Zuzana Lanc
<p>Zuzana Lanc was was born in Liptovský Mikuláš in central Slovakia and grew up in the nearby village of Liptovské Sliače. She and her twin sister, Brona, lived with their mother, Anna Vesela, and their grandparents. Zuzana speaks fondly of her childhood in Slovakia and says that she was ‘so happy,’ especially compared to children growing up in the United States today. She enjoyed Russian and Slovak classes in school and excelled at recitation and speaking competitions. In 1987, Brona’s mother moved to the United States and married Zdenek Vesely, an American citizen. Although the plan was for the girls to follow shortly after, it took well over one year for Brona and Zuzana to be allowed to leave the country. They arrived in the United States in October 1988 and settled in with their mother and stepfather, who now had their younger sister, Margret, in Aurora, Illinois.</p>
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<p>Zuzana and Brona received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated. While in school, Zuzana worked at the deli at Kmart, a job which she says helped improve her English. Upon graduating, Zuzana worked a number of customer service jobs. She then moved into the IT field, working at Motorola and HP. She received a two-year degree from the College of DuPage.</p>
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<p>Today Zuzana lives in Downers Grove, Illinois, with her daughter, Emilka. She speaks Slovak to her daughter and the two of them return each year to Slovakia to visit family. Zuzana, along with her extended family, keeps Slovak holiday traditions and loves to cook Slovak food. While she says that she is ‘so glad’ to have grown up in Slovakia, today she calls the United States home and is thankful for her mother to have made the decision to give her daughters a better life.</p>
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Vladimir Cvicela
<p>Vladimir Cvicela was born in Kl’ačany, Slovakia in 1946. He came from a farming family and says that, after school, he would chase rabbits with dogs and play hockey with the other village children. Growing up, Vladimir wanted to become an electrician, but began working as a repairman on the local collective farm instead. When he was 19 years old, Vladimir was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and sent to České Budějovice, where he trained as a tank driver. He says his tank unit was disbanded two years later, however, following the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vladimir spent his last year of military service helping farmers in the Šumava region of the Czech Republic. Following his time in the military, Vladimir returned to work at the collective farm in Kl’ačany. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969 when he visited Vienna on a bus trip organized by his employer from which he did not return. He says that he was approached by two Slovak emigrants in the Austrian capital who gave him information about how he too could claim asylum. Vladimir spent five months in Austria, where he found a job as a glazier’s assistant and started learning English. He came to Cleveland in March 1970, where he was met at the airport by two of his distant relatives who had also recently arrived in the city.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir says he almost immediately found a job in Cleveland, at the city’s Sherwin-Williams Paint plant. He worked at the company for 12 years until he was laid off and found employment at Joseph & Feiss tailors. Outside of work, Vladimir was a member of the Cleveland Slovak soccer team, where he played goalkeeper. He met his wife Maria in 1980 when she came to Cleveland from Kolačkov, Slovakia to visit her sister, Ludmila Anderko. The two were married at Sts. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, later that same year. Vladimir and Maria have two children who were raised understanding Slovak and as members of the Lucina Slovak Folklore Ensemble. Vladimir says it was ‘important’ for him that his children maintained Slovak traditions and the language, and that he is happy his children’s involvement in dance troupe Lucina has taken the family back to Slovakia on several occasions. Today, Vladimir lives with his wife Maria in Parma, Ohio, and is a grandfather. In his retirement, he maintains several rental properties around the city of Cleveland.</p>
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Vera Truhlar
<p>Vera Truhlar was born in Říčany in central Bohemia in 1940. Her father, Jaroslav, a cyclist who competed in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, owned a machine and repair shop. Vera’s mother, Marie, in addition to raising Vera and her younger brother, helped with the business. At the insistence of her mother, Vera began private English lessons when she was in fourth grade; she continued learning the English language through high school. Vera played on her school volleyball and basketball teams and was also an avid skier. She attributes her lifelong interest in sports to the influence of her father. After graduating from high school, Vera attended Charles University in Prague where she studied physical education and Czech language. She then began teaching at a school in Mukařov, a town a short distance from Říčany.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3871" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609033249im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler71.jpg" alt="Handler" width="350" height="496" />In 1969, Vera made plans to travel to the United States for two years to improve her English. A friend’s brother who lived on Long Island offered to sponsor her. He paid for her plane ticket and gave her a job as a receptionist at the nursing home he owned. Vera was able to secure a visa and, on July 18, 1969, flew to New York City. She first lived in Patchogue on Long Island while working at the nursing home. Shortly after arriving, Vera met her future husband, Joe Truhlar, a third-generation Czech who spoke Czech. When the couple married in 1970, Vera knew that she would not be returning to Czechoslovakia. She says that because of her failure to return, her mother was repeatedly questioned by authorities and only stopped being bothered when Vera asked the government for an official pardon. Vera and Joe settled in East Islip and Vera was hired as a physical education teacher by the Connetquot School District. She taught at Oakdale Bohemia Junior High for 33 years and coached the school gymnastics team. She keeps in touch with many of her former students.</p><p> </p><p>Vera lives a short distance from the town of Bohemia, New York, and says that she has felt at home there since her arrival because of its Czech history. As a member of the Bohemia Historical Society, the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, the American Friends of the Czech Republic and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Vera believes it is important to keep the ‘Czech spirit’ alive in herself and her surroundings. She has kept up her love for sports and participates in cycling and track and field in local and national senior competitions. Vera travels to the Czech Republic once a year to visit her family. Today, she lives in East Islip, New York, with her husband, Joe.</p>
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Petra Bolfikova
<p>Petra Bolfikova was born in Havířov in eastern Moravia in 1985 and moved to Děčín in northern Bohemia with her parents when she was three years old. Petra’s mother Renata is a dentist and her father Michal teaches computer science classes at a university. Petra says that shortly after the Velvet Revolution, her father (who at that time was a high school teacher) took advantage of private enterprise and joined a partnership that provided social service programs. Before returning to teaching, he was the head of social services in Děčín. Petra began learning English before she started school, as her parents put her into private lessons. After fifth grade, she attended gymnázium, where she continued learning English and also studied German.</p><p> </p><p>Petra attended VŠE (the University of Economics, Prague) and studied international business. She spent one semester abroad at York University in Toronto and visited New York City while on a school break there. After receiving her master’s degree from VŠE, Petra began studying for her MBA at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. She says that the prestige of an international degree, her desire to study in the United States, and a partnership between the two schools led her to this decision. She graduated from this program in May 2012 and began working as a marketing specialist for the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation. While studying at Bradley, Petra enjoyed making Czech food and celebrating Czech holiday traditions like St. Nicholas Day. Recently, Petra returned to the Czech Republic and settled in Prague.</p>
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Peter Hruby
<p>Peter Hruby was born in Prague in June, 1921. His father, Petr, owned a shoe shop in the Prague district of Karlín (which Peter says went bankrupt as shoemaker Tomáš Bat’a cornered the local footwear market), while his mother, Marie, stayed at home raising him and his younger brother Jiří. Peter graduated from high school in 1939 and planned to study at Prague’s Charles University, but with all Czech universities shut by the occupying Nazis that same year, he went to work in a factory making military equipment in the nearby town of Chotěboř. Upon liberation in 1945, he did enroll at Charles University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, literature and languages.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3517" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609122502im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-118.jpg" alt="Peter's ID card at Radio Free Europe" width="400" height="266" /></p><p>He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal <em>Skutečnost</em> [<em>Reality]</em>, which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as <em>Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia</em> and <em>Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature.</em> He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
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Pavel Paces
<p>Pavel Paces was born in the Strašnice district of Prague in 1949. His father, Karel, owned a liquor distillery and his mother, Marie, was the office manager for the business. After the distillery was nationalized following the Communist coup, Pavel’s father became a courier for the anti-communist resistance. In October 1949, (shortly after Pavel’s birth) he was warned by a friend on the local police force of his imminent arrest and left Prague. He spent one month in hiding and then crossed the border into Germany where he stayed in a refugee camp. Pavel’s mother, meanwhile, aided two men who claimed to have met her husband in Germany and said they were traveling to Bratislava. The men were arrested by communist authorities for their illegal cross-border trips, and named Pavel’s mother as an ‘accomplice.’ She was subsequently arrested and held in Pankrác prison for two months. She was released in March 1950 and, one month later, had a guide assist her and her three sons (Pavel and his older brothers Karel and Miloslav) across the border near Cheb. They were reunited with Pavel’s father and lived in Germany for 18 months, first in refugee camps and later in Munich. The family sailed to New York City in November 1951 and settled in the Yorkville neighborhood.</p><p> </p><p>Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.</p><p> </p><p>Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.</p>
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Paulina Porizkova
<p>Paulina Porizkova was born in Olomouc in 1965 and grew up in the Moravian town of Prostějov. Her parents, Anna and Jiří, left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and settled in Sweden. Paulina remained with her maternal grandparents in Prostějov and says that her time with them was ‘delightful.’ Paulina’s parents, meanwhile, were attempting to reunite their family and gained attention in Sweden for their actions. After three years had gone by, they planned to ‘kidnap’ Paulina after flying into Czechoslovakia with the help of Swedish pilots. On her way to Prostějov, Paulina’s mother (who was traveling on a fake passport) was detained for speeding and arrested when her identity was revealed. Because she was several months pregnant, Paulina’s mother was released to her parents’ house and remained under house arrest. Paulina says that her father, who had remained in Sweden, had managed to keep their case in the media, which put pressure on the Czechoslovak government. In 1973, Paulina, her mother, and her brother were allowed to leave the country.</p>
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<p>Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.</p>
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<p>Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.</p>
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Paul Brunovsky
<p>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.</p><p> </p><p>The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.</p>
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Otomar Hájek
<p>Otomar Hájek was born in 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, where his father, František, a military officer and diplomat in the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, was stationed. When his father became head of military intelligence in 1935, Otomar’s family moved back to Prague, but then left again four years later when his father was appointed military attaché to the Netherlands. Following demobilization of the Czechoslovak military, Otomar’s father became an officer in the French Foreign Legion, and the family moved to Algeria. The Hájeks subsequently spent time in Southern France before they were evacuated to London in 1940. After his father died in a car accident in 1941, Otomar’s mother Ružena, despite having no work experience, found a job as a radio announcer at the BBC. During WWII, Otomar attended the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain. Otomar, his mother, and his brother moved back to Czechoslovakia after the War, and he says they were very happy to be back.</p><p> </p><p>Otomar completed high school in 1949 and says he was lucky to be able to continue his studies in mathematics at Charles University, as many of his classmates were not given that opportunity. Otomar says that his university years passed relatively quietly because he was not politically active. He says he is proud of the fact that he was never asked to join the Communist Party, because officials knew he was a ‘hopeless’ cause. He remembers in particular being sent to a labor camp for one summer while still a student. Upon finishing his degree, Otomar applied for postgraduate studies, but, because of his father’s intelligence background, he was rejected. He was placed as a junior assistant at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), in the faculty of electrical engineering. Otomar says he was fired about six years later as a result of ‘political changes’ and had a very hard time finding a job, again because of his father’s previous intelligence position. He finally found work at a computer research institute where he and his colleagues were tasked with creating Czech computers. Otomar remembers this being very difficult, as they had little to no access to equipment and scientific knowledge from outside of the country. He was later able to return to research at Charles University, where he received his doctorate in 1963.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Otomar attempted unsuccessfully to leave the country several times, both legally and illegally. He finally had the opportunity in 1966 when he was permitted to accept a job at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for one year and bring his wife, Olga. Otomar says that he felt obligated to return to Czechoslovakia after the year, but his brother convinced him otherwise. In Cleveland, Otomar and Olga had their son, Michael, and became involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). They became American citizens in 1974. Otomar is well known in his field of applied mathematics and was a Humboldt scholar at TU Darmstadt in the mid-1970s. His son Michael speaks Czech, and his wife Olga cooks traditional Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian food. Otomar and Olga frequently visit the Czech Republic and are in regular contact with their families there, thanks to Skype. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><a href="/web/20170609072102/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Hajek_Final.pdf">Full transcript of Otomar Hájek’s interview:</a></p>
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Monica Rokus
<p>Monica Rokus was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in January 1950. Her father, Jan, worked as an architect for the firm Stavoprojekt and then for the city of Košice, as the assistant to the municipal architect. Monica’s mother, Eudoxia, meanwhile stayed at home raising her and her older brother, Paul. At home the family spoke Hungarian and Slovak. Monica attended the Slovak-language Kováčska Street <em>gymnázium</em> and, as a keen gymnast, competed with the club Lokomotiva Košice in her spare time. Upon graduation in 1968, she had plans to study in Bratislava at Comenius University’s Sports Faculty.</p><p> </p><p>In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.</p><p> </p>
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