Bruno Necasek
<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>
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Joseph Pritasil
<p>Joseph Pritasil was born in Miřetice, eastern Bohemia, in 1925. He was one of seven children raised on a farm by his father, Antonin, and mother, Anežka. Joseph says he had to walk three and a half miles to school on a daily basis and, on Sunday, the family walked the same path to the nearest town to attend church. After receiving his basic education, Joseph attended metal-working school and, from 1942 until the end of WWII, he worked in a local factory as a machinist.</p><p> </p><p>Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.</p>
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Karel Kaiser
<p>Karel Kaiser was born in Domažlice in 1932 and grew up in nearby Kdyně. In 1938, he moved to Prague with his father and two older sisters – Karel’s mother had died shortly prior to the move. Upon graduation from high school, he studied architecture at Charles University for one year, but was then expelled because of his father’s position as a self-employed tailor. During a <em>brigáda</em> [work brigade] in Ostrava, where he was employed as a builder, Karel met his future wife, Vlasta, who was working as a secretary. The couple moved back to Prague, married and had two daughters, Miroslava and Iveta (who later Americanized her name to <a href="/web/20170609131421/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/yvette-kaiser-smith/">Yvette</a>). Karel began his career in theatre as a writer, but soon transitioned into the technical arts, working on sound, lighting, and set design. At Divadlo Na zábradlí he worked with Václav Havel and, while at D 34 (now known as Divadlo Archa), Karel met Josef Svoboda, a renowned architect and scenographer. In 1959, Svoboda invited Karel to join his Laterna Magika project, a non-verbal theatre which had enjoyed great international success the previous year at Expo ’58 in Brussels. Working as a theatre technician for Laterna Magika’s eastern touring company, Karel traveled extensively throughout the Eastern Bloc, visiting Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union.</p><p> </p><p>Karel says that the idea to leave Czechoslovakia had been germinating for a while, due to his treatment at university and his hope for his daughters to have a better life. But, he says, he was waiting for a ‘safe chance’ to move his family. In January 1968, he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, with the western touring company of Laterna Magika for HemisFair ’68. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Karel traveled back to Prague for a short visit, during which time he and his wife made a ‘quick decision’ that the family would leave the country. After he returned to the United States, Karel sent his wife an affidavit and she began securing visas and passports. In late December 1968, his wife and daughters traveled to England to stay with his sister for one month. They arrived in Dallas, Texas, on January 25, 1969. The family found a small apartment in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas and Karel found a job in construction. In 1971, he found employment at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel as a light and sound designer, while also working nights as a janitor. After 12 years, he became head electrician at the Hotel Anatole, also in Dallas. In 1999, Karel and his wife retired and moved back to Prague. Vlasta died in 2005 and Karel returned to the United States. He currently lives in Chicago with his daughter Yvette and her husband, Tim.</p>
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