Peter Bisek
<p>Peter Bisek was born in Prague in 1941 and grew up in the Braník district of the city. His father was a civil engineer and his mother, who had studied philosophy and philology at Charles University, stayed home to raise Peter and his sister and two brothers. Peter enjoyed sports and was an avid basketball player. He recalls spending summers at a camp run by his Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren.</p><p> </p><p>Peter attended gymnázium but says that he was denied the opportunity to continue his education after abstaining from a vote to expel two of his classmates wrongfully accused of cheating. He found employment at a print shop in Prague and worked several manual jobs there before entering into an apprenticeship in typography. Peter was told that he would be sent to study graphic arts at Leipzig University, but four years later, he was denied the opportunity and instead offered membership in the Communist Party. He says that these events led him to make plans for leaving the country. In 1963, Peter married his wife, Vera, who worked in a publishing house. In May 1965, Peter and Vera took a bus tour to East Germany. They then changed their destination on their paperwork and traveled to Sweden, where they stayed for six months on a work visa. Peter says that although they could have easily stayed in Sweden, they both wanted to leave Europe, and he hoped to continue his education in the United States. In November 1965, Peter and Vera sailed to Brooklyn, New York, and settled in Astoria.</p><p> </p><p>Peter’s first job in the United States was as a linotype operator for Americké Listy, a Czechoslovak newspaper printed in Manhattan. He took English classes at NYU and, after joining the typographical union, decided not to return to school. In 1971, Peter and Vera moved to Long Island. There they had two children, Veronica and Jonathan. In 1986, after working for The New York Times and Newsday, Peter and Vera started their own typography studio called Typrints. The original Americké Listy folded in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution and, after a few months, Peter decided to revive the publication. The first issue of their Československý Týdeník (in 1997 renamed Americké Listy) came out in April 1990 and, for the next 20 years, Peter and Vera published each issue, until June 2010 when they retired.</p><p> </p><p>Peter has been active in the local and national Czech community. He is a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and on the board of directors of the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR). For six years, Peter served as president of the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, which runs the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden. During Peter’s term, the organization increased its visibility and membership, and added new students to its Czech and Slovak language school. In 1997, Peter received the Presidential Medal of Merit First Class from then-president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, for the role his paper played in the Czech Republic’s early acceptance into NATO. In 2005, Peter and Vera also received the Gratias Agit award from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs for “spreading the good word of the Czech Republic abroad.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In addition to his activities in the Czech-American community, Peter is an avid, internationally-recognized rowing coach and veteran oarsman. He has coached three U.S. junior national champions and is considering returning to his old rowing club in Prague to take a coaching position which, he says, would bring him closer to his son Jonathan’s family, now based in Plzeň. Today, Peter lives in Glen Cove, New York, with Vera, who is enjoying her new role as a grandmother.</p>
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Zelmira Zivny
<p>Zelmira Zivny was born in the village of Blšany in 1937. Zelmira’s mother grew up in Komárno on the Slovak-Hungarian border and had met Zelmira’s father while he was stationed here with the Czechoslovak Army. He then took a post teaching at a Czech school in Blšany, which was in the Sudetenland. When this area was annexed by Adolf Hitler as part of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Zelmira’s family was forced to leave. After moving several times in six months, Zelmira’s father found a teaching job in Kněževes, a town near Rakovník. Following WWII, Zelmira’s family moved to the nearby town of Jesenice where she attended school.</p><p> </p><p>Zelmira went to high school in Rakovník and then studied journalism at Charles University in Prague. Zelmira was an excellent student and, along with Jiří Dientsbier (who became a close friend), was offered membership in the Communist Party after her first semester. Zelmira had several summer jobs, including at a county newspaper in Podbořany, very close to where she had been born. During her last year in university, Zelmira worked at Czech radio (Český rozhlas). She and her husband, Milos Zivny, married during this last year as well and the pair stayed in Prague.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2564" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609102642im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/e-IMG_3268_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-IMG_3268_(WinCE)" width="400" height="299" /></p><p>Zelmira worked as a journalist for the magazine Svět v obrazech for many years and traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc, including to Uzbekistan. Zelmira says that things began to change after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She gave up her Party membership and helped Jiri Dientsbier publish a book. Coupled with her connections in the West (professional contacts as well as distant family members ), Zelmira began to feel a lot of ‘pressure,’ and she was taken in for questioning several times. When her daughter did not get into the high school she had hoped to attend, Zelmira and Milos began to think seriously about leaving the country. In 1984, they received passports and permission to take a vacation in Yugoslavia. Zelmira, Milos and their two children crossed the border into Austria and spent several months at Bad Kruezen refugee camp. With the help of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California, in February 1985.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1985, Zelmira was offered a job with the International Rescue Committee as a refugee resettlement worker. She later joined her husband who had started his own cabinetry business. Zelmira and Milos have been heavily involved in the local Sokol organization since their retirement. Although she says that Prague will always be in her ‘heart and head,’ she is very happy in the United States. Today she continues to live with Milos in the house they bought shortly after arriving in Oakland.</p>
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Zdenka Hauner-Manley
<p>Zdenka Hauner-Manley was born in Prague in 1954. She lived in the neighborhoods of Vinohrady and Zizkov with her parents and older brother. Zdenka’s mother, a Prague native, worked as an accountant while her father, who had been born in Prague and grew up in Hradec Kralove, was an economist for the Ministry of Agriculture. Although it hampered his professional ambitions, Zdenka’s father refused to join the Communist Party. Zdenka says that she ‘led an interesting cultural life’ with her family in Prague as they often went to the theatre, the opera, and historic sites. She also fondly recalls traveling abroad with her family to nearby countries like Bulgaria, East Germany and Yugoslavia.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenka attended <em>gymnázium</em> and says that her high school experience was ‘great’ as she met a group of friends who were politically like-minded and enjoyed similar activities. She took private German and English language lessons as well. Following high school, Zdenka studied dentistry at medical school of Charles University. In 1976, she traveled throughout western Europe, an experience which led her to realize how isolated she and her country mates were from the rest of the world. On a subsequent trip to Switzerland, Zdenka considered not returning to Czechoslovakia; however, she decided return in order to finish medical school. She graduated and began working as a dentist.</p><p> </p><p>In 1980, Zdenka met George Hauner, and the pair decided to marry and leave the country. Zdenka says that George shared her viewpoint that the communist system was ‘insane,’ and they both had career aspirations that could not be realized in Czechoslovakia. They married in January 1981 and, as they both had visas for a short trip to Austria, left the country the following month. After three months in a refugee boarding house, Zdenka and George arrived in New York City, assisted by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees and their sponsor, a friend of George’s.</p><p> </p><p>While at the Social Security office during her first days in the U.S., Zdenka met someone who helped her find a job as a dental assistant. She worked in that capacity while completing a post-graduate program at NYU and becoming a licensed dentist. Zdenka’s parents were able to visit her several times in New York, including a six-month stay after her son was born in 1987 (her daughter was born in 1996). She first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1989, two months before the Velvet Revolution and today, travels back to Prague each year where her father and brother still live. Today, Zdenka lives in Manhattan with her husband, Jim, and practices as a dentist.</p>
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Zdenek David
<p>Zdenek David was born in Blatná, South Bohemia, in May 1931. He moved to Prague at age seven, however, when his father Václav (a judge) was appointed to the capital’s circuit court. Zdenek spent most of WWII in Prague and remembers his schooling changing under German occupation. He says students at his gymnázium on Husova Street were taught no history during the War and were expected to learn subjects such as mathematics in German. Zdenek remained in the capital at the time of liberation and remembers ‘chaos’ as reprisals were inflicted upon ethnic Germans and those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Zdenek left Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1947, when he gained a one-year American Field Service scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Putney School in Vermont. When the Communist takeover happened in 1948, his parents urged him not to return home in light of the political climate.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609043310/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=sf.profile&person_id=3405" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Zdenek on the Wilson Center’s pages</a></p>
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Zdeněk Bažant
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3237" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609085212im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-119.jpg" alt="Zdeněk Bažant" width="200" height="253" /></p><p>Zdeněk Pavel Bažant was born in Prague in 1937. He was raised in Prague, though during WWII he spent a long period in southern Bohemia with his aunt. His father and grandfather were engineering professors ČVUT (Czech Technical University) and his mother – a junior colleague of Milada Horáková – held a doctorate in sociology. Zdeněk recalls the time following the Communist coup in 1948 as difficult for his family. He was labeled ‘bourgeois’ because of his parents’ backgrounds. His maternal grandmother had acquired a number of properties through the sale of her factory; at this time Zdeněk says that all of these buildings were nationalized. He says that it was at this young age that the idea of leaving the country began to germinate. An excellent mathematician, he was national champion of the Mathematical Olympics in 1955.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Zdeněk studied civil engineering at ČVUT and graduated at the head of the class. He was not, however, accepted into a postgraduate program, which he attributes to his decision not to accept an invitation to join the Communist Party. Instead, Zdeněk began working as an engineer for Dopravoprojekt, a state company, and was able to complete a doctorate in engineering as an external student. In 1966, after earning a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University, he traveled abroad on two fellowships, to Paris and Toronto, and then on a visiting appointment to Berkeley, California. Zdeněk was in Toronto during the Prague Spring in 1968. He and his wife Iva (whom he had married the previous year) were planning on returning to Czechoslovakia; however, upon hearing the news of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, they decided to stay abroad.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1969, Zdeněk was appointed associate professor at Northwestern University, and is still today at this school, holding a distinguished professorial chair in civil engineering and materials science. He is a world-renowned, frequently-published researcher with much of his work focusing on structural and materials engineering. Zdeněk and Iva have two children, Martin and Eva, who, although they did not learn it at home, can both speak Czech. Zdeněk enjoys many hobbies, including skiing, tennis, and playing the piano. His passion for skiing led to his 1959 patent of a safety ski binding which was mass-produced and became very popular among Czech skiers. Although he visits Prague several times a year and says he misses the ‘beautiful landscape of Prague,’ Zdeněk says that he has been ‘very impressed with America’ and has no plans to return to the Czech Republic to live. He also has no plans to retire. Today, Zdeněk lives with his wife (a retired physician) in Evanston, Illinois.</p>
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Vojtech Mastny
<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
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Vlado Šolc
<p>Vlado Šolc was born in Prešov in eastern Slovakia in 1972. He grew up with his mother, Anna, who was a sewing teacher, his father, Julius, who taught at a military school, and his older sister, Martina. Vlado’s family had a cottage near Lake Domaša, and many of Vlado’s fondest memories are of his time spent in the countryside where he loved to camp and fish with his friends. Vlado says that when he was younger, he loved animals and dreamt of being a zookeeper; he owned many pets, including snakes, mice, and guinea pigs. When Vlado was 14, he began attending a military school. His first year was spent in Košice, and he lived in a dormitory in Prešov for his final three years. The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 broke out during the time Vlado was at school; he says that he and his friends snuck out of the barracks to join the demonstrations in the city.</p><p> </p><p>Upon graduating, he was sent to a military airfield in Hradec Králové where he was an electronic communications specialist. After the split of Czechoslovakia, Vlado returned to Prešov to work at a military base there. At this time, he became interested in psychology and decided to pursue a degree in the subject. In 1997, he began studying psychology at Charles University in Prague after being discharged from the Army. One year he spent studying abroad in Finland. While at university, Vlado spent several summers working on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and met his future wife, Rebecca, there. After he graduated, Vlado decided to move to the United States. He and Rebecca settled in the Milwaukee area where Vlado found a job as a case manager. He is now a licensed therapist with his own practice. In 2006, Vlado began a training program at the C G Jung Institute of Chicago where he is studying to be a Jungian psychotherapist. Vlado and Rebecca have two children, a son named Emanuel and a daughter named Veronika. Although his daughter is not yet talking, he says that his son is learning Slovak and that they keep several Slovak traditions at home. Vlado lives in Glendale, Wisconsin, with his family.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609131419/http://www.therapyvlado.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vlado’s professional website</a></p>
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Vlado Simko
<p><img class="alignright wp-image-4000" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808051742im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/vlado-sis.png" alt="vlado-sis" width="250" height="370" /></p><p> </p><p>Vlado Simko was born in Bratislava in 1931 to a Slovak father and Czech mother. His parents, Miroslav and Mária, were both educators; his mother taught at a high school in Bratislava while his father served in the Ministry of Education. His sister, Olga, was born five years after Vlado. Vlado says the onset of WWII was difficult for his family, as his mother lost her job because of anti-Czech sentiment in the newly-independent First Slovak Republic. Towards the latter half of the War, Vlado and his family were evacuated from Bratislava and sent to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town in northwestern Slovakia. Upon their return to Bratislava, Vlado resumed his schooling. He spent the summer of 1947 in London as part of a student exchange program. After graduating high school in 1950, Vlado enrolled in Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine. While studying, he worked part-time in a physiology research lab. He met his future wife, Mary, who was also a medical student, while attending a concert. After finishing graduate school, Vlado and Mary married, and he found a job in the physiology department of the Research Institute for Human Nutrition where he eventually became director of the laboratory.</p><p> </p><p>Vlado says that he and his wife were given permission to travel outside the Eastern Bloc to attend conferences and present papers; however, they were not allowed to take their son, Daniel (who was born in 1959), with them. In the late 1960s, Vlado joined the Communist Party. He says that faith in the leadership of Alexander Dubček spurred this decision; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 led him to rescind his membership. It was at this time that Vlado began searching for ways to leave the country and sent out letters to his contacts in the West. He was offered a two-year visiting professorship at Cornell University in the School of Nutrition and, on April 1, 1969, left Czechoslovakia with his family. After three years at Cornell, Vlado completed a two-year fellowship at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, and was then offered a job as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Simkos lived in Cincinnati from 1974 until 1982 when they moved to New York City where Vlado became head of the gastroenterology department at the Brooklyn V.A. Medical Center.</p><p> </p><p>Vlado became involved in the Czechoslovak community shortly after arriving in the United States. He served on the board of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and is the current president of its successor, the Czech and Slovak Solidarity Council. Vlado is currently on the board of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Relief and is the executive vice-president of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU). Vlado refers to his immigration as ‘the best decision of [his] life’ and considers himself an international citizen. Today, he lives in Staten Island, New York.</p>
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Vladmir Pochop
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2533 size-full" title="Vladimir in 2012" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609195344im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/vladmir-pochop.png" alt="Vladimir in 2012" width="283" height="283" /></p><p>Vladimir Pochop was born in Lázně Bělohrad in northeastern Bohemia in 1946. He grew up in the town of Nová Paka where his grandmother owned a fabric shop. When her shop was nationalized following the Communist coup in 1948, she hid part of the stock so that it would not be confiscated; however, she was found out and arrested. Vladimir’s father offered to take the punishment for her and was sent to a labor camp in the uranium mines of Jáchymov. Vladimir (who was not told where his father was) says that once he was released, he had trouble finding work and ended up working menial factory jobs for the rest of his life. Vladimir himself had trouble getting into high school and, at the age of 14, moved with his mother and stepfather to Ostrava where he attended mining school. In addition to classroom studies, Vladimir worked in the mines on the weekends. On the recommendation of the school director, he was admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and began studying electrical engineering. After two years, however, Vladimir was put into a special program for computer science. He graduated in 1969 and, the following year, married Jana Pochop, whom he knew from his home town.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir worked for a technical consulting company which he said allowed him free reign to focus on his research in geometric modeling. In 1974, he was invited to spend one year at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Charles University in 1977. Although Vladimir was satisfied with his professional life, he says that living under communism was a struggle, as he and Jana had had trouble finding a place to live in Prague and he felt stifled by the lack of certain freedoms. In January 1980, the pair received visas to London for two weeks and, on their way home to Prague, got off the train in Munich and made their way to the American Embassy. Vladimir was questioned by U.S. military intelligence for four months. They were given asylum in Germany, Vladimir found a job at BMW and they moved into an apartment.</p><p> </p><p>In 1981, the Pochops received permission to immigrate to the United States, but they had to wait eight months as Jana was pregnant. Their son Jan was born in September 1981 and, in April 1982, the Pochops flew to Atlanta, Georgia. Two weeks later, Vladimir went to California in search of a job. When he found one at a start-up tech company in Silicon Valley, his wife and son joined him and the family settled in Mountain View. Vladimir and Jana had another son, Martin, in 1984. That same year, Vladimir joined the company Autodesk and, as a chief scientist there, helped to develop AutoCAD and other products. He became an American citizen in 1989 and today holds dual citizenship. As both of their sons now live in Prague, Vladimir says that he and Jana have considered returning to the Czech Republic. Today, they live in Concord, California.</p>
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Vladimir Maule
<p>Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.</p><p> </p><p>When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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