Dusan Schejbal
<p> </p><p>Dusan Schejbal was born in Prague in 1934. He spent most of his childhood, however, in Moravia – in Brno and then the village of Vranov during WWII. His father, Josef, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Air Force who fled to Britain to become an RAF pilot following the Nazi invasion. Dusan’s mother, Dobruška, meanwhile, was sent to a Nazi internment camp in Svatobořice between 1941 and 1943. Dusan and his mother spent the final years of the War together in Vranov, hiding in the woods, says Dusan, during the last few days of the conflict. They were reunited with Dusan’s father upon liberation in Prague in May 1945.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Dusan’s father had risen to prominence in the RAF during the War, achieving the rank of group captain and receiving an honorary award for his service from King George VI. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia in 1945, he became the commander of České Budějovice airfield. In 1947, he was appointed Czechoslovak military attaché to the United States and moved to Washington, D.C. to serve alongside Ambassador <a href="/web/20170612014146/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/juraj-slavik/">Juraj Slávik</a>. Dusan and his mother followed in 1948.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Communist takeover in 1948, Josef resigned from his post and the family moved to the suburbs of Maryland. Dusan says his father took a job as a gas station attendant, while his mother went to work as a sales lady at Garfinckel’s department store. Dusan attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville and then the University of Maryland, where he majored in history and studied Russian as a minor. In 1957, Dusan was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent two years in Zweibruecken, Germany. Upon his return, he worked for the IRS and the Navy as a civilian employee. He married in 1962 and has three children. Today, Dusan lives in University Park, Maryland, with his wife, Krista. The pair travel extensively and Dusan says he still audits Russian classes at the University of Maryland.</p>
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Frank Lysy
<p>Frank Lysy was born in Spišské Vlachy in eastern Slovakia in 1916. His father worked as a maintenance supervisor on the Košice-Bohumín Railway, while his mother stayed at home raising Frank and his six siblings. As a child, Frank was involved in Boy Scouts, and enjoyed playing soccer and skiing. Of his childhood he remembered in particular a visit that Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk made to his school on its anniversary, and a fire that caused severe damage to his town when he was around eight years old.</p><p> </p><p>Frank attended teacher training college in Spišská Kapitula, where he says he received a ‘unique’ education as graduates were trained not only to work as village teachers, but as organists in the local church as well. Frank graduated and became a teacher for a short while, but was taken away from his job in 1938 when he was drafted into the Army. He says that when he reported for duty in Košice, however, he was turned away as no new recruits were being accepted (as this was at the time that the Munich Agreement was signed). He traveled to Bratislava, where he became a student of Slavistics and philosophy at Comenius University. In 1943, Frank was accepted as an exchange student at the University of Padua in Italy. He had a friend who was then the Slovak cultural attaché in Rome and, as WWII progressed, he moved to Venice with his friend and the few remaining representatives of Slovakia in the country. In the last days of the War, Frank moved to Berne, Switzerland, under the protection of the International Labour Organization. By this time, he had already carried out a couple of diplomatic missions and says he worked with the International Red Cross to deliver donated medicines to Terezín concentration camp in Bohemia.</p><p> </p><p>Following WWII, Frank took a job at the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry in Prague. He says that Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was a ‘weak man’ and that there was a fear throughout the ministry that Communist Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis was aiming to take over the department. Frank remembers employees being ‘tested’ at that time with invites to join the Communist Party and trade unions. In 1947, he was posted to Olso, Norway, on a diplomatic assignment. When the Communist coup happened in February 1948, the Czechoslovak ambassador to Norway resigned but Frank stayed on at the Embassy. He resigned himself in February 1949 when he received an order to return back to Prague.</p><p> </p><p>Frank arrived in the United States on July 10, 1950, as he said staying in Norway would have been ‘too dangerous.’ His first job was as a researcher and analyst at Radio Free Europe in New York City. He moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1952. The following year, Frank took a job with the CIA which he held until an intelligence leak outed him in 1956. Thereafter, he went to work for Voice of America, where he became a senior editor of the Czech and Slovak service. He retired in 1991. Frank was a member of the Slovak League of America and the First Catholic Slovak Union. He returned to Slovakia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Matica Slovenska in 1988. Frank lived in Delaplane, Virginia, until his death in November 2011.</p>
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George Heller
<p>George Heller was born in Mariánské Lázně, western Bohemia, in 1948. His father Evžen, who was Jewish, left the country for Palestine in 1938 and there joined the Czechoslovak division of the British Army. Following WWII, he returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Mariánské Lázně, where he met George’s mother Jiřina who was originally from Plzeň. They established a successful bakery, but when their business was threatened with nationalization following the Communist coup, they decided to leave once again. In 1949, the family moved to Israel. When George’s father learned that he was eligible to live in any Commonwealth country due to his service during the War, the Hellers left for Canada and settled in Montreal in 1952. George’s father began working in bakery and soon opened his own business. George recalls a close-knit, thriving Czech community in Montreal, and he and his parents forged lifelong connections with other Czechs in the city. He says that his mother kept a Czech household; she cooked traditional foods and maintained holiday traditions. When George was 14, his father put him to work in the family bakery and he spent much of his free time there.</p><p> </p><p>After graduating from high school, George began working for Hudson’s Bay Company as a fur trader in northern Canada. He stayed with the company for 20 years and worked his way up through the firm holding numerous positions. He eventually returned to the Hudson’s Bay Company as CEO in 1999 after managing the North American and European arms of the shoe company Bat’a and heading the 1994 Commonwealth Games held in Vancouver. Following the Velvet Revolution in 1989, George’s relatives in Czechoslovakia turned to him for assistance in starting business enterprises of their own. Since then, he has also been contacted by both the Czech and Slovak governments for his business expertise and knowledge of Western markets. In 2005, to celebrate the entry of the Czech Republic into the European Union, George, in conjunction with the Czech Embassy in Canada, organized an exhibit of Czech glass in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s flagship store in Toronto.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>George holds Czech and Canadian citizenship and says that there is ‘no downside’ to dual citizenship. He frequently travels to the Czech Republic, for business purposes and to visit family. He raised his two children speaking Czech and passed on to them Czech traditions. Now retired, George sits on several boards and serves as the Honorary Consul General of Thailand in Toronto. He and his wife Linda split their time between Toronto and California.</p>
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Juraj Slavik
<p> </p><p>Juraj Slavik was born in Prague in October 1929, son of the then-minister of the interior, Juraj Slávik. In 1936, Juraj’s father was sent to head the Czechoslovak diplomatic mission in Poland, with whom relations were strained because of both countries’ claims to parts of Upper Silesia. Juraj attended the Lycée Français de Varsovie [the French School in Warsaw] but, in light of heightening tensions, was sent to school in Switzerland just before the outbreak of WWII. After a brief spell in Belgium, Juraj spent the War in Britain, first with his parents in London (where his father was a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) and then as a boarder at Magdalen College School in Oxford and the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj returned with his parents to Czechoslovakia in 1945. One year later, however, Juraj’s father was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States and so the family left for America. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Juraj’s father resigned from his post and the family decided to stay in the United States. Juraj’s siblings Dušan and Taňa remained in Czechoslovakia, where Dušan was subsequently arrested and spent 11 years in jail.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and then volunteered for the draft, serving in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1956 as a translator debriefing Czech and Slovak refugees after they crossed the border into West Germany. In 1960, Juraj married his wife, Julie Bres Slavik. The couple have two children. After a successful career working for the U.S. government’s cultural exchange Program, Juraj, now retired, devotes much of his time to Slovak and Czech organizations, including Friends of Slovakia and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1990, Juraj returned his father’s ashes to his native Slovakia. He has worked with Slovak and Czech historians to have his father’s letters published. In 2006, a book about Juraj’s father, titled <em>Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969</em>, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.<br /></p>
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Marek Skolil
<p>Marek Skolil was born in Slaný, central Bohemia, in March 1962. His mother, Jaroslava, was a nurse who later worked for the national chain of record stores Supraphon, while his father, Pavel (whom he did not see very often following his parents’ divorce), served in the Czechoslovak Army. Marek started primary school in Slaný before being sent to nearby Kládno to attend a special language school where he learned German, Russian and French. After attending the local secondary school in Slaný, he decided to spend his last year of schooling as a boarder at a school in Žd’ar nad Sazavou, which prepared students to go to university in Moscow. Marek says he had no intention of studying in the USSR, but that this year away from his family did subsequently help him live abroad. In 1980, after being rejected and then accepted in a series of events he refers to as ‘surreal’, Marek began a degree in psychology at Charles University in Prague. He left the country before finishing his studies in June 1983.</p><p> </p><p>Marek settled in Paris, where he began by working as an au pair. He resumed his psychology studies at Paris X – Nanterre and, in 1986, started working at the legendary Czech exile publication <em>Svědectví </em>[Testimony], run by Pavel Tigrid. He worked at the quarterly as the deputy editor until after the Velvet Revolution. After a couple of years working as a journalist and lecturer in Paris, Marek was invited to join the new Czech Foreign Ministry (following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992). He did and started his diplomatic career on the French desk in Prague. He was subsequently sent to Paris as the deputy chief of mission, and then to Vietnam and Lebanon as ambassador. It was on a posting to the latter that he met his Slovak wife, Lydia, with whom he has two children. Marek was the first ever consul general of the Czech Republic in Chicago between 2005 and 2010.</p>
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Otomar Hájek
<p>Otomar Hájek was born in 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, where his father, František, a military officer and diplomat in the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, was stationed. When his father became head of military intelligence in 1935, Otomar’s family moved back to Prague, but then left again four years later when his father was appointed military attaché to the Netherlands. Following demobilization of the Czechoslovak military, Otomar’s father became an officer in the French Foreign Legion, and the family moved to Algeria. The Hájeks subsequently spent time in Southern France before they were evacuated to London in 1940. After his father died in a car accident in 1941, Otomar’s mother Ružena, despite having no work experience, found a job as a radio announcer at the BBC. During WWII, Otomar attended the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain. Otomar, his mother, and his brother moved back to Czechoslovakia after the War, and he says they were very happy to be back.</p><p> </p><p>Otomar completed high school in 1949 and says he was lucky to be able to continue his studies in mathematics at Charles University, as many of his classmates were not given that opportunity. Otomar says that his university years passed relatively quietly because he was not politically active. He says he is proud of the fact that he was never asked to join the Communist Party, because officials knew he was a ‘hopeless’ cause. He remembers in particular being sent to a labor camp for one summer while still a student. Upon finishing his degree, Otomar applied for postgraduate studies, but, because of his father’s intelligence background, he was rejected. He was placed as a junior assistant at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), in the faculty of electrical engineering. Otomar says he was fired about six years later as a result of ‘political changes’ and had a very hard time finding a job, again because of his father’s previous intelligence position. He finally found work at a computer research institute where he and his colleagues were tasked with creating Czech computers. Otomar remembers this being very difficult, as they had little to no access to equipment and scientific knowledge from outside of the country. He was later able to return to research at Charles University, where he received his doctorate in 1963.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Otomar attempted unsuccessfully to leave the country several times, both legally and illegally. He finally had the opportunity in 1966 when he was permitted to accept a job at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for one year and bring his wife, Olga. Otomar says that he felt obligated to return to Czechoslovakia after the year, but his brother convinced him otherwise. In Cleveland, Otomar and Olga had their son, Michael, and became involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). They became American citizens in 1974. Otomar is well known in his field of applied mathematics and was a Humboldt scholar at TU Darmstadt in the mid-1970s. His son Michael speaks Czech, and his wife Olga cooks traditional Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian food. Otomar and Olga frequently visit the Czech Republic and are in regular contact with their families there, thanks to Skype. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><a href="/web/20170609072102/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Hajek_Final.pdf">Full transcript of Otomar Hájek’s interview:</a></p>
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