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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>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DLtje_sYlMM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My family had a very positive view of the Soviets. Number one, when I was born, my father was already in jail. He was jailed in 1942 – in the spring of 1942 – and he was in a labor/concentration camp called Krems an der Donau in Austria until 1945. And the camp, which was a mix between a labor camp and a concentration camp, was actually liberated by the Red Army. So my father had a very favorable view of the Soviets and the Russians because he was liberated by them, and he, quite frankly, escaped with his life. He was lucky to get home in 1945 and he saw me when I was three years old.”</p><h4>Industrial School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iop80fwrN_k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think that it was a very good system, because in this industrial school one day week you actually had to work in a factory. Prague in those days had a lot of industrial productions, basic factories, basic Class A factories manufacturing trucks and railroad cars and streetcars and airplanes. So one day a week we have to go to a factory and physically work with the workers. That, I think, was a great experience to learn what really happens in manufacturing, what really happens in a factory, and I think it was a great experience. Whether it was in a metal working shop or whether it was in a tool making shop, whatever it was, you all of the sudden had an experience with the real world.”</p><h4>Jazz Band</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tz0cegQoR24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“If you had an orchestra or a club – any kind of a social gathering – you had to have, under the communist law, something called provozovatel in the Czech language, meaning like a sponsor. You couldn’t just simply have a knitting club, just people getting together and knit, you couldn’t do that. You could knit, but you had to have a sponsor. And it would have to be an organization approved by the system. So we found a couple places where the organization – a youth organization or municipal organization – would allow us to practice and play under their logo. So one of our logos was Youth Group of Fidel Castro. My orchestra was known as the Storyville Jazz Band – Storyville was a part of New Orleans, we studied New Orleans in detail, including the maps – but we were playing as the Storyville Jazz Band, part of the Youth Group of Fidel Castro. So I have a photograph here somewhere where we’re playing, and above us is a big picture of Fidel Castro.”</p><h4>Trouble</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MYZ6fvEui3w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of the laws in Czechoslovakia was you couldn’t put up a poster, because the police immediately figured out ‘If he puts up a poster, he’s organizing something,’ and that was a no-no. Of course, how do you advertise something all of the dances and all of the stuff, you have to have posters. I was one of the guys who made posters, and in known places in Prague I would go and post the posters. And so twice they basically arrested me for the posters, twice they interrogated me, twice I was in jail because of this poster business. But it wasn’t just the poster, because they always suspected something much more sinister. We weren’t really all that sinister. We just wanted to play jazz and have a good time, but the police and the secret police, they thought ‘Hmm poster.’ So I was in jail. And then I was in jail because I had a gun, which I inherited from my grandfather, and in those days in Czechoslovakia you couldn’t have a gun. I showed it to somebody and he reported it and so they came and jailed me.”</p><p><em>How long were you kept in jail?</em></p><p>“With the gun I was there for two days. In interrogation if you will. You know ‘Where did you get the gun? Who gave you the gun? Is there somebody else who has a gun?’ and that kind of thing.”</p><h4>Computers</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vk9FOLCLapY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were limits on exports and imports of technology. For example, we were not allowed to import Western technology. Czechoslovakia couldn’t do that. So we were relying on Russian computers, Minsk, which were manufactured in Minsk which is today Belarus. That was the main center of the Russian computer industry. So these computers were decimal computers, and we had access already to magazines from the West and literature from the West. We knew that we were ten years behind in technology. So we worked on them, we did our work, but we knew that this was ridiculous, ‘What are we doing here? We’re working with something which is…’ So absolutely it was stifling. You couldn’t really do much. You had to do what you were told, but you couldn’t really innovate. You couldn’t come up with a better idea. The best people who were in the technology business in those days left or emigrated way before me. It was a nice job, put it this way. I got the salary and I had a nice office and I did interesting things. In those days, we wore white coats. The computer guys and gals wore white coats; we looked like physicians. But it wasn’t really motivating.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mm01EbluApA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most of the regiments came from Central Asia. Most of these guys couldn’t speak Czech or Russian. A lot of these guys were Asian folks. I don’t know what they told them, but I think they told them ‘You’re in Germany or some other Western country defending socialism.’ These guys were crazy. Well, they were not only crazy, they were kind of puzzled, they had a puzzled look on them, like ‘Where am I? What’s going on here?’ but many of them were crazy, shooting guns. All of the sudden in the middle of the city you had tanks and guys with the machine guns and bullets flying. It was terrible.”</p><p><em>Did you have any personal encounters with the soldiers?</em></p><p>“Many, many.”</p><p><em>Did you try to talk to them?</em></p><p>“Tried to talk to them. Well, that’s what we did for days and days. We would walk the city, we would sit there with flags and we would try to talk to them, because most of us spoke Russian. So we would approach them, and they were approachable. Not that they were not approachable, because they were village boys from Kazakhstan and they had no idea, so many of them were approachable, and many of them kind of talked. But they really didn’t know where they were. Well, I don’t think they had an idea. The officers did, but I think the staff, I don’t think so.”</p><h4>Next Step</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPQOeDs0eE0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was also applying for work at IBM in Austria, and it turns out that in the same building where the main headquarters of IBM in Austria was the Canadian Consulate. One day I was up with IBM, and I’m on the elevator from the IBM office and some people get on the elevator speaking Czech and they say that they just came from the Canadian Consulate and the Canadian Consulate said they can go to Canada. I’d tried, early on, to get to the United States, but the U.S. Embassy told us that it would be a year and a half in a refugee camp, and I thought ‘Well, what am I going to do in a refugee camp? I mean, I don’t want to be in a refugee camp,’ and Ota, my wife, thought the same thing. So we went to the Canadian Embassy the same day. She was sitting down in the café on the sidewalk and I said ‘Hey listen, let’s go back to the Canadian Consulate,’ filled out the form, and the rest is history. Ten days later we were on the plane.”</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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Frank Safertal
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Frank Safertal was born in the Holešovice district of Prague in 1942. His father, also named František, had been arrested shortly before Frank’s birth because of his participation in an underground resistance group. Frank’s father was sent to a labor camp in Krems an der Donau in Austria for the remainder of WWII and only saw his son for the first time after the War ended in 1945. During the War, Frank and his mother, Milena, lived with her parents in Holešovice. Upon returning home, František became a manager of a dental sales company, but when the business was nationalized in 1948, the family moved to Jablonec nad Nisou in northern Bohemia where he became the quality control manager of a factory. Four years later, the family returned to Prague. Frank says that his father was passionate about sports and passed the hobby on to him. From a young age, he skied and played tennis and soccer. Influenced by one of his teachers, Frank became interested in music and learned to play piano. After grade school, Frank attended an industrial school, and then enrolled at the University of Economics, Prague (VŠE) for industrial engineering. He says that his time at university was ‘eye-opening,’ both intellectually and politically, and that he began to realize ‘how bad the regime was.’ Frank started a jazz band at this time, and was jailed for advertising dances. He says he was also influenced by Western artists in Prague (such as Gene Deitch and Allen Ginsburg), from whom he heard about life in the United States. Frank graduated from university in 1966 and served one year in the military near the German border in Klatovy. In 1967, he began working as a computer engineer at ‘the nationalized IBM.’ The same year, he met and married his wife, <a href="/web/20170710095022/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otakara-safertal/">Otakara Safertal</a>.</p><p> </p><p>Although Frank had been thinking about spending some time abroad, he says that, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, the decision to emigrate was ‘very quick.’ He and Otakara received exit permits and, ten days after the invasion, took the train to Vienna. Frank was encouraged to stay in Austria and even interviewed for a job at IBM, but ultimately, he and Otakara decided to move to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in October 1968, where Frank began taking English classes and became in involved in the Czech theatre group Nové Divadlo with his wife. While working for Hughes Network Systems, Frank lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and Prague for three years (following the Velvet Revolution). In 1998, his employer transferred him to Maryland. While living in the Washington, D.C. area, Frank has been active in the Czech community. He served as the secretary-general of Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) for six years and helped organize numerous congresses. Today, he is a consultant for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Community Life
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Engineers
Holesovice
Nove Divadlo
school
Sports
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
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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>Jewish Hiding</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HpdqrFda7XM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When the deportation of the Jewish population started in 1942, my parents, to protect me, put me in an orphanage that was run by Catholic nuns in Bratislava. So I was there for two years. Fortunately, my parents were not put into a concentration camp, mainly because my mother was a physician and they needed physicians even during the War. So she was allowed to practice ophthalmology, not in Bratislava, but in Prievidza in central Slovakia. And then in 1943, things were not good, but my mother felt secure enough, so she took me out of the orphanage and I joined her in Prievidza. My father actually had a job. I think he was demoted in his position, but was still allowed to work for the same business that he worked for before. And then in 1944, when the [Slovak] Uprising started against Germany and the Nazi government, my father was able to join us and get out of Bratislava, and then when the uprising was suppressed, my mother and I went into hiding in a small village near Prievidza. My father joined the uprising and was able to get through the front line to the Soviet Army by December of [1944 sic.]. And we didn’t know about him and he didn’t know about us, but then we were reunited after the Russian Army came.”</p><h4>Fluent</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b0DSKEtNMvE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Being born in Bratislava, I grew up with three languages, partly because my mother was born in Budapest. She not only spoke Hungarian, but her family came from Austria so they continued to speak German at home. So I grew up with three languages which was helpful. In addition, even though at school I studied French, my parents pushed me to study English privately, and I took private lessons in English, attended an intense course in English, and even passed the state examination in English.”</p><h4>Opportunity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zIjJrk4NUts?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did not think that we would be given permission – my wife and I together – to leave, because that was very difficult. Usually they kept one person behind as [security]. Then, to our surprise, we got an invitation from a colleague in Vienna who I knew professionally, and he said ‘Why don’t you come and stay with us for a weekend?’ So we said ‘Fine’ and we applied for permission, but we didn’t really expect that we would be allowed to go, but to our surprise we were allowed to go for a weekend. Our host in Vienna didn’t know that once we got out we would not be coming back so it was a surprise to him.</p><p>“There was actually one event that’s worth mentioning. About three days before this fateful trip to Vienna, I am at work in the Institute of Virology and somebody comes in and they said ‘You have a telephone call from Vienna.’ So I started shivering because I thought maybe this friend is cancelling the invitation, and it was pretty unusual in those days that you would get a telephone call – especially at work – from a Western country. So I went to the phone with trepidation, and there was Dr. Moritsch, our host, and he said ‘I wanted to let you know that I have tickets for the opera, and could you bring your tuxedo?’ Well, a tuxedo was the last thing I wanted to carry with me, but I said ‘Sure.’ Needless to say, I didn’t bring a tuxedo, but we went to the opera nevertheless.”</p><h4>Plan</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j5L_9sr_siE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We decided to tell my parents, and my wife’s mother was not alive anymore, but we lived with her father in our house and we knew that the first thing that will happen is that that the secret police will come and speak to him. So, in order to protect him, we thought it would be best if we did not tell him. I think he may have sensed it anyway, but we didn’t tell him. We did tell my parents and they were very supportive. They felt that we would have better chances for a decent life in the West, even though it was a risk and we didn’t know how things would work out.”</p><h4>NY Impressions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Nf4YzSUN4JI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We remember that day very well. It was the fourth of February, 1965. It was a beautiful sunny winter day, and we were driving with my wife’s brother through the Triborough Bridge and saw the skyline that was lit up with the setting sun behind the skyscrapers. It was really an unforgettable experience and the first impressions were wonderful. And then there were surprises, like you always see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but you don’t realize that there are side streets. Especially 47 years ago, there were many more low buildings and brownstones and townhouses, so those were a little bit of a surprise to me because you always only see the tall buildings in photographs.”</p><h4>Dreams</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/utUoKp-1Nuo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The dreams usually would be that we suddenly find ourselves back in Czechoslovakia and we are very upset. I don’t think the dream would go as far as that we would actually be put in jail but I would just, in that dream, tell myself ‘How could I be so stupid to come back here?’ And I think maybe there were some parts of it that had to do with the secret police (StB) and jail and experiences of that kind. Usually we would have the dreams when we were getting ready for a trip to Europe, because I remember a few times when we flew to Vienna, we were told that sometimes when an airplane has an emergency they would land in Bratislava. I don’t know if that ever happened in real life, but in the dream, we imagined that we would actually land in Bratislava and they would drag us off the plane and put us in the proper institution – proper for them.”</p><h4>Vilcek Foundation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ni44_CJRLbo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Gradually we came up with the idea to combine our backgrounds – our professional backgrounds as well as our personal backgrounds – and develop a program that has something to do with the arts, which is my wife’s background, something to do with biomedical science, and also with immigration, because both of us are immigrants. The current mission of our foundation is to raise public awareness about the contribution of immigrants to society in the United States, especially in the sciences and the arts. We started a program of prizes that we give to very prominent immigrants in the arts and in the sciences; for example, we, just a few weeks ago, gave prizes. The arts field this year is dance, so Mikhail Baryshnikov was one of our winners and the science prize was given to a very prominent professor at the University of California, Berkeley who was born in Peru. His name is Carlos Bustamante. And then we give several more prizes to younger people who are not yet so well-known but have already accomplished something unusual at a young age. In addition, the foundation supports some cultural programs oriented toward immigration.”</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
Jan Vilcek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jan Vilcek was born in Bratislava in 1933. His father, Julius, was a business executive and his mother, Bedriška, was an ophthalmologist. Prior to WWII, Jan recalls often traveling to Hungary, where his mother was raised, to visit family. In 1942, when deportations of Jews began in the Slovak Republic, Jan’s parents sent him to a Catholic boarding school and orphanage. Despite the family’s Jewish heritage, for a while Jan’s father was permitted to continue to work in Bratislava, although in a lower position, and his mother was sent to work in Prievidza in central Slovakia. Jan joined his mother in Prievidza and, in 1944, his father left Bratislava and came to Prievidza as well; however, when the Slovak Uprising of that year was crushed, Jan’s father joined the partisans while Jan and his mother went into hiding. As the Soviet Army advanced into central Slovakia, the family was reunited and lived in Košice for a few months before returning to Bratislava.</p><p> </p><p>Jan attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Bratislava and was accepted to medical school at Comenius University. He became interested in microbiology and immunology research and, after graduating, started working at the Institute of Virology (part of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) where he earned his doctorate. Jan married his wife, Marica, in 1962. In October 1964, the pair was invited by a colleague of Jan’s to spend a weekend in Vienna. At the American Embassy in Vienna, they were given permits to travel to Germany where they claimed asylum. A little more than two months later, Jan and Marica received visas, and they flew to New York City in February 1965. After a short stay with Marica’s brother, the couple moved into an apartment in Manhattan and Jan started his job (which he had arranged overseas) at the NYU School of Medicine. Jan has spent his entire professional career in research and has done important work with the proteins interferon and tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Together with his colleagues, he created an antibody to block TNF and helped develop the drug known as infliximab or Remicade, used for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and several other inflammatory disorders.</p><p> </p><p>In 2000, Jan and Marica started the Vilcek Foundation, an organization that recognizes the contributions of immigrants to the United States in art and science. Jan has received several awards and recognitions for his professional and philanthropic achievements including the Gallatin Medal from NYU. In 2013, he was presented with a National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama. Today, Jan is a professor of microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine. Although he visits Slovakia often, he considers himself a ‘true New Yorker.’ He lives in the city with Marica.</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
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
English language
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Jews
Partisan
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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>Awareness</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/M0J1AGnvSBE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Actually any time things were discussed up to a decent hour I could sit by, be quiet and listen, because [my] parents insisted that I know, as the oldest one in the family, about the situation, the danger and so on. So when they asked us then to go outside and watch, when my father wanted to listen to Radio Free Europe or, you know, to Moscow or London, whatever, if somebody would be, you know, just kind of snooping around, so I was supposed to knock on the window, because the villa was so large and anybody could from any side… So this was one thing that we had to do and then eventually, towards the end of the War, he would say ‘Take this and drop it off there and there.’ And it was obviously for partisans, guerrillas, so you know, he said ‘It’s extremely dangerous and you can do it, as a little boy.’ I had, you know, on one side a milk jar and just said I was going to pick up some milk, which I was going to do, and coincidentally I dropped this at the designated place.”</p><h4>Coup Change</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m17RjfPSeTM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had too much floor space for that, and so I had to be always registered – even when I lived in Prague I was registered. And then grandparents had to move in. So that we had both grandfathers, both grandmothers, and you know, times were not the greatest and there was not enough coal, not enough money to heat any other rooms, and so we all congregated in a small kitchen. So everything had to happen in this kitchen. And, it was usually so that my father, when he was not in the pub, that means 14 days into the month when he was penniless, because the first week he would pay for everybody and so on, so he would be sitting, feet in the oven, v troubě, to keep warm, and reading one of his books. The ladies would have to jump around him to cook and to do this. Grandparents would be around and we would be doing homework on one table. It was just like you hear about Russian families or gypsies, how they lived, and so on. And so that is how we lived. And then you would go and sleep in a rather cold room, and I just wanted to test myself and so I decided to sleep in a hallway, and so my wish was that one day, you know, I would put a glass of water, and then one day it would freeze. It didn’t happen completely that it would freeze, but it had a faint kind of a cover of ice. So I was very happy that I achieved that.”</p><h4>Army Music</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxBeKT7AUp0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got moved to more musical things, but I still had to go on rozcvička [training maneuvers] and I had to do the basic things and so on, and horrendous things happened. There was a kid who took his life and then another kid who lost fingers because as you had to very quickly, you know, board the tank and so on, somebody just dropped the lid and I was just really terrified. And the worst time was when they would wake you up at night and take you somewhere and drop you off in the woods, and I was supposed to, you know, I had flags and I was supposed to regulate tanks. And once I was so horribly tired and lonesome in the woods, it was raining and I just decided I will take a nap. And I woke up, this horrendous noise, and the tank – I don’t know how far it was from me – not too far, really, but I just couldn’t believe it. You know, there was a guardian angel there.”</p><h4>Fond Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k6LXByAa2sA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Several of us were graduates of Prague Conservatory, so we had a chamber group, and we decided that we would simply look for opportunities out of the barracks and whatever they wanted us to do, and go and play for these workers and talk to them about music. And they just loved it, so we were like, you know, exactly what the Communist Party wanted us to be, and so on. And so, when then later on I was leaving the service, they said ‘Well, what could we do for you?’ And I said, ‘Well, could you write me a recommendation, please? And preferably on stationery of the party.’ And so with this, this was the only thing that saved me and I was able to go out to Iceland, because, I still remember at Pragokoncert, there was a wonderful young woman who said ‘Ale pane Paukerte, vy se vrátíte’ – you will come back. I said, well – I couldn’t look into her eyes – I said ‘Of course.’”</p><h4>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nybIxyIHYUg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was fortunately only one night in that little jail. And I had the most excruciating toothache of my life. I’ve never had toothache like that. And in the morning I slept, maybe, just a little bit, just drowsy – and all of a sudden I hear the Trout Quintet of Schubert. And there was a little window like that. And I knocked on the door, and the chief of the station came and said ‘I heard that you are a musician, I thought you will enjoy this.’ And he said ‘Would you like to have breakfast, do you have money?’ I said yes. ‘Well, go to town, and I expect you in one hour here. You will go to Copenhagen.’ So, I said ‘Oh my god, this is really fancy, because they trust me.’ And, there were two plain-clothed policemen with me, but they were basically guarding a guy who looked like a… I don’t know, I mean, he might have murdered somebody, what do I know? I just have no idea. So, they watched him all the time, on the boat or on the train. And to me they said ‘Do you have money? So go and buy yourself a beer. You have very good beer in Denmark.’ So I could get a beer, and towards the end of the day we came to, I’ve forgotten the name of the street but it was a commissioner for foreign affairs, something like through the police, and I think his name was Dahlhoff or something like that – kind of a very sharp guy, kind of looked at you and pierced you. He said ‘Well, so here is your ticket to Prague. And you want to go to Belgium.’ So, we will help you to get a Belgian visa. He gave me the address, ‘You will go to the Belgian Embassy, you will call them up.’ I said ‘What happens if I don’t get it?’ ‘Well, you have the ticket to Prague. In the meantime get yourself a place to stay, not on the street, you have money. And we will just hope for the best for you.’”</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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Karel Paukert
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Karel Paukert was born in Skuteč, in what is today the center of the Czech Republic, in 1935. His father worked in the local bank, Kampelička, up until the Communist takeover. Following the coup, he was sent to work in the town’s granite mines and then the Semtex factory in Semtín. Karel’s mother, Vlasta, stayed at home to raise Karel and his siblings, but also later got a job as an office clerk at the local shoe factory, Botana. Karel was sent to <em>gymnázium</em> for two years in the nearby town of Chrudím, but was then sent back to the <em>jednotná škola</em> [vocational school] in Skuteč when this <em>gymnázium</em> closed, due to reform of the school system. He started playing oboe when he was 16 years old. In 1951, Karel was accepted at the Prague Conservatory, where he studied organ with Jan Krajs for the next five years. During this time in Prague he also played in the orchestra at the Jiří Wolker Theater (today’s Divadlo Komedie.) After one year at HAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) composing music for students of the school’s puppetry section, Karel was conscripted to the Czechoslovak Army in 1957. Because of his oboe playing, he was sent to Písek to become part of the army’s musical division.</p><p> </p><p>Karel says it is through his good references from the army that he was allowed to travel to Iceland in 1961, to become head oboist with the National Symphony Orchestra there. It was during a visit to Norway the following year that Karel says he decided not to return. He set out for Belgium, where he wanted to train with the organist Gabriel Verschraegen, but he was detained in Denmark for traveling without a visa and had to spend months in Copenhagen waiting for an affidavit from the organist. Karel spent two years in Ghent before arriving in America in 1964. He studied for a doctorate in St Louis, Missouri, before accepting a post as professor of organ music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 1972, Karel became an American citizen. He moved to Cleveland in 1974, where he began to work for the city’s Museum of Art. He retired in 2004, but continues to work as choirmaster and organist at St Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights. He has three children.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Arts
Communist coup
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Education
German
gymnazium
Kampelicka
Military service
Occupation
Pisek
Religion
Resistance
school
Skutec
World War II
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40037cb9cf21c4ac93a82e1184d0eb19
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>Nymburk</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2xKcvCIKITA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We lived, initially, on the town square, where granddad had his law office. Dad had his law office together with granddad. And we lived on the same floor as the offices at the back. And my first childhood memory of that place was an explosion in the bathroom, where somebody was cleaning clothes using some explosive thing and somebody else lit the light for the water heater and the thing exploded. But the building was so solid that the outside walls didn’t fly out, I just remember as a little kid climbing over bricks in the hallway. We all survived except the nanny, poor soul, who was the one who lit the match. She survived and I believe that dad looked after her, because she was disfigured, I believe.”</p><h4>anti-Nazi</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sseu3N0aIwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had, we were forced to accept the German commandant of the small garrison they had in Nymburk – he lived in our house. He was actually a fairly pleasant guy as it turned out in the end. He could hear the BBC bim bim bim bim, because granddad was hard of hearing and upstairs he was listening to BBC. The German never said a word, except he mentioned to my dad that he was a reservist and really in real life he was an attorney in Hanover someplace.</p><p>“At the same time – this is in the dying days of the War, I was already 16 – we had an underground Sea Scout group. It was all illegal of course, scouts were not allowed. And we formed a… it was a dangerous endeavor because we connected with the partisans that were in the hills of Loučeň, north of Nymburk. And we were supposed to keep an eye on German military trains and road transports. To do that, we posted lookouts in the highest point of Nymburk – that was the cathedral… the major church.”</p><h4>Questioning</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iD5IToB83OI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then the last act of our wartime experience with the Germans was at night. A small group of us climbed under the main bridge and removed the German dynamite which was installed to blow the bridge to protect the German rear as they were retreating. And that was a foolhardy thing to do, because we didn’t know the first thing about disarming explosives. And all we had was just pliers to clip the wire, you know, hanging. And we didn’t blow ourselves up and the bridge survived the War.”</p><h4>Trenches</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wWhqQGFLoP0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“A very strong recollection from those days was a brigade, a working brigade, of the law students. The centuries-old law students club was called Všehrd, and Všehrd had a compulsory work brigade in Kladno, in the area of Kladno. Not in the coal mines, but something else that struck me as nothing short of horrendous. It was, we were transported by several buses from Prague to Kladno, without being told what we were expected to do. We were issued shovels and so on and marched outside town, where there was a newly constructed concentration camp – barbed wire around. And we were supposed to dig a trench on one side. It was in a sort of flood-prone area, so this was some sort of trench for the water. And it gave me hours… of course, we worked at a tempo of one shovel-full a minute, maybe, or every five minutes. We worked as slow as we could.</p><p>“We kept our eye on the occupants of the camp behind the barbed wire, and it was heart-rending. There was a lot of old people, a lot of young ones. There was one obviously feeble-minded youngster, who was making faces at us. I’ll never forget that face. It sort of dawned on me then that in a communist society, people who were not healthy and capable of physical labor for the state were not expected to live very long. And I remember the trip back to Prague on board the bus, I mean we were all joking on the way out, on the way back there was not a peep on the bus. We just sat there in shock.”</p><h4>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cxLk54HFMVE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were marched to the county office, which was also the headquarters of the police. And there sitting in an interview room – not an interview room, a waiting room – were all the members of Buna’s group, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t know. And the other scout and myself were the only two outsiders, because we were only brought in because we were seen talking to him. So, we were the first ones, I guess we didn’t have to wait very long, because we were all seated far enough from one another so that, you know, no information could be exchanged. And one by one we were marched in this room, which was very small, and sat there with lights in our eyes, and it was a communist-style interview with hands – with spread fingers on top of a desk, and during the interrogation, something sharp like a pencil was stuck in the table between our fingers, sometimes hitting it, sometimes not hitting it – you know, it was just like some sort of Russian roulette with a pencil or some sharp object, you know, you were not allowed to look at it, you had to look in the bright lights in your eyes.</p><p>“And they couldn’t get anything out of me, because luckily they didn’t ask any questions having anything to do with my underground activity. They would have then gone, of course, to more severe torture immediately – this was just simply to make sure that I was not a member of this group, which I very clearly was not. So I was let go. And then, I remember walking across the bridge home, it was just almost like a rebirth. From that point on, my belief in what I was doing was so much stronger. I knew then that this was something that had to be fought and I did all the damage I could.”</p><h4>Freedom Train</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jKioFpXsI7Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I stood there with my back against the handbrake, hoping to make it invisible, and sort of studying the people on board, most of whom were actually high school students returning home to Aš, which was the town on the border – high school kids – and then the train started accelerating instead of slowing down. We could see the machine-gun towers, the minefields with the barbed wire around, all the beautiful sights of a police state. And me standing there alone, watching the beautiful hills, actually, other than that on the border.</p><p>“It was so close then, from that point to the border, there wasn’t much time to think of anything else. This enormously fat policeman approached me and tried to push me away from the brake, whereupon I jammed the gun in his stomach and tried to use him as a barrier between myself and his colleagues who were behind him, praying to God that I wouldn’t forced to pull the trigger. But the guy turned cowardly like all the defenders of totality and didn’t do anything, just stood there giving me a horrible look of hate. I could smell his breath smelling of beer and onion and buřty [sausages] and that’s how I crossed the border.”</p><h4>Tricks</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KA49rUW4g5Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mum was brilliant. I found that out later from [my sister] Eva. When we embraced for the last time, and she watched me drag my suitcase to the… She didn’t go with me but, I guess that either the same day or… she got on the phone to the police and said that she is worried. No, it couldn’t have been the same day, it must have been the next day that she [said] she’s very worried about her son who’s been depressed for a long time, and he’s now missing and she would like some help in trying to locate him because she’s afraid that he might want to commit suicide.</p><p>“And that was beautiful, when finally I got connected [with the Freedom Train], initially I’m certain that thanks to the Americans I was not connected, but unfortunately they would have to be absolutely stupid not to connect me with the press in Canada, which was only a month and a half after the escape. But by that time, it was on record that my mum reported me missing and… I was depressed then in Canada, but for different reasons!”</p><h4>Book</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YG8mH8qwyuY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know the main reason was that after a few trips to Prague, I came to the realization that the younger generation in Prague had to know more about the horror at the beginning of the communist era. They all knew a lot about the end of it. But the beginning was a terra incognita to them, they didn’t know bugger all, as they say. And already a lot of cynical people were discounting anything that really was horrible in the first years. It was just beyond description, the arrests, the concentration camps, and so on.”</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
Karel Ruml
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Karel Ruml was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in the nearby town of Nymburk. His father was a lawyer while his mother stayed at home, raising Karel and his younger sister, Eva. Throughout his childhood, Karel was an active member of the Sea Scouts, which were outlawed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WWII. He and fellow crew members of the homemade boat Vorvaň (meaning ‘sperm whale’ in Czech) began to engage in anti-Nazi resistance, monitoring troop movements on behalf of the local partisans and disarming explosives planted by the Germans in the last days of the War. In 1947, Karel began his studies at Charles University’s Law Faculty in Prague. For reasons of his class background, he was expelled from school in 1949, one year after the Communist coup. He went to work in a knitting factory in the North Moravian town of Frýdek-Místek, where he was approached about becoming a courier of secret documents from the nearby Polish border to Prague. Karel says he was trained by a man called Paul in ways to avoid detection and target shooting.</p><p> </p><p>After about one year in northern Moravia, Karel moved back to Nymburk, but continued to work as a courier, using frequent visits to his uncle in Bohumín as an excuse to travel to the Polish border. In 1951, he received word that other participants in this network had been arrested and that he should escape Czechoslovakia as soon as possible. Through a crewmember of the boat Vorvaň, Karel learned of a plot to hijack a train and drive it over the border into Western Germany.</p><p> </p><p>On September 11, 1951, Karel and a number of other hijackers did successfully tamper with a passenger train’s brakes so that it hurtled across the German border, carrying them and a number of civilians, many of whom chose not to return home. The event was widely reported in the Western media and the locomotive in question was quickly dubbed ‘The Freedom Train.’ Those who escaped on the train spent some time in Valka Lager refugee camp in Bavaria before, in most cases, emigrating to Canada.</p><p> </p><p>Karel settled in Toronto where he lived until 1961, when he moved to California. His work in the insurance industry brought him to Ohio in 1978. After a time spent in Chicago establishing a new insurance company in the mid 1980s, Karel returned to Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife. They have one son. In 2001, Karel published a book about his experience of leaving Czechoslovakia entitled <em>Z deníku vlaku svobody</em> [<em>The Freedom Train Diary</em>].</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170710094631/http://www.meu-nbk.cz/www/index.php?sekce=1&zobraz=cestni-obcane" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A municipal list of Nymburk’s honorary citizens, in which Karel Ruml is counted (in Czech)</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Bohumin
Concentration camp
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Education
Forced labor
Partisan
Refugee camp
Resistance
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Dublin Core
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
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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
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Transcription
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<h4>1951 Trial</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uOrBafTKKok?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“All of a sudden, they yanked me out the cell, brought me to a big room full of people, I did not know… nobody told me what it was about. I was there, there were some people up there on the podium, and I couldn’t make out what it was all about. In about 15 minutes they took me back to the cell. And later on somehow I was told that I was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. That was the whole trial! No defense attorney or anything. Absolutely nothing, nobody asked me nothing, nobody told me anything, you know. That was communist justice.”</p><h4>Pankrac Prison</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qzkrADDL_oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Cleaning the feathers – it came in bags. Goose feathers with chunks of skin on it and all that. All putrid, you know. So lots of dust around and there was a little cell that was meant for probably two people, there were three of us or four of us. It was cold there, you couldn’t… there was a toilet tight next to the door. We had to use the toilet, you know, to relieve yourself, we had to wash ourselves in the toilet and we had to drink out of the toilet because we were not given any water. In the morning you got a little cup of bitter tea, I mean coffee, and that was it. Otherwise showers, maybe they took you into the shower once every two months. We were supposed to be allowed to go out and walk around the yard every other day or so, so maybe once a week, once every 14 days. And the food was completely inadequate. It was so little I got so weak that going, I was on the second floor, I believe, so going up the stairs I couldn’t make it. I was climbing holding onto the railing.</p><p>“Once they threw me into the correction… that means in to the solitary…because, they couldn’t prove it of course, they did not have to prove anything, they just said I was communicating in Morse code through the walls. I was, you know, but they couldn’t tell, they just said ‘okay you, you go’ and they put me I think 14 days in that solitary in the basement. Well, that was real pleasant. You did not have your mat there, nothing during the day, not a blanket, just the very light whatever you had on – a shirt and breeches. Otherwise it was ice cold in there. In the morning, they gave you a bucket and you had to scrub the floor, the whole floor. So everything was wet. Then, the rest of the day, you had to stand under the open window at attention. And the snow was coming through the window. At lunchtime they opened the door and threw in a little bowl of red hot soup, or something, you know, you had to gulp it down, you burned your mouth, because in two minutes they were back taking the empty stuff out. And when I came out of it after 14 days, that cold and all that, so every joint I was moving was cracking.”</p><h4>Resistance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mXK0G409dRU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did not have any grandiose plans, you know, like ‘Oh we are going to overthrow the regime.’ That was quite obvious that you cannot do it. You just have to do whatever you can do. Even if it is small stuff, if everybody did a little, that regime could not have lasted six months, you know. But just a little. We tried to do our best under the circumstances. So we did not, we knew something about the second resistance during the War, where people were trying to organize large groups, lots of people, getting ready for big actions. That never worked out, because you have too many people involved, there will be somebody who will blow the whistle, and it is not going to happen. So we decided right from the beginning, knowing what was happening during the War, to keep it small, really tight, really strict security, and just do whatever we could, not trying to contact other people and all that, that was a recipe for disaster.</p><p>“There were lots of people, as I could see in the prison, who wanted to do something. They were there, they were connected to some group, big group, then it blew up, they wound up in jail before they could do anything, you know. But they were willing, if they had good leadership, those people would have fought. So, saying that the people did not want to do anything or risk anything, that’s incorrect. There were lots of people who were willing, but the thing is, most people need somebody who tells them ‘do this or do that.”</p><h4>Passenger Train</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7x3BKlRCmQs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The guys, Milan and Joseph, they got off the train at the train station before Berlin – well I thought that was the end of it, the end of them, you know, because I heard shooting and that. So I was under the train and kept going, stopped once or twice more in different stations but now I couldn’t see the names of the stations or anything, so I was thinking to myself ‘Well, I’ve got to get off the train because maybe the train is passing through Berlin, I might wind up in the Communist sector on the other side so, just take a chance…’ I decided the next stop, I’ll just drop and see where I am. That’s all that you could do, you know?</p><p>“So I dropped between the rails there and the train left. There was some guy looking through the door there, the glass, and he kind of dropped his jaw, because he saw me there. What he did after that I don’t know, the train was gone and I ran. I got from the railroad yard and I took a hostage there. There were like little shacks or sheds and people living there so I caught a half-drunk guy there and forced him to take me to the American barracks.”</p><h4>US Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6CNegVdgxzE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a completely wrong picture of the whole thing – what we thought the army should be like, you know, because the United States Army was something completely different from these national armies, like the Czechoslovak Army. We saw in the Czechoslovakian Army people were very highly motivated, you know, the officers corps and all that. It was the same in most of the… like in Germany, right? Or in France or in England. But here it was a completely different thing. Also, first I thought, prior to – well, it took me a while before I changed my mind but – I thought I would stay in the army. Because I couldn’t imagine being anything except an officer like father. And of course, I thought that was the thing to do. When I saw how it worked here I said ‘No, I don’t want any part of it.’ Because there was also nothing going on, it didn’t look, you see, that was the main thing… because the Korean War was over, nobody knew anything about Vietnam, and our enlistment was up and we said ‘What? We are going to run around here like jerks polishing boots and all this?”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Radek Masin
Description
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<p>Radek Masin was born in Olomouc, southern Moravia, in 1930. His father, Josef Mašín, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Army who was later executed by the Nazis, while his mother, Zdenka, was a civil engineer, who spent part of WWII in Terezín. Radek and his brother <a href="/web/20170609125243/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/joseph-masin/">Joseph</a> received bravery medals from Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War. According to Joseph, the brothers attempted to render German fighter planes traveling through their town by train unusable during WWII, and at one point helped a pair of Russian POWs escape.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609125243/http://www.radio.cz/en/article/130440" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.</a></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Benes
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Forced labor
Jachymov
Nazis
Pankrac Prison
Podebrady
Political prisoner
Resistance
Solitary confinement
Terezin
World War II