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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Refusing to Vote</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LfzKdCLHjSI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“There was one moment when there were elections and I refused to vote, which was tantamount to voting no for the Party. She [my mother] was very scared about that and she was trying to convince me to go and vote. But I didn’t.”</p><p><em>What was the voting age?</em></p><p>“Eighteen.”</p><p><em>You didn’t go and vote?</em></p><p>“I didn’t go and vote, I was actually… I was on purpose not at home on the day of the voting, on the election day. Because I knew, somehow I knew that they might come to – the election committee might come and invite me to vote. And they did in my absence.”</p><h4>Acting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fTtHxCKIHfg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Talking about the politics, it was very tightly controlled by the government, by the Communist Party. You were told what plays you could produce and what you could not stage. You also had to produce a Soviet play, and a play that was so-called ‘progressive’ – that was a political propaganda play. I was fortunate that actually I didn’t have to play, for the year that I was in this theatre, I didn’t have to play in any of those propaganda pieces. I even got to play in an American play. It was controlled, you were only allowed a certain percentage of Western plays, so I was in that ten percent of Western plays we were allowed to play. The theatre had altogether ten plays in a year. We would split the company and stage ten plays, of which I was in five.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eCML_74gbaw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She once, during Charter 77, she – there was a meeting at her school and the Communist Party chief was talking against Charter 77 and she asked her, my mother asked her, “Well, have you read it?” And the communist said “No,” and my mother pulled out Charter 77, a copy, and handed it to her. That was definitely the wrong thing to do. Fortunately they kind of hush-hushed it, she just had to move, she couldn’t teach in that particular part of Prague anymore and eventually she stopped teaching altogether and became a dorm supervisor for high school kids, which she liked better anyway. I remember that moment when… She actually had a nervous breakdown when this happened to her, and I remember us children telling her “How could you do that? This is just something that’s not done!” And then I realized the absurdity of it, that she was doing something that was right, but of course, under that current regime, it was suicidal to do anything like that.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qNTa0PNIuu0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was scared of the United States before coming here. I knew… I guess there were still some remnants of the communist propaganda in me about America. There was what I knew from novels about crime in the United States and I was expecting that I would immediately be meetings gangsters at the airport. But that did not happen. I was met by a friend, because already in Prague we – there were three of us at [Charles University’s] Department of Philosophy that decided we would leave, and we planned together and all managed to leave at around the same time, and they already were in the United States, so I stayed with them in Queens for a little while. But my first impression: I didn’t quite meet the gangsters, but my first impression was that New York was tremendously dirty.”</p><h4>Marionette Theatre</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xiq6y2RuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1984, while I was with the black light theatre [<em>Ta Fantastika</em>], I did a storytelling performance at Jan Hus Church with my three marionettes. And they told me, “We used to have a puppet theatre here.” So I kept asking what happened to the puppets until they let me go to the attic and there, in an old chest, were 24 marionettes – 24 large marionettes – between 18 and 26 inches.”</p><p><em>… The dimensions of the ones…</em></p><p>“No, these are 48 inches. These are much bigger. Maybe we can pan later on across some of those puppets here. So, I did two shows at Jan Hus Church and the second one, the next week after the discovery, I brought out a king and a <em>vodník</em> (a water spirit) and did a story with <em>vodník </em>and a story with the king. And then kind of kept thinking about them. And when I quit the black light theatre I put together with another friend, Jan Unger, who studied puppetry at the puppetry school in Prague – the Academy of Musical Arts [DAMU] had a puppetry department – so with him I put together a puppet company.</p><p>“My own training in puppetry really goes to childhood when I played with my mother’s toy puppet theatre from the 1920s and, together with my brother and sister, we put on shows. Fairy tales, mostly.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DZhSVrgwvvw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was really determined not to be closed in a Czech community. So I met some Czechs, but I was trying to totally live in an American circle, in American circles, and I purposely avoided Czechs. And despite that I met some Czechs who are good friends, but it took quite a while before I joined some Czech organizations, and that was after I started our theatre company. And surprisingly enough – that is contradicting everything I was saying, but I was trying not to meet Czechs, but I was telling Czech stories and started a Czech puppet theatre company.”</p><h4>Daughter</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Qk_IG_S6L0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At one point I tried, I was reading to my daughter in Czech when she was really small, and at some point she started refusing it, at a point where she recognized that she didn’t understand, she suddenly started refusing reading in Czech. And I gave up too easily, I guess, because years later she complained that I never taught her Czech.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Vit Horejs
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vit Horejs was born in Prague in 1950. His father, Jaromír, was a teacher and author (who published over 50 books), while his mother, Věra, taught gym and Czech. Vit was the youngest of three siblings. Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, he says he ‘believed in the system’ and even became Young Pioneer of the Year when he was around ten years old. Vit says he became disillusioned following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That same year, he made his first trip to France. It was at this time that Vit began studying French, philosophy and theatre at Charles University in Prague. He returned to France in 1969, having faked an invitation to secure himself an exit permit. Also during his studies, Vit visited England which, he says, made him ‘fall in love with English’ and consider a life abroad. He stayed in the United Kingdom for longer than his exit permit allowed and so had his passport confiscated upon his return to Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p>Vit graduated from university in 1975 and went to the Moravian town of Šumperk to take an acting job in the municipal theatre. He left the theatre after one year so as to move back to Prague, where he worked as a freelance actor and developed plans to leave the country. The chance came in 1978 when Vit was translating Primo Levy’s <em>Il Sistema Periodico</em>; he says he managed to procure an invitation from the author to consult with him on the translation in Italy. Vit left Czechoslovakia in March 1978. He did travel to Italy, but continued on to France, where he spent one year in Paris, studying mime and waiting for either the United Kingdom or the United States to process his visa request. He arrived in New York City in February 1979, sponsored by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Vit settled briefly in Queens, working first as a bike messenger and then a cab driver. He subsequently moved to Manhattan and became involved in the Czech-American black light theatre company <em>Divadlo Ta Fantastika</em>. He stayed with <em>Ta Fantastika</em> for a number of years, moving to Florida in the mid-1980s with the company. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, Vit embarked upon his own venture, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre – using (among other props) puppets unearthed in the attic of New York City’s Jan Hus Presbyterian Church.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vit has toured the United States with the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre on several occasions, often performing his adaptations of traditional Czech fairytales (such as Rusalka and Jenůfa) in American schools. He serves on the board of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie. The couple have one daughter, Sarazina, who is currently in the Czech Republic on a scholarship learning Czech.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Alternative culture
Americanization
Arts
Charter 77
Czech language
English language
school
Sumperk
Teachers
Vodnik
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKda885FPwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is <em>srazka</em>, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”</p><h4>Cleared</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HFlNKVM3Dm4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p class="wp-caption-text">Tony’s father Antonin in 1946</p><p>“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”</p><h4>The War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Gw6EEIWZBU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”</p><h4>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTltUpQjLKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”</p><h4>Escape into Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHWxyBuqBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”</p><h4>Refugee Camps</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_s8N3S9mQ8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.</p><p>“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”</p><h4>American Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1BbEXNzJ24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tony Jandacek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.</p><p> </p><p>Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czech language
Education
German
Journalism
Mushrooms
Nazis
Occupation
Prison
Refugee camp
school
Smichov
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
World War II
Zelezna Ruda
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JEYW3jUagxY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I remember the Revolution itself. I remember it sort of as a feeling. I know our parents, mostly because we were little, we watched it on TV. They did not go, because they had two little kids at home, they did not go <em>zvonit klíči</em>[jingling keys], as they call it, in the square, but we stayed at home and I just know that we felt that something essential was changing in our life. I remember when I started to go in elementary school, it had already changed, it was already past the Revolution, but the manners and the way the teachers taught was still very much in the communist way. I remember in the very first grade, I’m a left-hander and they tried to make me a right-hander, which was a common practice during communism, and I said no. I was like ‘No way. I’m a left-hander and I’m going to be that way.’ I think either my mother or my father went to school and said ‘No, this is not going to happen, this is not communism anymore.’ So this is one of my memories. Mostly the Revolution was just a feeling, but one of my memories from growing up is that after the Revolution, it was sort of a chaos that happened, and I know that growing up in Jižní Město, sometimes the neighborhood was very crazy at those times. During communism, I think everything was more uniform, everybody was the same; you did not have drunks on the streets. It was just sort of, all very gray, but very uniform, very same, and then everything sort of changed, and all of the sudden there were immigrants allowed in the Czech Republic. Everything changed and it was a bit of a chaos.”</p><h4>Impressions of America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QSC-fEanza4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think most people have no idea – if they were never here – what the United States are about. I think at some point, when I was a teenager, I imagined it as from [the TV show] <em>Friends</em>. Young people living together in a cool apartment in Manhattan, just hanging out all the time. That’s a bit how I imagined it, but that’s when I was a teenager. I think before I came here, I knew a number of people who lived here, I heard stories; I knew it from television and music. I think it was still a shock. Also, for a part, because I did not come directly to New York, but the first four months I used to live in Washington, D.C. which I imagined very, very differently because it’s a capital and I imagined just as a strip with the White House and the Capitol, but that wasn’t the case. So I lived in several different parts in Washington, D.C. and that was a bit of shock; I did not expect that was what it was going to be like.”</p><h4>Change in the Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kQmXAIohi8E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I would say it changed completely. I would say it changed rapidly. Before, the Czech community was living together. Most Czechs were concentrated in one neighborhood, there were Czech stores, restaurants, you name it. It was really a Czech neighborhood. Just from the stories I’ve heard, Czechs, at those times, were really helping each other. They were capable of doing things such as working a 12- hour shift in one restaurant and then going next door to the competition of the restaurant and volunteer for another four to five hours to help fix the restaurant or build the restaurant. So it was really a community thing; the community was very, very tight together and working closely.</p><p>“Right now, I would say it’s more spread out. At some point a lot of Czechs moved out to the rest of the United States and then in New York the ones in New York moved to Long Island and Staten Island and all over the city. I would say the older community, which is now much smaller, they still hold together. They’re still very active in their community and they organize events together. As far as the younger Czechs, not as much. Younger Czechs have the tendency – I would say it’s almost the Czech mentality now – to be as far as possible from the Czech community. They want to live their own life, they don’t want to be part of the community, they don’t want to have Czech friends. They just want to stay on their own. And I would say me, in the beginning, before I got involved in the BBLA, I was very much the same. I was not trying to get as far as possible from the Czech community, but I would say I had two actual friends and that was it. The rest of my friends were either American or from anywhere else. The young Czechs just don’t want to be part of the community as much.”</p><p><em>Why?</em></p><p>“I don’t know. I can’t speak for them, I can speak for myself, but I did not leave Czech Republic to go to Czech concerts and eat in Czech restaurants. No, I wanted to experience New York for what New York really is. So that was my experience. Hard to say for everybody else.”</p><h4>Divide</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i7A99F2j9Uk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There is a divide, definitely. The young community is very divided from the older community. I’m probably a bit of a bridge between them. The reasons are hard to say; there could probably be studies about it. For me, I think the main reason is it’s the actual reason why they people left the country. The older Czechs left for political reasons and they all sort of have this common reason why they left. They left because of Communism. To sort of seek freedom. Today’s Czechs, they all have their own reasons. A big part is the financial thing, they wanted to make money which is not going to bring people together from my experience. They want to make their money on their own somewhere and not be heard from and then go back with the money or do something with the money. There’s a million other reasons, but it’s not one common reason, and that’s the biggest reason why they don’t stick together much and they don’t stick with the older community.”</p><h4>Heritage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kmB4fzBIdkw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My son, I speak to him Czech; however, at home, we do speak in English. I do speak to him in Czech; it’s hard to teach him actually Czech. I do want him to speak Czech definitely, but I think I probably don’t speak enough to him. He speaks mostly in English. He has some Czech words that he follows and he always says that in Czech, but he speaks mostly English. He understands some more Czech, but I think it’s going to take a lot of effort for him to speak Czech, and I will have to put him in a Czech school here and I will have to be sending him for vacations in Czech a lot. But I do want him to speak Czech definitely.”</p><h4>Adopted City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nnQwmK9O52o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I love it here in New York of course. I think it’s such a great city that it’s hard after New York to start anywhere else because it’s never going to match up.”</p><p><em>What do you think makes it so great?</em></p><p>“I’ve thought about it a lot and I think for a part, it’s all this mix of all the nations and races. That’s probably one reason, but I don’t think that’s the sole reason of it. The city just has its soul. I think every city has its own atmosphere and feeling. So as Prague does, so I think New York does as well.”</p>
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Title
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Tomas Hadl
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Tomas Hadl was born in Prague in 1985. His mother is a doctor who has a private practice in Prague while his father is an economist who works for the Czech bank ČSOB; prior to the Velvet Revolution, he worked at the Ministry of Finance. Tomas grew up in Jižní Město, a 1970s housing estate in Prague consisting of dozens of <em>paneláky</em> (high-rise apartment buildings). Tomas describes his building as ‘gray’ and ‘grim,’ but he says that there was a distinct change in his neighborhood following the Velvet Revolution and that it became ‘crazy.’ He attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Jižní Město and began working as a production assistant at Česká televise [Czech public television] while still at school. Tomas continued this job after his graduation and worked his way up to become a script supervisor. In 2005, Tomas decided he wanted to travel and signed up with an agency to work as a lifeguard in Washington, D.C. for four months. Although he says his experience with the agency was not what he expected, a weekend trip to New York inspired him to extend his visa and remain in the country.</p><p> </p><p>Tomas lived with some Czech friends in Staten Island, but says that he was not actively involved in the Czech community for his first few years in New York. He knew little English and learned the language through conversation with friends. After working several jobs, he met the president of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), the organization in charge of Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan which acts as an umbrella organization for a number of Czech and Slovak heritage groups. In 2008, Tomas began volunteering at the BBLA; today he works as a manager for the organization and is responsible for coordinating events, managing business affairs, and maintaining a relationship with both the Czech Foreign Ministry and the Consulate General of the Czech Republic. He also works for a consulting and project management firm. Tomas lives in Staten Island with his wife and their three-year old son.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1989
Community Life
Czech language
Jizni Mesto
Post-1989 emigrant
Velvet Revolution
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Karlovy Vary</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X1Sulr6p2AM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I would say that Karlovy Vary was a great town to live in, because it was not too Czech. It was kind of cosmopolitan, because every two years we had an international film festival and, because it was a spa [town], we had international guests. Many Russians, but also some foreigners. And why it was also wonderful was because it was a small town, international, and yet, you walked just ten minutes out and you were in the woods. So I’m actually very blessed that I was growing up there.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lnowDNayT8Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The college life – as any college life – was fun. Although, imagine this. We didn’t have computers; we didn’t have iPhones; we didn’t have televisions in our rooms – we had maybe a little radio in there. So the life for students was actually very interesting. And Prague was very gray and kind of Kafkaesque. If you go to Prague nowadays it’s Disneyland, but at that time it was grayish and broken. But I’m kind of nostalgically thinking about it because we were going… The wine was very cheap – so we spent our time in pubs, in the wine bars. We, even as students, could afford it, and we were discussing things. We were discussing philosophy and books and the meaning of life, and we were going to movies. If a book was published that made it through the censors, [we asked each other] ‘Did you read that?’ It was exciting to get a book! People were standing in line for books. So that part was fun.”</p><h4>Communist System</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yhKIU7NlLDs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was frustrated because the whole setup of life in Czechoslovakia was, in a way, humiliating to people’s minds, because you have to repeat or you have to participate or you opened the newspaper and there were these idiotic statements about harvest and about how we are fighting [Patrice] Lumumba and all that stuff. Not Lumumba – we were friends with Lumumba – but ‘We’re fighting the imperialists’ and stuff like that. And then you were waiting in line for one banana. If you heard ‘Oh there was a banana,’ it was exciting; or if they run out of underwear. Materialistically, it was very frustrating.</p><p>“But I think that as far as the mind goes, we were much richer for that because people were gathering around thoughts and ideas rather than around things. So we were not discussing ‘Oh, do you have a camera’ or ‘Do you have this or that?’ It was like ‘Do you have the book? Did you read it? Did you see the film? What did you think?’”</p><p><em>But were you aware that your access to reading matter and media was restricted?</em></p><p>“Of course. People were smuggling magazines from the West and books from the West. But one thing, paradoxically, when I’m looking back at it, is yeah, there was no freedom; there was censorship; the books were censored. There was ridiculous censoring of sentences because there was a word that could mean something to the Communists. But, as far as books go, in a way, the censorship also censored garbage. So what you have now on the market in Czechoslovakia, in the bookstores, all this garbage – the badly translated horror stories and love stories and romances and wellness books – that didn’t exist. They were actually publishing good quality books with illustrations. Book design was actually an art. Now they are manufacturing paperbacks. At that time, there was an art to bookmaking. So yes, you couldn’t get the latest novel by some disputable author, but it was smuggled in one way or another. If you really wanted it, you got it somehow.”</p><h4>Olympics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lfHRAqssNi4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I interviewed to become a hostess for the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid and I was accepted, and because I spoke Polish and the Polish hostess didn’t show up, I ended up being a hostess for the whole team. And that was very interesting because the Czechoslovak team brought their own hostess, who was Slovak, and it was interesting because they were very, very protective of their contacts. They were not really venturing out to talk to Americans – and especially not to émigrés. At that time, I was already studying film, so one day I get a phone call to my dorm that Miloš Forman called me and that I can call him back at reverse charges. So as a film student, I was excited of course. So I called him back and he asked me if I would help him to get a hotel room because he wants to come to a hockey game in Lake Placid.</p><p>“So I thought, ‘Ok I’ll do it.’ I thought he would offer me a job on one of his films, but that didn’t happen. So I did that and then I thought, ‘Wow, Miloš Forman in Lake Placid. I’ll take him to the Czech team. So I talked to the Czech hostess. They didn’t want to. Because he was persona non grata, so they would not accept for him to just come by. So I took him to the Polish team and the Polish team were all excited: ‘Oh yeah, we love you and [<em>One Flew</em>]<em> Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</em>’ and vodka here and vodka there. Totally different approach. And I know the Poles were always much better treating their émigrés than the Czechs. Even during communism, they had this Polonia – which is the Polish abroad – and they never had problems communicating with them.”</p><p><em>But rejecting Miloš Forman. That must have been quite striking.</em></p><p>“Yeah. It was embarrassing. It was just pure embarrassment for the country.”</p><h4>Friends of Czech Greenways</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FIhcKR8i5Kk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our idea in Czech Republic was to help the local economy and bring people out of Prague, because everybody goes to Prague. But there is so much to see elsewhere. And the locals needed to see foreigners because some of the greenway goes near the Austrian border so it was a no man’s land, so they didn’t see many tourists. We are trying to bring tourists there so the penzion [B&B] owners, the restaurants, the hotels, they learn better service. Better nutritious foods, better standards of service, et cetera, and they learn English. We had all kinds of programs and projects in place and cooperating with other people. Now, we are actually sort of picking different projects. Right now, I’m focusing on promoting and helping the new herb garden that we sponsored at the Valtice Chateau in Moravia. We just sponsored two students from Mendel University who work in the garden to go to London to study for a week how it’s done in the Chelsea Physic Garden. They came back with lots of ideas and enthusiasm. I run the Facebook [page], website and network and all that stuff. Moravian Wine Trails, that’s another one. Also a very successful program.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Suzanna Halsey
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Suzanna Halsey was born in Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia in 1951. Her father, Alois Pakeš, was a grandson of the mayor of Písek. He studied law, but Suzanna says that his bourgeois background prevented him from practicing after the Communist coup in 1948 and, instead, he worked in an office job. Her mother Ruth was originally from Polish Silesia and worked as an office manager. Today Suzanna’s mother lives in Germany. Suzanna says that she was lucky to have been raised in Karlovy Vary as it was a rather cosmopolitan town, thanks to its world-famous spas and its international film festival. She moved to Prague in 1969 to study Latin and philosophy at Charles University. Upon graduating, Suzanna worked for a publishing house editing philosophy textbooks. It was here that Suzanna witnessed the public humiliation of one of her colleagues who attended the funeral of the philosopher Jan Patočka which, she says, led to her decision to emigrate. In 1977, Suzanna managed to get permission to travel to West Germany for three days. She extended her stay abroad for one month and traveled on to France and England, where she met her American husband. Suzanna returned to Czechoslovakia and the following year, after all the arrangements were made, moved to New York City.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Because of her knowledge of Russian, Suzanna quickly found a job filing newspaper articles at the Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. She enrolled in SCPS filmmaking class at New York University (NYU) while working as a secretary for an art director at Walt Disney NY. In 1980, she left her job to travel and during that time worked as a hostess for the Polish team at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Suzanna returned to New York City and did freelance film and video editing; she later worked for OMNI magazine. In April 1990, Suzanna organized a multimedia event at Manhattan’s Symphony Space called Prague Spring 1990, celebrating the Velvet Revolution and Czechoslovakia’s newfound freedom. Later, she organized several other events focused on Czech culture and literature. Today, Suzanna teaches Czech language courses privately and at NYU. She is also a freelance translator, interpreter and Czech diction coach for theater and opera. In 1995, she was invited to become the administrator of the Friends of Czech Greenways, an organization in New York that promotes cultural and environmental preservation along the Prague-Vienna Greenways. Suzanna is on the board of the New York chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and organizes events and programs. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Community Life
Czech language
Milos Forman
Pakes
Pakesova
Patocka
Pisek
school
Translator/interpreter
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5ab68b8bbc3e1c670e59726e00d4087f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Emigration Problems</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WbBPxYhcXZs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You know, there was an issue, why you want to leave, how, why did you come here, what was the situation, you know? We were approached by a lot of different agencies trying to find out what the problem was, why we came, why we decided to leave the country and stuff like that. But it wasn’t really like serious issues, but the problem was the language. We did not speak any English at the time we came over so obviously it became really hard to deal with these issues because of the language.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PtLVR6IrnWk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did have to pay some money to people there to give us the… At that time, you had to have a visa to the United States and all that stuff that comes with it. And fortunately enough I had somebody who was willing to take some money and give me the permission to go. And so that’s how we actually ended up leaving – the whole family – because at that time, they did not like to let a family leave as a whole family, for this particular reason, because people did not want to come back. And because I was working at the restaurant as well, you know, there were a lot of people; they were coming in and so I did find somebody who was willing to take the money and get me the permissions and let me go.”</p><h4>Pilsner Restaurant</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ofhyKbJbIss?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The favorite dish was the pork tenderloin. Roast pork, dumplings and sauerkraut, as well as breaded pork tenderloin as well as potato salad and stuff. Obviously roast duck, no one can go wrong with roast duck, and goulash. So the typical Czechoslovakian dishes. But out of all, the roast pork and pork tenderloin were the biggest seller. And we baked our own bakery items, everything was made on the premises where we baked the bread. And so it was kind of emotional when we got to the point where we were closing the door. We had tons of daily customers, they literally were going to the restaurant every day for lunch.”</p><h4>Grandchildren</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bD9cZC0GX7w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s very, very funny, because Andrea was born in the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia at that time, and she was seven years old when we moved here. I don’t know why the kids didn’t want to speak Czech – once they started learning English, they didn’t want to speak Czech. And we were sending them to Czechoslovakia every summer for like two or three months for the language and just to see where their parents came from. And so she learned how to speak Czech, she can read a little bit (Andrea) but she can’t write, right – or she does a funny way. Tina, on the other hand, Tina was born here. And she can speak, she can read and write in Czech. So she’s… And I say ‘Guys, if you want to talk to grandma, she doesn’t speak English, it’s the only way to communicate with her.’ So that works out well. We have a little issue with the grandkids, because my daughter’s husband is American and they speak English at home. So it’s kind of harder for us to force them to speak Czech, but we will get there, we will make sure they can speak Czech.”</p><h4>More Czech than American</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FxXntLeRgv8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was 28 years old [when I left] so obviously I am going to feel more Czech than American because I grew up under different circumstances. My kids, Andrea, I would say 50-50. The grandkids obviously, you know, they’re American. But there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just trying to keep them aware of where mommy came from and where their grandmother and grandfather and all that stuff so that they understand that. But as far as feeling American or Czech? I would say 60-40 Czech. And, you know, like I said, most of our friends… we have a lot of American friends as well, but most of our friends are Czechs and, like I said before, we are getting together as much as we can, just to get together, you know.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Robert Dobson
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Robert Dobson was born in Prague in 1956. He grew up in the Nové Město part of the city. His father Vilém worked in construction and died in a workplace accident when Robert was still a child. His mother Alena subsequently raised Robert on her own and worked as an office manager. Robert says his childhood in Czechoslovakia was extremely happy and, once his own family was settled in the United States, he sent his children back every summer to stay with their grandparents and ‘gain exposure to nature’ at summer camps.</p><p> </p><p>Robert studied to become a waiter at vocational school in Prague and then worked at Klášterní vinárna, near the city’s National Theatre, and Restaurace Beograd, a Yugoslav restaurant not far from Wenceslas Square. At this time, Robert also took part in cycling competitions and worked to earn some extra money as a hair model. In 1976, he met his wife Yvonne; the couple’s first daughter Andrea was born the following year.</p><p> </p><p>Robert’s sister-in-law had emigrated to Downers Grove, Illinois, in 1968. He and Yvonne decided that they too wanted to leave Czechoslovakia. After one failed attempt to emigrate to Switzerland (which resulted in Yvonne’s passport being confiscated), Robert found someone willing to accept a bribe and help them assemble the papers they needed. The family came to Downers Grove to stay in 1984. In America, the couple’s second daughter Tina was born.</p><p> </p><p>Robert’s first job was as a bartender at a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He started working for a friend at Little Europe restaurant in Brookfield before he heard of a Czech restaurant coming up for sale in Berwyn. Robert bought Pilsner Restaurant in 1987 and ran the business with his family for the next 13 years. He says the family ‘loved’ running the restaurant, but that they sold the business as Czech custom in the neighborhood declined. Today, Robert runs a remodeling and construction firm based out of Bolingbrook, Illinois. He and his wife Yvonne enjoy spending time with their grandchildren and are determined, says Robert, to teach them to speak Czech.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Czech language
English language
Family business
Family life
hotel industry
Klasterni vinarna
marriage
Nove Mesto
Restaurant
Sense of identity
Sevcu
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a40efed19b43096db4e0b84259ade82f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3i6pZyDnwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It was the part of Prague that had domkáři. Those were associations of house owners, and they were quite virulently anti-communist. By the ‘50s, the most vocal people obviously were gone, exiled, sent to prison, and unknown, so it was a kind of underground rumble. But it was obvious people knew about it. People would pay attention to who was talking to whom, and so it was rather instructive to any little kid because, in spite of the propaganda, we knew that there was a sea of discontent, and so I grew up with this. Part of that part of Prague [Hloubětín] was the communist worker’s movement who agreed with the communists, and they would mainly meet in the local pub; in fact, in Předni Hloubětín there were one or two pubs for three streets, and they were well-populated in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening, three times as much. And those people, they would perhaps never put up with discussion about the fault of communists. And if you went into the big Hloubětín, just perhaps a 10 or 15 minute walk away, there you could hear that rumble. People, the underground, discontent, because people who owned the houses, very often what would happen would be that they would lose part of their house and the communists would just quite simply put some family into part of their building or part of their little house, and they wouldn’t ask for any permission essentially and so now you had to share quarters – your own in your own home – with somebody you didn’t know. And then, kind of an evil scheme that was hatched in some of the communist planning minds was to make sídliště – the housing development – and part of it, they destroyed those rodinné domky – family houses – and they would just take away the gardens and put a huge, monstrous panelák [prefabricated high-rise] and so the houses suddenly found themselves without a garden, standing in the middle of the development and they didn’t like it either. So obviously, there was a lot of discontent with which I grew up.”</p><h4>Education Lacking</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BJugMUJOXTI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Humanistic sciences or history or even language – it was pitiful. It was absolutely pitiful. If I learned anything, it is because my father inherited filled bookcases from his parents and I essentially would read a book or two a day, perhaps four during the weekend. And also, my mom refused to get television, which means we didn’t have television and if you didn’t play volleyball with your friends, there was nothing to do but read, or raid grandma’s garden and eat her radishes, or eat the radishes and read, and so that was how I spent my childhood.</p><p>“Sciences, however, perhaps because many well-meaning educators exited and/or retreated in to the fields of science – and that was also my plan – the sciences were well-taught. We had many idealistic teachers and we knew that they were ideologically flawed, if judged by the communist measuring stick, and we loved them even more for that. We really had good scientific preparation.</p><p>“But humanistic subjects, boy was it pitiful. It was worse than if they didn’t teach us anything because factually it was not correct and the interpretation and even ways how to study were completely wrong. I didn’t know how to do research because essentially we were told to parrot what we were told, and even the parroting could have been potentially quite lethal, because the official policy was changing. They changed the official policy that we learned by heart and it wasn’t good anymore suddenly, so the first day of our school year, we would get glue and empty pages and we would actually slap empty pages of paper onto a page which we were supposed to erase from the memory of communist humanity. And we did it. We of course read through it very carefully before we did it.”</p><h4>Reasons for Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6w-6iLDsINk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“By the time I was 19, suddenly I realized that there was a huge depth, a cavern, ready for exploration for me to find out what I was a product of, and I had the opportunity. Then came August 21 [1968] and I went to Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and, because at that time I was good-looking, there was a photo of me which appeared on the front page of Paris Match and in Europe in several Western publications, and obviously I wasn’t anonymous. I met the person who was overseeing the teachers in the school where I was studying, and suddenly she perked up as a communist. She made sure that I knew that she noticed me and so at that time suddenly I realized ‘I want to get out. I want to get out and I need to get out.’</p><p>“There were two reasons. One was they wouldn’t let me continue at school, and of course I knew that it was somewhere some farming cooperative that I would have to go to; and/or that I wouldn’t have a chance to grow intellectually and understand what was happening to my whole nation. To the literature, to the music, to the film. To the people, to their relationships. And because we were all raised with this admiration of the national reawakening – národní probuzení – I really felt defensive of whatever was Czech, whatever was Czech culture. The survival of the nation was… we were fed the worries of the survival of the nation, and suddenly I realized that communists were perhaps enemies of the survival of the nation, as far as highly educated, cultured, and democratically-cultured nation. So that was the moment when I decided I had to leave.”</p><h4>Twice to Vienna</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oE9PcNrMh2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a friend who actually was British who had a car. He came to Prague before the occupation and he gave me a ride to Vienna, and I left with him. It was rather interesting and memorable – and there was another person in the car. We were in the car and there was one Russian tank in front of us and one Russian tank behind us, and I was just thinking ‘Do they have good brakes behind us?’ because there was no space if their brakes failed for us to escape the accident.</p><p>“We made it to Vienna and then from Vienna we started to get all kinds of rather optimistic news: students went on strike, professors were supporting students very often, and on and on. I was really homesick and I felt I needed to perhaps go back and reconnect with my friends, and the reconnection really didn’t happen. People were scared. The few people I knew who were straight, they were gone. Nobody knew where they went. They were gone to the West, and so I just then packed up once again and I left. I was able to leave – that was a completely crazy thing. An elderly gentleman provided me with a handwritten letter in which – he was Czech – in which he certified, or wrote, supposedly as a doctor, that my fiancé was dying in a Viennese hospital, and so I went for a výjezdní doložka [exit permit] which I got, and then I flew to Vienna. As I was coming through the airport, there was the guy who opened the list of people [who were not supposed to be allowed out of the country], there were names and names and names, and he goes [down the list] and he stops and I was there – I swear I was there – and he puts his finger by that line and he wishes me good luck. I had výjezdní doložka for four days. To me, it was a message.”</p><h4>Involved</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t7APo4Twqu4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I realized that culture is not only what we get from our parents; it’s this collective construct. We get something from them, we take it, we transform it, we add to it, we subtract from it whatever is not needed, is not usable, and we hand that new thing that we have lived, whether it was everyday existence and/or literature, music, visual arts, we hand it on to our children. And that culture depends on broad, democratic participation. If you don’t have broad participation, you cannot have the exclusive top, because the exclusive top depends on this growth towards the top of the pyramid, and I realized that if we don’t get engaged in this participation, we impoverish ourselves, we impoverish our neighbors, and we impoverish that part of the Czech culture that is living outside which is part of the diaspora. It’s my kind of quiet fight for the rights of the Czech diaspora to exist and be part of Czech culture, and so I tried also to communicate the achievements of this Czech diaspora to the kernel of the Czech culture, which happens to be in the Czech lands, and to motivate them into the re-acceptance of that part of their history. But not only that, to rebuild the bridge between the American Czech-ness, which was in so many ways instrumental and defining for the existence of modern Czechoslovakia, and build new bridges which would allow Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech lands after ’89, to reach once again the global community. Because after all, we can be the stepping stone.”</p><h4>American Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oBt6ykSk5x0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was really wonderful. It was in Kansas City and during the ceremony of citizenship, the judge was reading the background of the people who applied for citizenship, just two or three sentences, and introduced each one of us. There was a Chinese guy and he says ‘Nuclear physics.’ Then he goes ‘Doctor from India.’ Then he comes to me and says ‘Czech linguist, PhD.’ And he says ‘We are gaining so much. Thank you for wanting to be American citizens.’ In addition to it, there were about 40 families who adopted Korean kids, and they were all girls in ruffles. They were all fidgeting; they were tiny, perhaps two years, three years old, sitting on the laps of their parents. The parents shedding tears and kissing them. Obviously they had been raising them for two or three years; they were their children. So it was a really happy occasion. All those happy, absolutely melting, parents and the few of us who were welcomed and thanked for willing to be American citizens and adding our value to the American nation. It was such an emotional thing.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mila Saskova-Pierce
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Mila Saskova-Pierce was born in Prague in 1948. Her mother, Miluše, was a high school literature teacher while her father, Vladimír, worked in a factory. She was raised in the Hloubětín district of the city along with her brother and her cousin, whom her parents adopted. After attending<em>gymnázium</em>, Mila applied to Charles University, but says that her application was rejected because she applied for a course of study that was no longer available. She worked for one year, first at the municipal incinerator and then for the national funeral home. Mila’s second application to Charles University to study medical biochemistry was accepted and she began her studies in 1967. It was at this time, according to Mila, that she really began questioning the system and interacting with dissidents. During the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, a photograph of Mila protesting on Wenceslas Square was published in several Western publications – an event which she says ended her anonymity and threatened her future. Within a few days of the invasion, Mila left Czechoslovakia for Vienna, but returned to Prague that October. When she realized that the situation was not going to get better, she left the country once more. After a short stay in Vienna, Mila moved to Belgium. There she studied Slavic and Russian languages and journalism for one year at the University of Liège before transferring to the Free University of Brussels. She graduated in 1975 and completed a one-year program in language philosophy at the University of Leuven.</p><p> </p><p>In 1976, Mila moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in linguistics at the University of Kansas. She met her future husband, Layne Pierce, in the university library when they discovered both spoke Czech (he had studied the language in college). Mila and Layne married in 1977 and have two daughters. After finishing her PhD, Mila taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for two years. Since 1989, Mila has been a professor of Czech and Russian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mila is active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language. She is also involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. Mila believes that Czech-American culture is integral to the wider Czech culture and she hopes to ‘build a bridge’ between the two. Today Mila lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Education
gymnazium
Hloubetin
Miluse Saskova
Russian studies/speaker
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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ef4791b483fb57b9fa8f8d67dee941cf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Marek's Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PkKdrebUGEs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Supposedly it was a very wild time. I have photographs of myself being a year and half sitting my dad’s lap and his hair is a big curly afro and drinking beer in pubs. I understand that at that time pub life was very much the center of social life where people were able to vent their opinions and be in maybe safer company. We were in company of all kinds of artists in Prague, and that’s also what I’ve come to understand, that then, even more so that now, there was one group of underground art people, and I’m proud to be in the lineage of that.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2xBdanMllH0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to a wonderful elementary school, and I like to say that our class photos were just a rainbow. All my classmates were mostly first generation immigrants from China, from Israel, from India. A very good cultural education, learning how to say all those different names, and just as six, seven year olds getting together and realizing that there’s no difference between us. So that was a brilliant way to start.”</p><h4>Czech Culture</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VofyMtElG6o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mom very consciously maintained Czech culture, in terms of kitchen, even the style of furniture. She was very alternative when she was here, but if we look at photographs we can see that there was definitely no Americanization. There was no sofa, there was no microwave. I remember especially the dinners, they looked just like what you get now [in Prague]. Of course, me and my brother were kind of against it. We wanted the McDonald’s and the hamburgers and stuff, but my parents were very consciously and very open about ‘No, we’re not giving into that and we are proud of our culture and we are going to maintain it.’ What is funny is all my classmates did the same in their houses. If you went to their house, it would be like little China and they would have real Chinese food for dinner, and then the Indians, so each home was like a little oasis of that culture.”</p><p><em>Why did they keep it so Czech in the middle of New York?</em></p><p>“I guess we could see it from a few different perspectives. One is that that would just be the honest thing to do, to be true to one’s culture. I think that one of the fundamental values in our household was to be aware, to be educated, and to be broad-minded and multicultural, and I think that Prague, I see it more and more over the years that it’s the heart of Europe, and I’ve thought very often why that is, and if you look on the map you see it basically as the crossroads of all these different routes. I think that the Czech history and nationality is very educated, very world-conscious, and I think that the fear was that the Americans, how they’re isolated by the seas, there was this fear that we would become small-minded, and therefore we should actively maintain our broad awareness.”</p><h4>Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z9tsWCzGP_M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When we were singing the national anthem and things like that at school, I remember for years and years and years, I didn’t know what I was saying. The words didn’t stand out to me as individual words, it was just kind of a mishmash of syllables. I really, not until I was about 12 or 13 did I actually hear it and say ‘Oh right, that means something.’ That was kind of the first experience of me encountering English, just seeing it as a curtain of sound.</p><p>“I remember that when I was eight and he [his brother] was ten, there was a point where I decided that I’m no longer going to speak Czech and that I’m going to even make an effort not to understand it. Now with my work with children, I’ve learned that there’s a special age around that time where the kids discover the tendency to rebel and be naughty, as opposed to before doing everything that their parents say, and now they discover, wow they can really go against the rules, and I think that’s what that was. My dad explains it to me that if I would say to my mom ‘I don’t understand,’ that’s kind of giving me the go-ahead to do things she’s telling me not to do. It’s pretty smart. Pretty useful. In monolingual households, you can’t use that excuse, so it was a good excuse. From that time, it really went downhill. By the time we were 12, I actually didn’t understand.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZjY66IbRTag?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My first visit was 1992. [It was] me and my brother doing all the classic tourist stuff, going to the castle and going to other castles outside of Prague. But, being young teenagers, very often bored and complaining and stuff. But visiting my extended family, my cousins, my uncles. So that was probably my introduction to ‘Aha, we have actually family here.’ I remember coming to visit the flat that I live in now and we approached the building, probably by taxi and parked in basically rubble, cement. It looked like pictures that we see now from Afghanistan. I remember thinking ‘Wow, this is serious.’ It was totally fresh. There was none of this renovation boom having started yet. It really felt as if it was just after a war. I liked the hominess of the public venues, like restaurants and things. That resonated, and obviously, maybe I had still unconscious memories of smells and things, that when we came into, not necessarily a city pub, but a country pub, I would feel like ‘Oh, that’s good.’ And I recognized all the food, obviously. I think there’s another important thing is that I knew people were looking at us as Americans. The way that we dressed, our hairstyles and things like that. The fact that we didn’t speak Czech. That was a big one.</p><p>“When I was 16, it was with a girlfriend I had at the time. We decided to come to Prague in the summer. You could say that my trip here when I was 12 definitely didn’t inspire me to acknowledge my roots, my Bohemian roots, but the trip in ’96 I think did. It reminded me that there is this very rich cultural place that I come from, and that trip to Prague, I was really impressed.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JZmT0DqI9tU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Coming back here, I definitely felt I had made a step in the right direction to a simplified life, to a life more connected with its lineage. Especially the fact that this culture had just overcome the foreign element and now had the opportunity to really be itself and really finally embrace its roots. I think that I felt here a very fresh impulse to discovering the identity of the nation. Having had this political-economic force rid of, now the people were free to determine their own fate, which I felt New York and America didn’t have. I felt there was, if anything, a force growing in power which determined the fate of the culture.”</p><h4>Decision to Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GXD5gjfyN_I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I come here, and almost everyone who I meet, when they find out about my story, they say ‘Why? You can live in America and you’ve chosen to come back here? Why?’ And so some people get the long, some people get the short answer, or they say ‘Is it better here? Is it better here or better there?’ And I always say that it’s totally subjective. It’s subjective. When I’m here, I feel – because I like physics – so I imagine it as if you have a bowl and you take a marble and you drop it at any point, it’s going to roll around a bit, but it’s always going to end up at the bottom. So that’s how I feel when I’m here, when I’m in Prague, and especially because of Prague, the way it’s a valley so it’s got all these different ridges around the edge, but then when you’re in the center, at the National Theatre, you’re actually at the bottom. So when I stand there on the corner, I feel like this is home.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Marek Eisler
Description
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<p>Marek Eisler was born in Prague in 1980. His father, John, was an architect who worked at SIAL studios while his mother, <a href="/web/20170709111743/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/eva-eisler/">Eva</a>, was a designer who came to be known for her jewelry in particular. Marek was raised alongside his older brother in the city’s Podolí district. In 1983, his father was offered a job at Richard Meier & Partners Architects, and so the Eislers moved to New York City. They settled in Jamaica, Queens – which, according to Marek, was a very diverse neighborhood and full of first-generation immigrants. Marek says that although his mother was determined to keep Czech traditions and customs in their home, he was not very connected with his Czech heritage and even made a concerted effort to forget the Czech language. In 1993, the Eislers moved to Manhattan, and Marek’s parents often hosted brunches, dinner parties, and gallery installments that drew artists, architects, and designers to their home; Marek says these events and people had a lasting influence on him. As a teenager, he became interested in the hip-hop and electronic music scenes.</p><p> </p><p>After graduating from high school in 1998, Marek knew that he did not want to attend college; instead, he had a desire to travel and explore his different philosophical and spiritual interests. He volunteered at a holistic community for several months in Devon, England, before moving to Prague in the spring of 1999. Marek lived with his grandmother and uncle in the city’s Prosek district, where he devoted one month to relearning the Czech language. In addition to producing multimedia events focused on ‘sound art,’ Marek began tutoring students in English. Six years ago, two people approached him almost simultaneously about joining the teaching staff of The Waldorf School in Jinonice. Marek says the alternative educational philosophy and his ‘inclination towards taking care of children’ convinced him to become an English teacher at the school. Marek has been back to the United States twice since he left and says he has no intention of resettling in America, as Prague now ‘feels like home.’<br /></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Americanization
Arts
Child emigre
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
English language
Podoli
Pop culture
Teachers
Western
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>March 1939</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1jQxiwWlCc0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were in Baghdad and my father was recalled back to Zlín. He had finished his work in Baghdad, which was the setting up of a factory and he was going back to his new job in Zlín. So we packed up our things, my mother, my father, and I – I being an only child – and set off in this very beautiful car. It’s an old 8-cylinder Packard. It was a lovely ivory color with green leather upholstery. They had bought it for each other as a wedding present way back and had it shipped out from Czechoslovakia to Baghdad. The car was then driven from Baghdad to the port of Beirut. In Beirut, the car was put on a platform, covered in a canvas and hoisted onto the front deck of this boat which was called the S.S. Jerusalem, and off we sailed to go to Trieste. Trieste being the point where we were going to land and then drive the rest of the way through the Balkans and up back to Zlín.</p><p>“The journey was uneventful; when we arrived in Trieste, the crane began to unload the car, and as the crane was lowering this car on its wooden platform with a canvas cover, about four feet above the quay, one of the ropes broke and the car slid sideways and fell, sustaining damage. This was terrible for all of us – we weren’t expecting it. My father ran to the telegraph office and cabled back to Zlín saying ‘Looks like I’m going to be quite delayed. Car severely damaged in fall from crane.’ We went off, had coffee, had to plan what we were going to do next, waiting for the telegram. The return telegram came back – and I need to know the timing of this, but I’m going to tell you what I think is right. The telegram came back and said ‘Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what happened at 4:00 this morning?’ And it was Hitler marching into Prague. ‘You stay put until further instructions.’</p><p>“Well, it transpired that as a result of our staying put, for whatever it took – I don’t know, a week or so – to repair the car, my father was not taken back into the Czech Republic by the company, but they set him up in Serbia and, from there, Kenya. And as a result of that, our lives were all outside the terrible horror that so many of our relatives and so many of the countrymen of those nations that were first under Nazi rule and then all those years under the totalitarian state suffered. We, by the skin of our teeth, our lives were changed.”</p><h4>Serbia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qfltySUF81k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We first briefly went to a place called Borovo in Serbia where there was a Bat’a factory, and then my father was asked to work with the people in Zlín who were given carte blanche by the Wehrmacht to make shoes for the German Army. They were not going to close that place down. So the Czechs then had to bring in raw materials – rubber from Malaya, various hides, this kind of thing. So there was an import/export business going on between Zlín and various parts of Czech investment, and my father was told ‘Look, you’re going to be an import/export person, but one of the things, but one of the things we’re going to be doing is using you to get certain people out. So you’ll be able to petition for, let’s say, a doctor.’ And many of the doctors were Jewish. Many of the Bat’a doctors, and there were quite a huge number of them, maybe 20 or 30, working exclusively for Bat’a in Zlín. Zlín was an enormous population of Bat’a employees. Many tens of thousands. So he had to be very careful because there were quite a few sympathizers in this Borovo factory with what was going on in the Sudetenland of Czech. So he had to be very careful how he got people out and brought them to Borovo, where he was able to transfer them to various parts of the world. One of the lovely things is that the doctor he brought to Kenya, a man called Sanyi Gellert whose daughter became a doctor, they looked after my parents to their dying day. So in a way, it was a give back for this extraordinary time when the Nazis were already occupying Czechoslovakia, but still people could be brought out.”</p><h4>1st Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5cZJMToVxR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to Iraqi school; my first language was actually Arabic. Sadly, it’s gone out of the window supplanted by Swahili which is kind of a coastal Arabic.”</p><p>Yet you retained your Czech.</p><p>“My Czech, wonderfully, was spoken at home around me all my life and so I’m very grateful for that. That way I was able to go back after the [Velvet] Revolution and spend easy times becoming accepted in the various groups that I had to work with. Had I just come there purely as a Czech in name and not in language, it would have been much more tricky.”</p><h4>First Trip Back</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qtx9Ixp83Dg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My first time back, after my very early departure at the age of one, was in 1961, just before I came to the States. I suddenly had an urge to go there, and I borrowed a little Lambretta motorbike and, with virtually no luggage, I went zooming off. It was okay; I was able to go through Čedok, but I had to stay at given designated place, and of course I didn’t, so I went to stay with relatives. I didn’t realize that this was a terribly silly thing to do. So on my way back, I stopped at the front and they said ‘Ok, fine. Let’s see your passport. These are the designated [places]. You never stayed there; I don’t see the stamp.’ I said ‘Well, you know, I have relatives and I was staying with friends.’ So I was held for a day while they verified all this. So I went back and it was very, very dark times. Very gray times.”</p><h4>Prague-Vienna Greenway</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5Qy_0-w423c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“1987 is the time that I saw the possibilities there of a lovely countryside for walking and biking and ecological tourism. So then when ’89 occurred, I’d already been thinking about setting up a trail, but of course, until communism fell it wasn’t practical. And in ’89, I got the idea of bringing the Hudson River Valley Greenway trail concept to a Prague-Vienna greenway trail, as basically a walking and hiking trail from castle to castle, from historic town to historic town, between these two lovely capitals. Got the idea, put it before a lot of funders and they loved it, particularly people like Rockefeller Brothers, German Marshall Fund, American Express Philanthropic. A very important fund was an environmental group called the Hickory Foundation. And so on and so on. We began to work with the World Monuments Fund and they used us and our office in Valtice to start their program. So that kind of snowballed into greenway, restoration of this very important landscape which later became, through World Monuments Fund efforts, a UNESCO designated landscape – the whole thing, 200 square kilometers. And then, from that time, which was about 1992, my wife and I went there and we lived there every year for six months. From 1992 until 2004. That was the period when it really bloomed into a growing thing and spread into neighboring Poland, Slovakia, and it’s now in Bulgaria and Romania. So it’s really a very flourishing concept of biking and hiking trails. But really it’s not so much the tourism, it’s also about community building and supporting heritage, so when you come to a town on the greenway trail, you can go to the local glassblower, artist, meet with them, go behind the scenes, so to speak. And it’s all about that.”</p><h4>Admiration</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CRQ8uMHqEyI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“That’s entirely due to my parents who left when they didn’t want to leave, adored – absolutely adored – their motherland, and if you think of the era of their upbringing, it was immediately after WWI; the first Czech[oslovak] Republic was created; the country was full of hope and vision, and industrious, successful; people were well-educated. What I call First Republic Czechs – a certain type, my father’s contemporaries – they’re wonderful. They have a particular quality to them.”</p><p>How would you describe that quality?</p><p>“Well, without sounding elitist, they’re very intelligent. They study, they read, they love music, but also they can garden, they can grow turnips. They’re rounded people. And it was a period of little Czechoslovakia industrializing itself. So many industrialists were also very rounded people. Many Czechs that I know of my father’s era had hobbies. Everybody had a koníček, as they call it. My father’s hobby was filming. And they became real experts on geology, anthropology, local law, that sort of thing. So they were very interesting people. Maybe I just hit the mother lode, but other Czechs I’ve spoken to remember this era.</p><p>“So then I’m abroad, and there are my parents talking about this place that I come from, over and over again. Showing me photographs; my mother, a lovely cook, teaches our African cooks to do vepřo zelo knedlo [pork, dumplings and sauerkraut], all the local Czech goulashes and stuff. I lived in a funny way in a Czech culture. We spoke a terrible patois at home, of Czech, English and Swahili all mixed up. So it was logical that when this place suddenly got its head above water that something inside me said ‘Come on! See what they were talking about.’”</p><h4>Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TB9IIyAdI7c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I have these ten grandchildren and my mission with them is to demonstrate that life doesn’t end at Montauk Point. So each year I take pairs – never three, you always get a triangle – you take them in pairs and they have to be pushing ten. We go to my place in Mikulov and we spend ten days there, basically meeting little Czech kids, swimming, there’s a little horse riding, bike riding a lot, eating fried cheese which they love (very unhealthy), and then we go to Vienna where I have friends. We stay with friends for three days, and then we go to Venice and stay there for three days. They have to keep a diary and have a little camera and take photographs, and I’ve got through six. This year I’m taking the two boys. I only have two boys, and eight girls. Amazingly, they remember everything.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lubomir Chmelar
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Lubomir Chmelar was born in Zlín in 1935. His parents both worked for the Bat’a shoe company, his father, Josef, as an executive and his mother, Anna, as a designer. His mother would eventually start her own fashion design business. At the age of one, Lubomir moved with his parents to Baghdad, where his father was tasked with opening a Bat’a factory. The Chmelars lived in and socialized with the small Czech community there. In March 1939, Lubomir’s father finished his work in Baghdad and planned toreturn to Zlín; however, the day they arrived in Trieste, Italy, and planned to drive to Czechoslovakia was the same day that Hitler occupied the country. They were instead sent to Serbia for a short time before moving to Kenya. Lubomir lived with his parents on the outskirts of Nairobi until he went to boarding school in Britain following the War. He attended Oxford University where he studied civil engineering with the intention of starting an engineering design consultancy in Kenya (where his parents would remain for the rest of their lives). After a two-year apprenticeship in London, Lubomir planned to seek out jobs in Canada and Mexico before returning to Kenya; however, while in Toronto, he met his future wife, Tiree, and, in 1962, the pair married and moved to New York City.</p><p> </p><p>Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Bata
Child emigre
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Engineers
Fashion
Jews
Zlin
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KZzxhBaNzqQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was 14, so at that age you start forming ideas about the world, and we felt that there is something wrong with all the things they are telling us, and communism fell and it was like ‘Oh yeah, so this is what that is.’ We had been told that the communist system is the best system ever, but you can see that people emigrated from communism to Western Europe, but it never happened the other way. So we were like ‘There’s something wrong. Why all these people from Germany don’t come here and all people from Slovakia are trying to escape to Austria and Germany?’ We were like ‘Ok, maybe that’s not all true that this is the best system ever.”</p><h4>Biology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zdwKr5taFao?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was fun to learn new stuff. I was interested in biology, so I enjoyed it. It was a really good social life with your colleagues and classmates because you studied a lot together and after that, when passed the exam, you had fun together, and after that you study again. Because I studied biology, we used to have a lot of field trips and field classes, so it was kind of nice to get out of the city and still be in school, but be in the field.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wUzcO0d-70Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was no need to learn the Czech language. Of course, growing up in Czechoslovakia, there is mutual understanding, so I could understand everything. I just kept speaking Slovak because I would rather speak normal Slovak than broken Czech if they can understand me, and there was no problem. My thesis, I wrote in Slovak because I could have written it in broken Czech or decent Slovak, so I chose decent Slovak. There were some official documents that had to be written in Czech; of course I was using Czech in these official grand reports or emails, but for day to day work I used Slovak.”</p><h4>Trip to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hv2kVVr-TM4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was really interesting. The first time I visited the U.S. it was in late fall/early winter of 2001, so it was right after the attack on the World Trade Center. It was really chaotic because they had really chaotic security, and it was during the anthrax attack so everybody was freaking out about anthrax. They made us walk through sponges soaked with a lot of chemicals. They almost took all our clothes off. They went through all of our luggage. It took us forever. We almost missed connections; everything was late. So it was really chaotic. But when I was in the U.S. again, it was really interesting, because at the time, people were really patriotic everywhere with the American flag and ‘God Bless the U.S.’ So I thought that this was the U.S., but no, it was just a response to the terrorist attack.</p><p>“I remember really enjoying my time there in the U.S. because it was Florida, and coming from Prague (it was December) there was already snow, and I came to Florida and it was really nice weather. So I enjoyed that and thought ‘Oh, this is a perfect country to live.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jozef Madzo
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jozef Madzo was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in 1976. He says that he had a ‘really nice childhood’ and enjoyed spending weekends with his family at their cabin in Slanec, a small town outside of Košice. Jozef was active in a karate club and computer programming club, and showed an affinity for science from a young age. He was in eighth grade at the time of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which he says resulted in numerous name changes for the schools he attended. After graduating from<em>gymnázium</em>, Jozef studied biology at Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika [Pavol Jozef Šafárik University] in Košice. Summers he spent working in construction. He recalls one particularly fun summer during which he worked in the Czech Republic picking hops.</p><p> </p><p>In 1999, Jozef enrolled in a molecular biology doctoral program at Charles University in Prague and his research focused on childhood leukemia. During this time he attended several conferences in the United States; his first trip was in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Through contacts he made at conferences, Jozef applied for and was given a research position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One year later, he transferred to his current position at the University of Chicago. Jozef says that he has two homes, one in Chicago and one in Slovakia, but that he finds it easy imagining his future in the United States.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Czech language
Education
Kosice
Pavol Jozef Safarik University
Post-1989 emigrant
Slovak Language
Velvet Revolution
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80c195706d01669bfde0382f129ee349
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Cowards</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqUip6SS8Mo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3_IF0JneBNg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Visiting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vENInl2_Q0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Mother Leaves</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dqD42GbOmSc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>1st Birthday</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xGuD586niXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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!’”</p><h4>Czech Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iZqDVG9YWR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zxqFPy-7I1s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Rich?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JnJ7U5Oap6Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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!’”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jerri Zbiral
Description
An account of the resource
<p>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 <em>Lebensborn</em> 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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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, <em>In the Shadow of Memory</em>, 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.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Child emigre
Concentration camp
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Czech-German relations
Discrimination
Forced labor
Heydrich assassination
Judaism
Lidice Massacre
Nazis
Refugee camp
Sense of identity
World War II
Zbiralova