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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>Obstacles to Emigrate </h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zl_ElO6fbcM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My mother had to sell the house and then my father – since the divorce was pretty nasty – he didn’t want to sign papers, he needed to sign papers for me to leave Slovakia. So he actually didn’t sign the papers; I traveled to Austria and I traveled under an assumed name. Relatives lived in Bratislava, and they had already emigrated. Part of the family emigrated to Canada when, after ’68, the Canadians were taking a lot of Slovaks and Czechs. So part of the family was already in Canada, and they were related to my mother, so I guess they got the idea [for me] to assume one of their names, and we lived with them for about two weeks until I got my story straight.</p><p><em>And how did this make your move easier?</em></p><p>“Well, I don’t think it made it easier; it made it possible to travel with my mother. She traveled under her name and I traveled with my aunt.”</p><h4>Assimilation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5VfBPDzSdvc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You do because you need to survive. You need to be able to talk to people, and if you just speak Slovak all the time, they don’t speak Slovak in the store or Czech or Russian – now they speak Spanish – so you have to assimilate. You assimilate language-wise, but cultural-wise, that comes with the system. As you live there, you start doing what other people are doing. For my mother, she had to assimilate to the system once she bought a house, you have to cut the lawn, you have to take care of the shrubs and all that stuff. That was part of life, and with the same saying, ‘If you go Rome, you do as Romans do,’ and ‘If you go to Greece, you do as Greeks do.’ You left that life in Slovakia, and you’re surrounded by English speaking people. You still have the cultural things and you still get together with Slovaks in different organizations, but at the same time you have to live life and you have to work and make a living so you have to assimilate.”</p><h4>U.S. Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MAkjpMmUQm8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“[We were] trying to discern – let’s say they served in the military – once we learned they served in the military, then we pursued that angle. They were already refugees at that point. If they were able to provide us with valuable information, then we could help them with getting their German visa or permit to stay in Germany, or wherever they wanted to go. If they came to us and they wanted to go to the United States, then we would debrief them and find out, and if we could help them, of course we would help them. We really weren’t interested in how they lived. What we were interested in was if they worked for the police, then we wanted to know how the police operated. If they were in the military, which most of them were, which units they served in and how did that operate. Where were the training sites and stuff like that.”</p><h4>Slovak Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kFxnZ104GVE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m not forgetting the language, but I haven’t been there to be able to develop the language, to grow the language. Language grows and it develops. I owned a translation service for awhile, but I had to look through dictionaries all the time because I haven’t been there to develop the vocabulary. I left as a 13-year old and because I speak basic Slovak, so to speak, I can’t translate. Some people can translate, they look at it and write it down and it’s done. So it’s not a realistic goal for me to have a translation service.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-MQr2hX1Ip0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My life in Slovakia was relatively short, so I’m more culturally developed American-wise than Slovak-wise at this point. For me, I maintain my roots so to speak by listening to Slovenské ľudové piesne [Slovak folk songs]. Now I have sons that I have dancing [with the Slovak dance troupe Lucina], so I associate with that. I was in Bratislava-Cleveland Sister Cities, but I’m an American now. I’m more American than I’m Slovak at this point.”</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
Alfonz Sokol
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Alfonz Sokol was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1956. He grew up in the village of Vel’ké Zálužie with his parents, Alfonz and Milena. His father worked in the office of a grain collection and processing facility while his mother stayed at home and raised him. Alfonz’s maternal grandfather had immigrated to the United States for economic reasons prior to WWII; his wife joined him after the War. When Alfonz was in fourth grade, his parents divorced.</p><p> </p><p>Alfonz attended school in his village until fifth grade when he went to a larger school in Michalovce. He recalls his involvement in the Pioneer youth group and says that many of his group’s activities focused on botany. In the summer of 1966, Alfonz and his mother visited his grandparents who had settled in Cleveland. Upon returning home, he says his mother began making plans to emigrate. It took three years before Alfonz and his mother were finally able to leave, as they had to sell their house and receive permission from Alfonz’s father. This permission was never given, and Alfonz left the country under an assumed name. In early summer 1969, Alfonz and his mother crossed the border into Austria. They applied for a visa at the U.S. Embassy, and, while waiting, rented a suite in a guest house. Alfonz’s grandparents sponsored the pair, which facilitated the process and, after five weeks, Alfonz and his mother flew to the United States. They settled in Cleveland where his mother quickly found a job cleaning hotels. On weekends, Alfonz helped his grandmother clean offices at an oil processing plant.</p><p> </p><p>Alfonz went to Hillside Middle School for eighth grade where he says studying was a struggle because he did not speak English. He communicated with a Russian language teacher and a Ukrainian student while learning English from a picture book. He says that biology and math were especially challenging subjects for him. His high school Russian teacher convinced him to study the language in college, and after taking some core courses at Tri-C Community College, Alfonz enrolled at Ohio State University. In 1976, he traveled abroad to Moscow and studied for three months at the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. On the advice of a professor, Alfonz joined the U.S. Army Reserves as a Russian linguist; he went on active duty in 1981. In the mid-1980s, he was stationed in Munich debriefing Slovak refugees. Alfonz met his wife, Donna, at a Slovak dinner in Lakewood in 1990; the pair married in December 1991. They have three sons together. Alfonz has been involved in the Slovak community in Cleveland, attending dances and picnics and participating in organizations such as Bratislava-Cleveland Sister Cities. Today, Alfonz lives in Parma, Ohio, with his wife and children.</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
Americanization
Community Life
Divorce
English language
Military service
Russian studies/speaker
Sense of identity
Slovak Language
Translator/interpreter
Velke Zaluzie
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2e6b8f5d1e212157d45e567579496822
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>Radio Technician</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PfDg9UqL9x4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You know, I always had a knack for it because I built… we called them crystal sets, I guess they had them here too. The place where I grew up, we didn’t have electricity, so crystal doesn’t require electricity. And I built my own battery – you can take a beer bottle and wind a piece of string around it dipped in, it had to be dipped in alcohol, and you burnt it off, after you burn it off you have to pour cold water on it and snap it, and that thing would be perfect, so that’s how I made my own batteries. And from there I could power something a little more powerful than a crystal radio, but yeah, I always monkeyed around with this, it was my forte, so to say, my cup of tea.”</p><h4>Bananas</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aWz84uHLncw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I do remember bananas before the War came. And I didn’t see bananas again until I got to Germany in 1951. The first thing I bought there was bananas, honest to god! Because I remembered the taste, I remembered what they looked like, but we couldn’t buy them. They were not available during the War and after the War either. So, six years after the War I ended up in Germany and I still remembered the bananas from 1938, before the War.”</p><h4>Crossing into W. Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/51AhtZaa3Ac?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Domažlice is about three or four stops from the border, but we figured that that was what they call the border zone. And we figured we didn’t want to risk it because in order to get in the border zone you had to have a special permit, okay? This is before the border was fortified, the border zone in some places would be pretty wide. In some places it was narrower, but then when they fortified the border, meaning they put the barbed wire fence there and plowed the fields, then they didn’t care, they could let you go up to the border or pretty close. But up til that time, no they wouldn’t. So, in ’51 we were pretty lucky, they didn’t have the barbed wire fence up, they had a guard with a dog, that would be one guard and one dog, but we were lucky that the wind was coming from Germany to us, so the dog didn’t sniff us. Every once in a while they would leave the place, we were sitting there about two hours, right on the border before we crossed. Because then, I think it was about 1:00, 12 or 1:00, I’m not sure which, he left his area of patrol, so to say, where they went through the motions of changing the guard, so right behind their backs we went down, it was just downhill, you know. So we were in Germany.</p><p>“But even there, because we had heard stories that sometimes that sometimes they put the border ahead of it or that the Germans would return the escapees back to the Czechs, you know. So we were looking through the paper that was there on the road and it was German. Okay, so we’re in Germany, we knew that. But the Germans when they interviewed us – and that interview, mind you, that took a long time – I remember from, it was dark already when we left the police station. But they were nice, they offered us cigarettes and they fed us, and the guy took us to the restaurant for supper. He had a rifle, and I couldn’t speak German, not that well, but my buddy spoke almost perfect German. Anyway, the guy says ‘You’re not going to go anyplace are you? I would have to shoot.’ ‘No, we’re not.’ So, he put the rifle in the corner, you know, and just sat down with us.”</p><h4>DDT</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3RvYCCEYnOY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The bedbugs, one guy could lie amongst them and they wouldn’t bother him – that was Lukeš, with the glass eye – the other one, Fišera, he would scratch himself so bad he had open sores. And I tell you, they know where to attack, like where your meat is soft over here. My ears in the morning would be like this, except I didn’t scratch myself as much as he did. And we had <em>tepláky</em>, which is like a sweat suit, sweats – we’d tie it here, tie this, and powder our faces and hands with DDT powder. Well yeah, that’s the only thing there was. And bedbugs, it didn’t bother them, they must have been used to it.”</p><h4>Communication</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dwrgLmvnhM0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well that was funny too, we would talk sometimes on the phone and all of a sudden you could tell the volume going down and… nothing! And letters, there was a couple of letters that got out of the country by a person who was leaving, okay, those letters you could write what you want, otherwise you had to be careful what you wrote.”</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
Bruno Necasek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Bruno Necasek was born in Semily, northern Bohemia, in July 1932. Both of his parents, Marie and Karel, worked as laborers in textile factories in the region. His parents got divorced when Bruno was still very young, and he was assigned to his father’s care, which he says was somewhat unusual at that period. During WWII, Bruno’s father left home to work in Vrchlabí, and so his paternal grandmother took charge of raising him and ‘making ends meet.’ Growing up, Bruno says his home had no electricity, and he remembers completing his homework by carbide lamp-light and making battery-powered radios to listen to at home. In 1949, Bruno moved to Liberec to study at the town’s textile school, where he says he got into trouble for hanging pictures of former Presidents Masaryk and Beneš on his dorm room wall. Upon graduation two years later, he began working as a statistician in a cotton mill, where, among other duties, he was involved in working on the mill’s five year plan. He emigrated in October 1951 when his supervisor at work warned him that, on account of his ‘political unreliability,’ he may be sent to a mine should his employers find someone else to fill his position.</p><p> </p><p>Bruno crossed into Germany with two friends near Klenčí pod Čerchovem, western Bohemia, on October 20, 1951. His group was escorted by German police to the town of Cham, where they spent several nights in prison. Bruno and his friends were subsequently sent to Straubing for five days and then on to Valka Lager refugee camp near Nuremburg. Bruno remembers the bedbugs in particular at Valka Lager camp and says of the whole experience: ‘You have no idea how bad that was.’ After almost immigrating to Brazil in 1952, Bruno decided to join the U.S. Army. He served between 1952 and 1957, completing basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then traveling to Austria, where he was stationed as a member of the 516th Signal Company. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957, Bruno settled in Cleveland, where he knew some people from his time in German refugee camps. He became an American citizen the following year. Bruno met his future wife <a href="/web/20170808010802/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/zdenka-necasek/">Zdenka Necasek</a> on a trip to Czechoslovakia to see his family in 1972. The pair spent a couple of weeks together before deciding they would marry and that Zdenka would come to live in Cleveland. Preparations for their wedding were complicated when Zdenka was refused an exit visa to visit Bruno in the United States, and Bruno was repeatedly refused permission to enter Czechoslovakia. In the end, the process took four years and the pair were married by proxy, with Zdenka’s lawyer standing in for Bruno at the wedding service. Today, Bruno and Zdenka have two children, who both speak Czech. Bruno is now retired from a career in telecommunications and lives with Zdenka in Seven Hills, Ohio.</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
Benes
Border patrol
Divorce
Domazlice
Klenci pod Cerchovem
marriage
Military service
Refugee camp
Vrchlabi
World War II
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1ccb060ec443e0cd5fb2180c313bd71d
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>Kveta's Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LB5uRklpRq4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He was always bothered by inequality in wealth between people. He had trouble accepting that there’s a class of people that’s very wealthy and a class of people that’s very poor. But I don’t think he actually actively did anything in that direction. But he supported equality or fair treatment: that was his objective. But I think what happened with him was that he was so extremely intelligent and knowledgeable that his frame of reference was horribly skewed, because I don’t think he understood that not everybody was as smart as him. So, he could easily… he didn’t care, he could easily give up what he had today, because tomorrow he would have double. Do you understand? He could easily earn money quickly. So, he didn’t understand the struggles of most people because he was definitely above an average person – he spoke four languages fluently, he was, you know, extremely good at what he did, at college his picture was on the wall way after he graduated as one of the best students they ever had, you know. But they did send him to Cuba and he was drinking with Castro. Yes, so, when he left for Cuba, he was already involved with someone else who would be my stepmother and my brother was born in Cuba.”</p><h4>House Troubles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9hWgIofG760?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They did want to take the whole house, and they would come every so often, I remember, when I was a little kid, people would come to our house and they would measure the whole house, because they had some rule, if your property exceeded some whatever square feet, or meters in our case, they had a right to take it. And they wanted to convert our house into a department store, but we were right on the money. Like, by just a centimeter – one more centimeter and it would be over, but they just couldn’t find that one centimeter! That’s what happened.”</p><h4>Immigration to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OmdkiRoEg1A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The idea was that I would come and visit them for summer vacation, and I got a passport, and I was pretty much set to go, but then my grandmother got an idea that I should not be traveling alone and she wanted to come too. And at that point… so she went to apply for a passport, and that triggered my stepfather’s sister saying she wanted to come too. And then everybody was applying for a passport, which delayed the whole thing. I was 16 years old. And by the time it was processed or anything could be done, they actually called me to the passport station and took my passport away. So, nobody went.”</p><h4>Reunited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wyXPV3z1EC8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I heard later, and I don’t even remember at what point that was, that when they finally released us, I was the second one to go and that the first child released was a child who was terminally ill. I don’t know for sure, the story goes that she got hit by a car crossing a street and so somehow, whether that triggered something, or whether she had an infection anyway, she had only six months to live, so they let her go, to die with her parents. And I guess she was only ten years old. Whether that is true or not, I really don’t have anything to substantiate that. And I was told I was the second one. But again, whether that’s the truth, I don’t know. And supposedly it was 35 of us they let go, from the whole country. So you have to imagine, it’s, you know, even though it’s not a big country, but still, that’s hard to find somebody else like, in your situation.”</p><h4>Politics or Family?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cAp-2S9EjrM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Of course, the sad part is that it’s bad enough to deal with family issues – you should not have to have politics interfere in your family life, because then, it’s almost like you have no place to go. And that’s what happened to me at that one point, you know, when I graduated from high school. I was completely stuck. I didn’t know if I could go to school, I did not know if I could leave the country, I just did not know. There was nothing. And I was, you know, becoming an adult. I did not know how to survive. I was really scared to death. I did not have any skills, any, any skills worth mentioning as far as who would hire me, you know… to do what?”</p><h4>News Conference</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bMYi3GcZXg4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We landed around 7:00 on February 10, in the middle of the winter. And of course, unknown to us, there were reporters waiting. So, when we were getting off the plane, the stewardess came and told us we had to wait, to be the last, because they already knew. You know, and at that time I’m already thinking ‘That doesn’t sound good!’ And sure enough, we get off the plane, and you know, there is my mother, my stepfather and a bunch of photographers and then they drag us into a room and I had a press conference, right off the bat. Yeah. I could answer questions, but I didn’t understand what they were asking so my stepfather had to translate for me.”</p>
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Kveta Eakin
Description
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<p>Kveta Eakin was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1956. When she was 18 months old, however, she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents’ home in Brno, Moravia. Her father, Arnošt, was a successful agricultural engineer, who subsequently moved to Cuba to work for the government there. When Kveta was eight, her mother (also called Květa) remarried. Kveta’s stepfather was Dr. Vladimír Šimůnek, an economist who became one of President Alexander Dubcek’s advisors during the Prague Spring in 1968. Dr Šimůnek had been teaching economics in Brno, but shortly after marrying Kveta’s mother gained a fellowship in Prague, and so the pair moved there, while Kveta herself remained with her grandparents. In 1969, Kveta’s mother and stepfather moved to the United States, when the latter was offered a position at Kent State University in Ohio. The pair defected and Kveta was, in her stepfather’s words, ‘kept hostage’ for six-and-a half years in Czechoslovakia. Following the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Kveta was reunified with her mother in Cleveland in February 1976. She says she was the second person released from the country as part of a pledge to reunify families torn apart by the Cold War.</p><p> </p><p>That year, Kveta started her studies at Kent State. She graduated in 1980 with a major in psychology. Ten years later, she returned to university to gain a masters degree in rehabilitation counseling, which is her current area of work. Kveta is now settled in the Cleveland area, where she is active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the local Czech drama group, Včelka. She has one son, Paul.</p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
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NCSML Archive
1968
Divorce
Education
emigrant
Helsinki Accords
Kankova
marriage
Prague Spring
refugee
Simunkova
Vcelka
Women workers
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cc48e7fa263cc04a1541d841bcf911db
Dublin Core
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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>Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rox4yCr0dZ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“They wanted to give me more chances in life. People were really… on the one hand, people living in a communist country – or at least in communist Czechoslovakia – were on one hand isolated, they didn’t have access to information and they were definitely not making a lot of money, that’s why they couldn’t travel etc. etc. But on the other hand, education and languages were important, even if they were not very important practically, because you couldn’t travel. It was something that was actually quite wise of my parents to open this gate for me – that was good.”</p><h4>Psychology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CF0jMzRhe5c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I tried to get to Charles University and that was a typical communist-era anecdote. You know, the whole thing was that I was not accepted, although I had all the best scores with the exception of Russian, where I had a slightly… I had a dvojka z ruštiny [a B for Russian]. But still, you couldn’t get into these quotas. And so, funnily enough, I didn’t even… send an appeal – as far as I remember, I didn’t even do this. And that’s actually when I realized that I want to leave the country; if I cannot study, I will leave. But strangely, my stepfather, he met as it happens – there was this school maybe gymnázium, (secondary school), gathering of people. You know, from time to time, they have this anniversary gathering – and there was this guy who must have been a big-shot whatever in the Ministry of the Interior or wherever – something like this – and he said ‘If you want some help just call me.’ So my dad did, and suddenly I received an answer to an appeal that I never posted, that yes, I am accepted to university, which was rather surrealistic; people had already started university, I came a week later. And that’s how I started psychology, but in my head, in a way, this was the breaking experience, I felt like ‘No, I don’t need this, I want to see the other side.’”</p><h4>Baptized</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QasHK-1kfAY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Maybe a year before leaving the country – so when I was 20, 21 – I got baptized at home, at my friend’s home, where we were meeting regularly, reading evangelical, but, you know, very modern guys, like Bonhoeffer and these freedom evangelists – you know, people who were rather avant-garde in terms of their theological thinking.”</p><p><em>Why did you decide to get baptized at that age?</em></p><p>“That was something that, at the time, was very meaningful to me. It was a very rich (and enlightening to me) alternative to the philosophy that was being served to us politically – Marxism, and those things. And as all religion, it was also obviously because there was a community of people who were very interesting and very strong. You know, people with whom I am friends until today.”</p><h4>Church</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/olP18RDIV3Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was tolerated, now of course, when you were… you know, the fact that I got baptized in an apartment – that would be already a big problem for the friend of mine who made the ceremony, and who actually later on became a professor of theology at the Prague faculty etc. That was really forbidden, but for the rest, it was tolerated. Obviously, a lot of people in these circles were people who were also politically active in their position, but it was not necessarily the same thing. Some people were very far… were clearly opponents to the regime, other people, like my father, were actually, you know, in the Party, as many people were, and still going to church, and somehow he could manage…</p><p>“You know, small towns were always worse, in Prague you could hide somehow, there was so much going on. In a small town like this of 20,000 people, it was actually a little bit more dangerous or you needed more courage, because everybody knew you and you were going to church. But people were going to church, some people were going to Catholic church, it was not exactly like in Poland, where church was really strong and the regime… These churches – the communists did not like them, but it was okay, at least they knew who they were – these people. And as long as you didn’t cross a certain limit, a certain red line, which was basically to be publishing and spreading information of not just religious, but even religious, it was not encouraged… but that was the line.”</p><h4>Coach Tour</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IX0UJ25IumI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“People were queuing in a queue, as I did, for three days, you know, making shifts – there was this self-organization of the people. You know, you came for two hours, and then you left, and then the day after, you came for another two hours and people were helping themselves in the line like this, because – they knew why – because on the day, D-Day, when the sale was open, even though I was eleventh in the line, after these three days, five minutes before the opening of the store, some people from the store came, opened the door and suddenly, even when you were eleventh in the line, there was not enough seats for me on the trip to, what was it? France or Western Europe, which was supposed to have a number of 14 or something. So clearly, things were going on. So I ended up in the trip to Greece – a wonderful country – and I spent my two weeks there. And what happened was that I sold my record collections, my parents gave me some money; it cost 20,000 crowns, which was a lot of money at the time! A lot of money! So, there were not many 20 year olds, young people, taking this trip. And this didn’t escape the people traveling. You know, on this day I came to the meeting point and they would say ‘Oh yes, there were young people like you last year – they didn’t return!’ And I was like ‘Oh no! That’s not my case!’ And you know, I have my sleeping bag with me – a sleeping bag for a trip in a hotel! You know, there were things…</p><p>“And then I was selling these albums, so obviously I had to tell these people, because otherwise they wouldn’t understand why I was selling these albums. So I think I was very lucky, there must have been at least maybe 40-50 people who knew I was emigrating. Nothing ever happened to me; nobody ever denounced me, because there were cases when this happened. People were all ready with their luggage, and two hours – that’s the way they were doing it – they were coming to the house two hours before you were leaving, and they just took your passport and you go nowhere.”</p><h4>Paris</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S4PPOoq_OUw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It just happened that at the time, this was the time that computers were becoming more important, especially, among other things, in the printing business and the publishing business, and they just needed someone in the rédaction to take care, not of IT (I would not be the right person), but someone who could use it – that was the breakthrough, to be able to use it. And it happened to be me – so I started like this: I was actually basically just typing one of Mr Tigrid’s books on the computer – you had people for this at the time – and then from this it moved on and suddenly I was among the inner circle of Svědectví, which was a very small, family owned kind of operation. And this was quite exciting, I was a little bit afraid that it might really affect negatively my family back in Czechoslovakia, but suddenly it happened. And so, after a few years where I was working at the Centre Pompidou, you know, to make my living during my studies, I was offered a job at Svědectví and I took it, and I think I was what you call the deputy editor, or in France they call it secrétaire de rédaction – you know, the guy who is taking care of collecting the manuscripts, keeping to the deadlines and getting the issue together. And I stayed there from 1986, I think, until 1990.”</p><h4>Skeptical</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLFvczEKJkI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Every emigrant, with the time you are [away]… your idea and your image of your homeland – where you are coming from – gets frozen in what you left. Just this very idea that life and changes could continue after you… that there even could be changes, is an abstract thing for you. In your deeper way of thinking, you believe it’s like it was. I mean this was a rather short time, I only left in 1983, we were in 1989, so it was six years, but still, I was not exactly following and realizing that things that were not possible before were [now] possible. But on the other hand, I was actually following Gorbachev and I think I was the only one in the whole editorial committee who probably naively believed that Gorbachev is maybe bringing something… I was not wrong on this, that it was actually opening new opportunities, so it is not that I was totally pessimistic or disconnected, but I was very skeptical specifically about Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Cut Ties</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B5ceNfZg63U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I thought that I would never, ever return to the country unless things changed, and I didn’t believe that they were going to change. It was really like a tabula rasa, which was important, I think. Again, it is something I would recommend to everybody if you jump like this – if you want to really emigrate – I think that’s the mentality. I always believed this; I was not looking specifically to… well, I did have Czech friends, and I worked, actually, with Czechs, which was something, but I was really not looking for it. It was an accident. And this whole time, basically these eight years that I spent in Paris, I was doing my best to become French. I mean, as ridiculous as it might sound or look, that was the philosophy. The philosophy is: you cannot do this halfway. And there is a wisdom in this, the challenge of living a new life wherever in the world is quite huge, and if you stay halfway, I… I always pitied these people who were living in Paris, and actually I had friends like this, and they are friends until today, some of them returned, and I understand them, it’s their point, but in a way I pitied them…</p><p>“I don’t like this ambiguity, you know, I think at some point in life you can overcome this and you, you have [your] identity built enough, and it can be a double identity, and then no problem. But, when you struggle for life, and you start a new life, I think it is definitely more conducive to success and to even some kind of logic, to focus on the world where you live and that was my philosophy – I mean, you can do it both ways, all kinds of ways, there is not one way.”</p>
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Marek Skolil
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
Communist Party members
Diplomatic service
Divorce
Education
Journalism
Kladno
Marxism
national
Politics
Religion
Sense of identity
Slany
Svedectvi
Underground
Zdar nad Sazavou
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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>Devoted</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mgYHJpfQnwc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe>
<p>“In 1948, when the communists finally took over in Czechoslovakia, people were not accepting it very well, they didn’t want it. Because first of all, people were losing their own property, they didn’t own anything. And my father thought everything belongs to everybody – you couldn’t be having more than I do, or I shouldn’t be having more than you do – we all should have the same. And his own sisters, who lived in a different village, Dubovany, by Piešťany, his own sisters didn’t want to accept that people have to leave their property or something and let Communists run it. And he went over there to talk to his sisters to sign, they had some farmland. My aunt had a small amount of farmland, and my other aunt, and he didn’t feel that they should own that – they should all own it and all together work. So he was very, very strict about it, he would talk and say ‘No, you have to agree, it’s going to be a better life for you, I guarantee you’.</p>
<p>“He had really good ideas, and those ideas which I heard, which he told me, I liked them, because I felt yeah, everybody should… there shouldn’t be hungry people, there shouldn’t be poor people, everybody should have a little piece of something, everybody should have free school, free health program. And that’s what communists promised. So that’s how he believed it.</p>
<p>“Until, I believe, after we left, in the late seventies – he died in 1976. After 1968, it was that Prague Spring and everything, and things were changing. And he went outside, in the city, in Bratislava, and he sees these big shots, these communist leaders talking and being rich, suddenly they were rich, loaded with money and he would say – later on I found out, he never said anything to me, because we were over here – ‘Now something is wrong! Because this is not how I wanted. I wanted to have everything equal, this is not equal.’”</p>
<h4>Communist</h4>
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<p>“It was a small village, farmland, there were about 300 population, that’s it. And that teacher who was working with me – her name was Rosie, Ružena, Rosie – she got me involved with the people. We had a drama club, we had the kids involved in pionieri, that was kids… I was a Pioneer when I was in sixth or fifth grade or something! And sväzáci, that was a teenagers’ club, they wore blue shirts, so we were involved with them. With the drama club we put on some play, that was a teacher’s job in the farmland or villages, the teacher has to do that. And because of that, somebody came up with the idea of ‘Why don’t you become a Communist?’ So that woman, that Rosie said ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want to be!’ She was single, 36 years old, she didn’t want to be. I wanted to be because, I think it was something I wanted to prove to my father, or I wanted him to be proud of me or whatever. I thought that he would be proud.</p>
<p>“And when I told him I was asked to be a Communist Party member, first you are on a waiting list for about a year, and then you are promoted, a full-blown… He looked at me and he says to me ‘Wait a minute! Do you want to go because you believe it, or do you just want to go because you think it’s not time to do it?’ I said ‘No, I want to believe it.’ He said ‘Alright then, you have to live by that!’</p>
<p>“So, I lived by that except one thing: I never claimed that I don’t believe in God. That was my private thing. When somebody asked me the question ‘How are you doing with your view on God and religion?’ I said ‘I’m still working on it.’ That was my answer. That was the only thing that I kept with me, I always believed in God. Because I thought, that has nothing to do with it, communism and God. God is taking care of even communist people.”</p>
<h4>Radio Free</h4>
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<p>“I know my husband one time brought some radio, it was about midnight, we were listening to something, but we called it propaganda. I didn’t believe that. I said ‘Yeah, they tell you anything they want to.’ We say in Slovak ‘keď vtáčka lapajú, pekne mu spievajú’ – did you ever hear that? ‘If you want to catch the bird then sing to him.’ So I thought, this is a nice, nice, speech, but that’s not my idea… When my husband brought up the idea of leaving Czechoslovakia, I said to him ‘You know what, why don’t you go, because I know some people, older people, men went to the United States and made money and then supported their wives, sent for their wives. Why don’t you go?’ And he says ‘Well, I think I have some place a marriage license, and on the marriage license you’re in my name. So, that makes no sense, me going without you. We all go, or nobody goes.’”</p>
<h4>Army</h4>
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<p>“My father, because he had contact with everything, he knew what was going on. He said to my husband, ‘You know what, probably you are going to be called to service, because Cuba is happening, and a lot of soldiers are being called and sent to protect the country. Probably you are going to be called too.’ And my husband says ‘Dad, why me? I already did my… I am not like a regular soldier!’ And my father says ‘Well, it can happen.’ We got home and about 10:00 in the evening somebody knocked on the door, a man, in a uniform, and he says to my husband ‘You have to report at the airport tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning.’ And that’s when reality hit me. I had a two year-old daughter, and he left in the morning, he went to the airport, and then, at the end of the day I didn’t hear from him, and it wasn’t like here where everybody has phones. We didn’t have a phone, I was living with my mother in law, she didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a phone. So, the following day, I went to a phone booth, and I called the army reserve or somebody, and I asked about my husband, and they said to me ‘Oh, you know what, súdružka, you don’t have to worry about it, but we can’t tell you where he is, it’s a secret.’ And I didn’t know anything. So, a week went by, I didn’t know anything, and then about maybe ten days later, he called me and he said that he is in Trenčín – I don’t know how many miles it is from Bratislava – he’s in Trenčín, he’s with the army, he is safe, and he is working as a driver. He was driving some big surgeon or big shot in the army, driving him from one place to another. That’s about it. And I said ‘Are you coming to visit or something?’ And he said ‘No, I can’t even talk to you for long, I have ten minutes only.’”</p>
<h4>1968 Invasion</h4>
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<p>“It was a beautiful day and I took my kids to play outside. We had an apartment building with a little kind of playground; there was a sandbox, trees and a line for hanging your laundry. And I used to, in those days, I used to wash diapers by hand, we didn’t have disposable ones, it wasn’t that good a time like now. So I took those diapers and I hung them on a line and my youngest one was in a stroller sleeping, his afternoon nap. And a helicopter was flying. I was in the building already, and then I heard people, I went on the balcony and I saw people on the other balcony screaming ‘Take the children in! Take the children in!’ So, the helicopter was shooting, I don’t know at whom. So I ran downstairs, a couple of people helped me get the kids inside, and then we find in a couple of diapers holes. I wish I saved those diapers those days!</p>
<p>“I’m sure they were not shooting at the children, probably because it was the center of the city, probably some commotion was going on on one of those streets and one little bullet got lost or something. So I had another reason, I’m not going stay here, I’m moving out of here, I’m going to live with grandma. Because I thought in a village, it’s nice and quiet, what is the city offering you? Nothing!</p>
<p>“Then, later on that afternoon, my husband – I sent him to get the bread, he came home without bread – he says ‘The stores are empty, no bread!’ I said ‘I need milk for my youngest one.’ Over there for babies, you need a prescription for baby milk, you can’t buy it just like that. And it’s also only in drugstores or pharmacies, they were equipped with the milk for babies. So I said, ‘I’m going to get milk for Lubo,’ so I went down the street, I lined up in front of the pharmacy, I’m standing in line, and they say to me ‘We need a birth certificate, we are not giving you this milk, because anybody can come with a prescription. And we have a shortage, look at the shelves, they are empty.’ So I went back home, walked about ten minutes, meantime helicopters were flying and shooting, we were hiding in one house, in a building, we ran. The whole street, everybody ran into the building. They were shooting, nobody got hurt. I got home, I got the birth certificate, I went back to the pharmacy. No more milk.”</p>
<h4>Departure</h4>
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<p>“In 1969, when we left Slovakia, it was secret, nobody knew about it, not even my father, because my father would call the police and lock us up. He wouldn’t allow it – he said it later on. He said if he knew we wanted to leave, he would have taken precautions so that we won’t leave, even if we went to jail. Yes, he was very upset. Because he was a devoted communist, and he thought he had raised me the same way, and how can I leave my country?</p>
<p>“And he wrote us letters, kind of mean letters, and in those letters he said ‘I don’t think you have an idea what is waiting for you, life out of your country is very hard. I remember my life, it wasn’t easy, and it’s not going to be easy for you, especially because you have four children.’ And ‘Why did you do that? Did I raise you the wrong way, or did I make a mistake raising you? You left this country, you left your family! You shouldn’t do that.’ And he was very upset, and my husband wrote him a letter and apologized to him for me, saying he shouldn’t be mad at me, because it was not me who was doing that, it was my husband who wanted to leave, and I just followed him because I was his wife. So I don’t think my father ever made peace with me leaving.”</p>
<h4>English</h4>
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<p>“The language was really tough, my husband went to Berlitz, so he picked up quick, he was talking all day. The kids, they didn’t have problems at all. My daughter, she was a fourth grader when we left Czechoslovakia, when we got over here they put her in second grade, because they said that’s where she should pick up English. About three months later, she went to the principal, that was a nun, and she said to her ‘I think I speak good enough English, I want to go to fourth grade.’ And they transferred her to fourth grade. So she picked up really good, she didn’t have problems, my boys didn’t have problems. My problem was I didn’t want to talk to anybody, when we were living in that town house, I would go outside, my kids were playing and the next door neighbor would talk to me, I turned I went inside because I didn’t understand her. So, I watched TV, there were soaps, and I would watch them and I said ‘Every day it’s the same people!’ I didn’t understand what was said, I didn’t understand when is the story and when is the advertising, the commercials! I didn’t know, I couldn’t.</p>
<p>“Then my kids were watching a lot of kids’ shows and I would watch with them. And you know what show? Sesame Street! Sesame Street helped me… I watched Big Bird ‘one, two…’ and that’s how I learned English from the TV.”</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
Melania Rakytiak
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</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
Catholicism
Catholics
Cierna Voda
Communist coup
Communist Party members
Divorce
Education
Family life
local
Lutherans
marriage
Marxism
Politics
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Strecanska
Stredna pedagogicka skola
Surovce
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
World War II
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edb42f7afcea5968a253d2386cebaa40
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>Growing Up</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vKNLvuN7LU0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was very lucky. My mother used to make dresses for me and everything so I used to have really nice things. Also, some people had friends or family abroad and the family sent them some dollars or marks or whatever, and they would buy so-called bony and they could buy things in Tuzex. We didn’t have this chance, but we would sometimes borrow a magazine and it was called Seventeen. I have a funny feeling it was an American magazine for teenagers. We would borrow it from these people and we would, with my mother, say ‘Oh look, this is a nice dress. Make me a dress like that.’ So it was nice. In this Tuzex – maybe this will be interesting to say – when I was a teenager, the coolest thing was to have blue jeans and you couldn’t get blue jeans here. You could get them in Tuzex or otherwise you didn’t, so it was a good that was very much in demand.”</p><h4>Gymnázium</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FEHy72T_Eec?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This <em>gymnázium</em> was a very good one, but I remember I went through it like in a dream because I had a head full of the West. I was aware that we can’t travel, we can’t have things that we want. It was the ‘60s, the Beatles. You couldn’t get records and my head was full of it. And then of course when I fell in love, I was just looking out the window, and I don’t know how I managed to have good marks, quite honestly, but I did.”</p><h4>Cultural Fascinations</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wmedamxXpLc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was very much into fashion and all this, so I was very much aware that you couldn’t get cosmetics. There was Twiggy, there was Brigitte Bardot. I had some pocket money and I would either use it to buy one good thing – I’ve always preferred to buy one good quality thing that just anything – or I would spend this money on buying pictures of film stars. I had this scrapbook of Brigitte Bardot – I still have it somewhere – and I would look at her and think ‘I wish I could buy these things. I wish I could wear them. She looks fabulous.’ Then, of course, there was Twiggy, and because I was so skinny I could identify with her because it wasn’t fashionable to be skinny. Then the Beatles, the music. The ‘60s here in Prague I think was a pretty open time. Jazz. My father liked jazz. So there were these cultural things which were seeping through and I was always upset that I couldn’t be part of it and that it was so closed.</p><p>“We couldn’t travel and we couldn’t say what you wanted to say. It was just terrible. I remember, actually, when I first visited Greece, I was sitting at the Acropolis and just looking at the sea and I remember I thought ‘This is just so beautiful. If I die now, I don’t mind.’ Because for me, it meant so much to be there and actually experience that beauty because I never thought this would happen.”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EaW4ifV5ffA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At first I was frightened; I was overwhelmed because it was just too much. The skyscrapers, the people, the noise. At the same time, it was wonderful, but I was scared. I remember I was staying at some Czech’s apartment in the Upper West Side and I decided I had to go to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. I went to through the park [Central Park] and I got to the museum and I thought ‘I wasn’t killed, thank God.’ Because you heard all those stories about Central Park, I thought ‘My God, it’s so dangerous,’ but of course then you realize it’s not. I found the people, people who didn’t even know me, they were so helpful. It was just so different. It took me, I would say, after I returned there with a green card – because I picked up the green card in London – it took me about six months when I got used to New York and I realized that it’s a city where you feel anything can happen. Any minute, anything. Anything good, anything bad. And it was an excitement that kept you on your feet, in a sense.”</p><h4>Relationships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G-TH5sM2Zdw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I first came to New York and I lived there, I felt the ocean. I felt the distance between America and Europe; I really did. When I was in London, I didn’t seek the Czech community, but I did at first when I was in New York. There was this Czech girl who took care of me. I met her in the church somewhere in Astoria, so I was friendly with her and sometimes there used to be some veselka [social gathering], this sort of thing, so I used to meet other Czechs. But to be honest, very often I used to come back quite depressed. After a while I decided that I prefer to be with Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are lots of interesting Czechs there, but you don’t necessarily get to see them. Initially, it was an impulse because you feel so far away from home and really, at least I felt, that Europe was far. I felt a great distance.”</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
Olga Prokop
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Olga Prokop was born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1949. Her father was an officer in the military and her mother stayed at home and raised Olga. Later, her mother would become the director of a nursery school and her father worked for Škoda. Olga’s family moved to České Budějovice when she was two and, a few years after that, to Prague where she started school. Olga says that when she was growing up, her head was ‘full of the West.’ She loved movie stars, music, and fashion, and especially enjoyed borrowing <em>Seventeen</em> magazines from friends. While at <em>gymnázium</em>, Olga says that she wanted to study medicine, but that she was offered a spot in the school of dentistry instead. By the time she was to enroll, however, Olga had decided to move to Britain to marry her high school sweetheart. She arrived in London in the summer of 1968, with her wedding planned for August 28. Her mother arrived on August 19 and, on August 21, they received word of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Olga says that the two did not receive word of her father for several days.</p><p> </p><p>Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.</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
Americanization
Divorce
Fashion
gymnazium
marriage
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
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e6640e1f37dbdce79a28bfaaaa648e94
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>Hiding</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bi7XQlRhcks?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Her portion of the family became involved in the Heydrich affair. My grandfather was a lay president of the Russian Orthodox church in Prague and it was really his idea to hide the parachutists who killed Heydrich in the Russian Orthodox church in Resslova Ulice. So the Heydrich assassination took place in 1942 and the whole portion of my family on my mother’s side perished. My grandfather was executed shortly after the assassination. There was a mock trial staged by the Nazis where all the members of the Russian Orthodox church were sentenced to death and they were shot in Kobylisy, and my grandmother and my mother and her new husband, they went to Terezín, and from Terezín to Mauthausen, and my mother perished in Mauthausen.”</p><p><em>So your grandfather was an activist.</em></p><p>“My grandfather was an activist in the sense that he was a patriot. He was a member of Sokol and similar nationalistic organizations, and because of his involvement in these organizations he was approached when these parachutists who killed Heydrich needed to be hidden or sheltered. He provided the shelter in the Russian Orthodox church, which is now a museum.”</p><h4>Danger</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nq62le4ucN0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They not only killed the people who assisted directly, but also the family members. Often people ask me how come I survived and my brothers, and the only reason why we survived was because my parents were divorced. So even though it was a painful thing, it really saved our lives. My mother remarried and her husband also perished. The Gestapo did come a few times to our house, but my father, who was educated under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spoke German and he always managed to turn the Gestapo away. Sometimes he claimed that we were sick with infectious diseases which the Nazis were afraid of. Three times, he said that the Nazis came to get us as children, but he always managed to turn them away.”</p><h4>Prague Uprising</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HokwmFWMIDE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I do remember the revolution. I was nine years old. I remember we didn’t go to school because there was already some unrest, but we went to the island Žofín, which is right near the Národní divadlo [National Theatre]. We were there with my brothers and then we saw that people started to hang Czech flags – the tricolore – and so my oldest brother, who was 14, said ‘It sounds like trouble,’ so we ran home, and the shooting started. I remember there was a Protestant church right across from the house where we lived and one of the Nazi snipers holed himself up in the tower of the church and was shooting at people, but eventually he was also annihilated.</p><p>“But then I have memories of driving through the streets of Prague and there were Nazi sympathizers. I remember a woman walking barefoot with a huge picture of Hitler hanging from her neck, covering her entire body, and she was holding a wooden pistol, like a mockery, and pointing it to the picture of Hitler. So they tortured her, humiliated her, etc. And then I remember the Nazis hanging from the lampposts. As a nine-year-old I was very impressed by that picture, even though as soon as we passed that kind of scenery, my father pushed my head down under the car seat.”</p><h4>Hiccup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YoYtfV8_Vqw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was 15 years old, the communists decided that I couldn’t continue my education. It was interesting because I lived in a neighborhood where also lived the later president [Václav] Havel. As a matter of fact, we were classmates in the same public elementary school for five years. That was a fate that I shared with Havel. He was in the same predicament when the communists came; he was also not allowed to go to school, and he worked in a brewery from what I remember. I think for a while in a chemical factory and later in a brewery. Some of his plays refer to this.</p><p>“When I was 15, the communists said that my education was finished and my parents – my father and my stepmother – they put up a tremendous fight. Everything failed, but then of course my stepmother prevailed because she figured out a way to move me out of Prague and to the village where she was schoolteacher and she knew everybody and everybody knew her. I worked in a chemical factory too, in a lab, Spolana Neratovice, a chemical factory in a small town called Křinec. I worked there for a year and, after a year, I was no longer a bourgeois element, but the working class decided that I needed to further my education, so they sent me to a gymnázium. But the only concession I had to make was that I couldn’t return back to Prague, so I went to a gymnázium in Nymburk.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jfsrCW1yUvg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were 400 Czech tourists and we didn’t know who was an agent. Probably for every bus there was an agent, or maybe two, so I didn’t know if it would be possible to escape. But then one day, they took us to the beach, which of course was a tremendous treat for all of us who grew up in a landlocked country, and then at the beach I decided that I’ll make my escape. I felt the agents lost control of us – who was in the water, etc. – so I left from the beach, and because I was afraid that I would be conspicuous I didn’t have anything with me except my pants and a shirt and a bathing suit. So I made a clean break. The communists gave us pocket money worth six dollars, so I had less than six dollars because I already spent a little bit of it. Even though I brought my diploma onto the ship, at that point, when I was on the beach and I felt I had the opportunity to leave, I didn’t even have the diploma.”</p><h4>President</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dtX19jcUgVY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s very interesting because here we decided not to split into two nations. Even though the official name of that organization is the Bohemian Hall, we feel that Slovaks are our brothers, and I always felt that they should be encouraged. As far as I’m concerned, we didn’t split; I consider it still a Czechoslovak organization. Naturally, there is some conflict and controversy about that too, because there are people who perhaps don’t like the Slovaks and there are some Slovaks who don’t like the Czechs, but as far I’m concerned, it’s one nation.”</p><h4>What If</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kX-fyirZkcw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In my opinion, it would have been a horror. I mean, I did experience it a little bit in Teplice, where I worked after my graduation. But the subservience that we were forced into, the insincerity, the inability to trust anybody, to be able to speak freely; in my opinion, it was horrible. Destruction, really, of a human spirit. This is why I treasure this country most because, quite to the contrary, it encourages you. And I would say I am probably a little bit of an individualist, but this country kind of appreciates it.”</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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Paul Ort
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paul Ort was born in Prague in 1936. His father, Miloslav, was a surgeon, while his mother, Ludmila, stayed home to raise Paul and his two older brothers. When Paul was three, his parents divorced and his mother soon remarried. In 1942, Paul’s family became involved in the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich when his grandfather, a lay official of the Russian Orthodox Church in Prague, helped hide his killers – Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. Paul’s grandfather was executed by the Nazis, and his grandmother, mother, and stepfather were sent to Terezín and Mauthausen, where they died. Paul and his brothers went to live with their father, who later married their governess. At the age of 15, Paul was sent to work at a chemical factory in the small town of Křinec for one year. He then attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Nymburk. Paul was admitted to the medical school at Charles University and graduated in 1961. He worked for one year as a trainee in orthopedics in Teplice.</p><p> </p><p>In 1962, Paul received a tourist visa for a trip to Tunisia. While on the beach with his tour group, Paul left the group and hitchhiked to Tunis where he made contact with a diplomat from the West German Embassy who helped him claim asylum. Paul eventually received permission to immigrate to the United States and, in 1963, moved to New York. He took a qualifying exam which would allow him to work in the United States, and then traveled to Venezuela to visit family members. While there, he was offered a job as an expedition doctor, and spent one year in the Venezuelan jungle. Paul returned to New York in 1964 and completed an internship at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center. When Paul was offered a residency in orthopedics at Bellevue Hospital (in conjunction with NYU), he moved to Manhattan. He worked as an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years and, in 2005, was offered the job of chief of orthopedics at the VA NYC Medical Center. Paul believes that his career has flourished thanks to his move to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Paul’s first visit back to Czechoslovakia was after the Velvet Revolution; he says that his acquaintance with Václav Havel (with whom he attended elementary school) prevented him from being allowed to return under communism. Since his arrival in the United States, Paul had been involved in the Czechoslovak community in New York. In 2011, he served as president of the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. Today, he lives in Manhattan.</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
Concentration camp
Divorce
Education
Gabcik
Healthcare professionals
Heydrich assassination
Krinec
Kubis
Nazis
Terezin
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
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>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.</p><p>“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.</p><p>“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.</p><p>“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”</p><p>How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?</p><p>“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”</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
Peter Demetz
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second 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
1948
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
World War II
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7c46e6abfdf6728f7f88fa82470d2a66
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>Divorce</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xW3k77OfBg0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”</p><h4>Bombing of Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Cq9f43kjWE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”</p><h4>Prison Visit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mY-k8GtjGEw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”</p><h4>Barely Graduated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cXz1EFXTab4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”</p><h4>Business Principles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F2DMGMCo6A4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”</p><h4>Student Trade Union</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Rr0WO4C8cc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of it.’”</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
Peter Palecek
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2531" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler1.jpg" alt="Peter Palecek 2012" width="250" height="417" /></p><p>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437/http://recordingvoices.blogspot.com/2012/06/peter-palecek-on-his-father-general.html">Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.</a></p><p> </p><p>As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2530" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-16.jpg" alt="Handler-1" width="350" height="584" />Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.</p><p> </p><p>Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.</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
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Catholics
CKD
CVUT
Divorce
Education
German
gymnazium
Occupation
Political prisoner
Prison
Svatoborice
Terezin
Vertel
VSE
Warsaw Pact invasion
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
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>Massacre Survivor</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hyqD8HBFXQU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”</p><h4>Opinions Hurt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tlzpSg6Eixc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”</p><h4>Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A3Na8BQnvdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fou0milWM60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.</p><p>“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QkstvhUWd2A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”</p><h4>Mistake</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x71Xtz_qLIQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?</p><p>“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”</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
Vera Plesek
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper <em>Hlasatel</em> for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.</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
Concentration camp
Discrimination
Divorce
Family life
Healthcare professionals
Kosinova.
Prison
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers