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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Grandfather</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ov3W5odcdpU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>I remember my grandpa returning from the concentration camp, which was very lucky because his good friend learned of his imprisonment and intervened with the Allies and put him on a list to be exchanged. So my grandpa and the other leaders of Sokol – he was one of the five leaders – were on transport to Auschwitz, all the others died there, but they took him out of a railroad car, cattle car in Terezín and gave him a ticket to Prague.</p><h4>First School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b1polGDAGMM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>I was largely with my aunt in southern Bohemia, and I started going to school in the village of Radějovice which was about three miles away. I had to walk across tracks and through the fields, and I loved that, because the first bench, first row, was first grade, second row was second grade, fifth row was fifth grade, everything together. The teacher was fantastic: ‘Now I’m teaching for the first graders, now I’m teaching for the second graders.’ I listened to it all. It was very stimulating. And he was such a dedicated guy who loved to teach. He played the violin for us in class; he would hit our fingers with the bow. That was during the War, it was a great memory. I liked it more than the school in Prague when I came to regular school with a big class. So education does not only depend on how much money is spent and how big classes are. That guy, he achieved alone more than probably the teachers gave me subsequently.</p><h4>Skiing and a Patent</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Amm1F4mHrhw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>I invented, in 1958 after a ski accident which busted my knee, a ski binding – which was an alternative to Marker, which was the first, a year before – and had it patented. With a big effort, I managed to get it produced. It was not so easy, but eventually, in 1962 or ’63, one third of Czech skiers – by my sales figures – were using my binding, the ZPB binding. Then I had some other patents of systems for bridges and such things, but this one is the best known. It is actually exhibited, my binding, in the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, New Hampshire. On the other hand, the income was decent but not like it would be here, so fortunately I didn’t go into this kind of business, otherwise I would have been diverted from what I really like.</p><h4>Education Systems</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KCqdhk3oL9U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>In this country, we recognized quickly that education has a completely different spirit. My children never had a systematic course of history or geography. But what they do for example, my son in the second grade – already from the first grade at school – they have to go to the library and the teacher says ‘You study Richard III’ and then he has to make a presentation at school, or study the Napoleonic Wars and make a presentation, or tell us something about Indonesian history. But they never had a systematic drill, the rote learning, so I think in this regard, many Americans are not properly educated, like systematically, but it leads them to be creative and that’s a plus.</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Zdeněk Bažant
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3237" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609085212im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-119.jpg" alt="Zdeněk Bažant" width="200" height="253" /></p><p>Zdeněk Pavel Bažant was born in Prague in 1937. He was raised in Prague, though during WWII he spent a long period in southern Bohemia with his aunt. His father and grandfather were engineering professors ČVUT (Czech Technical University) and his mother – a junior colleague of Milada Horáková – held a doctorate in sociology. Zdeněk recalls the time following the Communist coup in 1948 as difficult for his family. He was labeled ‘bourgeois’ because of his parents’ backgrounds. His maternal grandmother had acquired a number of properties through the sale of her factory; at this time Zdeněk says that all of these buildings were nationalized. He says that it was at this young age that the idea of leaving the country began to germinate. An excellent mathematician, he was national champion of the Mathematical Olympics in 1955.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Zdeněk studied civil engineering at ČVUT and graduated at the head of the class. He was not, however, accepted into a postgraduate program, which he attributes to his decision not to accept an invitation to join the Communist Party. Instead, Zdeněk began working as an engineer for Dopravoprojekt, a state company, and was able to complete a doctorate in engineering as an external student. In 1966, after earning a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University, he traveled abroad on two fellowships, to Paris and Toronto, and then on a visiting appointment to Berkeley, California. Zdeněk was in Toronto during the Prague Spring in 1968. He and his wife Iva (whom he had married the previous year) were planning on returning to Czechoslovakia; however, upon hearing the news of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, they decided to stay abroad.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1969, Zdeněk was appointed associate professor at Northwestern University, and is still today at this school, holding a distinguished professorial chair in civil engineering and materials science. He is a world-renowned, frequently-published researcher with much of his work focusing on structural and materials engineering. Zdeněk and Iva have two children, Martin and Eva, who, although they did not learn it at home, can both speak Czech. Zdeněk enjoys many hobbies, including skiing, tennis, and playing the piano. His passion for skiing led to his 1959 patent of a safety ski binding which was mass-produced and became very popular among Czech skiers. Although he visits Prague several times a year and says he misses the ‘beautiful landscape of Prague,’ Zdeněk says that he has been ‘very impressed with America’ and has no plans to return to the Czech Republic to live. He also has no plans to retire. Today, Zdeněk lives with his wife (a retired physician) in Evanston, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Concentration camp
Education
emigrant
Engineers
Radejovice
refugee
school
Sports
Teachers
Zdenek Bazant
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Jewish Fate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZM3FiOxM8ms?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Most of them ended up in the concentration camps. My best friend and schoolmate and his younger brother and older sister, father and mother perished in the concentration camp. I was about 12 or 13 years old. I came to school one morning and he didn’t come. They day before was the last time I saw him, and they never returned back. Most of them did not return back to my hometown. They perished in the concentration camps, which was a very heartbreaking situation.”</p><h4>Limited News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SgQh2o6s2wo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Listened to BBC London. That was the information during the War for people under the Nazi’s control. They used to come listen at the windows – the Gestapo – [to see] if people are listening to the foreign broadcasting. But that was the only information you could get. Nobody could write to you; they opened the letters. They were interfering with broadcasting. But still, there was a possibility to get some news.”</p><h4>Journey to U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WiCYczcS37c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So I didn’t have some problems getting here. Why? I got an American passport because my parents were American citizens, and I got an American passport in the American embassy in Prague. There were some restrictions and we were worried they won’t let us go out, me and my brother – younger brother – because we were born there [in Czechoslovakia]. And if you were born in that country, you were considered to belong there by them. Luckily we made it through the borders by the train all the way to Paris. We were in Paris for two weeks and Cherbourg one week. Why? There was a strike on the boats, and a couple times they sent us to Cherbourg by the trains and they brought us back to Paris, because they said the strike was over but it wasn’t over. So it took me three weeks in France to wait for the trip.”</p><p>“I came to this country December 5 by boat, which was the nicest trip I ever had in my life. Five and a half days being on the boat, the Queen Elizabeth. As a young man, I met other young people there. We had a good time, excellent food, and the trip in my case was too short. I didn’t want to leave – it was so good.”</p><h4>$0.75/hr.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LgMVnLQfDUY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The people at Garden promised me that after one month I will get $0.80 an hour. I stayed there – a month came, two months came – the raise wasn’t coming. Three months came. Finally I was brave enough to ask what happened to my raise, five cents. I went, on the way home, I didn’t find my punch card at the clock, and I went back to the supervisor. I said ‘Where is my punch card?’ He said ‘You are fired.’ I said ‘Why?’ ‘We can get so many people for $0.75 an hour, why would we pay you $0.80?’ I said ‘I didn’t want to quit, but you promised a five cent increase and that’s all I was asking.’ Nope, I was fired. Despite that I had my cousin in the high position in Garden Electric. But the money was very important to this system.”</p><h4>Major Events</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1PyLxAQKT54?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I met my wife Sunday evening, the day before. I started my business the next day, and I met my wife at the Sunday evening dances in the Sheraton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. So I did two things in my life – met my future wife and start my business. I rented space and I started a very small tannery, and I was making drumheads for musical drums. First batch I made, I went with the samples to the company who were making drums, Ludwig Drum Company. The owner was a gentleman from Germany. He was very nice and knowledgeable, and he liked my product so much he said ‘I will take everything that you make in your place for my drums.’ So I started to produce more and more until I came to the point that he said ‘You are making too many, I can’t use them all.’ So I had to look for new customers for the existing amount of product.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vlastimil John Surak
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Vlastimil Surak was born in 1927 in Brezová pod Bradlom in western Slovakia. His father, Matej, had moved to the United States when he was 15, but returned to Slovakia in 1920 and married his mother, Alžbeta. In 1922, the pair went to the United States, but again returned to Slovakia in 1926. Vlastimil’s father owned two tanneries in Brezová pod Bradlom while his mother stayed home raising Vlastimil and his two brothers. During WWII, Vlastimil recalls hiding in forests and small villages whenever Nazis came through his town to avoid being conscripted or sent to work in Germany.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil attended business school in Bratislava and, upon graduating in 1947, returned to Brezová pod Bradlom to work in his father’s tannery. He says that after the Communist coup in 1948 ‘things started going so bad, there was no other thing on my mind, just to leave.’ Vlastimil and his younger brother Slavomil did not have trouble obtaining passports, as their parents were American citizens. They left Czechoslovakia in November 1948 and sailed to the United States three weeks later on the <em>Queen Elizabeth</em>. Vlastimil recalls this trip as a great experience. They took the train to Chicago where they were met by their older brother, Miloslav, who had come to the United States two years earlier. Vlastimil found lodging with a Slovak family, and eventually found a job with an electric company. He says that it was always his plan to have his own business, and in February 1954, following in the footsteps of his father, Vlastimil started the National Rawhide Manufacturing Company (later Surak Leather Company). Initially, his business was making drum covers, but when rawhide was replaced by plastic, he turned to making leather for jackets and gloves; he owned this business until 1995. Vlastimil’s parents arrived in Chicago in 1964, following what he says was years of persecution under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Following the communists’ rise to power, his father lost his business and properties and was sentenced to prison for a number of years. Because of his American citizenship, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey intervened and was able to secure his release.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vlastimil has been married to his wife Elizabeth for over 50 years and they have three children. His two daughters were debutantes with the Czechoslovak National Council of America. In 1989, he was shown on television in Daley Plaza, celebrating the Velvet Revolution; however, Vlastimil has not been back to Slovakia because he says he “doesn’t want to change the picture in his mind” of his home. Today, he lives in Lake Forest, Illinois.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Brezova pod Bradlom
Concentration camp
Family business
marriage
Nazis
Political prisoner
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Massacre Survivor</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hyqD8HBFXQU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”</p><h4>Opinions Hurt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tlzpSg6Eixc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”</p><h4>Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A3Na8BQnvdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fou0milWM60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.</p><p>“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QkstvhUWd2A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”</p><h4>Mistake</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x71Xtz_qLIQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?</p><p>“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vera Plesek
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper <em>Hlasatel</em> for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Concentration camp
Discrimination
Divorce
Family life
Healthcare professionals
Kosinova.
Prison
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/atqndUlLUt8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“At the time, she [his mother] was working as a press attaché at the Dutch embassy. This is under the communist regime. And the communists had a spy in the Dutch embassy, and they identified my mother’s boss as a spy. So she was under pressure. And she told me, already, under the communists, she had all kinds of pressure – things were being stolen. They didn’t particularly appreciate middle-class, bourgeois people. So there was pressure, but this embassy situation increased the pressure, and so she negotiated with the secret police to be able to leave. The standard of leaving was you get one suitcase; she was able to take a couple of crates. And the Dutch government helped, because she was working for the Dutch government. They arranged for a ship, and at that time there was very little shipping, so [we took] a freighter from Holland to Australia, six weeks. And I have some vague memories of that. I’ve got sort of a King Neptune certificate for crossing the equator.”</p><h4>Australia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/USqHqMGQkoU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Initially, when I came to Australia – I think partially under my mother’s influence; she literally was disgusted with Europe, with the Nazis and the communists, and I, reflecting that, my attitude was ‘I want to learn English, I want to assimilate and to hell with the background.’ Yes, my father was a famous guy, so what? And so in Australia, I had virtually no connection with anything Czech.”</p><h4>Newspaper in Baltimore</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3MgVo938_Bg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Baltimore, at that time, was really the pits. This was post-‘68 riots, but, I was going to the paper of H.L. Mencken, and that swayed me. And I felt I needed some metropolitan newspaper experience, because I was working for a small newspaper in Beirut, and that’s how I ended up here. After moving here, we said, ‘Oh we’ll stay here a couple years.’ But then, part of my assignment was to write about, back in the early ‘70s, [William] Donald Schaefer was mayor, and they made efforts to revive the city, and I was writing about that and I got into it. I got interested in urban affairs. Also, I liked city living. That’s one thing rubbing off on me from Prague was liking living in the city. And my wife was from Westchester County, New York, so she’s rebelling against suburbia. So basically, living in the city suited us, walking to work. And then in ’75, we moved here.”</p><h4>Father's Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qa575jAuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Radan Dolejš organized another concert at Lucerna where leading contemporary Czech musicians played my father’s music. And to me that was a revelation. Compared to in ’72 when I found the records which made the whole sound very schmaltzy, who cares – now we had contemporary musicians giving it a real contemporary interpretation. I said, ‘Wow. This is something.’ Suddenly energized me into the music. Plus, I learnt that he composed jazz music, and dance music. I mean, he was no fuddy-duddy. And, the leading Czech rock group, called Olympic, play one of his songs. So one of his songs was adapted to rock music.</p><p>“And this reconnecting process is multifaceted. From seeing my father, a stony figure in the movie which I had no connection [to] – and my wife said she saw an eerie resemblance, they way she put it. I didn’t see it at all – to hearing <em>Česká Písnička</em> [one of his father’s best-known songs] for the first time and not understanding one word and being hit by it emotionally, to starting to find documents, to mama’s memoirs, to reconnecting to the music through these concerts in Prague, to the documentary, and going through the process of that.”</p><h4>Father's Story</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/niCNaqnDVm0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And Arnošt [Lustig, the author who featured in <em>The Immortal Balladeer </em>with Tom], the interesting thing is, he saw my father as a symbol of the non-Jewish victims. Which, to me, elevated that. And he appears in the documentary, and he adds a sort of philosophical level, a humanistic level to it. Which is above and beyond my father, and that’s the part that so fascinates me. So one of the things I’m really interested in now is to use my father’s story, not for itself, but in conjunction with other people – not only Czechs – other people who are musicians, artists, writers, who defy oppression. And oppression doesn’t have to be Nazis or Communists; it can be anywhere.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thomas Hasler
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Thomas Hasler was born in Prague in 1941. His mother, Charlotte Jurdová, was a linguist with a doctorate in philology from Charles University, and his father, Karel Hašler, was a very popular Czech songwriter, actor, director, and playwright who, before his son’s birth, was arrested by the Gestapo because of the patriotic nature of his songs. Karel Hašler was killed at Mauthausen concentration camp one month after Tom was born.</p><p> </p><p>Tom says he does not have many memories of Czechoslovakia, as he left the country when he was only seven years old. His mother was able to secure exit visas in 1949 when the department she worked for at the Dutch embassy came under scrutiny after her supervisor was named as a spy. Tom and his mother moved to Australia, where, he says, he did not make an effort to retain his Czech heritage. In 1958, Tom and his mother were sponsored by an acquaintance to come to America.</p><p> </p><p>They arrived in Santa Barbara, California, but shortly thereafter moved to Connecticut. Tom began college at age 16, due to the differences in the American and Australian education systems. He studied political science at Hobart College (in New York) and received his master’s degree in journalism from University of Michigan. Tom interned at<em>The Daily Star, </em>the English-language newspaper in Beirut, in 1968, where he remembers hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also met and married his wife, Bonnie (a New Yorker) while in Beirut. Upon returning to the United States, Tom accepted a job offer from the Baltimore <em>Evening Sun</em>. He became an American citizen in 1975, but says he recently also got his Czech citizenship back.</p><p> </p><p>While growing up, Tom knew little about his father. However, more recently he says he has made an effort to discover as much as possible. In 2007, Tom was the co-producer and subject of a documentary titled <em>The Immortal Balladeer of Prague</em> <em>[Písničkář, který nezemřel</em>] which chronicles his search for his father’s work and legacy. He says he is fascinated by the ‘political side’ of his father’s music, which, he adds, led ultimately to his father’s death. He also discovered his mother’s memoirs and diaries which has given him insight into his father’s personal character. Tom has visited Prague several times and says that he no longer feels like a tourist there. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arnost Lustig
Arts
Ceska Pisnicka
Concentration camp
Education
emigrant
Journalism
Jurdova
ktery nezemrel
Pisnickar
Radan Dolejs
refugee
Sense of identity
Tomas Jurda
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cof-Jjem4-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“The biggest problem was that we had to move from our apartment, because we lived on the main street and Jews were not permitted to live on the main street. That was making the city ugly, if you had Jews living on the main street. So we had to find an apartment in a side street, which we did and it was actually pretty good. But then, of course, we couldn’t visit swimming pools, public places. We couldn’t visit parks, we couldn’t go to the movies, we couldn’t travel without a permit, and we had to wear the Star of David. So you had to be marked. And that was not a very pleasant thing, and not necessarily because of the fact that you had to deliver your sporting equipment. You had to give to the state. You had to donate it to the state. Of course all kinds of jewelry. Your bank accounts were frozen. And finally, my father was prohibited from being an attorney, so he had to find another job. It couldn’t be an attorney; it had to be some clerk, which we finally found. He was a clerk in a shoe factory and he did some clerical job there. But that gave him an exemption that we would not go into an concentration camp – at least not initially.”</p><h4>Labor Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7M4B3Ou6bVM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We all went to Auschwitz together and except for me, everybody perished. There was tremendous famine there. We had practically no food, so I lost – I was never a big guy – but I lost at least 40 pounds. So when I was liberated I weighed about 80 pounds. So if this would have taken a longer time I certainly wouldn’t have survived, because it was not only the lack food, but also hard labor. We had to work – which I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t stand that Auschwitz. I remember that smoke and the fire and the smell of burning bodies. So I reported myself that I am an expert electrician, which of course I was not. But I was taken as an electrician to a neighboring little camp where they had some electrical work; I never did anything electrical because it turned out that was a different camp – they mixed me up. But it doesn’t matter; it was still a labor camp, where the food wasn’t much better but at least we had to work and we were occupied and tired and came home and went to bed and slept. So I didn’t have too much time to think about things. So that’s why I was able to survive, and don’t forget that Auschwitz, and the neighboring camps, was liberated much earlier than the rest of the camps because the Russian front was so close. So actually, Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. I was liberated a little later because I was in a slightly more Western camp, but still it was the beginning of February.”</p><p><em>So which was the camp you were moved to?</em></p><p>“It was called Gleiwitz – Gliwice in Polish. That was an industrial city, as most of them there, in the same area of Auschwitz, maybe 35-40 miles from Auschwitz. Very close. And that was the sister camp because they didn’t have gas chambers in Gleiwitz, only in Auschwitz. So if somebody was too weak to work, then they sent him back to Auschwitz from Gleiwitz. There was no crematorium and no gas chamber, so there was a big difference.”</p><h4>Previerka</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/urb1PQlQVso?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had a <em>prověrka,</em> <em>previerka</em> in Slovak, and I was given a condition that I can study, but I have to finish in the proper term. The fact that there was a <em>previerka</em> is horrible, but they way they acted toward me I would say is reasonable. They gave me a condition. They gave me another condition, which was given not on the university side but on the civilian side, that they suggested to me to be more in touch with the working people. That I was much of a high-nose, snobbish guy who is an intellectual who is studying medicine; that I should go to the folk, to the people, and I did. I immediately reported to become a factory physician for one month, to be close to the workers, and then I became a company physician later at the university, to become more united with the working class.”</p><h4>Communist Party</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YxJNO_Yvbuc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I came back from the [concentration] camp, and it was not a communist state yet, I joined the Czechoslovak youth organization, which very many people joined. But that was good only until I was 27; after 27 it automatically became the Communist Party. So that’s how I became a member of the Party, but for three years I didn’t even pay my dues. But when I had my <em>previerka</em>, I was ordered to be more active as a member and after three years I paid my dues backwards and became more active, meaning I attended Party membership conferences and meetings and that’s it. But I was never a functionary or any office holder. So that was Party membership, which may have helped me a little bit in my difficult life as the son of a bourgeois who was in jail – maybe, I’m not sure.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9sNzXVEXmnk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s an insane system, that communism. That’s why it never worked any place, and it can be maintained only by terror, by secret police and by forbidding this and forbidding that and censoring the mail and censoring the newspaper. That’s why I felt it acutely that I had to go to the evening meeting of the Party, that I had to go on May 1 to manifest for Stalin, which I didn’t want to. So that’s why I was very anxious to get out, and when I did get out, suddenly I had all the possibility for doing research, doing what I wanted to do all my life. I had a laboratory, I had my mice and rats for experiments, I had a professor who took care of me – specifically had several fellows and I was one of them; excellent teacher – and I said ‘For goodness sake, now I’m going back to that Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Lost Angeles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2XKVN5xedNU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Los Angeles is just a chapter, like Miami is a chapter, and we had a very good president who really arranged all kinds of lectures. And at that time we were lucky because, for instance, Milos Forman was there in Los Angeles and he gave a number of lectures. There was another guy who was chair of a filmmaking institute; I forgot his name, but he was a member of SVU. Then we had a painter, quite famous locally; he was a member. So it was interesting company: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professionals, filmmakers. And it was interesting to go to because it was a social club more or less, and it was not only lectures but also parties – beer and wine and some cookies and some good Czech cooking, because we went usually from one house to another – we didn’t have an official meeting place – or we met at the Beseda Sokol. They had one in Los Angeles.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thomas Gral
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical <em>gymnázium</em> in Nitra.</p><p> </p><p>Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a <em>previerka</em>, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3399" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609054041im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_(WinCE)" width="500" height="488" />In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Communist Party members
Community Life
Concentration camp
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Holocaust
Jews
Kosice
Military service
Slansky
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>1951 Trial</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uOrBafTKKok?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“All of a sudden, they yanked me out the cell, brought me to a big room full of people, I did not know… nobody told me what it was about. I was there, there were some people up there on the podium, and I couldn’t make out what it was all about. In about 15 minutes they took me back to the cell. And later on somehow I was told that I was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. That was the whole trial! No defense attorney or anything. Absolutely nothing, nobody asked me nothing, nobody told me anything, you know. That was communist justice.”</p><h4>Pankrac Prison</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qzkrADDL_oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Cleaning the feathers – it came in bags. Goose feathers with chunks of skin on it and all that. All putrid, you know. So lots of dust around and there was a little cell that was meant for probably two people, there were three of us or four of us. It was cold there, you couldn’t… there was a toilet tight next to the door. We had to use the toilet, you know, to relieve yourself, we had to wash ourselves in the toilet and we had to drink out of the toilet because we were not given any water. In the morning you got a little cup of bitter tea, I mean coffee, and that was it. Otherwise showers, maybe they took you into the shower once every two months. We were supposed to be allowed to go out and walk around the yard every other day or so, so maybe once a week, once every 14 days. And the food was completely inadequate. It was so little I got so weak that going, I was on the second floor, I believe, so going up the stairs I couldn’t make it. I was climbing holding onto the railing.</p><p>“Once they threw me into the correction… that means in to the solitary…because, they couldn’t prove it of course, they did not have to prove anything, they just said I was communicating in Morse code through the walls. I was, you know, but they couldn’t tell, they just said ‘okay you, you go’ and they put me I think 14 days in that solitary in the basement. Well, that was real pleasant. You did not have your mat there, nothing during the day, not a blanket, just the very light whatever you had on – a shirt and breeches. Otherwise it was ice cold in there. In the morning, they gave you a bucket and you had to scrub the floor, the whole floor. So everything was wet. Then, the rest of the day, you had to stand under the open window at attention. And the snow was coming through the window. At lunchtime they opened the door and threw in a little bowl of red hot soup, or something, you know, you had to gulp it down, you burned your mouth, because in two minutes they were back taking the empty stuff out. And when I came out of it after 14 days, that cold and all that, so every joint I was moving was cracking.”</p><h4>Resistance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mXK0G409dRU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did not have any grandiose plans, you know, like ‘Oh we are going to overthrow the regime.’ That was quite obvious that you cannot do it. You just have to do whatever you can do. Even if it is small stuff, if everybody did a little, that regime could not have lasted six months, you know. But just a little. We tried to do our best under the circumstances. So we did not, we knew something about the second resistance during the War, where people were trying to organize large groups, lots of people, getting ready for big actions. That never worked out, because you have too many people involved, there will be somebody who will blow the whistle, and it is not going to happen. So we decided right from the beginning, knowing what was happening during the War, to keep it small, really tight, really strict security, and just do whatever we could, not trying to contact other people and all that, that was a recipe for disaster.</p><p>“There were lots of people, as I could see in the prison, who wanted to do something. They were there, they were connected to some group, big group, then it blew up, they wound up in jail before they could do anything, you know. But they were willing, if they had good leadership, those people would have fought. So, saying that the people did not want to do anything or risk anything, that’s incorrect. There were lots of people who were willing, but the thing is, most people need somebody who tells them ‘do this or do that.”</p><h4>Passenger Train</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7x3BKlRCmQs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The guys, Milan and Joseph, they got off the train at the train station before Berlin – well I thought that was the end of it, the end of them, you know, because I heard shooting and that. So I was under the train and kept going, stopped once or twice more in different stations but now I couldn’t see the names of the stations or anything, so I was thinking to myself ‘Well, I’ve got to get off the train because maybe the train is passing through Berlin, I might wind up in the Communist sector on the other side so, just take a chance…’ I decided the next stop, I’ll just drop and see where I am. That’s all that you could do, you know?</p><p>“So I dropped between the rails there and the train left. There was some guy looking through the door there, the glass, and he kind of dropped his jaw, because he saw me there. What he did after that I don’t know, the train was gone and I ran. I got from the railroad yard and I took a hostage there. There were like little shacks or sheds and people living there so I caught a half-drunk guy there and forced him to take me to the American barracks.”</p><h4>US Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6CNegVdgxzE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a completely wrong picture of the whole thing – what we thought the army should be like, you know, because the United States Army was something completely different from these national armies, like the Czechoslovak Army. We saw in the Czechoslovakian Army people were very highly motivated, you know, the officers corps and all that. It was the same in most of the… like in Germany, right? Or in France or in England. But here it was a completely different thing. Also, first I thought, prior to – well, it took me a while before I changed my mind but – I thought I would stay in the army. Because I couldn’t imagine being anything except an officer like father. And of course, I thought that was the thing to do. When I saw how it worked here I said ‘No, I don’t want any part of it.’ Because there was also nothing going on, it didn’t look, you see, that was the main thing… because the Korean War was over, nobody knew anything about Vietnam, and our enlistment was up and we said ‘What? We are going to run around here like jerks polishing boots and all this?”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Radek Masin
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Radek Masin was born in Olomouc, southern Moravia, in 1930. His father, Josef Mašín, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Army who was later executed by the Nazis, while his mother, Zdenka, was a civil engineer, who spent part of WWII in Terezín. Radek and his brother <a href="/web/20170609125243/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/joseph-masin/">Joseph</a> received bravery medals from Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War. According to Joseph, the brothers attempted to render German fighter planes traveling through their town by train unusable during WWII, and at one point helped a pair of Russian POWs escape.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609125243/http://www.radio.cz/en/article/130440" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Benes
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Forced labor
Jachymov
Nazis
Pankrac Prison
Podebrady
Political prisoner
Resistance
Solitary confinement
Terezin
World War II
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bce262aef24013bcbef45ffabbf34dbe
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uj2jH460ytY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“In 1940, they started to promulgate a series of anti-Semitic laws whereby businesses were expropriated. First they started in a small way; for instance, Jews were not allowed to own luxury goods. My father already had a car, which was unusual in those days, so no car. No furs. My mother had to give up jewelry, and there was no sports equipment. So I, at the age of ten or eleven, had to give up my skis, my ice skates, my sled and my most prized possession of all, which was my red bicycle. I loved the red bicycle and I had to give that up. My mother told the story that I once came home crying because I saw a boy riding my bicycle.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IWS8Ey0Ctvc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father was a great Zionist and in August 1939 he was a delegate from Slovakia to the World Zionist Congress, which took place in Geneva. He was there when the War started and wanted to rush home, and everybody said ‘Hey, hey, don’t do that. You can help your family better by staying out here and trying to get them out.’ Well, that was easier said than done. He was in Geneva; after his visa expired the Swiss kicked him out and he moved to Paris, and when, in 1940, the German troops overran Paris, he moved down south in France, ultimately to Portugal, and in Portugal he applied for a visa to the United States. It took quite awhile. So he left Trenčín in August 1939 and in March 1941 he arrived in New York. So he immediately applied for visas for myself, my mother and my grandmother – my mother’s mother – who lived with us at the time, but that was a rather complex procedure which took a lot of time. So this was in 1941 and then in December 1941 you had Pearl Harbor, and that was the end of all civilian travel across the Atlantic and we were trapped there.”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MFKHghgluWk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Sachsenhausen was liquidated and we were forced on what was called the Sachsenhausen hunger march, which started – this, of course, I got from my later research – started on April 20. They announced that the camp is going to be blown up and whoever remains will die in the camp. The camp at that time contained I think about [35,000 prisoners], and about [32,000 of us] started on this hunger march and about 3,000 stayed.* In the event, two days later the Soviet troops liberated Sachsenhausen and all these prisoners who were too sick and feeble to walk were actually liberated at that point.</p><p>“We marched for what turned out to be 12 days in a northerly direction. The food that we received were packages of the International Red Cross, which kept us alive. That was totally amazing. The International Red Cross, which was run by Count Folke Bernadotte from Sweden, had these Red Cross trucks – they were white with huge red crosses painted on the sides and painted on the top. They approached the German lines and they more or less talked their way across German lines and they said ‘We are here just on a humanitarian mission’ and somehow they got permission to cross, and the second day after we left we were stopped by these Red Cross trucks and given food packages. For the next 12 days this happened several times and we basically survived on the food packages given to us by the International Red Cross.”</p><p><em>Peter adds that “during the march, whoever was unable to walk was directed to sit down in a ditch along the road and shot dead by SS guards. It is estimated that around 6,000 prisoners died in this fashion.</em></p><h4>May 2nd 1945</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Lv9kHq-AtI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First we discovered that there was a field of potatoes there, so we dug up some new potatoes in May and we made ourselves a fire and we boiled a milk-can of potatoes. There was a small group of us. There was a profusion of German military equipment lying around, so we got some German helmets and we ripped out the leather that fastened it to their chins and we used that as a bowl and we helped ourselves to the potatoes, and kept eating potatoes and eating potatoes until we couldn’t eat anymore. We just couldn’t believe that here was still some more of this delicious food and we were sated. We couldn’t eat anymore. This stays in my mind; we just sat there grinning at one another sort of sheepishly. I mean, this was such an incredible feeling.”</p><h4>Feeling American</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2rZsDoUqyU8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I wanted to become American and I had the benefit of education here, which was American, and I feel American. To some extent I’m still a displaced person, but also, due to the fact that I’ve worked in the art museum for the last eight years where I give the lectures in English and I try to enunciate clearly, it’s interesting that most of my audience are tourists from out of town. The tourists come from various parts of the United States mainly, and some from foreign countries. The American tourists who come here think of me as a New Yorker because they are used to all kinds of New York accents here and they don’t realize I have an accent. New Yorkers every once in awhile will stop and say ‘Well, where do you really come from?’”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Kubicek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Kubicek was born in Trenčín in northwestern Slovakia in 1930. His father, Andrej, owned a drugstore in town and his mother, Ilka, who was from the Sudeten part of Moravia, often worked there. Peter attended a Jewish school in Trenčín; he says that only a handful of his middle-school classmates survived WWII. In August 1939, Peter’s father traveled to Geneva for the World Zionist Congress. As a result, he was not in Slovakia when WWII officially broke out. He made his way to France and Portugal and, in March 1941, to New York. His attempts to obtain visas for his family were unsuccessful and, by December 1941, travel to the United States was impossible. Peter, his mother and his grandmother were deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in October 1944.</p><p> </p><p>Peter was separated from his family and transferred to six different camps before ending up in Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945. With the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans liquidated Sachsenhausen and started the prisoners on a forced march. Peter says that he and his compatriots were given food packets by the Red Cross which kept them alive during the 12-day march. On May 2, his group was liberated, and they made their way to Schwerin (in northern Germany) where American troops had taken over the city. With the help of an American soldier, Peter made contact with his father who, in New York City, had not heard from his family for several years.</p><p> </p><p>Although Peter’s grandmother died in Bergen-Belsen, he found his mother on the streets of Prague shortly after liberation. Peter had contracted tuberculosis while in the concentration camps and spent one year in a sanatorium. In November 1946, he and his mother moved to New York City and were reunited with his father. Peter studied European history at Queens College and attended graduate school in Lausanne. He joined the import/export business that his father had started and, when his father died in 1963, took over the company. Peter and his wife Edith (a Czech émigré who was born in Prague) have two daughters and three grandchildren. After retiring in 2001, Peter became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012, he published his memoirs, titled<em>Memories of Evil: A World War II Childhood</em>. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Americanization
Concentration camp
Discrimination
Jews
Liberation
Nazis
Trencin
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f9759d447b3e7b529d51e1b75d5c0be6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.</p><p>“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.</p><p>“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.</p><p>“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”</p><p>How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?</p><p>“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Peter Demetz
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
World War II
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e6640e1f37dbdce79a28bfaaaa648e94
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Hiding</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bi7XQlRhcks?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Her portion of the family became involved in the Heydrich affair. My grandfather was a lay president of the Russian Orthodox church in Prague and it was really his idea to hide the parachutists who killed Heydrich in the Russian Orthodox church in Resslova Ulice. So the Heydrich assassination took place in 1942 and the whole portion of my family on my mother’s side perished. My grandfather was executed shortly after the assassination. There was a mock trial staged by the Nazis where all the members of the Russian Orthodox church were sentenced to death and they were shot in Kobylisy, and my grandmother and my mother and her new husband, they went to Terezín, and from Terezín to Mauthausen, and my mother perished in Mauthausen.”</p><p><em>So your grandfather was an activist.</em></p><p>“My grandfather was an activist in the sense that he was a patriot. He was a member of Sokol and similar nationalistic organizations, and because of his involvement in these organizations he was approached when these parachutists who killed Heydrich needed to be hidden or sheltered. He provided the shelter in the Russian Orthodox church, which is now a museum.”</p><h4>Danger</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nq62le4ucN0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They not only killed the people who assisted directly, but also the family members. Often people ask me how come I survived and my brothers, and the only reason why we survived was because my parents were divorced. So even though it was a painful thing, it really saved our lives. My mother remarried and her husband also perished. The Gestapo did come a few times to our house, but my father, who was educated under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spoke German and he always managed to turn the Gestapo away. Sometimes he claimed that we were sick with infectious diseases which the Nazis were afraid of. Three times, he said that the Nazis came to get us as children, but he always managed to turn them away.”</p><h4>Prague Uprising</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HokwmFWMIDE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I do remember the revolution. I was nine years old. I remember we didn’t go to school because there was already some unrest, but we went to the island Žofín, which is right near the Národní divadlo [National Theatre]. We were there with my brothers and then we saw that people started to hang Czech flags – the tricolore – and so my oldest brother, who was 14, said ‘It sounds like trouble,’ so we ran home, and the shooting started. I remember there was a Protestant church right across from the house where we lived and one of the Nazi snipers holed himself up in the tower of the church and was shooting at people, but eventually he was also annihilated.</p><p>“But then I have memories of driving through the streets of Prague and there were Nazi sympathizers. I remember a woman walking barefoot with a huge picture of Hitler hanging from her neck, covering her entire body, and she was holding a wooden pistol, like a mockery, and pointing it to the picture of Hitler. So they tortured her, humiliated her, etc. And then I remember the Nazis hanging from the lampposts. As a nine-year-old I was very impressed by that picture, even though as soon as we passed that kind of scenery, my father pushed my head down under the car seat.”</p><h4>Hiccup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YoYtfV8_Vqw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was 15 years old, the communists decided that I couldn’t continue my education. It was interesting because I lived in a neighborhood where also lived the later president [Václav] Havel. As a matter of fact, we were classmates in the same public elementary school for five years. That was a fate that I shared with Havel. He was in the same predicament when the communists came; he was also not allowed to go to school, and he worked in a brewery from what I remember. I think for a while in a chemical factory and later in a brewery. Some of his plays refer to this.</p><p>“When I was 15, the communists said that my education was finished and my parents – my father and my stepmother – they put up a tremendous fight. Everything failed, but then of course my stepmother prevailed because she figured out a way to move me out of Prague and to the village where she was schoolteacher and she knew everybody and everybody knew her. I worked in a chemical factory too, in a lab, Spolana Neratovice, a chemical factory in a small town called Křinec. I worked there for a year and, after a year, I was no longer a bourgeois element, but the working class decided that I needed to further my education, so they sent me to a gymnázium. But the only concession I had to make was that I couldn’t return back to Prague, so I went to a gymnázium in Nymburk.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jfsrCW1yUvg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were 400 Czech tourists and we didn’t know who was an agent. Probably for every bus there was an agent, or maybe two, so I didn’t know if it would be possible to escape. But then one day, they took us to the beach, which of course was a tremendous treat for all of us who grew up in a landlocked country, and then at the beach I decided that I’ll make my escape. I felt the agents lost control of us – who was in the water, etc. – so I left from the beach, and because I was afraid that I would be conspicuous I didn’t have anything with me except my pants and a shirt and a bathing suit. So I made a clean break. The communists gave us pocket money worth six dollars, so I had less than six dollars because I already spent a little bit of it. Even though I brought my diploma onto the ship, at that point, when I was on the beach and I felt I had the opportunity to leave, I didn’t even have the diploma.”</p><h4>President</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dtX19jcUgVY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s very interesting because here we decided not to split into two nations. Even though the official name of that organization is the Bohemian Hall, we feel that Slovaks are our brothers, and I always felt that they should be encouraged. As far as I’m concerned, we didn’t split; I consider it still a Czechoslovak organization. Naturally, there is some conflict and controversy about that too, because there are people who perhaps don’t like the Slovaks and there are some Slovaks who don’t like the Czechs, but as far I’m concerned, it’s one nation.”</p><h4>What If</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kX-fyirZkcw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In my opinion, it would have been a horror. I mean, I did experience it a little bit in Teplice, where I worked after my graduation. But the subservience that we were forced into, the insincerity, the inability to trust anybody, to be able to speak freely; in my opinion, it was horrible. Destruction, really, of a human spirit. This is why I treasure this country most because, quite to the contrary, it encourages you. And I would say I am probably a little bit of an individualist, but this country kind of appreciates it.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Paul Ort
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paul Ort was born in Prague in 1936. His father, Miloslav, was a surgeon, while his mother, Ludmila, stayed home to raise Paul and his two older brothers. When Paul was three, his parents divorced and his mother soon remarried. In 1942, Paul’s family became involved in the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich when his grandfather, a lay official of the Russian Orthodox Church in Prague, helped hide his killers – Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. Paul’s grandfather was executed by the Nazis, and his grandmother, mother, and stepfather were sent to Terezín and Mauthausen, where they died. Paul and his brothers went to live with their father, who later married their governess. At the age of 15, Paul was sent to work at a chemical factory in the small town of Křinec for one year. He then attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Nymburk. Paul was admitted to the medical school at Charles University and graduated in 1961. He worked for one year as a trainee in orthopedics in Teplice.</p><p> </p><p>In 1962, Paul received a tourist visa for a trip to Tunisia. While on the beach with his tour group, Paul left the group and hitchhiked to Tunis where he made contact with a diplomat from the West German Embassy who helped him claim asylum. Paul eventually received permission to immigrate to the United States and, in 1963, moved to New York. He took a qualifying exam which would allow him to work in the United States, and then traveled to Venezuela to visit family members. While there, he was offered a job as an expedition doctor, and spent one year in the Venezuelan jungle. Paul returned to New York in 1964 and completed an internship at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center. When Paul was offered a residency in orthopedics at Bellevue Hospital (in conjunction with NYU), he moved to Manhattan. He worked as an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years and, in 2005, was offered the job of chief of orthopedics at the VA NYC Medical Center. Paul believes that his career has flourished thanks to his move to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Paul’s first visit back to Czechoslovakia was after the Velvet Revolution; he says that his acquaintance with Václav Havel (with whom he attended elementary school) prevented him from being allowed to return under communism. Since his arrival in the United States, Paul had been involved in the Czechoslovak community in New York. In 2011, he served as president of the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. Today, he lives in Manhattan.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Community Life
Concentration camp
Divorce
Education
Gabcik
Healthcare professionals
Heydrich assassination
Krinec
Kubis
Nazis
Terezin
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Jewish in WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wtNyFyw03NI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Of course, ’39 was the time when Nazis took over completely, but we did not feel it until ’40, ’41. We only felt it by the everyday happenings in our school where the children would chase us around because we were Jewish and they were not. And we first didn’t understand what happened, we had no idea that we were any different. So my father had another task to explain – how you are different. And he had a great theory; that’s the first time he mentioned that ‘It is not our fault that we are Jewish. Actually, it is not a fault. It’s just something that one is and one isn’t, and these children are to be pitied because they’re just uninformed, obviously their parents are uninformed , and, you know, we just have to try to ignore the best we can.’”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hB12poJltNg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were washing dishes and the soldiers showed up and told my mother and my father that we need to pack up something that we can carry on our backs and we are going to leave. So we were taken to the camp in – the concentration camp – in Žilina. You know the difference, there is a concentration camp and there is an extermination camp, so we were just taken to the first place. So we left our house. That was the last time I saw my house. I don’t really want to go into the whole thing because you probably heard many stories like that, you saw many movies like that, every story is a little bit different. To us, as children, it was a completely unexpected experience. We were city girls and we had no idea that things like that, like you sleep on straw, existed. And that you eat when you are supposed to line up to eat and you eat what you get and not what your mother has for you. Special things, everything disappears, in one moment.”</p><h4>Release</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XhwYkfhJn9o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, with all the other men, he went out from the camp every morning. They marched out to work on the roads – break up the stones for the road making. And he was always obviously thinking about how to get us out of there. But he couldn’t come up with anything, because once you’re there you hardly ever…But then he had still a brother in Banská Bystrica, which is one of the bigger towns in Slovakia, who was still out. I don’t know how come they didn’t pick them up yet, but he was still out there. So he chanced it and he wrote a little note and packed it up and wrote on the note that whoever finds it, please send it to such-and-such address, please. That was all. And he wrote to his brother where we are, and do something. Because my father immediately knew what it meant. He was more informed than other people because he was very observant, and he also, with his friends, listened to the radio – that we are not supposed to have anymore. No radios, no jewelry, no purse, no nothing. And he knew that from London that things are really heading to the Final Solution.”</p><p>“And his brother got it. So somebody picked it up. I think it was the first miracle that I ever saw. And my uncle went, and I don’t know to this day how he got a small village past Banská Bystrica, persuaded – they needed a dentist of course – that they should vouch for us, and if they do that, if the commander of the local – it was called Hlinkova garda [Hlinka Guard]. That was a fascist Slovak organization – if he will say that he will watch out for us, and if they need us, we are there and will be handed over. So, they did it. They took our family, and we moved there.”</p><h4>Priest Help</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3efFrs4asnU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Slovak state had a president who was a Catholic bishop. And he of course was under the command of Hitler, and at the time they were negotiating how many Jews he was going to send him and how much money they’re going to get for it. And the Slovak priest in that village decided that he absolutely doesn’t listen to that kind of…that’s not his boss, his boss is a little bit higher up and that’s the only boss that he listens to. So he told his flock that the pope thinks this way but God doesn’t think that way. God thinks that we don’t hand over innocent people to be slaughtered. Why? And so that’s how we basically got saved.”</p><h4>Discovered</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J89ahwolBqQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had sentries, when someone in the village down there saw somebody coming, they would send a kid up to tell us, and then I was sent up there to tell those, but once it didn’t work out, and when I was going up to the last house, there was not a German troop, but the Hungarian troop; which was Hungarian Fascist, which were really, really, hateful. And they had a German commander with them, but the German already knew that they were losing, so he was thinking about the future and how’s he going to get out of this. But it was too late for us…we knew that if they catch so many people in one house they know they are hiding, these people are hiding. And they see the families, the children, and old people and middle-aged people. So they came up there and there we were. It was very unpleasant. And the German commander talked to my aunt who spoke German and he said ‘I know. It’s over, it’s over.’ But the Hungarians said ‘We need to take the guys with us,’ because they had to go through a partisan… the guerilla fighters’ territory. ‘We are going to take the men with us so they lead us through the territory and then we get over where we can join our forces. And the women and the children we need to shoot because, you know, what are we going to do with them?’”</p><p>“So they stood us up against the wall, and my little cousin, who was about six, she saw her father. She was an only child and her father’s little girl. Oh, she didn’t want her father to go anywhere, of course. She jumped off and went to him, and this guy said ‘We are ready to shoot, what is this, the kid?’ So the German commander said ‘Oh for heavens’ sakes guys, they’re just children and women, so why are we going to shoot them? What’s the sense of it? Let’s go.’ So they started leaving, and after they left and led my father and uncle and all the other guys down. And then we got very lucky, because in two days they were back. So they led them through the territory and decided to let them go. So they all came back. Including my father. So there was no better end to the story than this.”</p><h4>Censorship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w9DcjPmGlH4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I worked for the radio – I’ll just tell you a short story – in the section for young people and small children, so at night [we broadcast] fairy tales. So there is a French fairy tale called ‘The Red Balloon,’ everybody knows. So we had nothing to play so I said to my boss ‘Why don’t you reprise ‘The Red Balloon,’ we haven’t seen it in a long time, new children didn’t hear it.’ But you always have to, even if it’s old, you have to send it up to the advisor. That was not a Russian yet, that was our own NKVD [secret police] advisor. And he reads everything and then when he signs under it and you can put the tape on. I get a call: ‘Comrade Sever.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ I said ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ ‘What is this Red Balloon?’ I said ‘It’s a fairy tale.’ ‘I know that. But did you read to the end?’ ‘Yeah, I read to the end. The red balloon flies too high and it pops.’ ‘What’s the red balloon and it pops?’ I said ‘Well comrade,’ I don’t know what we called him. Tlačový dozor are press overseers. ‘I’m so sorry that you have such terrible thoughts. I didn’t think of it, but you did. I don’t know about you.’ He said ‘Stop being silly and change it to another color.’ I said ‘Ok, like what?’ ‘Like yellow.’ I said ok. Ok, no tragedy, but imagine that you are a writer and every word that you have in your book you have to cross out.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Klara Sever
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Klara Sever was born into a Jewish family in 1935 in Trebišov, Slovakia. With the outbreak of WWII and the founding of the First Slovak Republic, Klara and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Žilina. While in the camp, Klara’s father was able to get a note to his brother living in Banská Bystrica, who, in turn, persuaded a local official to vouch for the family and get them released from the camp under his supervision. The family lived in several locations until they were forced to go into hiding in 1942. Klara remembers being discovered by a troop of Hungarian soldiers who wanted to capture the men and shoot the women and children. At the last minute, however, the commander stepped in and saved their lives. Although the men were forced to march with the soldiers, they all returned in a few days. After the War, Klara and her family traveled to Lučenec to look for the rest of her family. They were only reunited with two of her uncles.</p><p> </p><p>In 1951, Klara attended the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Upon graduation, Klara wanted to pursue her studies further, but says she was blacklisted due to her marriage to her husband, whom she refers to as “an enemy of the state.” She recalls having difficulty finding a job as an artist, but eventually found employment restoring castles throughout Czechoslovakia. Working in restoration for five years classified her as a laborer, and she finally received her degree in art history from Comenius University. Klara then began working as a radio reporter and editor of art programming. She supplied material and reports for underground radio broadcasts during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.</p><p> </p><p>It was at this time that Klara and her husband decided to leave Czechoslovakia and, about two weeks after the invasion, they crossed the border into Austria. Klara says the border was patrolled by both Soviet and Slovak soldiers, and the Slovak soldier who inspected their car told them to leave ‘quickly.’ Her husband had connections with Western journalists he had met in Prague not long before, and he met one of these at the French embassy in Vienna. The French ambassador personally handed them visas, and they traveled to Paris. In 1969, they arrived in New York City. Although she did not know yet any English, Klara worked a series of jobs reproducing sculptures. In the Washington, D.C. area, Klara has worked as a sculptor, preparing commissions and heading her own company. She speaks Slovak with her family, and has maintained Slovak traditions at Christmas and Easter.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arts
Banska Bystrica
Concentration camp
Cultural Traditions
Education
Jews
Journalism
Lucenec
Trebisov
Zilina