After about one year in northern Moravia, Karel moved back to Nymburk, but continued to work as a courier, using frequent visits to his uncle in Bohumín as an excuse to travel to the Polish border. In 1951, he received word that other participants in this network had been arrested and that he should escape Czechoslovakia as soon as possible. Through a crewmember of the boat Vorvaň, Karel learned of a plot to hijack a train and drive it over the border into Western Germany.
On September 11, 1951, Karel and a number of other hijackers did successfully tamper with a passenger train’s brakes so that it hurtled across the German border, carrying them and a number of civilians, many of whom chose not to return home. The event was widely reported in the Western media and the locomotive in question was quickly dubbed ‘The Freedom Train.’ Those who escaped on the train spent some time in Valka Lager refugee camp in Bavaria before, in most cases, emigrating to Canada.
Karel settled in Toronto where he lived until 1961, when he moved to California. His work in the insurance industry brought him to Ohio in 1978. After a time spent in Chicago establishing a new insurance company in the mid 1980s, Karel returned to Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife. They have one son. In 2001, Karel published a book about his experience of leaving Czechoslovakia entitled Z deníku vlaku svobody [The Freedom Train Diary].
A municipal list of Nymburk’s honorary citizens, in which Karel Ruml is counted (in Czech)
]]>Karel Ruml was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in the nearby town of Nymburk. His father was a lawyer while his mother stayed at home, raising Karel and his younger sister, Eva. Throughout his childhood, Karel was an active member of the Sea Scouts, which were outlawed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WWII. He and fellow crew members of the homemade boat Vorvaň (meaning ‘sperm whale’ in Czech) began to engage in anti-Nazi resistance, monitoring troop movements on behalf of the local partisans and disarming explosives planted by the Germans in the last days of the War. In 1947, Karel began his studies at Charles University’s Law Faculty in Prague. For reasons of his class background, he was expelled from school in 1949, one year after the Communist coup. He went to work in a knitting factory in the North Moravian town of Frýdek-Místek, where he was approached about becoming a courier of secret documents from the nearby Polish border to Prague. Karel says he was trained by a man called Paul in ways to avoid detection and target shooting.
After about one year in northern Moravia, Karel moved back to Nymburk, but continued to work as a courier, using frequent visits to his uncle in Bohumín as an excuse to travel to the Polish border. In 1951, he received word that other participants in this network had been arrested and that he should escape Czechoslovakia as soon as possible. Through a crewmember of the boat Vorvaň, Karel learned of a plot to hijack a train and drive it over the border into Western Germany.
On September 11, 1951, Karel and a number of other hijackers did successfully tamper with a passenger train’s brakes so that it hurtled across the German border, carrying them and a number of civilians, many of whom chose not to return home. The event was widely reported in the Western media and the locomotive in question was quickly dubbed ‘The Freedom Train.’ Those who escaped on the train spent some time in Valka Lager refugee camp in Bavaria before, in most cases, emigrating to Canada.
Karel settled in Toronto where he lived until 1961, when he moved to California. His work in the insurance industry brought him to Ohio in 1978. After a time spent in Chicago establishing a new insurance company in the mid 1980s, Karel returned to Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife. They have one son. In 2001, Karel published a book about his experience of leaving Czechoslovakia entitled Z deníku vlaku svobody [The Freedom Train Diary].
A municipal list of Nymburk’s honorary citizens, in which Karel Ruml is counted (in Czech)
“We lived, initially, on the town square, where granddad had his law office. Dad had his law office together with granddad. And we lived on the same floor as the offices at the back. And my first childhood memory of that place was an explosion in the bathroom, where somebody was cleaning clothes using some explosive thing and somebody else lit the light for the water heater and the thing exploded. But the building was so solid that the outside walls didn’t fly out, I just remember as a little kid climbing over bricks in the hallway. We all survived except the nanny, poor soul, who was the one who lit the match. She survived and I believe that dad looked after her, because she was disfigured, I believe.”
“We had, we were forced to accept the German commandant of the small garrison they had in Nymburk – he lived in our house. He was actually a fairly pleasant guy as it turned out in the end. He could hear the BBC bim bim bim bim, because granddad was hard of hearing and upstairs he was listening to BBC. The German never said a word, except he mentioned to my dad that he was a reservist and really in real life he was an attorney in Hanover someplace.
“At the same time – this is in the dying days of the War, I was already 16 – we had an underground Sea Scout group. It was all illegal of course, scouts were not allowed. And we formed a… it was a dangerous endeavor because we connected with the partisans that were in the hills of Loučeň, north of Nymburk. And we were supposed to keep an eye on German military trains and road transports. To do that, we posted lookouts in the highest point of Nymburk – that was the cathedral… the major church.”
“Then the last act of our wartime experience with the Germans was at night. A small group of us climbed under the main bridge and removed the German dynamite which was installed to blow the bridge to protect the German rear as they were retreating. And that was a foolhardy thing to do, because we didn’t know the first thing about disarming explosives. And all we had was just pliers to clip the wire, you know, hanging. And we didn’t blow ourselves up and the bridge survived the War.”
“A very strong recollection from those days was a brigade, a working brigade, of the law students. The centuries-old law students club was called Všehrd, and Všehrd had a compulsory work brigade in Kladno, in the area of Kladno. Not in the coal mines, but something else that struck me as nothing short of horrendous. It was, we were transported by several buses from Prague to Kladno, without being told what we were expected to do. We were issued shovels and so on and marched outside town, where there was a newly constructed concentration camp – barbed wire around. And we were supposed to dig a trench on one side. It was in a sort of flood-prone area, so this was some sort of trench for the water. And it gave me hours… of course, we worked at a tempo of one shovel-full a minute, maybe, or every five minutes. We worked as slow as we could.
“We kept our eye on the occupants of the camp behind the barbed wire, and it was heart-rending. There was a lot of old people, a lot of young ones. There was one obviously feeble-minded youngster, who was making faces at us. I’ll never forget that face. It sort of dawned on me then that in a communist society, people who were not healthy and capable of physical labor for the state were not expected to live very long. And I remember the trip back to Prague on board the bus, I mean we were all joking on the way out, on the way back there was not a peep on the bus. We just sat there in shock.”
“We were marched to the county office, which was also the headquarters of the police. And there sitting in an interview room – not an interview room, a waiting room – were all the members of Buna’s group, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t know. And the other scout and myself were the only two outsiders, because we were only brought in because we were seen talking to him. So, we were the first ones, I guess we didn’t have to wait very long, because we were all seated far enough from one another so that, you know, no information could be exchanged. And one by one we were marched in this room, which was very small, and sat there with lights in our eyes, and it was a communist-style interview with hands – with spread fingers on top of a desk, and during the interrogation, something sharp like a pencil was stuck in the table between our fingers, sometimes hitting it, sometimes not hitting it – you know, it was just like some sort of Russian roulette with a pencil or some sharp object, you know, you were not allowed to look at it, you had to look in the bright lights in your eyes.
“And they couldn’t get anything out of me, because luckily they didn’t ask any questions having anything to do with my underground activity. They would have then gone, of course, to more severe torture immediately – this was just simply to make sure that I was not a member of this group, which I very clearly was not. So I was let go. And then, I remember walking across the bridge home, it was just almost like a rebirth. From that point on, my belief in what I was doing was so much stronger. I knew then that this was something that had to be fought and I did all the damage I could.”
“I stood there with my back against the handbrake, hoping to make it invisible, and sort of studying the people on board, most of whom were actually high school students returning home to Aš, which was the town on the border – high school kids – and then the train started accelerating instead of slowing down. We could see the machine-gun towers, the minefields with the barbed wire around, all the beautiful sights of a police state. And me standing there alone, watching the beautiful hills, actually, other than that on the border.
“It was so close then, from that point to the border, there wasn’t much time to think of anything else. This enormously fat policeman approached me and tried to push me away from the brake, whereupon I jammed the gun in his stomach and tried to use him as a barrier between myself and his colleagues who were behind him, praying to God that I wouldn’t forced to pull the trigger. But the guy turned cowardly like all the defenders of totality and didn’t do anything, just stood there giving me a horrible look of hate. I could smell his breath smelling of beer and onion and buřty [sausages] and that’s how I crossed the border.”
“My mum was brilliant. I found that out later from [my sister] Eva. When we embraced for the last time, and she watched me drag my suitcase to the… She didn’t go with me but, I guess that either the same day or… she got on the phone to the police and said that she is worried. No, it couldn’t have been the same day, it must have been the next day that she [said] she’s very worried about her son who’s been depressed for a long time, and he’s now missing and she would like some help in trying to locate him because she’s afraid that he might want to commit suicide.
“And that was beautiful, when finally I got connected [with the Freedom Train], initially I’m certain that thanks to the Americans I was not connected, but unfortunately they would have to be absolutely stupid not to connect me with the press in Canada, which was only a month and a half after the escape. But by that time, it was on record that my mum reported me missing and… I was depressed then in Canada, but for different reasons!”
“You know the main reason was that after a few trips to Prague, I came to the realization that the younger generation in Prague had to know more about the horror at the beginning of the communist era. They all knew a lot about the end of it. But the beginning was a terra incognita to them, they didn’t know bugger all, as they say. And already a lot of cynical people were discounting anything that really was horrible in the first years. It was just beyond description, the arrests, the concentration camps, and so on.”
Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.
Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.
In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
]]>Joseph Masin was born in Prague in 1932 and was raised nearby in the Czechoslovak military barracks at Ruzyně, where his father Josef was an army commandant. With the outbreak of WWII, Joseph’s father became a leading figure in an anti-Nazi resistance group called the Tří králové [The Three Kings]; he was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Gestapo one year later. Joseph’s mother, Zdenka, meanwhile, was interned in Terezín concentration camp. Joseph and his brother Radek spent most of the War in the spa town of Poděbrady where, says Joseph, the pair carried out a number of anti-Nazi actions, for which they were decorated by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War.
Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.
Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.
In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
“Our mother, she was jailed twice, and she spent a long time in German jails, and during that time our maid was still with our family and also our grandmother, who came also from a family which was German speaking, so she was looking out for us and actually, it was our grandmother and our maid who saved us when our mother was taken prisoner, when she was in the jail. So, she saved us from going to be reeducated and re-assimilated into the German folks. Our grandmother went to the authorities and she said, when they wanted to take us away, she said ‘look, I am going to look after them, I am German and so I am going to bring them up in the proper frame of mind so don’t worry’ and this is how we were kind of saved.”
“The Russians were very, very friendly, very nice. We just loved them, everybody threw flowers at them, because we were all allies, we just did not recognize… they were our brothers. And as a matter of fact, the first troops which came to Poděbrady, who stayed there, we were so friendly with them. In the evening, they used to dance kozáček and they used to sing and they used to play harmonicas and us kids, we just loved it. And they had the troops… they had women soldiers also and officers were women also and sometimes they even had kids – not their own kids, but somewhere in Ukraine or Poland they were abandoned, orphans, these kids – so they took them with them and they were moving with them. So for us it was all new and they would share their food with us because there was no food, it was a pretty bad situation. So, initially it was all very friendly, it turned 180 degrees later on.”
“When the Germans were emptying some of the concentration camps, they were moving these Jews in open railroad cars during the winter time. And when these people, when they froze, their co-prisoners, they just threw them out of the railroad cars. And these guys, there were two guys, who simulated being dead. They were thrown out and they came through this Colonel Vaněk, they came also to the place where our POW, the Russian guy, came to [a hiding place made by the brothers inside one of the walls of their home].
“And as a matter of fact, before then, I don’t know if you have any experience of this, but kids when they are in their teens, 12, 14, everybody was playing clubs – so we had a club and our club, we dug a hole. Near our village, there was a little patch of woods and a sandpit, and in the sandpit there was a bunch of rabbits and these rabbits, they dig holes, and we enlarged one of the holes and made a kind of cave underneath, and it was our clubhouse. And as a matter of fact, in our clubhouse (because we did not have any place to keep our POWs) after we moved him out of our house, we moved him and these two Jewish ex-German prisoners; they were moved for a certain period to our clubhouse. So we kept them there. We were getting food to them also, because as kids we were not very obvious, we could carry the food and deliver it to them.
“And we have also, at that time through Poděbrady near the place we used to live, German military supply trains used to move and for example, they were moving fighter planes on these supply trains, on flatbed cars. So we went on these flatbed cars with hammers and so on, and we were damaging these fighter planes so that they could not be used elsewhere. But it was not that simple, because when they were moving these military freight supply trains, there was always anti-aircraft… there was the last car and the car right after the steam engine, they had cars with anti-aircraft guns and military guards. But these guys sometimes… either they were drunk or towards the end of the War, the discipline was not what it should have been, so they have not noticed or something and so we were able to do those things. And for these activities after the War we got this medal from Beneš.”
“It was raining, it was freezing, it was snowing. We were wet, our navigation was pretty bad because things in East Germany were not what we thought they would be. We decided… especially Zbyňa [Zbyněk Janata] was nudging us to move quickly, and so we decided to carjack, do carjacking, get a car and move to Berlin on four wheels.
“On that occasion, Radek let his gun… because Zbyněk wanted to have a gun there so just, he let him have the gun and he, for no reason, just to scare people, he fired the gun. And other people traveling on the road, which was the road by Freiburg going up north towards Berlin, other people started stopping, having heard the shotgun. Other cars started to stop and we had to abandon the effort. Because the fellow who was driving the car – it was a Volkswagen, an amphibious Volkswagen, and there was not enough place even in that vehicle for all of us, but when we pulled him out and Radek gave him chloroform, so before then, he pulled the key out of the ignition, and we had no way to start the car. We started to look for the keys, Zbyněk fired the gun and so there were about five, six people all of a sudden, several cars… before then, no cars stopped, but at that time all the cars started to stop and there and they started to chase us through the woods and Zbyněk sprained his ankle real bad.”
“Why we don’t go there? Because it’s not the country we fought for. In the army, in the U.S. Army, we had Slovaks, good Slovaks, there was a fellow; his name was Pokorný – he used to be a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army and he was in Special Forces, there were a couple of other Slovaks. We fought, we wanted to fight for something for Czechoslovakia, united Czechoslovakia, democracy and everything. None of this happened.”
“Democracy is not to drive a Mercedes, svoboda [freedom] is not to go to Cuba on vacation, or to the Caribbean or Mallorca, you know? It takes a little bit more; it’s a frame of mind.”
Following the Communist coup in 1948, pressure mounted on the women who had survived Lidice to come out in favor of the Communist Party, which Jerri’s mother refused to do. Jerri also says her mother faced the jealousy of her peers whose children had not returned from the Nazi camps. In May 1949, the family left Czechoslovakia, crossing the border from southern Bohemia into Germany. They spent one year in Murnau refugee camp before settling in Norway. Jerri says the three years she spent in Norway were extremely happy for her as a child. Her father, Jaroslav, however, did not take to the country, and when his brother in Canada suggested that the family move there he jumped at the chance. The Zbirals moved to Montreal in 1954. Jerri first attended English-language Catholic school and then received her secondary education in French. She came to the United States in 1971 to attend graduate school in Rochester, New York. It was her first job which brought her to Chicago, where she has lived ever since.
In 1982, Jerri started to record the stories of her relatives and others who had survived the Lidice massacre. Ten years later, she created a film, In the Shadow of Memory, about the tragedy and her own relationship to the event. She has spoken with her husband Alan about Lidice on Studs Terkel’s show on WFMT Chicago. An art dealer, Jerri’s firm The Collected Image specializes in Czech photography in particular. As an adult, Jerri converted to Judaism. She became an American citizen in 2000. Jerri has two children.
]]>Jerri Zbiral was born in Prague in November 1948. Her mother, Anna, was a survivor of the Lidice tragedy in 1942, which saw one Bohemian village razed by Nazi troops in retaliation for the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The town’s women were separated from their children and transported to concentration camps, while all of the men were taken to a local farm and shot. Jerri’s mother spent the last three years of WWII in Ravensbrueck concentration camp, while Jerri’s sister Eva was sent to live with an aunt in Germany as part of the Nazi Lebensborn program. Jerri’s mother walked back to Czechoslovakia after the war and was reunited with Jerri’s sister. She subsequently met and married Jaroslav Zbíral.
Following the Communist coup in 1948, pressure mounted on the women who had survived Lidice to come out in favor of the Communist Party, which Jerri’s mother refused to do. Jerri also says her mother faced the jealousy of her peers whose children had not returned from the Nazi camps. In May 1949, the family left Czechoslovakia, crossing the border from southern Bohemia into Germany. They spent one year in Murnau refugee camp before settling in Norway. Jerri says the three years she spent in Norway were extremely happy for her as a child. Her father, Jaroslav, however, did not take to the country, and when his brother in Canada suggested that the family move there he jumped at the chance. The Zbirals moved to Montreal in 1954. Jerri first attended English-language Catholic school and then received her secondary education in French. She came to the United States in 1971 to attend graduate school in Rochester, New York. It was her first job which brought her to Chicago, where she has lived ever since.
In 1982, Jerri started to record the stories of her relatives and others who had survived the Lidice massacre. Ten years later, she created a film, In the Shadow of Memory, about the tragedy and her own relationship to the event. She has spoken with her husband Alan about Lidice on Studs Terkel’s show on WFMT Chicago. An art dealer, Jerri’s firm The Collected Image specializes in Czech photography in particular. As an adult, Jerri converted to Judaism. She became an American citizen in 2000. Jerri has two children.
“She felt that the assassins were cowards and that they should have given themselves up. Or they should have immediately committed suicide. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘as a result of them hiding, we are the ones that suffered.’ So, I don’t know if everybody felt this way, but my mother felt that they were cowards and that they should have given themselves up.”
“So, the commandant said ‘Okay so, who knows… does anybody here know how to sew?’ And my mother said ‘I do.’ And so she was put into the detail, into the factory with the sewing machines and I think there were like 50 machines there, you know, and all these women lined up making… they were mostly making coats for the men on the Russian front. And they would get either old coats and they would take them and have to turn them inside out, and then sew in linings and stuff like that, or they would take confiscated fur coats and turn them inside out and make them into coats for the men. Oftentimes apparently they found money sewn in, jewelry sewn in, of course that all had to be handed over because otherwise they’d be killed.
“She got beaten quite a bit in the camps, because you had all this quota that you had to fulfill. Since she was a professional seamstress she was really very good. And she worked very hard, and of course they were on starvation food – they got watered-down beet soup, watered-down oatmeal – that was kind of the food of the day. So, a lot of the women got sick, a lot of the women refused to work, and because my mother was very good because that’s what she did for a living, she was made head of the division, which she absolutely hated, because she was responsible for everybody’s work. So if somebody didn’t want to work, or didn’t work very well, she was the one who got beaten, you know, because she was the one responsible. Oftentimes she would sit down and finish off the work or do extra work so that they would meet the quota. But it became so bad that she convinced the commandant, the head, the capo, that she really didn’t want to do this. I don’t know what happened but eventually at some point they let her not be head of the division.”
“In terms of the children, no one really knew, except for my sister. My sister’s father, like I said, was František Kubík. Kubík had two siblings back in Berlin, one of whom was Ella, who is this remarkable woman. And she had the nerve – she had the chutzpah, that’s the only way I can think of… this good Yiddish word, chutzpah – to, after the tragedy, after June 10… she wrote to the Gestapo in Kládno and said ‘My brother was killed, you have my niece, I’m married to a German who’s a soldier on the Russian front. If you give her to me, I will bring her up as a German.’ And whoever was reading that letter that day must have been having a good day, because they said okay.
“At one point this crazy aunt of hers, whom I have met and who I absolutely love – she was like this short – an amazing woman… So she took my sister and Renata, with a bouquet of flowers, and went to Ravensbrueck, basically knocked on the gates of the camp and said ‘We want to see Anna Kubíkova.’ And the person who was at the gate basically couldn’t believe who this woman was with these two kids, and they sent her away. They said ‘You better get out of here, this is not a good place to be with two little kids.’ And so she was sent away. But she didn’t go. What she did was she basically started meandering around the perimeter of the camp, which of course had, you know, these fences and stuff, and was speaking very loudly. And the women that were working in the fields were Polish women. And they heard her, of course, and word got back somehow – there must have been this whole network in the camp – to my mother. Because the group of Polish women said ‘We saw a little girl and she looks like you, she resembles you,’ which of course caused… which was an amazing emotional thing for my mother. And so she knew that my sister was alive.”
“There was an awful lot of hatred and jealousy towards my mother, for many reasons. First of all, my sister was the first one to come back. She was very healthy compared to the other children, she was cared for compared to the other children. She didn’t have to work as a domestic, as a few of the girls had to do. She was very well treated, she was with her aunt – albeit it was very difficult, because at one point they left Berlin and tried to make their way down through Poland, but that’s another story which I won’t get into. She had it much easier than the other children had.
“Since my mother had been married to František, who worked for ČTK, who was an announcer, she had a very good pension. So not only was she receiving concentration camp money for the government, the Czech government, she was also receiving a pension, which was a sizeable amount of money, apparently, from ČTK. She was receiving it, as was my sister. So she had money. And by the way, they relocated all the women, put all the women in Kládno, and every Lidice woman was given a home in Kládno, and we were given a home where my grandmother lived on the ground floor and we, my mother and sister, lived on the top floor. So, they were living in Kládno, and then they had money.
“And the third thing was that there was an awful lot of German hatred after the War. Totally understandable – there are hundreds of stories of retreating Germans being stoned and beaten to death by mobs. And the sentiment was so high that they started saying that [my mother’s late husband] František was German, that he wasn’t really Czech. He was German, and that’s why my sister had been saved, and that’s why she was getting all this compensation and blah blah blah. And you know how things get on and get crazy. So there was an awful lot of… my mother had a really very hard time. She constantly had to say ‘No, Frantisek wasn’t German. No, I’m really sorry, I don’t know where your other children are.’ It must have just been this intense, crazy time.”
“He was always looking for ways to make money. So, he played cards. And he was very good at it, but he was also very good at cheating. And my son, my son Max, whenever we’d go visit, my father would teach him how to play cards, and my father would always cheat. And of course he would cheat on purpose, and he would make it obvious he was cheating, because then my son – who was maybe six, seven, eight years old, whatever – would say ‘Děda, you’re cheating!’ And he’d say ‘No I’m not!’ And he’d say ‘Yes you are!’ And that would be the whole thing. But that’s what he did, right? So he cheated a lot, and he won a lot. And my mother was also really terrified, because you know, the guys that were there, you know, they were rough and tumble guys, right. And if they caught him, they’d beat the shit out of him. So it was my birthday, it was November 16, and of course, there was no money for anything, there were no kitchens, you couldn’t bake a cake or anything. So my father apparently comes in from the night before, and throws down a bunch of money – German marks, you know whatever, whatever else there was, including a Canadian 20 dollar bill, or maybe it was American, you know, I don’t remember now – and tells my mother ‘go buy a cake!’”
“They were never able to really, really get out of the country. Here they were in Canada, but they were never able to get out of Czechoslovakia, because there was little Czechoslovakia in our house. We spoke Czech, my mother made only Czech food. No other food but Czech, only Czech pastries and food. Great food, you know, can’t complain, especially the pastries, and she was a fantastic cook. But very limited, only Czech. I did not experience… we never went to other restaurants, my father traveled quite a bit with his work, so he was eating out a lot. He was away from home a lot, so when he came home, he wanted to be home so we never ate at restaurants. And if we went to the country or something, we packed food… Never went to restaurants.”
“And I felt, I think, for the first time… I mean I use the analogy that, and I think it’s pretty corny, that I was a flower ripped up by its roots with dirt still hanging on to it. And it really is, it’s not a unique thing to me… But at six months, I was ripped out of this culture, of this country, in very unpleasant, tension-ridden circumstances. But I still had this dirt attached. But my roots were just kind of dangling, you know, somewhere, and they would dry out, and then I’d be plopped in here, and then pulled out again, and then plopped down here. So I was always being shoved somewhere and then pulled out. And so you don’t really know where you belong. But what was interesting to me was going into the subway, the train, for example, or on a bus or a tram, and I’d sit there and everybody was speaking Czech in close quarters. And that’s all that I was hearing. And there was a kind of a bit of a comfort level – this total immersion. And I don’t know if it is genetic memory, you know, because being so young when I left. But it’s there – it was definitely there. And for years and years when I started to go back in the 1980s, I always had this kind of nervous energy before I went – this very nervous energy and then once I got there, there was like this calmness. Although now, having been there so many times, and being much more secure in who I am, and understanding more who I am, and being 62, having gone through a thing or two, I don’t have the desperate need to go back. I don’t have the desperate need to identify myself as Czech. Because before it was always ‘já jsem češka, já jsem Zbíral, já jsem češka.’ You know, and I don’t have that need anymore.”
“Especially when we first came to Canada, not as much Norway, but when we first came to Canada, this was 1954, and Czechoslovakia was in a bad state. A bad, bad, bad, state. And the Czechs back home had an image of us in Canada, and I can say Canada and U.S. too, because I’m sure it was the same here, that we’re wealthy, that we have an easy life, that we have a big car, that we have big houses, that we have, you know, fur coats and all this stuff. A couple of interesting things – and you’ll find this with almost any ethnic group – one of the photos that they send back… my father’s boss had a Cadillac, which my father was allowed to take home on weekends every now and then, because he would also tinker around in it and fix little things here and there. So, what did my mother do? She borrowed a fur coat and we all got nicely dressed up, and we stood in front of the Cadillac and took a family picture of us in front of the Cadillac and sent it back. You know, and you’ll find every ethnic group doing that. But even before we did that, as soon as we got to Canada, we started to get letters – ‘Oh, send me this, send me that, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme!’”
Upon graduating, Jana says that she had trouble finding employment and worked a series of temporary jobs. She worked for a construction firm for one year under the auspices of starting a company magazine; however, she says that she did very little actual work as she was given the job by a friend and the company did not actually have money for the project. She then found a job at a publishing house translating Czech language books into English. She quit her position when she was offered promotion with the stipulation that she join the Communist Party. With the help of her uncle, Jana began teaching at a language school. She married Jiří Fraňek, a journalist, and had two children, Jakub and Ruth. Jana says that although many of her friends signed Charter 77, she declined because of the effect she believed it would have on her husband’s job. Instead, she helped the cause by translating various documents relating to the Charter into English, including the Charter itself. Jana says that her dissident activities and refusal to join the Communist Party led to conflict with the headmistress of the language school at which she taught. She was questioned by the secret police, and eventually resigned. She then began working as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was in this position during the Velvet Revolution, when both she and her 15 year old son worked as interpreters for foreign journalists. In more recent years, Jana has accompanied Czech politicians such as Václav Havel and Václav Klaus on foreign visits to English-speaking countries, where she has been their interpreter. She lives in Prague.
]]>Jana Fraňková was born in Prague just after WWII in 1946. Her Slovak-Jewish mother had been in hiding in southern Bohemia during the War, and her cousin (who lived with Jana and her mother) had spent two years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Jana says that she did not learn of her Jewish heritage until she went to school, as her mother did not bring up the subject. Jana’s mother, who joined the Communist Party, worked in telecommunications for the government. As a result, Jana says that her home had the first television set in the neighborhood. As a young girl, Jana was active in sports and joined a competitive gymnastics club. She attended gymnázium and became interested in philosophy and politics; she began studying philosophy and English literature at Charles University. Jana says that the time of the Prague Spring was very exciting and that she and her friends ‘all believed in it.’ While working as an au pair in Britain during the summer of 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Her mother convinced her to stay in Britain where she landed an interview at Oxford University and was admitted to Saint Hilda’s College. She received permission from the Czechoslovak government to commence studies there, and graduated with a degree in philosophy and English. Jana returned to Czechoslovakia after three years and finished her degree at Charles University.
Upon graduating, Jana says that she had trouble finding employment and worked a series of temporary jobs. She worked for a construction firm for one year under the auspices of starting a company magazine; however, she says that she did very little actual work as she was given the job by a friend and the company did not actually have money for the project. She then found a job at a publishing house translating Czech language books into English. She quit her position when she was offered promotion with the stipulation that she join the Communist Party. With the help of her uncle, Jana began teaching at a language school. She married Jiří Fraňek, a journalist, and had two children, Jakub and Ruth. Jana says that although many of her friends signed Charter 77, she declined because of the effect she believed it would have on her husband’s job. Instead, she helped the cause by translating various documents relating to the Charter into English, including the Charter itself. Jana says that her dissident activities and refusal to join the Communist Party led to conflict with the headmistress of the language school at which she taught. She was questioned by the secret police, and eventually resigned. She then began working as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was in this position during the Velvet Revolution, when both she and her 15 year old son worked as interpreters for foreign journalists. In more recent years, Jana has accompanied Czech politicians such as Václav Havel and Václav Klaus on foreign visits to English-speaking countries, where she has been their interpreter. She lives in Prague.
“She was telling me that she lived there. They didn’t tell me we were Jews for a long time, because Jewish parents just didn’t usually tell their children because they were afraid; they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But she was telling me about the people and, actually, I knew them because we used to go to their place during the summer holidays, so they became like a part of our family – family that we didn’t have anymore because very, very few members of the family survived, and most of those who survived left not only this country, but Europe. They just wanted to be away from Europe, so they went to Canada, to Israel, to Australia. But I knew these people and I thought my mom had a beautiful time because she was telling me only about lovely things.
“My cousin was actually telling me about the concentration camp and only much, much later I found out that I was probably the only person she told, and I suppose she told only me because she thought I didn’t understand – I was little. I knew the word ‘camp’ for summer camps, because bigger children spoke about summer camps, so I thought she went to one of these. And when she was telling me about things that happened, I thought they were games. It was only later, when I went to school and I started hearing about Jews and about concentration camps, I realized what happened, and I realized we were Jews. Even though I didn’t know what it meant, I knew it meant something strange, but that was about all.”
“Imagine something that you really believe in is happening. You are 21. You feel that you, just by going into the street and signing various petitions, can change something. Can you imagine something more exciting? It was fabulous. And we all believed in it. Even though, I remember my mother and her friends talking and sort of worrying that it wouldn’t work which, in the end, it didn’t. But for us it was incredibly exciting. And it was very difficult then to stay in England, especially at the beginning, to stay in England, when you felt that you ought to come and help the country – we didn’t know at that time we actually couldn’t help the country.”
“In the end, I got stuck here. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t know what it would feel like, getting suddenly stuck. So I finished school, then I couldn’t find a job whatsoever for three years. And at that time there was a law that anyone who was not in school anymore and who was not a married woman had to work. It was an obligation, and if you didn’t work and they found you out, they would charge you with ‘leading a parasitical way of life.’ I don’t know who I would be a parasite to but… So I had to take various odd jobs on temporary contracts.
“Then, a nice good Commie, who was a friend of my mom, was a director of a big firm that built roads, gave me a job. It was the most terrible year of my life because I didn’t have anything to do there. I had to come there every day, spend eight and a half hours there, and there was no job. So I used to help people in other departments. They had to think that I was preparing something like the company magazine, which he told me ‘Look, we really don’t have money for that magazine; we’re not going to produce it, but you are here to get it going.’ So I had to pretend.”
“Charter 77 came. At the time of Charter 77, I was on maternity leave with my daughter, and lots of my friends were involved and they said ‘Come and sign it.’ I said ‘Look, if it were only my own decision, I would immediately. But my husband – and the father of my children – is a journalist. He would lose his job. I can’t do it. We are in it together.’ So in the end, we agreed that I would do the work for the Charter, but would not be a signatory. So I did lots of translations. I translated the Charter; I translated various texts that went abroad.”
“This IOJ had a lovely house which they used for these purposes. So I come there and the students asked me ‘What’s happening?’ And I said ‘Well, history is happening here. The regime is obviously getting dismantled.’ They said ‘Tell us, what’s going on?’ So I told them about hundreds of thousands of people in Prague and they said ‘What should we do?’ I said ‘I can’t tell you what to do, but if I were a journalist and I was at a place where history is in the making, for God’s sake, I wouldn’t sit in a classroom being lectured by the representatives of the regime that is going down the drain!’ They said ‘Do you think so?’ I said ‘Look, so many journalists are trying to get to Prague, trying to gather pictures, trying to gather news. You are here.’ Most of them already worked; they were active journalists – young ones. Okay, the next day I come there, because I had to come there and they said ‘You know, something’s happened. The students just didn’t come to class.’ I said ‘Oh dear. What could have happened to them? I hope they didn’t run into problems.’ ‘Well, we don’t know, but fortunately it’s the end [of the seminar]. Do you think we should report them?’ I said ‘Let it be. They’re probably curious.’ In the evening they rang me up and said ‘The IOJ is going, of course, to pay for the interpreters as agreed in the contract, but we’re afraid we won’t need you anymore.’ So I was paid for going to the demonstrations by the IOJ, and the students all followed my advice. So I thought it was good that I actually managed my last-moment revenge.”
“It was always very difficult to explain – let’s say in the ‘70s or even the ‘60s – to explain to Western Europeans what it is to live in a ‘socialist’ country. Because on one hand, they expected entering almost a prison when they came here, and then they were shocked that people lived normal lives, because they didn’t see underneath. The power the regime exerted on the people was much more subtle. It was through allowing you to go to school, or to study at university or not, to get this or that job, to travel somewhere or not, and that’s not what the visitors see. They can’t see this. And this was difficult to understand for Western Europeans, not to speak about Americans. It must be very difficult to understand for the Americans. It was just life that was seemingly normal, but only seemingly.”
In 1949, Geraldine’s future husband, Boris Kraupner, was worried that he would be arrested and crossed the border. A short time later, he arranged for Geraldine to join him in Germany. With the help of a guide, on the night of July 31, 1949, Geraldine and several other people hid in a farmer’s truck and crossed the border near Aš. She and Boris, who married later that year, spent the next seven years in refugee camps in Germany including Ludwigsburg, Bamburg, and Stuttgart. Geraldine recalls keeping up holiday traditions with other Czech families. While in Germany, Geraldine gave birth to two children, a daughter in 1950 and a son in 1953. In 1956, the Kraupners received an affidavit from their sponsors (a family living near Chicago) and they arrived in Evanston, Illinois, in late November. Soon after, the Kraupners moved to Chicago where they stayed for a few years before buying land and building their own house in Round Lake Beach. Boris began working as a mechanical engineer for Sargent & Lundy, an engineering firm that designed power stations, and Geraldine’s first job was packaging note cards in a shop. She held several jobs over the years, including working in a school cafeteria, selling linens at Carson’s, and sorting mail at Sargent & Lundy. Geraldine and Boris had two more children, a son and a daughter.
The Kraupners met other Czech families and joined the Stefanik branch of the Czechoslovak National Council of America. Geraldine says they continued Czech traditions, especially during the holidays, and brought up their children speaking Czech. Geraldine has been back to the Czech Republic several times, and has participated in Sokol slets while there. Today, she lives in Forest Park, Illinois.
]]>Geraldine Kraupner was born in Roudnice nad Labem, a small town about 40 miles north of Prague. Her father was a chemist while her mother was a seamstress who worked with her grandmother. Geraldine says it was her intention to attend business school, but that most schools were closed as a result of the Nazi occupation when she was old enough to attend. Instead, Geraldine began working at a Bat’a shoe store in Roudnice. Although she remembers little entertainment being available for young adults during WWII, Geraldine enjoyed going to the movies each week. Terezín concentration camp was not too far from Roudnice and, at the end of the War, Geraldine spent two weeks volunteering there for the Red Cross. She says the experience, especially witnessing the state of the survivors, is “something [she] will never forget.”
In 1949, Geraldine’s future husband, Boris Kraupner, was worried that he would be arrested and crossed the border. A short time later, he arranged for Geraldine to join him in Germany. With the help of a guide, on the night of July 31, 1949, Geraldine and several other people hid in a farmer’s truck and crossed the border near Aš. She and Boris, who married later that year, spent the next seven years in refugee camps in Germany including Ludwigsburg, Bamburg, and Stuttgart. Geraldine recalls keeping up holiday traditions with other Czech families. While in Germany, Geraldine gave birth to two children, a daughter in 1950 and a son in 1953. In 1956, the Kraupners received an affidavit from their sponsors (a family living near Chicago) and they arrived in Evanston, Illinois, in late November. Soon after, the Kraupners moved to Chicago where they stayed for a few years before buying land and building their own house in Round Lake Beach. Boris began working as a mechanical engineer for Sargent & Lundy, an engineering firm that designed power stations, and Geraldine’s first job was packaging note cards in a shop. She held several jobs over the years, including working in a school cafeteria, selling linens at Carson’s, and sorting mail at Sargent & Lundy. Geraldine and Boris had two more children, a son and a daughter.
The Kraupners met other Czech families and joined the Stefanik branch of the Czechoslovak National Council of America. Geraldine says they continued Czech traditions, especially during the holidays, and brought up their children speaking Czech. Geraldine has been back to the Czech Republic several times, and has participated in Sokol slets while there. Today, she lives in Forest Park, Illinois.
“The situation got so bad, they asked people to volunteer and go to Theresienstadt and help them over there. So there was a group of us – I was working at Bat’a – there was about four of us girls. We decided we’d go there to see the people – I don’t even want to think about it – how they looked. Skinny, laying outside. It was summertime, it was nice and warm. They let them lay outside, they tried to do as much as they could, our Red Cross, for them to get well. People were sending food, clothes, everything so we had to take care of it, open it, and there were people, nurses, who took the food or the clothing to the people. So we spent about two weeks in Theresienstadt helping them. We were more or less in the kitchen, helping prepare the food, the meals. We didn’t get in direct contact with them because sometimes they had a problem that only nurses could take care of. They worried about us not to get the problem, not to get ill too.”
“Today, the people that went [with me], I’m still in touch. We see each other. They live in Cleveland; we remember those times. When we went to Germany, we lived in Germany in the same town because the U.S. Army built the buildings for us, so we were in one area always together. We tried to keep our holidays, our football [soccer] games like at home. We tried to do the best we can because ‘Oh maybe we might go home soon, we might go home,’ but it never happened.”
“They were selling fabrics – I don’t know if you’ve heard that somebody did this – but there was a guy and he had money, it was a Czech guy, and he had money and he had a car, and he used to go to the factory where they make fabrics, like maybe for suits or coats or whatever. And the remnants, they couldn’t get rid of it, so our people went and they bought it for less money and then they went from one village to another, house to house, and tried to sell the product. They got pretty lucky sometimes. Of course, you put a higher price so you could have money, and another was you had to pay the guy who had the car, you had to pay him for the transportation. So that’s what my husband did for a short time.”
“We always had some program, some entertainment, especially when we had a special occasion happen in the Czech Republic. We celebrated Masaryk or Beneš, or we always had some entertainment to bring us back home. Or, this guy had maybe visited Czech Republic, so they talked about it. It was just culture, we had entertainment too. My husband was very much involved.”
After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, George’s family made plans to leave the country. George himself forged a letter from his grandfather living in Israel requesting that the family come to visit him. They were able to secure exit visas, and left Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1968. After about a month in Vienna, George and his family arrived in Tel Aviv in October 1968. Although at first George had a difficult time adjusting to life in Israel, he says he eventually learned both Hebrew and English, made some good friends, and got involved with local musicians. George studied English literature and linguistics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and spent a short stint in the Israeli army.
In 1977, George moved to London to continue his education. He was there for three years and remembers it as “the best time of his life.” In 1980, George secured a position as a teaching assistant for Slavic languages at the University of Toronto. He got married and had two daughters, and eventually became involved in the Czech community there, specifically joining Nové Divadlo [New Theatre]. In 1989, he moved to Reykjavík, Iceland, for a few years, and recalls hearing about the Velvet Revolution there, listening to a short-wave radio. George first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1991, and says that he was able to enter the country at the same border crossing he had used to leave 23 years earlier. Today, George is a professional musician. He frequently performs for Czech audiences throughout North America. He splits his time between Toronto, Canada, and Orlando, Florida.
]]>George Grosman was born in Prague in 1953. During WWII, his father, Ladislav, was drafted into the Slovak army and then sent to a forced labor camp because he was Jewish. His mother, Edith, who was also Jewish, spent most of the War in Auschwitz. After the War, George’s parents moved to Prague where Edith worked as a biology researcher and Ladislav found work in the publishing industry as an editor and writer. George’s father became well-known after writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film The Shop on Main Street [Obchod na korze]. George has early memories of walking the streets of Prague with his nanny and spending his summers in the country. He attended three different schools in Prague where he enjoyed history, grammar, and the humanities. However, George’s main interests lay in music. At the age of nine, he began learning classical guitar, and one of his teachers introduced him to more popular music. George spent many weekends and summers at Dobříš Castle, which was owned by the Czechoslovak Writers Union of which his father was a member. In 1967, it was there that George joined his first band.
After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, George’s family made plans to leave the country. George himself forged a letter from his grandfather living in Israel requesting that the family come to visit him. They were able to secure exit visas, and left Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1968. After about a month in Vienna, George and his family arrived in Tel Aviv in October 1968. Although at first George had a difficult time adjusting to life in Israel, he says he eventually learned both Hebrew and English, made some good friends, and got involved with local musicians. George studied English literature and linguistics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and spent a short stint in the Israeli army.
In 1977, George moved to London to continue his education. He was there for three years and remembers it as “the best time of his life.” In 1980, George secured a position as a teaching assistant for Slavic languages at the University of Toronto. He got married and had two daughters, and eventually became involved in the Czech community there, specifically joining Nové Divadlo [New Theatre]. In 1989, he moved to Reykjavík, Iceland, for a few years, and recalls hearing about the Velvet Revolution there, listening to a short-wave radio. George first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1991, and says that he was able to enter the country at the same border crossing he had used to leave 23 years earlier. Today, George is a professional musician. He frequently performs for Czech audiences throughout North America. He splits his time between Toronto, Canada, and Orlando, Florida.
“My dad was born in 1921, which made him exactly army age in 1939 when the war broke out; he was 18 years old. So he got drafted into the Slovak army, but being Jewish, they were actually drafted into a special regiment and they were given different uniforms, and instead of given guns they were given brooms, as a means of humiliation. And then they were sent to forced labor in a cihelna, a brick factory, and he was there, I think until about 1941 – I’m not really sure on the dates, my mother would know – and then he and a few friends escaped from there. And for the rest of the war were hiding in the mountains, and towards the end of the war, he joined the partisans and he was fighting with them for maybe the last six months of the war.”
“She was shipped out [to Auschwitz] with the first women’s transport, so there were men who had been shipped out earlier. She was shipped out in June of 1942, she and her sister. Her sister perished in the camp; she was killed, and my mom survived. She has a very strong spirit, and you can imagine it was absolutely terrible. She went through at least one, if not two, bouts of typhoid fever. Even with your fever up in the low 40s Celsius – it’s high – she had to go out and they would support each other and show up for the morning roll call. Because as long as you showed up for the roll call, then during the day there was a kind of way where they could hide you, so the rest would kind of walk out and you would creep back – she managed to do this for a few days.
As she gets older she talks about it more and more. It’s unimaginable torture. That’s really the only word. We say unimaginable this, unimaginable that. This is truly unimaginable, what that meant for three years. And she was there until what we now call the march of death, the death march, which was the evacuation of Auschwitz by the Germans. The sick and dying were left behind; many of them just died, some survived. And this was in January 1945 and with temperatures below 20, 25, 30 below, they would walk, trudge through snow towards Germany. Of course they never made it, many of them died. If you tried to escape you were shot on the spot. After three months of this, so now we’re maybe into late March, it was completely obvious the war was lost and the Germans just scattered and left the prisoners. And then my mom made her way from Auschwitz, which is really not far from the Slovak border to Humenné, and it took her like six weeks, because all the rail lines were disrupted. But she met very good people along the way who helped her and fed her, and so she made it back home.”
“My father believed in communism. He thought, after the War – it was the Soviet soldiers that liberated him, it was the Soviet soldiers that liberated Auschwitz, and so, my mother wasn’t involved at all, but my father was a member of the Party. And he believed that this is the right way to go. And now, bang, his brother gets arrested and he says, ‘No, this is not possible, this is wrong.’ So he traveled to Bratislava to see his brother and they wouldn’t let him see him, so he traveled back. Long story short, his brother was imprisoned, well, he wasn’t in prison, he was in custody, for two years without ever being charged with anything. Let go after two years, his health broken, and never being able to regain the same kind of position. So it took him another five to ten years to be able to get a decent job and get back into his career. And at that point, my father says this is just BS, you know, this whole communism thing is crap. And from that point on, he didn’t want anything to do with it. So on paper, yes, he was still a member of the Party, you couldn’t just quit. But, from very early on, I knew that this was not an ideology he believed in because he knew his brother was innocent.”
“The people from the United States sent us an occasional check for about 50 bucks. Now, for 50 bucks, you couldn’t do anything with the dollars, but you could take the dollars to the bank – and when I say bank, in all of Prague, with its million inhabitants, were maybe three banks. Right, the banks didn’t exist, you dealt with cash. You got your pay slip with the cash, no checks, no Visa card, nothing. So you would take the 50 dollars, you would go to the bank. For that you would get this special currency called bony. And with the bony, you could go to a Tuzex [store]. And so you went to a special store called Tuzex, and in the Tuzex, you could buy stuff that you couldn’t get anywhere else. So you could get Nestlé chocolate milk – phenomenal, I loved it, like a powdered chocolate. Of course, foreign cigarettes. My parents were both smokers, so Marlboro cigarettes or Dunhills, British cigarettes. What else? Coffee, instant coffee. Later on, Beatles records. So that made us a little bit better off because for the 50 bucks, I think one dollar was four bons, so that was 200 bons, and you could put together a pretty nice shopping basket for that. A packet of cigarettes was about five bons, so you know.”
“Did I want to leave? Of course I didn’t want to leave; I had my band. It was so exciting, I mean, the time was unbelievable. The amount of music that was happening, the bands that were happening. There was a new, even two new, music publications, there was a new record company that started putting out rock music, I started to write my own tunes. I mean, it was unbelievably exciting. Who wants to leave that?”
“I am a Czech-Jewish guy. That’s my origin. Is that my identity? Well, I travel with a Canadian passport. I cannot be just associated with the Czech community. Even if I terribly wanted to – and I don’t – but even if I did, I can’t, because I spent from 15 to 24 in Israel. And that’s a very, very crucial part of your life. So I have to be associated with that as well. I have very, very good friends in Iceland who I correspond with, who I visit, who visit me. Although I’m not Icelandic in any way, but I speak the language, I understand it, and there’s a part of me – through my daughters, through the fact that I got divorced there, I had relationships there with other people – that is also very strong. So that pulls me too.”
“The immigration informs it [my music] a lot, because it really formed me. It is this fundamental sadness that I have that has never left me, even though I love joking and I love life and I’m not a person that goes home and cries every day. But the sadness is there and when I write, it just comes out. And it comes out of this disruption of my life at the age of 15 which will never go away as long as I live. So I may not actually write about it, but it’s there. It’s even there when I even sing to crowds.”
Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.
His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.
In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper Mosty. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.
]]>Gabriel Levicky was born in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, in 1948. His parents, Hungarian-speaking Slovak Jews, both survived concentration camps during WWII; his mother was in Auschwitz and his father in Sachsenhausen. Gabriel says that they were not forthcoming with their experiences of the Holocaust. Gabriel’s father, a member of the Communist Party, was the director of the Dom kultúry (municipal cultural center) in Humenné. Gabriel says his teenage years were heavily influenced by Western culture, most notably music and literature. He was in a band called The Towers and subscribed to Svetová literatúra, a periodical devoted to world literature. Gabriel’s lifestyle and his involvement in the hippie movement in Czechoslovakia led to conflicts with his father; following his schooling, he left home and traveled around the country.
Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.
His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.
In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper Mosty. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.
“It’s the supreme example of highly sophisticated survival skills. You don’t want to jeopardize anything. You don’t want to jeopardize your family; you don’t want to jeopardize the future; you will say everything to everybody just to leave you alone. That was the whole principle. In other words, yes, I disagree maybe inside, but I openly say ‘Yes, of course, you are right.”
“I think that the most incredible period for me personally, for us as a young generation at that time, was the invasion of rock and roll. The music. Rock and roll culture. Radio Luxembourg. For us it was a fascinating world because we thought that if this is possible, something over there must be right. And it’s very difficult to explain to people who don’t understand the impact of culture on young minds or a young outlook. And rock and roll really changed a lot in Czechoslovakia. Bands mushroomed almost instantly. Right after a show on Czechoslovak TV, ‘the decadent West’ and they showed a picture of the Beatles running on the street from A Hard Day’s Night, and that day, those idiots created a mass movement. From day one to the next day, everybody started to look, or attempted to look like the Beatles and play the music.”
“I managed to arrive [in Humenné] late night; it was already martial law declared, and I didn’t know of course. So I was coming from the train and I’m walking towards my parents’ house, and boom. I come to the square. All these Russian tanks, lorries, trucks, they had this white paint through the body for identification. Every Russian vehicle was painted with a white stripe in the middle. So all I could see were these white stripes in the middle of the night, and here comes the patrol. A Russian officer with two soldiers. In Russian – I understand and speak Russian – he says ‘What are you doing here?’ and I said ‘What are you doing here?’ So this dialogue was happening in the middle of the night, and these two guys are holding their guns against me and he’s holding a handgun. And I start to shout ‘You mother f*****s’ – I was 20 – ‘Wait until the… you will see you are going to be kicked out of here when the Germans and Americans come and kick your ass outta here!’ And when they heard the ‘German’ and ‘American’ because it was ‘Ruskii, Amerikanskii, Nemetskii,’ they unlocked the guns, aimed at me, all three of them aimed their guns at me, and they said ‘Run.’ And I realized that’s it. So I said ‘Please don’t shoot,’ and I was running backwards like this, to the passage – there was a passage in the building which my parents lived around the corner – ‘Please don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ and they let me go. But it was a second. A split second. They could kill me, nobody would find anything about me, they could discard my body, nothing could be done about it, because I was the only one on the square.
“And the next day, I woke up and I went out, collected money and went to the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship House, I bought Soviet flags. I got all these kids with matches and they were walking around burning Soviet flags walking around the square around the Soviet tanks. I thought ‘Hey, they’re not going to shoot the little kids; they’re going to shoot us, but they’re not going to shoot the kids.”
“I was young. I was 20, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was my first time in the West. I wasn’t really ready for Israel. I was young, I was naïve. I was also sentimental, I was not ready. I was emotionally drained, I was physically drained.”
“The police essentially attacked my office. They came to do a search. Plainclothes police. They raided the place with Volgas, [Tatra] 603s and all these other cars and then they left. They took the samples from my type machine. Then my boss, this guy who hired me – he passed away; he was an alcoholic, died a few years ago; he was a very interesting guy – and he came to me and said ‘What was it, a ticket? A speeding ticket?’ And I said ‘No, no, no.’ ‘So what it is it? What happened here?’ ‘Well, nothing really, I just signed Charter 77.’ And he looked at me and said ‘You asshole, now I can’t protect you. Now you are out.’ And in one month I was pink, I was out.”
So, why did you sign Charter 77?
“For me, it was a moral imperative. I might sound like an idealist, but the moral imperative was very clear. I’m not supporting the regime. I have a lot to lose – some people had more to lose than me of course – but I’m not going to anymore do it halfway. I’m not going to compromise anymore. I’m just going to make a statement because it’s my responsibility as a citizen of Czechoslovakia to bring up these issues that are destroying the country. That was essentially my argument.”
“I asked them for my files; they brought it to me, and I was going through all the interrogation they did with my relatives, my friends, my ex-girlfriend, my ex-wife, including my letter I sent to Charter 77 reporting on abuses in Slovakia, which never arrived there because they confiscated it. Then I found an interesting section that said ‘350 pages erased’ or destroyed. And I said, ‘What the f*** is that?’ So I asked the guy who worked there, he said ‘Well, that’s what they did in ’89.’ Can you imagine? December 1989, they destroyed 350 pages. Some of them are referring to people who are actually spying on me, but it’s missing, it’s gone. So I asked them ‘What happened to my file? Somebody can access my file?’ Can you imagine, people can actually, for study purposes, can access your file which I think is totally absurd. This is your private file. The police could do anything, they could even imitate the signatures if they wanted, they could manipulate anything they wanted.
“So what’s the big deal, you can’t bring it back, you can do nothing about it, so what are you gonna do? I don’t dwell on it anymore. I mean, it’s my file ok, of course it’s disturbing, it’s mentally disturbing, and very very threatening because you see how they manipulated people and manipulated interviews.”
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
]]>Barbara Reinfeld was born in Prague in 1935. Her father, Miloslav, was a journalist who had also worked as a parliamentary stenographer for the National Socialist (or Beneš) Party. Her mother, Zdislava, who studied in the United States for two years, taught English and physical education before Barbara and her older brother, Erazim, were born. In 1941, Barbara’s father was arrested for resistance activity and sent to Pankrác prison for one year. He was then sent to Mauthausen concentration camp for the remainder of the War. Barbara’s mother was taken to Terezín in 1944. While both of her parents were imprisoned, Barbara lived with her mother’s brother in Prague. Barbara’s parents survived Nazi detention and returned to Prague at the end of the War. In 1947, Barbara’s father, who was active in the YMCA, was sent to the United States on a goodwill mission. Soon after he returned, the Communist coup occurred and Barbara’s parents decided to leave the country. In March 1948, the family traveled to Kvilda in southern Bohemia where they met a guide and other escapees. They crossed into Germany on foot and were sent to Regensburg refugee camp. Barbara’s father, with his connections through the YMCA, secured an apartment for the family in Munich where they stayed for almost one year while waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States.
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
“What I remember about school is that the first day of schooling, my official first school experience, was that we had to Heil Hitler when we first started the school day. So these teachers who are all Czech patriots would always do it funny. They wouldn’t do it right, and then the principal would walk down the hall and if he saw a teacher doing it wrong, they could be reprimanded. But they’d do that as a gesture of anti-Nazi [sentiment].”
And the principal was a Nazi?
“No, no, just a Czech that was concerned that a Nazi might be looking over or some inspector would come and see this. The other thing we did was we had to learn German, so as a point of patriotism we made sure we didn’t do well. So I could have very good German, but I don’t because of this. We’d come back with a C [grade] and the parents would say ‘Great! You’re doing great.’”
“My mother, at the end of the War, came back first, and I was living with an uncle of mine. I was so happy to see her; I said I wanted to go home immediately, so we went out on the street and we hailed a truck, and this truck took us home and I was so happy. It had to be one of the happiest days of my life. And then from that point on, everyday my mother would go to meet the transports to see if my father was on a transport coming back from Mauthausen, and for days and days she came back with nothing, so I kind of thought ‘Well, that may be it,’ but then one day she found him.”
“My father, in 1947, came to the States on a mission connected with the YMCA, because he was involved with the Y. He went back [to Czechoslovakia] thinking he had done his mission which was to explain to the Americans that Czechoslovakia was going to be the bridge between the two, between East and West. So it might be communist, but it wouldn’t be anti-American, because the Czech communists were different. Bad idea, but at that time he was operating on that idea.”
Did they believe him?
“Well, some people did because Czechoslovakia had been liberated by both, Russians and the Americans, so on that basis there was this thought that it could be the bridge between East and West. And my father believed it at the time. So he made a tour; it was two months or so. And he thought the tour went well as far as getting the idea across, that Czechoslovakia was not part of the Soviet bloc.”
“My father, I think, was very conscious of the fact that he wouldn’t survive another concentration camp or another prison. My mother was aware of that as well. So no, he did not hesitate at all, because other people were already getting arrested. And, actually, when he was being interrogated by the communists, it just happened that this guy came in and he said ‘Oh, you’re here’ and my father said ‘Yes, I was asked to appear at some hearing’ and this guy said ‘You come see me after you’re finished at [a] room’ in this office building. So my father went there and this guy said ‘You remember me?’ and my father said ‘Of course I remember you.’ It turned out that he had been in Mauthausen with my father but he was a big communist now and he told my father ‘Get out as quick as you can,’ so we did. But even if that hadn’t happened, I think he would have gone, because my father felt so strongly that he couldn’t survive another thing like that.”
Well that’s very kind of the communist.
“See the reason he did that is that my father had been very good to him in the camp. He would always give him an extra roll or whatever because he liked him as a human being. He was always very cooperative and very kind. He was a nice guy.”
“There was always that fear that we would get them in trouble, so we never wrote, and I think at some point they must have found out where we were, but there was no contact. Except one time. One time, the uncle that I used to live with during the War – he was a doctor – he did get out for a conference in Munich and my parents were in Munich. He wrote them, or they were somehow able to communicate and he said ‘Is there anything you want that you left behind?’ Even though we hadn’t told anybody, my mother did tell him that we were going to leave, and he said ‘If there’s anything you really want, bring it to our house and we’ll keep it for you.’ So when my parents asked if there was anything we really wanted to have if we ever came back, I decided to pack up my glass menagerie and it was taken to my uncle’s house, where I lived during the War. Then in the early ‘70s he was able to get out of the country to go to a medical conference and he was able to go to Munich. Somehow he was able to communicate with my parents and he asked ‘Is there anything I can bring?’ They said ‘Bring Barbara’s menagerie if you can’ and he did. So this is extremely precious. And now I’ve added to it a little bit since, and now my grandsons adore this menagerie and they’re so good. They just kneel and look and study and gaze at these wonderful blown-glass figurines.”
So these are examples of Czech glass.
“Exactly. Well, now there’s some other things in there now, but mostly they’re Czech blown glass.”
“The general atmosphere, even though it was hopeful, seemed grim to me and the conversations sounded like conversations I remembered after the War, like ‘This person’s coming back from prison;’ ‘This person’s being arrested by the communists;’ ‘This person’s being somehow mistreated.’ It sounded so similar that I decided I wouldn’t go back until things really changed. Then it looked like things were going to change, for the better obviously, but that got completely nixed by the Soviets, so then it was another 20 years. I didn’t go back until 1990 and then I started going back a lot. And then in 2007, I had a wonderful swan song of my career. I took 20 Hofstra students to Prague. I was the director of the whole program.”
What was the program?
“Hofstra University in Prague. They got credit for history, art, architecture… We had about five or six courses, they could choose three and they got nine credits, and we also did a trip to Auschwitz. It was wonderful. These kids were so wonderful. I was so proud of them. They were great.”