In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
]]>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from gymnázium, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
“Sport – that was really my hobby. Skiing, and later on I did windsurfing. I built by myself the whole board, so we were doing some windsurfing on the lakes. Other than that, sport was the big escape for people. Camping, going out to the forest, because everybody was leaving the city and going to – they called it a chalupa [cottage]– and going to villages and escaping from the city.”
“In 1962 we went to Vienna and I was nine years old, and when you crossed the border – everything in Czechoslovakia was kind of drab, gray and brown – we went to Austria and it was like a different world. The gas stations with the colorful flags and colors everywhere and new cars. I think that left a huge impression on me. [I thought] ‘I want to live here,’ you know? And Coca-Cola and fries! Eating fries was like ‘Wow.’ It was amazing. That definitely had a big impression on me. It was just once. The funny thing was we had really little pocket money, so we were traveling in Austria by hitchhiking on the highway. It was pretty cool. My dad, he spoke German fluently, because he was born there. Some people let us sleep in their houses. It was great. It was so special.”
“It was amazing. Suddenly you can read. There were new magazines, every month, coming out; new information. People were talking on the radio and on TV about what happened in the ‘50s in the Czech Republic, when they executed any opposition and [had] the show trials. I was 15 years old, but it had a great impression on me; I just hated communists. Then the Russians came in August, and it took like two years to break everybody, and that’s my disappointment with the Czech nation, that we gave up way too easily I think. I’m not saying that we should fight, because we didn’t have a chance, but what happened was people renounced their opinion really quickly. And I think it was much worse in the ‘70s maybe than in the ‘50s, although there were no executions or anything like that. But it was like the dark ages, culturally and morally. Yeah, I think the ‘70s was a really bad time, and when we saw the movie about Milos Forman [What doesn’t kill you…], he was talking about it and he said ‘There was no hope; it will be there forever.’ But 1968 was just amazing. It was so refreshing and everything.”
“We boarded the ship to Venice and we had a big luggage – for a one-day trip to Venice! And everyone was looking at us and, honestly, I was scared. I was really scared. Because you don’t know what to expect, you are leaving everything behind you, and so I didn’t enjoy this sailing across the sea too much. We got to Venice and they said ‘You from Czechoslovakia, there’s one gate and everybody else goes to the other gate,’ and they don’t even open the [other] passports, like Dutch and German; they just went through. And I felt like ‘That’s the reason I have to leave’ because it was so humiliating. I felt justification, like ‘I have to leave this.’ But the Italians told me, ‘You don’t need, for a one-day trip, this huge luggage, so put it back on the ship.’ Another thing, they left our passports on the ship. So I said ‘Ok’ and I took the bag with money and laminated [documents] inside and I went to the toilet, and I had a little pocket knife and I was ripping this bag to get the money and stuff out. I was so scared, but I got it out.
“So we went to Venice and we asked for asylum, and they said ‘No, don’t do it now. Come back when you are coming back and then you can do it.’ So we are wandering across Venice and we went to St. Mark’s Piazza and there were all these tourists having a great time, and we were kind of desperate. So we went back, but we didn’t have our passports, so one Italian guy offered to go to the ship to pick up the passports and some luggage, but he brought the luggage of some other person, so it was a mess; it was complicated. And after that, the Italians took us to the police station, they did a short interview with us, and they gave us tickets to Latina, which was a refugee camp close to Rome.”
“Our sponsors were a group of people from the United Methodist Church in North Carolina, in Raleigh, and it was just a group of fantastic people. Me and Zuzana, my ex, we are not religious people. I wouldn’t say we are atheist; I believe in something spiritual, but I am not necessarily Catholic or Baptist. But these people, they saw one paper with a really bad photo of us, and they decided ‘We want to sponsor these people.’ When we got to the airport, one of them took us to his home; we stayed there for two days; they found an apartment for us. They paid for an apartment for us for six months, they paid for our insurance, they gave us a car, they provided furniture for our whole apartment. Everything. The furniture, every piece was different, but who cares? And when we told this to our friends and relatives in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t believe it. They said ‘What do you they want for it?’ I said ‘Nothing. They want to help.’”
“I know people that went back right away, but I never had any intention to go back because I was so impressed with Americans, with their hospitality, and how they accepted us. That’s the major difference, I feel. And I’ve had big arguments with Czech people about like ‘Be proud that you are Czech,’ and I said ‘You know what, this is my homeland.’ I was treated so well here and when I go back I just don’t feel it. So no, I never had any desire to go back.”
Milos began working for Vodní stavby, the largest building company in Prague. He started as a draftsman and later worked his way up to engineer and manager. Milos says that because he was not a member of the Communist Party he was denied higher-level management jobs. He is particularly proud of working on the Prague Metro system during his years at Vodní stavby.
With his wife under some pressure from the secret police and his daughter being denied entrance to a high school she hoped to attend, the Zivnys began to think about leaving the country. In 1984 they received permission to travel to Yugoslavia for vacation and, the first day there, Milos, Zelmira and their son and daughter crossed the border into Austria. Milos says that his first thought was to go to Australia, but instead they were helped by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. In February 1984, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California. Milos found a job working for a cabinet shop – thanks, in part, to his knowledge of the metric system. After a few years he opened his own cabinet-making company with a partner and ran it for close to 20 years. After retiring, Milos and Zelmira became heavily involved in the local Sokol organization and enjoyed other opportunities with the Bay Area Czech community. Today, Milos and Zelmira live in the house they bought shortly after moving to Oakland.
]]>Milos Zivny was born in Kroměříž, a city in Moravia, in 1935. His father worked as an accountant for a state health insurance company while his mother stayed home to raise Milos and his two younger sisters. Following the Communist coup, Milos’s mother worked as a nurse and his father was kicked out of his job and worked in a factory in Brno. As a boy, Milos was a member of the svaz mládeže youth organization and also enjoyed playing sports, particularly basketball and volleyball. Prior to attending a technical high school in Vsetín, Milos was sent to Zlín to work in the Bat’a factory for one year. After four years of high school, Milos studied engineering at Vysoká škola železničná, a technical university in Prague. It was there he met his wife, Zelmira. The couple married in 1955, before graduating from university.
Milos began working for Vodní stavby, the largest building company in Prague. He started as a draftsman and later worked his way up to engineer and manager. Milos says that because he was not a member of the Communist Party he was denied higher-level management jobs. He is particularly proud of working on the Prague Metro system during his years at Vodní stavby.
With his wife under some pressure from the secret police and his daughter being denied entrance to a high school she hoped to attend, the Zivnys began to think about leaving the country. In 1984 they received permission to travel to Yugoslavia for vacation and, the first day there, Milos, Zelmira and their son and daughter crossed the border into Austria. Milos says that his first thought was to go to Australia, but instead they were helped by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. In February 1984, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California. Milos found a job working for a cabinet shop – thanks, in part, to his knowledge of the metric system. After a few years he opened his own cabinet-making company with a partner and ran it for close to 20 years. After retiring, Milos and Zelmira became heavily involved in the local Sokol organization and enjoyed other opportunities with the Bay Area Czech community. Today, Milos and Zelmira live in the house they bought shortly after moving to Oakland.
“I don’t remember too much the beginning of the War but I remember especially the end of the War. The situation of Kroměříž, in central Czechoslovakia – or this time, Böhmen und Mähren – was on the way for American pilots going from Italy bombarding Germany, going over Czech Republic. And every day we heard this humming and saw thousands and thousands of B-17s and B-24s flying over, and the sirens of course. The Germans had flights all around but they were not shooting because the plans were really high. But it was something that I never forgot because all over you see the [hum of the planes], and they were floating down these small strips against radar. And this I remember very well.”
“There was some special rule at this time. Communists will tell you when you graduated from high school or university, they tell you ‘You will be working in this town at this post.’ They gave you a special paper called umístěnka and they shipped you there. But we got married the last year of university because we knew when we got married they would send us to one place, not husband to Slovakia and wife to west Czechoslovakia or something like this. We were married in the beginning of the last year, and she started working in Prague in Czech rozhlas [radio] and after we graduated we had some special meeting with the people from university and they were actually sorting out where we were going. I claimed that my wife is already working in Prague; she has a place in Czech rozhlas and I would like to get my special paper for working in Prague. And they accepted it. It was actually good. The special paper meant that I started working for a company in Prague, and the company was Vodní stavby. It was the biggest building company in Prague. They had around 10,000 people working there; it was a huge company.”
“My first year in university. Because I was playing very good volleyball and basketball and our school team had some friendship with DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) with a school in Dresden and I was on this team. We went there for one week, playing volleyball and basketball, and some travel. This was the first time I was able to go to a foreign country. I was already in university – 1955.”
Was there a marked difference between East Germany and Czechoslovakia at that time or were they quite similar?
“They were very similar, but the DDR was not strict about… Everything in Czechoslovakia was government owned. In East Germany, there were still some private, small shops at this time. You could go to a small bakery and buy something; there was absolutely nothing like this in Czechoslovakia. But the system of produce was very similar. They had maybe some more stuff – for example, I remember raisins. They had more raisins; we could buy raisins in Dresden, but not very often in Prague. But we had more lemons; they had almost no lemons. Some things were really strange. They had restrictions in foreign trade in all communist countries, but each communist country had some slight difference. But there was no big difference.”
“There is two parts of the Czech community. There is one Czech community which is old. They are immigrants or daughters and sons of immigrants which are getting very old. This is Sokol itself. We are mostly around 60, 70 or 80, and this part is unfortunately going down. There is no way to get young people. We are trying, because there is a new Czech community in Silicon Valley. There are really a lot of young people who came here for work or girls who came to au pair and got married here. A couple of years ago they asked for a contribution to a Christmas party, making vánočka (Želka baked I think eight vánočka). We went there and there were 200 kids! Czech origin, Czech parents or half Czech. This is the young community we are trying now to bring to Sokol, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work too well. Because Sokol, even in the Czech Republic, it’s not… The younger generation has a completely different point of view.”
At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
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Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.
At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
“I played guitar. When I was about 14, I went to work for a summer in a cinderblock factory. It was hard work, but I made some money and bought my guitar. That’s also a time when I met a lot of people. You look, it’s a cinderblock factory, but everybody was an ex-professor, ex-teacher, ex-accountant, because they lost their job and the only thing they could do was doing manual labor. So that was another thought, ‘Now hold on just a minute, this is not right.”
“My father was always kind of enterprising, and what happened is he was a mechanical engineer taking care of construction machinery. At that point in time, there was a problem. They had a high rate of breakage, and he came up with an invention how to grease and maintain those things. And he was talking to everybody ‘Please start doing this,’ even going to the Ministry somewhere in Prague, but nobody wanted to do it. So he decided ‘Ok, I’m going to do it on my own.’ And he did. Except eventually, he was jailed and sentenced for reintroducing capitalist enterprise. So he spent I think about a year in jail in Jáchymov, in those uranium mines. And he was so good of an engineer that even when he was in jail he tried to make things better, ‘How can you do this better?’ So, as a matter of fact, they even let him out early for good behavior.”
“I went through college and then graduate school in a very good time. I started in ’65. In a couple of years, the Prague Spring started, and you could see it in schools. Suddenly it was open. They taught pretty much a more Western style. I got my undergraduate degree in political economy, graduate degree in business management, and postgraduate in systems engineering, and those were all things they pretty much taught Western style management, and I knew more about the stock market than people in the U.S., and systems engineering as a discipline – it was more related to what I did when I finished university – it was not so well-known even in the U.S. It started to be taught some ten years later, kind of building big systems and things like that. So that’s why I’m saying that it was a good time; because at the same time, the Prague Spring started at that time. There were a lot of new ideas.”
“We were very much in touch with what was going on, and I knew some people who signed it and things like that. But what was happening – I guess it was happening at every company – everybody had an interview and was asked ‘Sign this document that you do not agree with it Charter 77.’ I had a problem, so again I opened my mouth, and I eventually signed it, but I put ‘Signed under duress’ or something like that. That was an additional reason they were kind of saying ‘Well, you’re not going anywhere in your career.’ We had copies distributed. We had a copy of it; it was an underground copy, but yeah, we had it.”
“We were trying to go [to America] on – I don’t know what kind of visa it is – but reunion of family, because my father was already in the U.S. and he was a naturalized citizen at the time. But we needed my birth certificate and all the kids’ certificates to be able to prove that I’m his son and these are really my kids and we didn’t know that, we didn’t have anything. My family sent us photocopies; that was not good enough, it had to be originals. Finally, my family sent it through somebody who went to Greece. Well, the scumbag asked for a lot of money for doing that, but never delivered. My father started threatening that he’s going to put Interpol on it. Eventually, we got the documentation that we needed, but it took close to a year. Other people sometimes left after four months and were on the way to the U.S. or Australia. We’d been there for a year.”
“Those were not easy times, because when we moved in, we didn’t have anything. You wanted to cook dinner, we don’t have a pan, we don’t have any plates and things. So everything you had to buy. We came really with a pair of t-shirts and jeans for each of us. So you had to buy from scratch and start from scratch. Friends of my father gave us some tables. We bought a mattress to sleep on and stuff like that, but it took time until you set yourself up. We didn’t have anything.”
“We went to a few meetings with people, and I didn’t like one aspect of it. You had generations of immigrants – some people came during WWII, some people came after ’48 when it changed, then some people came in between, and then ’68 was another move, and then we came in ’78. Now what I didn’t like much was that people living in the U.S. were trying to tell me how it is, when I just came from there and knew. Their view was totally skewed because they – well, we didn’t like what was happening either – but they knew, ‘We know everything and this is what it should be like,’ and it was more like they were angry at the system, and I didn’t want to deal with that much. Especially, I didn’t want to talk so bad about the country back home, because then I would be talking bad about my family who is still there, about my friends who are still there, so I kind of avoided that for that reason.”
Otomar completed high school in 1949 and says he was lucky to be able to continue his studies in mathematics at Charles University, as many of his classmates were not given that opportunity. Otomar says that his university years passed relatively quietly because he was not politically active. He says he is proud of the fact that he was never asked to join the Communist Party, because officials knew he was a ‘hopeless’ cause. He remembers in particular being sent to a labor camp for one summer while still a student. Upon finishing his degree, Otomar applied for postgraduate studies, but, because of his father’s intelligence background, he was rejected. He was placed as a junior assistant at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), in the faculty of electrical engineering. Otomar says he was fired about six years later as a result of ‘political changes’ and had a very hard time finding a job, again because of his father’s previous intelligence position. He finally found work at a computer research institute where he and his colleagues were tasked with creating Czech computers. Otomar remembers this being very difficult, as they had little to no access to equipment and scientific knowledge from outside of the country. He was later able to return to research at Charles University, where he received his doctorate in 1963.
Otomar attempted unsuccessfully to leave the country several times, both legally and illegally. He finally had the opportunity in 1966 when he was permitted to accept a job at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for one year and bring his wife, Olga. Otomar says that he felt obligated to return to Czechoslovakia after the year, but his brother convinced him otherwise. In Cleveland, Otomar and Olga had their son, Michael, and became involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). They became American citizens in 1974. Otomar is well known in his field of applied mathematics and was a Humboldt scholar at TU Darmstadt in the mid-1970s. His son Michael speaks Czech, and his wife Olga cooks traditional Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian food. Otomar and Olga frequently visit the Czech Republic and are in regular contact with their families there, thanks to Skype. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
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Otomar Hájek was born in 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, where his father, František, a military officer and diplomat in the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, was stationed. When his father became head of military intelligence in 1935, Otomar’s family moved back to Prague, but then left again four years later when his father was appointed military attaché to the Netherlands. Following demobilization of the Czechoslovak military, Otomar’s father became an officer in the French Foreign Legion, and the family moved to Algeria. The Hájeks subsequently spent time in Southern France before they were evacuated to London in 1940. After his father died in a car accident in 1941, Otomar’s mother Ružena, despite having no work experience, found a job as a radio announcer at the BBC. During WWII, Otomar attended the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain. Otomar, his mother, and his brother moved back to Czechoslovakia after the War, and he says they were very happy to be back.
Otomar completed high school in 1949 and says he was lucky to be able to continue his studies in mathematics at Charles University, as many of his classmates were not given that opportunity. Otomar says that his university years passed relatively quietly because he was not politically active. He says he is proud of the fact that he was never asked to join the Communist Party, because officials knew he was a ‘hopeless’ cause. He remembers in particular being sent to a labor camp for one summer while still a student. Upon finishing his degree, Otomar applied for postgraduate studies, but, because of his father’s intelligence background, he was rejected. He was placed as a junior assistant at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague), in the faculty of electrical engineering. Otomar says he was fired about six years later as a result of ‘political changes’ and had a very hard time finding a job, again because of his father’s previous intelligence position. He finally found work at a computer research institute where he and his colleagues were tasked with creating Czech computers. Otomar remembers this being very difficult, as they had little to no access to equipment and scientific knowledge from outside of the country. He was later able to return to research at Charles University, where he received his doctorate in 1963.
Otomar attempted unsuccessfully to leave the country several times, both legally and illegally. He finally had the opportunity in 1966 when he was permitted to accept a job at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for one year and bring his wife, Olga. Otomar says that he felt obligated to return to Czechoslovakia after the year, but his brother convinced him otherwise. In Cleveland, Otomar and Olga had their son, Michael, and became involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). They became American citizens in 1974. Otomar is well known in his field of applied mathematics and was a Humboldt scholar at TU Darmstadt in the mid-1970s. His son Michael speaks Czech, and his wife Olga cooks traditional Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian food. Otomar and Olga frequently visit the Czech Republic and are in regular contact with their families there, thanks to Skype. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
“Things seemed right; not entirely right, but somewhat right. Things were far worse in Poland, where a person who was a Polish politician who lived on our street in London by the name of Mikołajczyk – they settled accounts with him by machine gun. Assassinations and so on. Things in Prague seemed to be ok, but not exactly right. And the bottom dropped out of things completely in February 1948.”
“Things were getting progressively worse at the university. I kept my head down, I did not collaborate with anybody with anything. I was not a member of the quite standard communist youth organization, kept that quiet. They sent me to a labor camp for one summer after the first year at university, where things were bad. Really bad. We were guarded by armed guards, work was very heavy, food was terrible, hygiene was unbelievable – there was an epidemic of typhus and essentially everybody got it. I don’t know why I was sent there. I think it was a sort of general warning, or a matter of principle; ‘Let the guy work his way.’”
“Essentially, immediately after the Communist takeover, we destroyed all our address books and diaries. We started avoiding all people who weren’t extremely close friends, because we would endanger them or they would endanger us once they were arrested. Whoever didn’t do that caused havoc among people. We didn’t read newspapers. We didn’t read magazines because there were very few of them. Books, new ones, weren’t very interesting. We borrowed books, one from the other; these in time became tattered and we still have a couple of those here. Social life was very circumscribed. One did not want to endanger others and be endangered by them. So if someone was your friend, he was really a close friend.”
“We were supposed to come up with Czech computers. We started out about six years behind the world situation, state of knowledge of computer design, manufacturing, and so on, and ended up about thirty years later [behind] because it was so slow. No contact with the outside world; occasionally we got a magazine, a professional magazine. Complete isolation, even from the Russians and the Poles.”
Do you think the nature of coming into a brand new industry, like creating computers allowed for a certain leeway?
“Yes, very much so. Very much so.”
That you didn’t have the bureaucracy that didn’t understand…
“They didn’t understand. There’s a standard story of a minister coming to inspect and learning about semiconductors and saying, ‘Socialist engineering needs conductors. Not semiconductors. Complete conductors.’”
“What was very unpleasant for anyone in the sciences was access to periodical literature. That was almost non-existent. One thing that is curious and somewhat funny – we got Russian books. I soon learned that we had no textbooks and I learned Russian at university, not in high school where I was supposed to learn it. Technically, I was extremely proficient in Russian. The Russians produced a lot of books themselves and sold them extremely cheaply. A poor university student could acquire a reasonable library. There was a shop in almost all larger cities, which on Friday mornings, showed new acquisitions and we rushed there. And they also then started translating American, good American textbooks. So with a couple of years delay, one could see what was happening. But, otherwise, no contact with world science. This probably hurt physicists far more than mathematicians who needed this, and publications, and occasional contact with other colleagues. They [physicists] need labs, apparatus, extremely expensive things. So a number of people who otherwise would have gone into physics and into medicine went into mathematics.”
“Our impression when we first came to the U.S., Olga and me – Olga had not been out of the country before, I had spent the War outside and so on. We felt – we agreed that both of us got this impression individually, not by osmosis – as if we had come home. As if we had come back to pre-War Czechoslovakia or something. People were normal, in a sense. As if we were beginning a normal life again. Our son was born here. He prides himself on being the first American. He was the first one who had a passport. We had re-entry permits and he had a passport.”
So do you think the system was what turned the people into something different?
“Yes. There was social engineering. There was even the phrase ‘an engineer of human souls.’ Definitely. There was an explicit attempt to do that, to change people’s natures, to change the nature of a human family. Not only society and community, but even a family.”
Peter says that there is a good-sized Slovak community in the Milwaukee area, which his mother has been involved in since moving there. He was a member of the Tatra Slovak Dancers of Milwaukee for a number of years. In 2001, Peter met his Slovak-born wife at a Slovak folk festival. The couple married in 2002 and speak Slovak at home to their two young children. They travel to Slovakia once a year to visit family and friends. Peter says that he ‘feels like a Slovak-American’ but does not rule out the possibility of returning to Slovakia on a permanent basis. Today, he lives with his wife and children in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
]]>Peter Esterle was born in Bratislava in 1973 and grew up in a small town called Zohor, located northeast of the capital city. His father was a meteorologist and his mother worked for IBM. Peter has a younger brother and a younger sister. In 1980, Peter and his family received travel visas for a vacation to Yugoslavia; however, instead of returning to Czechoslovakia, they crossed the border to Austria. The Esterles lived in Vienna for over one year; Peter and his sister attended school there and his father found work as a truck driver. Peter’s family had friends who had left Czechoslovakia previously and were able to help Peter’s father find a job selling machine tool equipment. In 1982, the Esterles moved to Milwaukee. Although Peter spoke Slovak at home with his family, he says that he was able to pick up English fairly quickly. In 1984, Peter’s family moved outside of Milwaukee to Franklin, Wisconsin. There Peter finished grade school and attended high school. While in high school, he began working for his father’s company, a machine equipment service and repair business. Upon graduating, Peter worked with his father while studying electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee part-time. In 2002, Peter began working at a foundry where he currently works in maintenance, installation and controls engineering.
Peter says that there is a good-sized Slovak community in the Milwaukee area, which his mother has been involved in since moving there. He was a member of the Tatra Slovak Dancers of Milwaukee for a number of years. In 2001, Peter met his Slovak-born wife at a Slovak folk festival. The couple married in 2002 and speak Slovak at home to their two young children. They travel to Slovakia once a year to visit family and friends. Peter says that he ‘feels like a Slovak-American’ but does not rule out the possibility of returning to Slovakia on a permanent basis. Today, he lives with his wife and children in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
“He was just upset with the lack of freedom, but the details he would know more than I. He actually wanted to escape by flying over the Dunaj (the Danube River) into Austria – there’s a peak above the river – with a hang glider at one point. He wanted to actually do that. So those were some pretty extreme measures that he was planning.”
“I had a lot of friends in Austria and it’s like they’ve been wiped from my memory. I started in a preschool, you could say, in jasle in Zohor and then from there I went to first grade in Austria and had all these friends and it was as if they never existed. So then when we got to the States, I started in second grade at that time and it’s as if Austria didn’t even happen. It was wiped from my memory along with the language. That’s one thing I remember, and I wish I would have kept my German. But if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
“I found out later that after my family didn’t come back, they were basically all questioned. My grandparents were questioned; my aunt and uncle were questioned. They [were asked] ‘Where are they? When are they coming back? Why didn’t they tell us that they were going to stay longer?’ It was actually pretty bad. They, the police or whoever, were trying to pry out of my closest family members – threatening them with prison time and whatnot – trying to pry out where we went and why we hadn’t come back. So that was pretty bad.”
Was anybody arrested?
“Not that I know of, but apparently it got pretty close to where…As I mentioned – and it’s all very vague to me – some of the family was more communist than not and they were under pressure to tell what had happened or where we went. Something transpired, which I didn’t get the full details of, that they did actually say where the family ended up and there were some repercussions, the details of which I’m not too aware.”
“Primarily at home [we sic.] speak Slovak and, interestingly, they speak Slovak very little. They understand absolutely everything in Slovak, but they’re now… because of TV and my son is going to school, he speaks primarily English at home, but he understands everything in Slovak, so it’s strange. But when we do visit Slovakia, he’s able to switch over and speak Slovak. It takes him, I’d say, about three or four days and he’s speaking all Slovak, and then when we come back to the States, he’s speaking Slovak for three or four days and then he’s back to English again.”
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
]]>Pierre Dobrovolny was born in Brno, Moravia, in October 1933. His father Ferdinand was an artist who worked with, among others, the Czech archeologist Dr. Karel Absolon. Pierre’s mother Růžena was a seamstress. Growing up, Pierre wanted to become a radio mechanic but, he says, this profession was a predominantly feminine one at the time of his graduation, so he went to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study electrical engineering instead. He graduated from technical university in 1958 and says he was ‘lucky’ to do so, given his outspoken nature and his critical view of the Communist government at the time. That same year, Pierre married his partner Vera. His first job upon graduation was at the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where he worked on equipment to measure radiation.
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
“When I was in the dorm I believe they knew everything I was talking about. Because those speakers… Every room had a speaker – like a radio – and the speakers were built two-way. And there was a secret room right at the front of that dorm where nobody was allowed to go, only some students who were Communist Party members. Besides that they had also guns with them. So there was something special going on in that room. And I believe they were listening to people in the dorm. But I didn’t… somehow I didn’t care at that time. It caught up with me later. I mean, somehow I was lucky enough to graduate. Then I got my first job which was with the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where we were building equipment to measure nuclear radiation. I was there for about half a year, and I found out that there was an opportunity to do a PhD – some PhD openings. And since I worked in the ultrasound labs, it was kind of close to what I had been doing before. I applied for that, and they made such a thorough research of my background that they kicked me out, even from my job.”
“There were two parts of the personnel department. One was like here, open where all the files are kept, and there was the other part of it, which was political, which was secret – all your background, even that you had forgotten a long time ago is still recorded. So that guy, who was the head of that department said ‘What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here! You were let go!’”
“You get blamed for it when it is not finished, that thing, but you have what they call responsibility without authority, or something of this kind.”
Vera: “In those days, if something went wrong, he wouldn’t lose his job, but he would go to prison.”
“That’s right, because it could be looked upon as sabotage. So all my colleagues over there, you could see the attitude, they were staying away from it, because the general opinion was – we got all the papers, all the research reports about how things were put together as far as the transmitter is concerned and you could see what they did, how they did it – and the general opinion was ‘It’s an experiment in physics.’ Not something where things have been concluded to the very end. Because some stuff was made really thoroughly, and some other parts were made really in such a way that nobody who was a real engineer would put it together that way.”
Stan himself was not allowed entrance into university and began working as an electrician at the JAWA factory. After one year there, he began his mandatory two-year military service. He returned to work for JAWA and, as his skills as an engineer were noticed, he was offered the opportunity to study electrical engineering at a technical school. Stan took night classes and received his four-year degree. He then became the assistant to Dr. Tomáš Horňák, the technical director at the computer research institute [Výzkumný ústav matematických strojü – Research Institute of Mathematical Machines] in Prague.
In the fall of 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion, Stan and his then-girlfriend, Wendy, decided to leave the country. They received visas to visit family in Vienna for one week and crossed the border. Dr. Horňák, who had left the country earlier that year, helped them find a place to live and helped Stan secure job at Siemens. In February 1969, Stan and Wendy (who had since married) were sponsored by an aunt and moved to the United States. The pair settled in Mountain View, California (they later moved to Redwood City), and Stan got a job at HP where he worked for 25 years. Among other accomplishments, he received a patent and industry-wide recognition for digital computer circuitry.
Stan and Wendy received American citizenship and had two sons. Stan’s hobby of electric cars turned into a business and he ran an electric car dealership for many years. Stan often visits the Czech Republic and says that he ‘feels at home’ when in Prague; however, he has no plans to return there permanently. Now widowed, Stan lives in Redwood City, California.
Stan Skokan was born in Prague in 1942. His father, Vladislav, worked as the chief technical officer for his grandfather’s HVAC business, while his mother, Zdeňka (who had studied electrical engineering), worked for a lighting company in Prague. In 1947, Stan’s father traveled to the United States for an official business trip. Although the 1948 Communist coup occurred while he was there, Stan says that he decided to return on behalf of his two sons. Stan’s grandfather’s business was nationalized and his father was sent to work in a labor camp at Jáchymov for 18 months. Stan’s mother, who had stopped working when her sons were born, returned to work designing appliances. When Stan’s father was released, he began working on a construction site and eventually made his way back up to designing heating systems.
Stan himself was not allowed entrance into university and began working as an electrician at the JAWA factory. After one year there, he began his mandatory two-year military service. He returned to work for JAWA and, as his skills as an engineer were noticed, he was offered the opportunity to study electrical engineering at a technical school. Stan took night classes and received his four-year degree. He then became the assistant to Dr. Tomáš Horňák, the technical director at the computer research institute [Výzkumný ústav matematických strojü – Research Institute of Mathematical Machines] in Prague.
In the fall of 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion, Stan and his then-girlfriend, Wendy, decided to leave the country. They received visas to visit family in Vienna for one week and crossed the border. Dr. Horňák, who had left the country earlier that year, helped them find a place to live and helped Stan secure job at Siemens. In February 1969, Stan and Wendy (who had since married) were sponsored by an aunt and moved to the United States. The pair settled in Mountain View, California (they later moved to Redwood City), and Stan got a job at HP where he worked for 25 years. Among other accomplishments, he received a patent and industry-wide recognition for digital computer circuitry.
Stan and Wendy received American citizenship and had two sons. Stan’s hobby of electric cars turned into a business and he ran an electric car dealership for many years. Stan often visits the Czech Republic and says that he ‘feels at home’ when in Prague; however, he has no plans to return there permanently. Now widowed, Stan lives in Redwood City, California.
“I have a very interesting memory, which can be pinned down to an exact date, so I know how old I was when I remembered it. I remember sirens, and at that time we lived on Londýnská 81 and we were going from the second story down to the basement, and I remember sitting underground in the cellar with one of the persons being dressed up in military fatigues with a gas mask, and he was the organizer of the safety of the citizens. So that is one. Then I remember, after it was all clear, we walked out of the basement and I ran to the street, and at the beginning of the street there was a barricade which people pulled out the cobblestones to force the tanks to go up so they shoot at the bottom of the tanks and people could hide behind the barricades. So that was the time of the uprising of May 5 through May 9, 1945.”
“In 1947 my father traveled to the United States. He was invited by a Jewish family from New York, and I know very little detail about that trip; again, I was too young. But from what I know, it was some kind of business trip on behalf of the Czech government, because my father was traveling on a diplomatic passport. He visited major corporations, like General Electric where I remember he was telling us that he saw a drawing of a locomotive on a huge wall of the building, and he was impressed by the planning and design here. I don’t know how far west he went; I know that he brought some things from Yellowstone Park and he brought flags of several universities, so I think he was visiting some universities. And that’s about all I know.
“Now, my father was caught by the communist revolution, actually being here in the United States, and he was forced to make a decisions: to stay and hope to get the family here, or come back. Well, my father made a crucial decision that it will be actually better if he returned. So he made a decision on behalf of me and my brother to return and face the consequences. In 1949 all the family property was confiscated, my grandfather’s factory was nationalized and, in 1949, my father was arrested and served 18 months in a labor camp.”
“I was going to enter my military service at the time of the Berlin Crisis [1961] so I was called in one month earlier, and they wanted us to become combat-ready very quickly, so I didn’t go through the normal boot camp that every military starts with. Instead they tried to get us driving as fast as we could. Now, I prepared for the military service a little bit by getting a truck driver’s license before getting to military service hoping that it will help me get a better assignment, and I did.
“But the surprise came about two weeks after the beginning of military service. The [officer] goes by my platoon and asks ‘How many of you have a high school diploma?’ Well, the mix there was that there were a few of us from Prague, and there were many sheepherders from the eastern part of Slovakia, so there were only two of us that raised our hand. So he picked us up and we were given train tickets to go back to Prague, and we were sent to a special course for movie operators, because every military base had their own movie theatre where they were showing the propaganda movies. So they needed two of us as movie operators and I was one of the two, and we were sent to Prague.
“Now, the course was at Prague Castle, and this is something unheard of. In military service, every soldier has to take care of all the chores himself. You have to make your bed, you have to clean your toilet, everything. Now in this special course we were housed together with the presidential guard. We got up in the morning, had breakfast, and had cleaning ladies making our beds and cleaning up after us. So we were sitting in the training courses during the day, we were eating in the cafeteria with the presidential guard, and I was serving my military service in Prague and going home for weekends. Unheard of during boot camp, but that was my luck.”
“During that time when I was finishing up my evening studies, one of the top scientists of the [computer] research institute had one personal assistant and was looking for a second one, and there again is a turn in my life. I was offered a job and I was picked to work with Dr. Tomáš Horňák, and he was the technical director of the institute and he worked independently, not directly on the design of the computer, but on the design of the instrumentation, so the engineers working on the computer can see the progress of their work and debugging and so on. So I worked with Tom for several years. We filed together for some patents, and we liked each other and worked together very well.
“In the meantime, the other top scientists of the computer research institute were slowly disappearing, escaping to the West. Every summertime vacation some of them didn’t come back from a trip to southern Europe and they were slowly making their way to the United States. That started with the founder of the computer research institute, Dusan Svoboda, who happened to be a classmate of both of my parents during their studies in university. So I didn’t know it at that time, but I found out later that that may have been the connection which got me the job at the computer research institute.”
“After one week of having a visa, we went to the Czech Embassy and they gladly extended our visa to one month. After one month, they gladly extended our visa to one year. And that was because the Czech government was hoping that some of the young people will come back and they wanted us to have the opportunity to come back legally. While I was in Vienna I received a letter from the director of the computer research institute [saying] that any time I decide to come back our jobs are guaranteed. Well, six months later, I became an illegal refugee because I left Vienna for the United States.”
“I was quite happy in the job that I had at HP and, again, that’s one of my lucks of life. People in America talk about employment as a job. You are trained to do something, you do your job, and that’s it. I was one of the lucky people [in] that I was rarely given a job. Maybe at the beginning, maybe at the end of my career at HP, but most of the time at HP I was proposing my own ideas; I was implementing my own ideas; I was very respected; and, despite the fact that I had no degree and was surrounded by all PhDs, I did very well. I retired from HP after 25 years with a golden name tag which meant that I can come back anytime and do anything in the company that I want to. At that time, very few people had that privilege.
“During my career there I met most of the HP executives. I had dinners with both Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. I knew them personally. I shared equipment with them occasionally. Bill Hewlett sat on top of my bench during the HP-35 project, which was the first pocket scientific calculator, and I did the largest chips, made by HP at the time, for it. I had a very satisfactory career.”
Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
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Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
“He had a lot of friends still in the town who knew who he was and what he did. So they came to him from time to time and said ‘Hey Tomas’ – his name was Tomas too by coincidence – ‘Can you fix my watch?’ or ‘My ring broke, can you fix it for my wife?’ And he did. And mostly only as an exchange for favors. The other person says ‘Oh I have hens; here is a dozen eggs’ or something like that. Money in many cases didn’t even exchange hands. However, and this is the bad part of Czechs, somebody turned him into the secret police. So during one of his night shifts in the wood factory, they came. They took him inside the hall, they turned on the circular saw, and they cut his fingers. He brought those home in the bloody napkin – the ends of the fingers from his right hand – and from that time, I could never ever become a member of the Communist Party, and that’s why I have a lot of resentment against the regime and everything there. Because it was to me something so brutal, so inhuman. I don’t know a lot of circumstances around it because I was a little boy, but I never will erase from my memory for the rest of my life, the totally bloody napkin, soaked with the blood and there were the three ends of his fingers. He tried to I guess take them to the hospital if they could sew it back, but they couldn’t because I guess it was too much delay. And this piece of the memory, it is too strong to forget about.”
“My father was the leader of a tourist club [turistický klub], I believe for 50 years, consistently, and along with that, I have a lot of great memories of traveling around the country. This club had been very active. They had built a relationship with a big factory in the town which provides electrical parts for automobiles, and they had a bus which was used a lot of the time during the week to take the people to different meetings or so forth, but on the weekends quite often the bus was available and the tourists somehow made the arrangements for some kind of fee to have the bus, and traveled to different parts of the country. So that’s why I spent easily every other weekend somewhere in the mountains, a lot of hiking, climbing, this kind of stuff.”
“Thankfully to my work and also to my sports – from childhood I was very heavily involved in a variety of sports, including skiing, cross-country running, and various other sports – so I had an opportunity to see a different part of the world, the lifestyle, life experiences and different ways how people lived their life. I wasn’t dependent only on the relatively small point of view living in a small town in southern Moravia.”
“I started working for a big computing center which was working with the data from a variety of different factories and organizations and returning them back. I was working as a hardware engineer so my duties were to be on standby, ready, when any part of the computer fell down. So I have to pick up there, find out what’s wrong, fix it, then the people who operate the computer continuously could process the data. But as I mentioned, this type of work didn’t really [appeal to] me very much. I am more of an action person, and those waiting periods, when I had to literally sit in the office and wait ‘til something goes bad was not, in my mind, very productive.”
“After my first trip to Holland, when I returned back, the people from the Communist Party approached me in the company, and they offered me a membership in the Communist Party, which I kindly refused. I tried to be diplomatic back then, so I said ‘It’s a big honor for me, but a big responsibility. I have to think about it,’ and so on and so forth. So I tried to procrastinate; however, it didn’t work very well. Another trip to Holland came quickly, and another, and they approached me again and I turned it down. I sort of refused. I said ‘I love to be and perform as an electrical engineer, I love the technical science, but I would prefer to stay aside from any kind of political activity.’ So for that reason I didn’t join it. So then a friend of mine who had been a member of the Communist Party – he mentioned to me that during the meeting, which they have on their own time, was mentioned that my next trip may not be west, but east. As little I knew at the time, I thought this was kind of a fair warning, and anywhere in the world I would be much better off than perhaps in the Gulag islands or anything like that. I don’t know if the situation would go that far eventually, but who knows today. It could, because there had been many people who disappeared. So I started to plan my escape or runaway from Czechoslovakia. On my very last trip to Holland, I had been able to carry with me my university diploma and a few other documentations, birth certificates and stuff, and I sent that to the friend of a friend in Germany with a note that I will pick it up sometime later.”
“I was not sure what responsibilities the tour guide had from the bus. If he perhaps will try to hold me, maybe even under gunpoint, I had no idea. So when the people got out of the bus and were picking up luggage, I used that as an opportunity when it was kind of chaos created, and it was late at night, so when I ran behind the corner during the darkness I thought perhaps I wouldn’t be followed or I wouldn’t be noticed. So I separated myself with my daughter from the group rather quickly, literally running away. Then I found that I was not followed by anyone, so the rest of the night I was just walking. But that short moment to getting from the place where we were getting out of the bus at some hotel, I literally ran away.”
“I found a home here. I am very thankful that even through some struggles I had a very warm welcome and help from Americans. So I find my home here, and I have to say sometimes I do have kind of mixed feelings because whenever I go there, of course I still have tons of friends there. It is very nice; I have to say, every time I am there for two or three weeks, I become a little bit homesick and I gladly return back here where I feel I am home.”
In early 1982, Viera began making plans to leave the country for a second time. Because she felt it would be difficult to travel while working at the university, she quit her job there and found employment with an aviation company. After receiving the necessary permissions and visas, Viera went on a two week trip to Turkey in June 1982. She claimed political asylum while there and lived in a refugee camp in Istanbul for five months. She subsequently traveled to Italy where she stayed in a refugee camp in Rome for several months before flying to the United States. In March 1983, Viera arrived in New York City and says that, when she got off the plane, she felt like she was ‘back at home.’ An acquaintance of Viera’s helped her find a job as a draftsman in Bethesda, Maryland. She says that as her English improved, she was able to work her way up to an engineering position in the same company. In 1989, Viera received American citizenship and was granted permission to travel to Czechoslovakia. She visited very soon after the Velvet Revolution and brought her son back with her to the United States. Viera is an active member of the Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C. and has hosted the society’s picnic, helped organize the Svätý Mikuláš [St. Nicholas] party, and served on the board of directors. Today, she is an engineer for the U.S. Postal Service and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
]]>Viera Jamrich was born in Nitra, western Slovakia, in 1952. Her father Ludovit was an accountant and her mother Antónia was a clerk at a canning factory. When her father was promoted at his work, the family moved to Prievidza. Growing up, Viera also spent time in Kamanová, where her mother’s family lived, and Topol’čany, where her father inherited land and built a house. Viera was attending a technical high school when, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, her mother decided to emigrate. Viera accompanied her mother to Vancouver where she took English classes and found a part-time job. Viera’s mother was unhappy abroad and, although Viera did not want to leave, the two returned to Czechoslovakia in August 1969. After graduating from high school, Viera studied mechanical engineering at Slovak Technical University (STU) in Bratislava. Her first job after graduation was working for the engineering company Montostroj. Later, she joined the faculty at STU and taught engineering classes. At this time, Viera married and had a son named Marek.
In early 1982, Viera began making plans to leave the country for a second time. Because she felt it would be difficult to travel while working at the university, she quit her job there and found employment with an aviation company. After receiving the necessary permissions and visas, Viera went on a two week trip to Turkey in June 1982. She claimed political asylum while there and lived in a refugee camp in Istanbul for five months. She subsequently traveled to Italy where she stayed in a refugee camp in Rome for several months before flying to the United States. In March 1983, Viera arrived in New York City and says that, when she got off the plane, she felt like she was ‘back at home.’ An acquaintance of Viera’s helped her find a job as a draftsman in Bethesda, Maryland. She says that as her English improved, she was able to work her way up to an engineering position in the same company. In 1989, Viera received American citizenship and was granted permission to travel to Czechoslovakia. She visited very soon after the Velvet Revolution and brought her son back with her to the United States. Viera is an active member of the Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C. and has hosted the society’s picnic, helped organize the Svätý Mikuláš [St. Nicholas] party, and served on the board of directors. Today, she is an engineer for the U.S. Postal Service and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
“I loved it. I mean, I loved it. That was the first time that I opened my eyes – I was 16 and 17, that was the time – and I was like a sponge. I absorbed everything. Everything, good and bad, but I lived only a good life because I could not afford to be some silly person. They put us in school where we learned English, and in the evening I would be at home. Actually, I was able to get a part-time job with a Jewish Czechoslovakian person who emigrated before 1938 and he was so kind. He had plenty of servants; he didn’t need me really, but he was kind enough that he paid me and all my job was to serve him lunch, really on a silver platter, because he wanted me to have something to do. He wanted to have a reason to pay me for some work so I could earn the money. I mean, let me tell you, it was a totally unnecessary job, but he was kind enough that he gave it to me so I could make money, I could go to school and enjoy my life while I was in Vancouver.”
“Not quite. I did not have extreme difficulties for one reason. Because I’m the black sheep of a family. What that means is, my parents were both in finances, and lots of people wanted to get into college of economy but me, because that’s what my parents were. I went to an engineering school. I’m a mechanical engineer. The system at the time – what we were told at the time – you imperialists were going to attack us and you were going to destroy us. So therefore, we needed our men who would be working in military factories, making tanks and everything, and we women needed to run the show. So they welcomed us with open arms. If I had wanted to go maybe into a different field, maybe if I wanted to be a doctor or a dentist, maybe that would have been a problem with my father’s situation, but it wasn’t because I applied for mechanical engineering.
“We were taught quite well. What it was is – I understand it now, I didn’t understand it then – the communist system said basically this: ‘We are paying for it; therefore, you will take the classes we tell you to take. You are not going to take any Mickey Mouse classes. There will be no Mickey Mouse classes. We are paying for it; therefore, you take Math I in the first semester, Physics I first semester, Statics, and there were five courses in every single semester. By the end of the fifth year, we will turn you into a mechanical engineer.’ And indeed they did.”
“When I finished college and I became a university professor, I didn’t go to church in Bratislava. I would not dare. I didn’t want some students to see me. They could go because they were students. If you are a student, you can go to church. What is going to hurt you? Nothing. But if you have this job and somebody sees you and somebody reports you, you will get into trouble, and I couldn’t get into trouble. It’s not like here, you quit and you go somewhere else, no. It stays in your record forever, and so I wouldn’t go to church. But when I back to my little village, behind everybody’s back, that’s when I went to church. I carried on my ordinary life. That’s where you could be the person that you were.”
“I quit [my job at the] university because I knew that I would not be able to get the permission to travel, so I quit the job and I went to work for an aviation company, and I worked there for only half a year. I have thought that was bad behavior on my part. I did purposely quit my job and went there to deceive them because I wanted a fresh start and I wanted the permit. I needed permission from the president of the company and I needed permission from the Communist Party member, and I needed also from the police department in my region. I needed so many permissions that yes, well, I deceived them. I admit that. I had done this, and so I went and worked there, only for one reason. Really I changed my job to be able to do this because otherwise I would have never been able to get out.”
“What I do remember is that when I got off the plane and when my foot touched the ground of the connecting bridge, I had this feeling that I never had before and I don’t think I will ever have again. It felt like I was back at home again. It wasn’t Canada, but it was this Western society, Western, American society that I felt that I was finally back at home. I didn’t have to pretend anymore, I didn’t have to try to be married, I didn’t have to do this, I didn’t have to do anything that I had tried to do in that system. It was what I realized, everything I had been doing was nothing else but hard work. It was work on my part because I tried to fit. I didn’t fit. Once I came back from Vancouver I didn’t fit ever again, but I tried. I knew who I was, I was a 20 year old young person, so I tried. Nobody told me, it wasn’t my mother or my father who told me ‘You have to do this and that.’ I tried on my own, but I never fit. And when I came here after so many years, that foot touched that ground, that’s what I remember how I felt, ‘I’m finally back at home.’ I don’t have to pretend anymore, anything. And I was free.”
After the War, Vladimir’s parents returned to the United States and, in 1947, Vladimir himself followed. He settled in Cleveland, working first as an assistant to his father, who was making cabinets for televisions at the city’s DuMont plant. In 1952, after a number of deferments, Vladimir was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was supposed to be sent to Korea, but in fact spent most of the Korean War stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In 1955, Vladimir married his wife, Clara, an American of Polish extraction. The couple have two children, Gerald and Jeanette. A life-long radio enthusiast, Vladimir has been involved in Slovak-language broadcasting in Cleveland for over half a century. He has hosted the Slovak Radio Hour on Cleveland’s WCPN with his son Gerald every Sunday since 1985.
]]>Vladimir Mlynek was born in the small village of Hamry, in northwestern Slovakia, in 1926. His parents, although both Slovak, had met in Cleveland, where they were married and had already raised two children, Vladimir’s brother and sister, Steve and Irene. Just before the Great Depression, the whole family returned to Slovakia. They bought a mill, from which Vladimir’s father, Štefan, operated a cabinet-making business. When they were old enough, just before WWII began, Vladimir’s brother and sister returned to the United States. When the family cabinet business failed towards the end of WWII, Vladimir moved with his parents to the more industrial town of Považská Bystrica. There he trained to become an electrician and started working for the local arms factory, later known as Československá zbrojovka.
After the War, Vladimir’s parents returned to the United States and, in 1947, Vladimir himself followed. He settled in Cleveland, working first as an assistant to his father, who was making cabinets for televisions at the city’s DuMont plant. In 1952, after a number of deferments, Vladimir was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was supposed to be sent to Korea, but in fact spent most of the Korean War stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In 1955, Vladimir married his wife, Clara, an American of Polish extraction. The couple have two children, Gerald and Jeanette. A life-long radio enthusiast, Vladimir has been involved in Slovak-language broadcasting in Cleveland for over half a century. He has hosted the Slovak Radio Hour on Cleveland’s WCPN with his son Gerald every Sunday since 1985.
“After the War, you know, the Germans left, there was no more need for ammunition so the plant was kind of idled. But the electrification was very damaged, we had a lot of work to get this thing under control – to get this thing back into operation. Although we had our own generating plant, but the Germans were smart, they took the exciters. So we could not use the generators. But we had extra exciters buried in the ground. So we got those out and in about five days we had one generator running, so we could provide the power for the city and some of it for the plant. So we were not that much damaged. But the electrification from outside was totally disturbed. You know, the towers were knocked out… were blown out… the poles and stuff like that. So that took time, but we had power about three weeks after the War was over.”
“We had several American pictures, but we had them hidden, we couldn’t play them because under the Germans, they wouldn’t let us play them. We had some Czech, we had a couple of Slovak films, but these came from Bratislava, you know, we always got a new film every week. And I don’t know what kind of film we were preparing because we never –played it – the Russians came and they wanted to… First of all, we got new machines, new projectors, Zeiss, from Germany, very good machines. And how they found out, we don’t know. But they wanted to take those machines to Moscow. They wanted to dismantle them and take them. But we got smart. We knew about this thing, that they wanted to come in and take these machines. So we dismantled them and buried them in the ground. So they were looking for them. Well, when they came in there were no machines and we said ‘well, the Germans took them’. They couldn’t believe it that the Germans had the time to dismantle them but we put them away, the Germans didn’t take them. They were brand new machines. We used them about six, seven, months, that’s all we had them, because we’d just put them up. And we had these old Phillips machines and so, while the Russians were over there, we didn’t want to put these new machines, we put these old Phillips machines up and we used those.
“Well, they didn’t care too much for them, because they were not as good machines as the Zeiss ones were. So, anyway, that was the experience we had with the Russians. Well, you know, the bad problem was we had movies projected on a wide screen, you know, wide and large. So they came drunk and they shot the screen and everything, shot the audio speakers behind the screen – they did that! Oh, how many times they did that! We couldn’t do nothing about it. We just shut it down and that was it! So this is the way it was. So many times we went without a movie three, four, weeks!”
“I went to Prague by night train, you know, the express night train. I got to Masarykovo Nádraží and I got right away to the consul, and the consul told me ‘We have no time’, he says ‘You better get out of here fast, because they are checking everyone coming in and out of these offices.’ That was the American consul. So, they put me on a train from there and he says ‘Let’s get you out of the country before they close the borders.’ So, when I come to Aš, which was the border town, the officer that came to check the various paperwork, he says ‘Well’ – he says, ‘according to my instructions, you should be held up over here. But…’ he says, ‘you want to go, you go. I didn’t see you. If anybody comes to check on me, I did not see you!’ So I got out, and I went through Germany on a train, all the way to Paris. From Paris, we were going to go to Calais. We got to Calais and we could not get onto the Queen Mary – the Queen Mary was the ship that was going to take us to the United States – because there were too many wrecks in the Channel. They did not have it all cleaned up yet. So they were not going to take a chance with that big boat going through the Channel. So they put us on a small boat and took us to Dover, England.”
“Father was always a narodovec – he wanted to go back home, he wanted to go back home. Well, at that time, Masaryk came over here and he was kind of soliciting for citizens. He wanted to have them go back home, he said ‘You know, you don’t have to be in America, we can make America at home, you’ve got the opportunity to make America in Czechoslovakia.’ At that time Czechoslovakia was kind of building up, sprouting up. And so he went over there, he went back. Mother was very much against it, she didn’t want to go. But they finally went in 19… I think it was just before the Depression, I don’t know exactly what year it was. So, through the Depression, they were already there. And father brought a lot of money over there and he lost it all. He lost over a million dollars in investments, because he got into politics. And he got on the wrong side of politics. So there were, you know, we were Catholics, and we got into a village where there were a lot of Lutherans. They were wealthy Lutherans, there were a lot of farmers. So, when he got this mill, he was expecting that he was going to get a lot of business from them. Well, they made a point of not giving him the job because they were so against the Catholics at that time. There were only seven Catholics over there in that village. The rest of them were all Lutherans. So he lost everything over there. That’s the time, like I said, that he moved to Považská Bystrica.”
“When I came to Považská Bystrica, I heard the PAs, you know, we had a PA system everywhere. And the first thing they said was ‘So-and-so and so-and-so have these working hours. They did not show up and we want to know why.’ This was on the public address system! I said ‘What will they do? What will they do? Put them in jail or what?’ ‘Ah!’ they said, ‘they’re supposed to be in work and they didn’t show up.’ They said ‘They’re looking for them’. How do you like that? This was in 1984 when I came over there. A lot of things surprised me, which were never there before. You know, the Germans were very tough on us as far as working. If you didn’t show up for work they believed that you are sabotaging their process. So you had to have the right excuse why you weren’t there. But this? I thought that things had changed. They actually got worse – because they looked for you. Because they planned on you, that you were going to be working there. How much they worked, I don’t know.”
“You know, when the communists took over, that mill never got repaired. It was just a shambles, let’s put it that way. There was still machinery that my father built for that mill. It was still there, it was never removed, but it was all cobwebbed and everything and a lot of rats were in the basement and the lower floor. And as a matter of fact there was a generator that we installed for ourselves, for our own electricity for the mill. That was still there but it was all, you know, never used. So for the whole era of the Communists taking over, this was never used. So somebody was living in the upper quarter but the mill was totally destroyed.”
“In 1984, Public Radio came to life, and they were looking for something to fill the time. Because public radio didn’t have all that many opportunities. They didn’t have any money to pay for the program, and secondly they didn’t have any volunteers either. So finally they came up and said ‘Would you want to originate any ethnic programs on this station?’ So we organized a group and we got 13 nationalities. And we started up.
“The only problem is now that everything is digital. And we have to do everything ourselves. We have to prepare the program right down to the second. If we don’t, the computer cuts us off. So we’ve got to figure out very well how to do it now. My son, he’s an expert on the computers, I’m not. Anyway, so we cut the program on a Thursday. We’re not getting paid, but we’re producing a lot of money for the station. We had the highest, I believe, this is what they told us, we had the highest turnout of donations for that one hour. Even their programs didn’t turn out that much money!”