Missouri, before accepting a post as professor of organ music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 1972, Karel became an American citizen. He moved to Cleveland in 1974, where he began to work for the city’s Museum of Art. He retired in 2004, but continues to work as choirmaster and organist at St Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights. He has three children.
]]>Karel Paukert was born in Skuteč, in what is today the center of the Czech Republic, in 1935. His father worked in the local bank, Kampelička, up until the Communist takeover. Following the coup, he was sent to work in the town’s granite mines and then the Semtex factory in Semtín. Karel’s mother, Vlasta, stayed at home to raise Karel and his siblings, but also later got a job as an office clerk at the local shoe factory, Botana. Karel was sent to gymnázium for two years in the nearby town of Chrudím, but was then sent back to the jednotná škola [vocational school] in Skuteč when this gymnázium closed, due to reform of the school system. He started playing oboe when he was 16 years old. In 1951, Karel was accepted at the Prague Conservatory, where he studied organ with Jan Krajs for the next five years. During this time in Prague he also played in the orchestra at the Jiří Wolker Theater (today’s Divadlo Komedie.) After one year at HAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) composing music for students of the school’s puppetry section, Karel was conscripted to the Czechoslovak Army in 1957. Because of his oboe playing, he was sent to Písek to become part of the army’s musical division.
Karel says it is through his good references from the army that he was allowed to travel to Iceland in 1961, to become head oboist with the National Symphony Orchestra there. It was during a visit to Norway the following year that Karel says he decided not to return. He set out for Belgium, where he wanted to train with the organist Gabriel Verschraegen, but he was detained in Denmark for traveling without a visa and had to spend months in Copenhagen waiting for an affidavit from the organist. Karel spent two years in Ghent before arriving in America in 1964. He studied for a doctorate in St Louis, Missouri, before accepting a post as professor of organ music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 1972, Karel became an American citizen. He moved to Cleveland in 1974, where he began to work for the city’s Museum of Art. He retired in 2004, but continues to work as choirmaster and organist at St Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights. He has three children.
“Actually any time things were discussed up to a decent hour I could sit by, be quiet and listen, because [my] parents insisted that I know, as the oldest one in the family, about the situation, the danger and so on. So when they asked us then to go outside and watch, when my father wanted to listen to Radio Free Europe or, you know, to Moscow or London, whatever, if somebody would be, you know, just kind of snooping around, so I was supposed to knock on the window, because the villa was so large and anybody could from any side… So this was one thing that we had to do and then eventually, towards the end of the War, he would say ‘Take this and drop it off there and there.’ And it was obviously for partisans, guerrillas, so you know, he said ‘It’s extremely dangerous and you can do it, as a little boy.’ I had, you know, on one side a milk jar and just said I was going to pick up some milk, which I was going to do, and coincidentally I dropped this at the designated place.”
“We had too much floor space for that, and so I had to be always registered – even when I lived in Prague I was registered. And then grandparents had to move in. So that we had both grandfathers, both grandmothers, and you know, times were not the greatest and there was not enough coal, not enough money to heat any other rooms, and so we all congregated in a small kitchen. So everything had to happen in this kitchen. And, it was usually so that my father, when he was not in the pub, that means 14 days into the month when he was penniless, because the first week he would pay for everybody and so on, so he would be sitting, feet in the oven, v troubě, to keep warm, and reading one of his books. The ladies would have to jump around him to cook and to do this. Grandparents would be around and we would be doing homework on one table. It was just like you hear about Russian families or gypsies, how they lived, and so on. And so that is how we lived. And then you would go and sleep in a rather cold room, and I just wanted to test myself and so I decided to sleep in a hallway, and so my wish was that one day, you know, I would put a glass of water, and then one day it would freeze. It didn’t happen completely that it would freeze, but it had a faint kind of a cover of ice. So I was very happy that I achieved that.”
“I got moved to more musical things, but I still had to go on rozcvička [training maneuvers] and I had to do the basic things and so on, and horrendous things happened. There was a kid who took his life and then another kid who lost fingers because as you had to very quickly, you know, board the tank and so on, somebody just dropped the lid and I was just really terrified. And the worst time was when they would wake you up at night and take you somewhere and drop you off in the woods, and I was supposed to, you know, I had flags and I was supposed to regulate tanks. And once I was so horribly tired and lonesome in the woods, it was raining and I just decided I will take a nap. And I woke up, this horrendous noise, and the tank – I don’t know how far it was from me – not too far, really, but I just couldn’t believe it. You know, there was a guardian angel there.”
“Several of us were graduates of Prague Conservatory, so we had a chamber group, and we decided that we would simply look for opportunities out of the barracks and whatever they wanted us to do, and go and play for these workers and talk to them about music. And they just loved it, so we were like, you know, exactly what the Communist Party wanted us to be, and so on. And so, when then later on I was leaving the service, they said ‘Well, what could we do for you?’ And I said, ‘Well, could you write me a recommendation, please? And preferably on stationery of the party.’ And so with this, this was the only thing that saved me and I was able to go out to Iceland, because, I still remember at Pragokoncert, there was a wonderful young woman who said ‘Ale pane Paukerte, vy se vrátíte’ – you will come back. I said, well – I couldn’t look into her eyes – I said ‘Of course.’”
“It was fortunately only one night in that little jail. And I had the most excruciating toothache of my life. I’ve never had toothache like that. And in the morning I slept, maybe, just a little bit, just drowsy – and all of a sudden I hear the Trout Quintet of Schubert. And there was a little window like that. And I knocked on the door, and the chief of the station came and said ‘I heard that you are a musician, I thought you will enjoy this.’ And he said ‘Would you like to have breakfast, do you have money?’ I said yes. ‘Well, go to town, and I expect you in one hour here. You will go to Copenhagen.’ So, I said ‘Oh my god, this is really fancy, because they trust me.’ And, there were two plain-clothed policemen with me, but they were basically guarding a guy who looked like a… I don’t know, I mean, he might have murdered somebody, what do I know? I just have no idea. So, they watched him all the time, on the boat or on the train. And to me they said ‘Do you have money? So go and buy yourself a beer. You have very good beer in Denmark.’ So I could get a beer, and towards the end of the day we came to, I’ve forgotten the name of the street but it was a commissioner for foreign affairs, something like through the police, and I think his name was Dahlhoff or something like that – kind of a very sharp guy, kind of looked at you and pierced you. He said ‘Well, so here is your ticket to Prague. And you want to go to Belgium.’ So, we will help you to get a Belgian visa. He gave me the address, ‘You will go to the Belgian Embassy, you will call them up.’ I said ‘What happens if I don’t get it?’ ‘Well, you have the ticket to Prague. In the meantime get yourself a place to stay, not on the street, you have money. And we will just hope for the best for you.’”
In February 1948, just days after the Communist coup, Lubomir participated in a student march supporting former president Edvard Beneš which was stopped by police and militia. Lubomir says that because of his participation in the march he knew he would come under the scrutiny of the authorities and decided to leave the country. He obtained false papers and, with a friend, was escorted to the border near Cheb. After being lost in the forest for several days, Lubomir crossed the border. Upon arriving in Bavaria, he says a German soldier attempted to send him back to Czechoslovakia. According to Lubomir, an American soldier intervened and sent him instead to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he stayed for one year. After being told it would take years to receive a visa to the United States, Lubomir decided to immigrate to Brazil where he found employment as a chemist at Pirelli Tyre Company in São Paolo. Lubomir says he was ‘very happy’ in Brazil, as he formed a small brass band and also wrote articles for a sports newspaper.
In 1957 Lubomir received a visa to the United States and moved to Cleveland. He found employment as a research chemist at Gibson-Homans Company where he worked for over 30 years, becoming a chief chemist, manager, and eventually vice-president. Lubomir is especially proud of discovering a method to eliminate the asbestos fiber in industrial products. In 1959, Lubomir married Jarmila Humpal, an American of Czech descent. He became involved in Czech theatre — writing, updating, and directing plays. In 1994, Lubomir’s Old Style Bohemian Brass Band toured the Czech Republic and he was invited to conduct at the Kmoch Festival in Kolín. Now a widower, Lubomir lives in Washington, D.C. with his former classmate from Jičín, Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg.
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Lubomir Hromadka was born in Folvark in 1926, and grew up in Jičín in northeastern Bohemia. His parents František and Julie owned a pub near Jičín, in the area known as Český raj [Bohemian Paradise]. Lubomir’s father had been in the Czechoslovak Legion during WWI, and Lubomir remembers him participating in annual parades that celebrated the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Music was an important part of Lubomir’s life, and at the age of six he began playing the violin. He learned how to play other instruments, including the trumpet, and played in and led several bands throughout his lifetime. Lubomir attended technical school and says that his studies were occasionally interrupted during WWII if students were needed to work for the German war effort. After the War, Lubomir finished high school and studied chemical engineering at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague).
In February 1948, just days after the Communist coup, Lubomir participated in a student march supporting former president Edvard Beneš which was stopped by police and militia. Lubomir says that because of his participation in the march he knew he would come under the scrutiny of the authorities and decided to leave the country. He obtained false papers and, with a friend, was escorted to the border near Cheb. After being lost in the forest for several days, Lubomir crossed the border. Upon arriving in Bavaria, he says a German soldier attempted to send him back to Czechoslovakia. According to Lubomir, an American soldier intervened and sent him instead to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he stayed for one year. After being told it would take years to receive a visa to the United States, Lubomir decided to immigrate to Brazil where he found employment as a chemist at Pirelli Tyre Company in São Paolo. Lubomir says he was ‘very happy’ in Brazil, as he formed a small brass band and also wrote articles for a sports newspaper.
In 1957 Lubomir received a visa to the United States and moved to Cleveland. He found employment as a research chemist at Gibson-Homans Company where he worked for over 30 years, becoming a chief chemist, manager, and eventually vice-president. Lubomir is especially proud of discovering a method to eliminate the asbestos fiber in industrial products. In 1959, Lubomir married Jarmila Humpal, an American of Czech descent. He became involved in Czech theatre — writing, updating, and directing plays. In 1994, Lubomir’s Old Style Bohemian Brass Band toured the Czech Republic and he was invited to conduct at the Kmoch Festival in Kolín. Now a widower, Lubomir lives in Washington, D.C. with his former classmate from Jičín, Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg.
“As a little boy already I started playing violin. I was about six years old or so, and then later on I switched to flugelhorn and trumpet since I heard the army band in Jičín. So I just loved the brass band. This was my love, music.
What style of music?
“This was the military style music. Like over here, John Philip Sousa type. Very nice, and very happy music. Very happy music.”
“I was involved in sport. I used to play ice hockey and football – what they call here soccer – and also handball. So I was very busy, and with music, I already had a band. So I wasn’t crazy, I was just always busy, busy doing something.”
“I was living in the Masaryk dormitory. This was the biggest dormitory in Prague for more than 1,000 students, and there formed the march to support President Beneš. They caught us before the castle where President Beneš lived, and we got a lot of [beatings] from the police and from the – not the military – but they were from the factories, workers who got arms and they beat us really badly.
So you’re standing in front the castle. How many people are marching would you say?
“Oh, thousands and thousands from all the universities. So we joined someplace and went to this castle to support President Beneš. Oh yeah, many, many thousands. And some people from the streets also joined us and they were supporting us. Only the militia and the police stopped us there. We couldn’t talk to the president. We sent there our representatives, but the militia didn’t let them talk to the president. So it was tough.
Were there chants in the streets? Were you saying certain things?
“Well, especially before the castle we were singing the national anthems. So as long as we were singing the national anthem, they let us. But soon we stopped, so they started to clobber us.”
“Right away when we crossed the border when we got into Germany, there was some German guy – big guy – who tried to stop us. He said ‘What are you doing here?’ We said ‘Well, we are refugees.’ ‘Oh we don’t want any refugees’ the German said, and he tried to push us back to Czechoslovakia. So we were yelling at each other, and apparently the GI, the [American] military people heard, so they came with the Jeep and said ‘What’s happening?’ So I told them ‘He’s trying to push us back, which is no-no because we are refugees.’ So they put us in the Jeep, and we had to disrobe and they checked everything, it was ok. And they gave us the ticket to Ludwigsburg.”
“No, no. No way. This was a starting point for us to go further. So we didn’t want to stay in Germany, but we could immigrate to either to Australia, Canada, or Brazil – I selected Brazil – so it was ok. A starting point to something better.”
Maria wanted to go to university, but this idea was vetoed by her guardian. She went to a local judge to plead her case which, she says, was rejected on grounds of her guardian’s ‘wisdom.’ She eventually left the Pivoňka farm during WWII as she says one of the sons became too keen on her and so the situation became difficult. Maria moved in with a good friend she had met at hospodyňská škola (home economics school), called Marina.
In 1946, Maria responded to an advert in the paper posted by a Prague family in need of a maid. The family was headed by V. S. Klíma, who was subsequently sent to the Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington, D.C. to work there as a counselor. Maria moved to America with the Klíma family in 1947. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Klímas decided to return to their homeland, while Maria applied for asylum in the United States. She was helped to do so, she says, by former ambassador Juraj Slávik. Maria went to work as a maid for an older American couple – Mr. and Mrs. Hills. In 1949, Maria wed a former Czechoslovak Embassy employee, Ludvik Sefcik, who had also sought asylum in America following the Communist takeover. The couple had five children. The Sefciks set up in business with a small lady’s clothing store in a building attached to their home. After running the store for six years they rented it out. When they sold the shop in the 1970s, Maria went to work at Woodward & Lothrop, a massive department store and Washington, D.C. institution, often fondly referred to as ‘Woodies.’ She retired after 26 years. Maria says that America gave her the ‘opportunity’ to work in fields such as retail without a formal education.
]]>Maria Sefcik was born in Nové Zámky, Slovakia, in 1922. Her father, Bohumil, was a civil servant who had been posted to the region. When Maria was less than two years old, however, she moved with her parents back to the family home of Ratenice, Bohemia, as her father fell ill with tuberculosis and could no longer work. He died when she was six years old and her mother, Růžena, remarried. Maria moved with her mother to the nearby village of Mlčice to live with her stepfather and his four children. When Maria was eight, her half-sister Růžena was born. Just under two years later, Maria’s mother died; Růžena stayed with her father, while Maria was sent to live with a guardian family in Prušice. Maria says she was happy living on the Pivoňka family’s farm and, with the pension she received following her father’s death, she was relatively well off.
Maria wanted to go to university, but this idea was vetoed by her guardian. She went to a local judge to plead her case which, she says, was rejected on grounds of her guardian’s ‘wisdom.’ She eventually left the Pivoňka farm during WWII as she says one of the sons became too keen on her and so the situation became difficult. Maria moved in with a good friend she had met at hospodyňská škola (home economics school), called Marina.
In 1946, Maria responded to an advert in the paper posted by a Prague family in need of a maid. The family was headed by V. S. Klíma, who was subsequently sent to the Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington, D.C. to work there as a counselor. Maria moved to America with the Klíma family in 1947. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Klímas decided to return to their homeland, while Maria applied for asylum in the United States. She was helped to do so, she says, by former ambassador Juraj Slávik. Maria went to work as a maid for an older American couple – Mr. and Mrs. Hills. In 1949, Maria wed a former Czechoslovak Embassy employee, Ludvik Sefcik, who had also sought asylum in America following the Communist takeover. The couple had five children. The Sefciks set up in business with a small lady’s clothing store in a building attached to their home. After running the store for six years they rented it out. When they sold the shop in the 1970s, Maria went to work at Woodward & Lothrop, a massive department store and Washington, D.C. institution, often fondly referred to as ‘Woodies.’ She retired after 26 years. Maria says that America gave her the ‘opportunity’ to work in fields such as retail without a formal education.
“Because I was a person who would work for free over on the farm. That’s my opinion, I guess he meant okay but, at that time, many people didn’t have the education to go someplace else. That was like years ago.”
And maybe also because you were a girl?
“Not only that, many people were like that – both boys and girls. Because many guys didn’t have much opportunity, only to marry somebody else who had… to be again on a farm. You know, [another person] in the village and stuff like that. So I inherited some money from my parents, I had the opportunity, but I was not allowed. That’s it.”
“I remember, yeah I remember the priest – he was even talking to me later on, and I remember that they hid in Kostelec, in the church, treasures from Prague. And he showed me where it is. So nobody knew it, but he was the priest and he wanted to tell somebody, right?”
So during the War he told you that?
“Yeah, before the War they put it over there. Because over there there’s a castle in Kostelec, and in the chapel they put it under the chór [sacrarium], you know, like where you come in, they made storage over there. So I did see it, we used to go to chapel in the church, at like 9 o’clock, and it was different, so he told me why it was different. They put the… the government put the poklad z Prahy [treasures of Prague] over there.”
So, some valuable items?
“Yes.”
“My [future] husband was at the Embassy when the communists came, so all his friends quit and so he quit to. He decided to quit the Embassy and do something. And since he was like an idealist and he wanted to be a cowboy, he went to the West with his friend. And I mentioned before it was a very primitive job, so he decided not to be a cowboy and to work in construction, helping people build walls and all that stuff. So he was in St Louis for some time, and after that he was homesick, so he came back to Washington and he was working at the Slaviks – you know, who [had been] the ambassador – they had bought a house in the meantime, so they needed some renovation. So helped them to build it and stayed over there with them. And afterwards Mrs. Slavik rented to young girls, she was cooking there for them, and so he left and went to my friend’s house. Because in the meantime my friend from the Embassy stayed here too, and they bought a house on 15th Street. So I met him through that, and I decided to get married, so we got married in ’49.”
“Well I do, but since I was young I never had like a permanent home. He [my husband] was from Chodsko and he was very much more at home over there. Whereas I was here and there, I was not that steady in the Czech Republic. So I took it easier than he did.”
“Sure, because in the Czech Republic I could not go to work at Woodies like I could here, I would have needed to have the education, to have the schools for it, and here I just had rather the practice because I had had my own store. They took me immediately. There was much more opportunity here than I would have had over there. And afterwards, even in the office, without schools and stuff like that, in the Czech Republic it would be impossible – you need to have the school, you need to have the paper to prove that you could do it. Here it was like ‘You can do it? Okay, try!’”