Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Ambroz began to consider leaving Czechoslovakia. Through letters exchanged with his brother-in-law who had already emigrated to the United States, Ambroz made plans for his family to leave. In July 1969, the Skrovaneks went to Yugoslavia for a vacation, but instead of returning to Czechoslovakia, crossed the border into Austria. Ambroz says that while waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States, a family friend arranged for them to stay in a private apartment in Vienna. In November 1969, Ambroz and his family flew to Washington, D.C. They lived with his wife’s sister’s family for nine months before renting a home. In 1972, Ambroz bought a house in Bethesda, Maryland. Ambroz’s first job was installing and repairing car radios. He soon found employment as an electronic engineer, and through his career earned several patents. In recent years, Ambroz has become involved in the Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C. Now widowed, he continues to live in Bethesda, Maryland.
]]>Ambroz Skrovanek was born in 1928 in Senné, a small village in south central Slovakia. His father, Karol, was a state notary while his mother, Margita, stayed home and raised Ambroz and his two younger brothers, Tomáš and Pavol. When Ambroz was nine, the Škrováneks moved to Modrý Kameň for a short time, then to Devín, in order for Ambroz to attend gymnázium in nearby Bratislava. Shortly thereafter, Devín was occupied by German soldiers, and Ambroz says his family was encouraged to leave the area. They moved to Komárno, a town on the border of Hungary. Ambroz, however, stayed behind and lived in a dormitory while finishing school. From a young age, Ambroz was fascinated with radios and electronics. He attended Slovak Technical University (STU) in Bratislava where he studied mechanical engineering for his first two years, as his chosen field of study, electronic engineering, was not yet available. During his summer holidays, Ambroz worked at TESLA, which led to his being offered a job there following graduation; he subsequently worked as an audio electronic engineer at TESLA for over 20 years. Ambroz married Kamila, the daughter of a family friend, and they had two children together, Thomas and Eva.
Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Ambroz began to consider leaving Czechoslovakia. Through letters exchanged with his brother-in-law who had already emigrated to the United States, Ambroz made plans for his family to leave. In July 1969, the Skrovaneks went to Yugoslavia for a vacation, but instead of returning to Czechoslovakia, crossed the border into Austria. Ambroz says that while waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States, a family friend arranged for them to stay in a private apartment in Vienna. In November 1969, Ambroz and his family flew to Washington, D.C. They lived with his wife’s sister’s family for nine months before renting a home. In 1972, Ambroz bought a house in Bethesda, Maryland. Ambroz’s first job was installing and repairing car radios. He soon found employment as an electronic engineer, and through his career earned several patents. In recent years, Ambroz has become involved in the Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C. Now widowed, he continues to live in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Once I was assigned to the kitchen to wash dishes. I washed them very quickly – they were surprised how quickly – but every one was dirty. They had to delay military lunch for the generals for one hour until somebody else washed the dishes. So they were, I guess, inclined to kick me out, but they didn’t send me home. And once they woke up the whole barracks for military exercises at 12 midnight. So of course, everybody jumps into uniform and was running to the cars and running somewhere. I was running to the cars, made a turn to the garage, sat down, and slept for two hours. When they came back, I joined them and together we went back to the barracks. Nobody noticed me, I was not so important at all.”
“I had a car, and every year we used to go to Bulgaria or Yugoslavia for vacation, maybe a week or two weeks at the most. So then we spread the news that we are going for vacation in Yugoslavia. We went simply to the southern border at Komárno and down to Yugoslavia, but we did not go to the Mediterranean Sea, but we turned north to Austria.”
“[We] landed here in Washington, National Airport, and Albrecht’s family were expecting us, and since then they took care of us because we had to get used to this type of life. Without a car you cannot exist here. You cannot go shopping a mile and carrying back a load. So they were really very substantial friends to us, and I helped them if they needed some repair or advice – technical advice – cars or TVs or radios, everything around the house, like I am doing now.”
“So the first job I got was in a radio shop for repairing auto radios, installation and repair. The old one we have to take out and put a new one in. So I worked from January to May – I don’t remember, four or five months – and then I made ten repairs while the other technicians made one or two daily. The owner was quite impressed and told me ‘Hey Ambroz, would you like to become my partner?’ And I told him, ‘Well, I am appreciating your confidence and offer, but I want to go a little bit in a different world, I cannot stay.’”
Although Frank had been thinking about spending some time abroad, he says that, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, the decision to emigrate was ‘very quick.’ He and Otakara received exit permits and, ten days after the invasion, took the train to Vienna. Frank was encouraged to stay in Austria and even interviewed for a job at IBM, but ultimately, he and Otakara decided to move to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in October 1968, where Frank began taking English classes and became in involved in the Czech theatre group Nové Divadlo with his wife. While working for Hughes Network Systems, Frank lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and Prague for three years (following the Velvet Revolution). In 1998, his employer transferred him to Maryland. While living in the Washington, D.C. area, Frank has been active in the Czech community. He served as the secretary-general of Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) for six years and helped organize numerous congresses. Today, he is a consultant for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife.
]]>Frank Safertal was born in the Holešovice district of Prague in 1942. His father, also named František, had been arrested shortly before Frank’s birth because of his participation in an underground resistance group. Frank’s father was sent to a labor camp in Krems an der Donau in Austria for the remainder of WWII and only saw his son for the first time after the War ended in 1945. During the War, Frank and his mother, Milena, lived with her parents in Holešovice. Upon returning home, František became a manager of a dental sales company, but when the business was nationalized in 1948, the family moved to Jablonec nad Nisou in northern Bohemia where he became the quality control manager of a factory. Four years later, the family returned to Prague. Frank says that his father was passionate about sports and passed the hobby on to him. From a young age, he skied and played tennis and soccer. Influenced by one of his teachers, Frank became interested in music and learned to play piano. After grade school, Frank attended an industrial school, and then enrolled at the University of Economics, Prague (VŠE) for industrial engineering. He says that his time at university was ‘eye-opening,’ both intellectually and politically, and that he began to realize ‘how bad the regime was.’ Frank started a jazz band at this time, and was jailed for advertising dances. He says he was also influenced by Western artists in Prague (such as Gene Deitch and Allen Ginsburg), from whom he heard about life in the United States. Frank graduated from university in 1966 and served one year in the military near the German border in Klatovy. In 1967, he began working as a computer engineer at ‘the nationalized IBM.’ The same year, he met and married his wife, Otakara Safertal.
Although Frank had been thinking about spending some time abroad, he says that, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, the decision to emigrate was ‘very quick.’ He and Otakara received exit permits and, ten days after the invasion, took the train to Vienna. Frank was encouraged to stay in Austria and even interviewed for a job at IBM, but ultimately, he and Otakara decided to move to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in October 1968, where Frank began taking English classes and became in involved in the Czech theatre group Nové Divadlo with his wife. While working for Hughes Network Systems, Frank lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and Prague for three years (following the Velvet Revolution). In 1998, his employer transferred him to Maryland. While living in the Washington, D.C. area, Frank has been active in the Czech community. He served as the secretary-general of Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) for six years and helped organize numerous congresses. Today, he is a consultant for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife.
“My family had a very positive view of the Soviets. Number one, when I was born, my father was already in jail. He was jailed in 1942 – in the spring of 1942 – and he was in a labor/concentration camp called Krems an der Donau in Austria until 1945. And the camp, which was a mix between a labor camp and a concentration camp, was actually liberated by the Red Army. So my father had a very favorable view of the Soviets and the Russians because he was liberated by them, and he, quite frankly, escaped with his life. He was lucky to get home in 1945 and he saw me when I was three years old.”
“I think that it was a very good system, because in this industrial school one day week you actually had to work in a factory. Prague in those days had a lot of industrial productions, basic factories, basic Class A factories manufacturing trucks and railroad cars and streetcars and airplanes. So one day a week we have to go to a factory and physically work with the workers. That, I think, was a great experience to learn what really happens in manufacturing, what really happens in a factory, and I think it was a great experience. Whether it was in a metal working shop or whether it was in a tool making shop, whatever it was, you all of the sudden had an experience with the real world.”
“If you had an orchestra or a club – any kind of a social gathering – you had to have, under the communist law, something called provozovatel in the Czech language, meaning like a sponsor. You couldn’t just simply have a knitting club, just people getting together and knit, you couldn’t do that. You could knit, but you had to have a sponsor. And it would have to be an organization approved by the system. So we found a couple places where the organization – a youth organization or municipal organization – would allow us to practice and play under their logo. So one of our logos was Youth Group of Fidel Castro. My orchestra was known as the Storyville Jazz Band – Storyville was a part of New Orleans, we studied New Orleans in detail, including the maps – but we were playing as the Storyville Jazz Band, part of the Youth Group of Fidel Castro. So I have a photograph here somewhere where we’re playing, and above us is a big picture of Fidel Castro.”
“One of the laws in Czechoslovakia was you couldn’t put up a poster, because the police immediately figured out ‘If he puts up a poster, he’s organizing something,’ and that was a no-no. Of course, how do you advertise something all of the dances and all of the stuff, you have to have posters. I was one of the guys who made posters, and in known places in Prague I would go and post the posters. And so twice they basically arrested me for the posters, twice they interrogated me, twice I was in jail because of this poster business. But it wasn’t just the poster, because they always suspected something much more sinister. We weren’t really all that sinister. We just wanted to play jazz and have a good time, but the police and the secret police, they thought ‘Hmm poster.’ So I was in jail. And then I was in jail because I had a gun, which I inherited from my grandfather, and in those days in Czechoslovakia you couldn’t have a gun. I showed it to somebody and he reported it and so they came and jailed me.”
How long were you kept in jail?
“With the gun I was there for two days. In interrogation if you will. You know ‘Where did you get the gun? Who gave you the gun? Is there somebody else who has a gun?’ and that kind of thing.”
“There were limits on exports and imports of technology. For example, we were not allowed to import Western technology. Czechoslovakia couldn’t do that. So we were relying on Russian computers, Minsk, which were manufactured in Minsk which is today Belarus. That was the main center of the Russian computer industry. So these computers were decimal computers, and we had access already to magazines from the West and literature from the West. We knew that we were ten years behind in technology. So we worked on them, we did our work, but we knew that this was ridiculous, ‘What are we doing here? We’re working with something which is…’ So absolutely it was stifling. You couldn’t really do much. You had to do what you were told, but you couldn’t really innovate. You couldn’t come up with a better idea. The best people who were in the technology business in those days left or emigrated way before me. It was a nice job, put it this way. I got the salary and I had a nice office and I did interesting things. In those days, we wore white coats. The computer guys and gals wore white coats; we looked like physicians. But it wasn’t really motivating.”
“Most of the regiments came from Central Asia. Most of these guys couldn’t speak Czech or Russian. A lot of these guys were Asian folks. I don’t know what they told them, but I think they told them ‘You’re in Germany or some other Western country defending socialism.’ These guys were crazy. Well, they were not only crazy, they were kind of puzzled, they had a puzzled look on them, like ‘Where am I? What’s going on here?’ but many of them were crazy, shooting guns. All of the sudden in the middle of the city you had tanks and guys with the machine guns and bullets flying. It was terrible.”
Did you have any personal encounters with the soldiers?
“Many, many.”
Did you try to talk to them?
“Tried to talk to them. Well, that’s what we did for days and days. We would walk the city, we would sit there with flags and we would try to talk to them, because most of us spoke Russian. So we would approach them, and they were approachable. Not that they were not approachable, because they were village boys from Kazakhstan and they had no idea, so many of them were approachable, and many of them kind of talked. But they really didn’t know where they were. Well, I don’t think they had an idea. The officers did, but I think the staff, I don’t think so.”
“I was also applying for work at IBM in Austria, and it turns out that in the same building where the main headquarters of IBM in Austria was the Canadian Consulate. One day I was up with IBM, and I’m on the elevator from the IBM office and some people get on the elevator speaking Czech and they say that they just came from the Canadian Consulate and the Canadian Consulate said they can go to Canada. I’d tried, early on, to get to the United States, but the U.S. Embassy told us that it would be a year and a half in a refugee camp, and I thought ‘Well, what am I going to do in a refugee camp? I mean, I don’t want to be in a refugee camp,’ and Ota, my wife, thought the same thing. So we went to the Canadian Embassy the same day. She was sitting down in the café on the sidewalk and I said ‘Hey listen, let’s go back to the Canadian Consulate,’ filled out the form, and the rest is history. Ten days later we were on the plane.”
George says he did spend several days in the woods at the very end of the War. When he returned to Vsetín, he recalls seeing corpses of Czechs accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Following WWII, George continued with his engineering studies in Vsetín, as part of which he says he learned English from a Czech soldier who had fought in the British Army during the War. Upon graduation, George went to work at MEZ Vsetín. He moved to Plzeň following his mother’s death in 1954, where he took a job at Škoda. He was employed by Škoda until leaving Czechoslovakia with his wife and son in 1968.
George was on vacation with his family in Yugoslavia in August 1968 when he heard that Warsaw Pact troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. He says that the Yugoslav police informed Czechs and Slovaks in the country at the time that they could stay if they wished. George had a cousin in the United States, however, and so the family tried to immigrate there. The Knessls traveled to Austria, where they were housed at a number of refugee camps, including Traiskirchen, while their visa applications were processed by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Within a couple of months, the family had visas and was flown to New York City.
George’s first job was in a hotel in Pennsylvania, which he says in no way used his experience as an engineer. The Knessls ended up settling in Chicago, where George’s cousin found him a job as a draftsman in the factory in which he worked. In Chicago, George became involved in the Spolek českých inženýrů [Czech Engineers’ Club], through which he says he found a job at General Motors. In 1972, the Knessls bought a house in Berwyn, in which George still lives today. He calls his home ‘an American miracle.’ George continues to be active in the Chicago Czech community.
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George Knessl was born in Volyně, southern Bohemia, in 1929. He was raised by his mother in Vsetín, near the Slovak border. George never knew his father as he was killed shortly before George was born. George attended technical school in Vsetín, which he says was severely disrupted towards the end of WWII, with classes being evacuated on account of bomb scares. When George turned 16 towards the end of the War, he received a letter conscripting him as a laborer to help with the German war effort. George says instead of responding to this summons, he remained at home and positioned himself so as to be able to run into the woods should officials come and investigate his whereabouts.
George says he did spend several days in the woods at the very end of the War. When he returned to Vsetín, he recalls seeing corpses of Czechs accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Following WWII, George continued with his engineering studies in Vsetín, as part of which he says he learned English from a Czech soldier who had fought in the British Army during the War. Upon graduation, George went to work at MEZ Vsetín. He moved to Plzeň following his mother’s death in 1954, where he took a job at Škoda. He was employed by Škoda until leaving Czechoslovakia with his wife and son in 1968.
George was on vacation with his family in Yugoslavia in August 1968 when he heard that Warsaw Pact troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. He says that the Yugoslav police informed Czechs and Slovaks in the country at the time that they could stay if they wished. George had a cousin in the United States, however, and so the family tried to immigrate there. The Knessls traveled to Austria, where they were housed at a number of refugee camps, including Traiskirchen, while their visa applications were processed by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Within a couple of months, the family had visas and was flown to New York City.
George’s first job was in a hotel in Pennsylvania, which he says in no way used his experience as an engineer. The Knessls ended up settling in Chicago, where George’s cousin found him a job as a draftsman in the factory in which he worked. In Chicago, George became involved in the Spolek českých inženýrů [Czech Engineers’ Club], through which he says he found a job at General Motors. In 1972, the Knessls bought a house in Berwyn, in which George still lives today. He calls his home ‘an American miracle.’ George continues to be active in the Chicago Czech community.
“Well, I can say it is nothing beautiful, but the next day I was going downtown to take a look. The first thing when I crossed the bridge, I saw the dead body of a woman over the side. They say that she was a collaborator with the Gestapo. It means people killed her. When the Army came, they had a rule that for the first two days, they are not responsible for any law. It is a lawless situation. When I went farther into the park, there were dead bodies of these collaborators. People again, people got together and killed them, because they were collaborating with the Gestapo. It was the ugly part, you know, but it was only one day before they cleaned it.”
“We found another camp where we were only supposed to stay for two days. And when I went to swim in the sea in the morning, (because I don’t have a shower in the morning when I’m by the sea, I jump into the sea) – I went swimming, and when I was getting out of the water, there was a German professor crying, saying how the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia with tanks, and how this damaged socialism. But I didn’t give a toss about socialism anymore.
“All the Czechs in the campground sat around radios and listened to the news from the United Nations and in general, so that we knew what was going on. After two days it was obvious that practically nothing is going to happen at an international level. The Yugoslav police paid us a visit; they invited us to a hotel nearby, where they told us our options and said that we can stay in Yugoslavia.”
“[When it came to emigration] one thing was easier for us, because for two years I had already guessed that there will be major economic problems in Czechoslovakia. Our factory was working at something like only 16% capacity. I thought I would have to emigrate for economic reasons. But of course the Russian invasion changed this into political reasons – that’s beyond debate.”
“The Czech Engineers’ Club had meetings every month. I mostly went there from the time that I had a car, which I bought in 1970 (we were here only one year without a car; it took us one year to save for a car). So, when I had a car, I went there every month. They kindly accepted me as one of them, and of course I now had a source of information. The next time I was looking for a job – the head of the club was Eda Vachrlon – I helped him with invites and I did everything, and he helped me get into General Motors and then we were working on the same floor. Unfortunately, what I am talking about is all in the past, because these people were all older than me. Today, I am 81 and they are no longer alive. So, due to an insufficient number of members, this organization no longer exists.”
George and his family stayed in Vienna for just over a month while awaiting immigration paperwork. They arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, and settled in Toronto in 1968. After taking English classes for six weeks, George began working and was admitted to the University of Toronto where he earned his doctorate. It was in 1976 that George first returned to Czechoslovakia to visit his parents. That same year, his company transferred him to California. By 1981, George had switched jobs and was sent to work on a software project in Japan. There, he met his second wife, Yuko. The couple married in 1983, returned to the United States, and had a son, Alan. In 1988, George set up a company in California’s Silicon Valley called Apogee Software Inc; he remains the firm’s president and CEO. Ten years later, he set up Apogee.cz in Prague as an out-sourcing partner of Apogee Software. He and his wife Yuko (the firm’s CFO) often visit Prague, both for business purposes and to enjoy the opera, ballet, and concerts that the Czech capital has to offer. The couple are proud of an apartment they own in a 14th-century historical building in Prague’s Old Town. George and Yuko are planning to ‘retire partially’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. They are in the process of reconstructing an old hunting lodge in Mirovice in southern Bohemia, which was owned by the Schwarzenberg family until 1938. George and Yuko currently live in Los Gatos, California.
]]>George Malek was born in Tábor in southern Bohemia. His father, Jan, owned a factory that produced auto parts while his mother, Marie, stayed home to raise George and his two brothers. Shortly after the Communist coup in 1948, George’s father’s business was nationalized and he was sent to prison for over one year. In the meantime, George’s mother began working at a co-op making stuffed animals. As a child, George was especially interested in woodworking and mathematics. He attended a technical school in Tábor where he studied building construction and equipment. Although he hoped to study at university, George was not initially admitted and, instead, joined the military. After training for one year as a paratrooper, he was stationed in Aš where he was tasked with manning a radio system and intercepting German military conversations and transmissions. George was then admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied computer engineering. He began to think about leaving the country to improve his job prospects and, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, crossed the border into Austria with his wife and young son, Robert. George’s father had helped them to secure visas under the pretense of visiting an uncle in Vienna.
George and his family stayed in Vienna for just over a month while awaiting immigration paperwork. They arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, and settled in Toronto in 1968. After taking English classes for six weeks, George began working and was admitted to the University of Toronto where he earned his doctorate. It was in 1976 that George first returned to Czechoslovakia to visit his parents. That same year, his company transferred him to California. By 1981, George had switched jobs and was sent to work on a software project in Japan. There, he met his second wife, Yuko. The couple married in 1983, returned to the United States, and had a son, Alan. In 1988, George set up a company in California’s Silicon Valley called Apogee Software Inc; he remains the firm’s president and CEO. Ten years later, he set up Apogee.cz in Prague as an out-sourcing partner of Apogee Software. He and his wife Yuko (the firm’s CFO) often visit Prague, both for business purposes and to enjoy the opera, ballet, and concerts that the Czech capital has to offer. The couple are proud of an apartment they own in a 14th-century historical building in Prague’s Old Town. George and Yuko are planning to ‘retire partially’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. They are in the process of reconstructing an old hunting lodge in Mirovice in southern Bohemia, which was owned by the Schwarzenberg family until 1938. George and Yuko currently live in Los Gatos, California.
“When I first did computers, those were Russian computers with vacuum tubes. So the full room of vacuum tubes was about as powerful as my little laptop, or even less powerful. Then professor [Antonín] Svoboda – who I knew personally – he left the country and he essentially designed the first family of IBM computers. So, judging from that, we were not that much behind, if a professor of computers from Czech Republic could come here and start a century of revolution in modern computers. Then of course, silicon came, integrated circuits came, and it just kept rolling.”
Were you able to read journals being written in America and Britain? Was that possible at that time?
“If it was strictly technical information, I could get my hands on it. It wasn’t easy, and it was censored.”
So how could you do this? Through the university library?
“Mostly through the university library. And between guys, sometimes, we would distribute things that we’d obtain in a somewhat questionable way and we would distribute it among ourselves.”
“We saw it as just the beginning. We thought that Dubček is just a temporary figure that will help us get to where we want to get, but then he would have to go because he was still a communist after all.”
So what did you do on August 21?
“We went to the streets, we talked to them [the soldiers], and it essentially was pretty much hopeless. There were some guys who would throw the Molotov cocktails at the tanks, but it was pretty much useless. You cannot fight the tanks and an armed army with bare hands and with stones. And if you do, they will shoot you. So then I went home.”
Was it scary? How scary was it?
“It was scary, but it was extremely frustrating. Extremely frustrating that a big country like them can come and do this and there is zilch you can do. You just shut up and pretend it didn’t happen. That was the worst part of it.”
“My father, he had a lot of connections, so he found a so-called uncle in Vienna that sent me an invitation. You had to have an invitation, so I got an invitation from the imaginary uncle in Vienna to visit Vienna for five days. So we could take with us only what was for five days. At the time, my son was four years old. I had my university papers and everything and I put it in his teddy bear. I sewed it inside and he was holding it. Then we stopped on the border and the Czech army people with Russian soldiers were going through the train and checking your papers. So I showed him my papers and he knows that I am escaping. He talked to the Russian guy and then the Czech guy said to my son ‘Hey, where are you going?’ He said ‘No, I won’t tell you,’ and holding his teddy. And then I looked at the Czech guy and I said ‘Please, let us go’ and he looked at the Russian guy and said ‘Oh, they’re ok. Let them go.’ People in the next compartment, they took them out, they lined them up in the railway station, and they took them to prison, so it was this close.”
“Well, there were two reasons. One reason was, I wanted to do something for the Czech Republic. I wanted to set up a company there; I wanted to get Czech people and pay them good salaries and help the country in some way, and this is a good way to help. The second reason was, quite frankly, Czech programmers are extremely good, but still pretty reasonable. I studied at university; I have a lot of contacts there; I knew people. The guy who is leading my company in the Czech Republic, he is one of the leading figures at university, so he could find me people who were the best of the best. I treated them well; they come to the U.S. for one year or so for a visit and for training, and I did something for country this way.”
“I like Czech food. I cook it whenever I can. We like Czech music. We like music in general. We like Czech composers. Smetana is one of my favorite composers; Dvořák, of course. But so is Bach, so is Vivaldi. I don’t really see myself as being a citizen of some specific country. I see myself as a world citizen. Wherever I am, I am happy as long as they treat me well and I return the favor.”
Following the Communist coup in February 1948, George decided that he didn’t want to ‘live under another occupation’ and left the country. After visiting a Sokol camp in southern Bohemia that July, George and a friend crossed the border into Germany. He spent several months in Regensburg and Schwäbisch Gmünd refugee camps; he then signed up with the European Volunteer Workers group and traveled to Britain where he was assigned to work in a brickyard in Peterborough. George worked there for over two years waiting for a visa to the United States.
After receiving a visa, George sailed to New York in February 1951. He began working in a plastics factory before being drafted into the U.S. Army in July. George served in the Army for two years, one of which was spent in Germany working as a cartographer. After his discharge, George worked as a draftsman for an engineering company in New Jersey for one year and then moved to Malden, Massachusetts. In 1955, George married his wife, Ludmila, also a Czechoslovak émigré, whom he had met in New York. They had two children, Peter and Sandy, whom they raised speaking Czech.
In 1962, George – who says he had always wanted to move to California – found a job at Stanford University working on a linear particle accelerator, the longest in the world. After five years there and a short stint in Philadelphia, George returned to California to work for GE’s nuclear energy division. In 1992, he retired from full-time work, but continued to act as a consultant until 2011. George also continued his education in the United States, earning a degree in engineering and management from Northeastern University and an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University. Now a widower, George enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He lives in Santa Clara, California.
]]>George Skoda was born in Prague in 1927. His father, Josef, studied accounting and held several jobs in that field, and also owned a business in the city. His mother, Louisa, worked as a stenographer before getting married and later stayed home to raise George. After elementary school, George began studying at an English gymnázium, which was closed down by the Nazis in 1941. He then transferred to a Czech school, which was also closed, and entered an industrial school. In the waning months of WWII, George was recruited to dig ditches near Olomouc for the German war effort. After a short time, with the end of the War imminent, George escaped from his work detail and returned to Prague. After liberation, he finished school and, in 1947, entered ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering.
Following the Communist coup in February 1948, George decided that he didn’t want to ‘live under another occupation’ and left the country. After visiting a Sokol camp in southern Bohemia that July, George and a friend crossed the border into Germany. He spent several months in Regensburg and Schwäbisch Gmünd refugee camps; he then signed up with the European Volunteer Workers group and traveled to Britain where he was assigned to work in a brickyard in Peterborough. George worked there for over two years waiting for a visa to the United States.
After receiving a visa, George sailed to New York in February 1951. He began working in a plastics factory before being drafted into the U.S. Army in July. George served in the Army for two years, one of which was spent in Germany working as a cartographer. After his discharge, George worked as a draftsman for an engineering company in New Jersey for one year and then moved to Malden, Massachusetts. In 1955, George married his wife, Ludmila, also a Czechoslovak émigré, whom he had met in New York. They had two children, Peter and Sandy, whom they raised speaking Czech.
In 1962, George – who says he had always wanted to move to California – found a job at Stanford University working on a linear particle accelerator, the longest in the world. After five years there and a short stint in Philadelphia, George returned to California to work for GE’s nuclear energy division. In 1992, he retired from full-time work, but continued to act as a consultant until 2011. George also continued his education in the United States, earning a degree in engineering and management from Northeastern University and an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University. Now a widower, George enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He lives in Santa Clara, California.
“My parents were on vacation at that time, and I was supposed to go – well actually I did – to a Sokol camp down in southern Bohemia, so they thought I was at Sokol camp. And the reason I didn’t tell them was, I said, ‘Well, if I get caught and they interrogate my parents, my parents can honestly say ‘We didn’t know about it.’’ So it was obviously a great shock when they came back from vacation, and they didn’t hear from me for about six weeks. Of course my mother was [thinking] ‘Is he killed somewhere?’ or ‘Where is he?’ Because the mail at that time… There was no Germany; there was a U.S. occupation zone, French, English. So we had to write to a guy in Switzerland and he had to write to somebody in Czechoslovakia [to say] that we are okay. So that took six weeks, seven weeks for the mail and so finally they got [notice] that ‘Oh yeah, they are okay.’”
“We tried several places. Well, we inquired; we didn’t try. Šumava was one of them, and we knew some people and they said ‘Well, there were some people that crossed here, but there were some people who got caught over there,’ and then finally a friend’s friend said ‘Well there’s people crossing over at Bor u Tachova.’ I had never been there before. I didn’t know the countryside, but I had a map and a compass and it was a chance we took. The border guard came five minutes after we crossed; as a matter of fact, when we were crossing, I heard somebody hollering, some dog barking, and what sounded like shots. But we said ‘Oh the heck with it’ and we just kept going.”
And there was no barbed wire? It wasn’t like it got later?
“No. There was a meadow and a granite marker, and one side was ČS and the other was D, Deutschland. That was it. And there were Germans drying hay on the other side.”
“There was a Czech newspaper, České slovo, that was issued in Munich which I subscribed to, so we were pretty well informed of what was going on. My parents and people that I knew didn’t write anything political because a lot of the letters were censored. My father said they got [letters] that the envelope was cut and [said] ‘This is officially censored’ so we never talked about politics. When I was in England and there was, not a girlfriend, but a girl I was interested in at one time. Her father was actually a general in the Czech Army. I sent her a letter and she sent me a postcard written in English that said ‘There’s a lot of problems’ and this and that. I didn’t realize it, but I sent another letter, and she sent me a postcard that said ‘I forbid you to write to this address,’ her father being in the Army. And he was fairly high up – Armádní generál or something. She said ‘If you want to write, write through a friend of mine.’”
“We went to the Sokol to exercise once or twice a week, but that was about the only thing. I don’t know if you know, but at that time there was a large Czech community in New York and it was between First and Third Avenue and something like from 62nd Street to 75th Street. There were Czech butchers and Czech bakers. A lot of these people immigrated to the United States in 1922, ’23, ’24, ’25… As a matter of fact, I lived with a family whose name was Koch – he was a carpenter – and he immigrated to the United States in 1924, so there were old, what they call, usedlíci [settlers]. It was interesting; these people immigrated to the United States for economic reasons. The new wave that came in, we escaped for political reasons, and they just couldn’t quite get it. There was, not a friction, but a lot of misunderstanding.”
“Freedom is a word that’s a lot of little things, and some big things. Freedom of expression. I mean, you can talk over here and you can say that the president is an idiot or not and people either agree with you or don’t agree with you, but nothing happens to you. Over there, under the communists, you ended up in a concentration camp. That’s one thing. Freedom of press. Over there, there was no freedom of press. Freedom of where you can live, how you can live. Freedom of where you want to go to school or don’t go to school. It’s a lot of these little things that are the difference. Under the communist regime; of course, the German regime too was much more regimented and controlled. So it’s not one big thing; it’s a lot of little things that make it happen.”
Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
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Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
“Everybody was almost poor, because people didn’t have too many things after the War – everything was destroyed. I remember I didn’t have shoes; I couldn’t go out and play because we didn’t have shoes for a few months, because it was not available to buy anything. At the end of 1946, the supplies started to come to the people, because the factory and everything was destroyed, and people didn’t have, you know, too much money to buy things and it was very hard. Just after I started to go to school, I remember, it was much better everything.”
“We were very careful not to say one word to anybody in the group, because we knew that in the group they have some informer. Exactly what happened was, we were in Warnemuende in Germany, which is in the North Sea region, you know, which is like a recreation area, and the German secret police came – the Stasi – and they took one girl away from us. The told her, ‘Take your suitcase and come with us immediately.’ They showed this ID to our leader who was with the group and said ‘We are police from DDR Germany and this girl must go back with us to Czechoslovakia immediately.’ And the girl was crying, unbelievable, you know, she was so sorry. Just two guys come and they say, right away ‘You must go with us.’
“Her idea probably was if she goes to Denmark she will stay over there, that is my thinking, you know. Just they took her away, we didn’t say anything, we always said ‘Oh, we are coming back, I must finish my house’ (because I was remodeling,) ‘We must do this when we come back.’ You know, we had a good time and we were friendly with everybody in the group, just we never ever said something bad about the government or ‘we will not come back’ or something. We always looked to the future back in Czechoslovakia, that ‘we will do this and come back and do that…’”
“You see, you went to the police in Denmark, and we said ‘We don’t want to go back.’ And they said ‘Ok, give us your passport.’ We must give them our passport, a young police officer in civilian clothes said ‘Come with me.’ We went to his car, we went to the hotel where we stayed and he said to the doorman ‘These guys go with me.’ He said ‘Let them go into the room, pick up their things and they go with me.’ And the doorman said ‘Well, it’s a police officer,’ you know, he didn’t say anything. We picked up our things, we went to his car, and he takes us to the penzion. It was not like a camp or something, it was a pension, a nice pension, in Copenhagen, and it was full of refugees – Czechs, Slovaks and Polaks.”
“I sent my mum, I tried to send her some money in the letters, and all the time, I sent the letters registered, you know, [to be picked up] in the post office. And what really bothered me was that the director of the post office told my mother ‘Open the letter here.’ And mother opened the letter, there was money in it, and he said ‘I give you one week to go into the bank and exchange this money the legal way.’ Because at this time there were bony and my mum could sell these dollars to somebody and some people liked to buy bony [with this foreign currency], because they liked to buy cars or go to Tuzex – at this time there was Tuzex [a shop where luxury goods could be bought for foreign currency] and all kinds of things. Just no, they told my mother something that was not right, because you have the law, you have secrecy, no? You’re supposed to have, in your letters, secrecy. And they said ‘Forget it, open it, right now!’”
“I was leaving the shipyard in Copenhagen and they sent me to this superintendent, because he must sign the paper for me to release me, and he asked me, he said ‘I heard that you are going to America.’ I said ‘Well, I would like to go.’ And he said to me ‘I lived in America for 15 years,’ he said, ‘I was working over there.’ He said ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ He said ‘If you don’t make it, come here and see me and I will take you back.’ He told me that. And I always remembered that, him saying ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ Thanks god, I was working hard, you know, working in construction in this country – it is not easy. I was working, I remember, I was working for this company for six years – it was George Hyman, it is now called something different – they changed it, now it is Clark Company. We were building this new Senate office building, it was like a big hole, three floors down, and the Washington temperature was 102 degrees. Back in the hole it was maybe 120 degrees! It was not easy, it was hard – and thanks god I made it. I was working most of the time inside construction, finishing everything, this kind of thing, you know, not outside. Just that time we were building that Senate office building I was working outside, because I didn’t want to leave the company, I wanted to stay with the company. And, it was not easy.”
In 1983, Joseph flew to Edmonton, Alberta. Five months later, he moved to Montreal where he began working in construction and development. Joseph’s first visit to New York was in 1985 and he spent a few years traveling between Manhattan and Montreal. He eventually settled in New York where he started his own construction business. Today, his successful company specializes in high-end residential development.
When Joseph first arrived in New York he says that he only knew two other Czech immigrants; however, almost 20 years later, he provided consultation for the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall (BNH) in Manhattan which began his involvement with the Czech community in New York. Joseph is on the board of the American Fund for Czech and Slovak Leadership Studies and the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR). Currently, he is the president of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), an organization which operates out of and administers Bohemian National Hall and promotes Czech and Slovak culture in New York. Joseph frequently returns to Prague to visit his mother. He lives in Manhattan with Stephanie, his wife of 17 years.
]]>Joseph Balaz was born in Prague in 1960. His father Ladislav worked for the national railway system. Prior to Joseph’s birth, his father was arrested and worked in the uranium mines at Jáchymov for seven years as a result of his being abroad for several years following WWII. Joseph’s mother Milada, who still lives in Prague, was an office manager for a company that manufactured paint. Joseph often went to his mother’s home town in southern Moravia to visit his grandparents and other relatives. He says that immediately following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, his mother sent Joseph to live with his grandparents for several months, and he went to school while there. Joseph attended the Institute of Technology and then began studying civil engineering at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). In February 1982, while on a university ski trip in Austria, Joseph and a friend left the group and hitchhiked to Salzburg. When advised, they traveled to West Germany to seek asylum. Joseph stayed in Bonn for one year and a half while being debriefed (as he had been in the Czechoslovak Army before leaving) and waiting for permission to immigrate to Canada.
In 1983, Joseph flew to Edmonton, Alberta. Five months later, he moved to Montreal where he began working in construction and development. Joseph’s first visit to New York was in 1985 and he spent a few years traveling between Manhattan and Montreal. He eventually settled in New York where he started his own construction business. Today, his successful company specializes in high-end residential development.
When Joseph first arrived in New York he says that he only knew two other Czech immigrants; however, almost 20 years later, he provided consultation for the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall (BNH) in Manhattan which began his involvement with the Czech community in New York. Joseph is on the board of the American Fund for Czech and Slovak Leadership Studies and the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR). Currently, he is the president of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), an organization which operates out of and administers Bohemian National Hall and promotes Czech and Slovak culture in New York. Joseph frequently returns to Prague to visit his mother. He lives in Manhattan with Stephanie, his wife of 17 years.
“Until 1968, there was even a Scout movement throughout the country. It was not an officially sanctioned movement; it was more what people privately would adhere to. I remember that for a couple of years I was a part of this young group – maybe I was a six, seven, eight year old – and we would gather once every two weeks at someone’s house and they would teach us to make knots with rope, and we were recognizing birds. Once a year, during the summer, I would go for about ten days or two weeks to a summer camp that was organized by this group of loosely-connected parents. So I never became a member of the Pioneer movement. I know that in every school across the country, it was mandatory that the kids participated in some of these things, but I don’t remember that much. I know later on, when I was at the Institute of Technology, that there was recruitment for the Communist Party and for the army, obviously, and things like that, but I managed not to participate in these things.”
“In general I was unhappy with the political situation in the country. It obviously bothered me that I couldn’t travel. It bothered me tremendously, even at the technical university, the ridiculousness of the whole setup. Even a simple textbook dealing with concrete and concrete mixtures would start with some proclamation that ‘Comrades in the Soviet Union invented the best mixture’ and nonsense like that. So I felt that it was a sad, strange dictatorship where I lived and I had a keen sense of something out there that fascinated me, and that was the draw. It was definitely this quest for a different life, obviously for some adventure, and also as a young guy you have a certain tolerance to the unknown and the silliness of some of these decisions based on just an emotion or something like that.”
“We managed to take part in this skiing trip to Austria which was organized by this association… sanctioned by the universities. I know that we somehow discovered that this trip to Austria was going to take place in a couple of months, essentially in February [1982], and we were already too late to formally to apply for it. So what we did was we actually took a very individual approach and we started going to all these individual offices that needed to give us an approval. We started with the school; we went to the police and, in my case, the army also. I think that all together we needed close to 12 approvals so that we could participate. Because we were approaching these decision-makers, these bureaucrats, individually, face to face, and obviously we adjusted the truth a little bit, sort of saying that everybody else promised an approval and it’s now just up to you to okay it as well, these people kind of did it, went along with it. Then we were able to go.”
“[My mother] knew that if I had the opportunity that I would leave. She actually supported it and the most traumatic thing was that the day I was leaving I couldn’t tell her. The only member of my family who knew that I was actually leaving was my cousin, who was a buddy and older, and I couldn’t tell my mom; I couldn’t tell anybody. That was most difficult. For me, it was actually quite difficult to leave. The week prior to the trip where I knew I was going to attempt to escape – emotionally, that was the most taxing time frame. What’s interesting is that the friend of mine that I escaped with was extremely upbeat at the time, because he was just planning the trip. He was expecting his wife would join us later on and he was carefree and upbeat, so he helped me tremendously during this time. After we escaped, a couple of weeks later when we were already in Bonn, he was actually down for weeks. Completely devastated, and he was thinking about going back, returning to Czechoslovakia. But at that time, I completely turned around and I was extremely upbeat about the fact that we made it, and it made sense for us to stay. He claims that I helped him, that I kept him there. What’s interesting is that if it didn’t work that way, maybe we would never leave, or he would have returned, or something like that. So it worked out well that we could support each other.”
“I actually wanted to return to Germany, because I spoke German; I was fluent. I didn’t speak English whatsoever. Also, Bonn was this sophisticated, extremely clean, colorful city and Edmonton was this strange outpost. I didn’t want to unpack my suitcase for a couple of months. But then, as it goes, I met some young people and we became friends, and they took me to the Rocky Mountains. And there, somehow, I discovered that this continent has something absolutely magnificent. I mean obviously there are some magnificent areas in Europe as well, and all over the place. I got somehow attached to it and I decided that this continent offers something else as well and I decided to stay.”
“My intent has been not to turn the building into a Czech social club, because I think that’s wrong. It’s sort of enclosing a group of people. On the contrary, I believe that the function of today’s groups, and especially our association and also the cultural center and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is to showcase Czech culture. Not only the past – I mean, we have to talk about the past because it’s also fascinating – but current, today’s Czech Republic. Democratic Czech Republic. And it cannot be just a showcase for art. It needs to be a showcase for science; also business. So I’m taking a lot of steps to make sure that we have Czech scientific groups or even companies showcasing their things here. So it has to be a platform showcasing Czech things to the U.S., not just New York.”
Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
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Lubomir Chmelar was born in Zlín in 1935. His parents both worked for the Bat’a shoe company, his father, Josef, as an executive and his mother, Anna, as a designer. His mother would eventually start her own fashion design business. At the age of one, Lubomir moved with his parents to Baghdad, where his father was tasked with opening a Bat’a factory. The Chmelars lived in and socialized with the small Czech community there. In March 1939, Lubomir’s father finished his work in Baghdad and planned toreturn to Zlín; however, the day they arrived in Trieste, Italy, and planned to drive to Czechoslovakia was the same day that Hitler occupied the country. They were instead sent to Serbia for a short time before moving to Kenya. Lubomir lived with his parents on the outskirts of Nairobi until he went to boarding school in Britain following the War. He attended Oxford University where he studied civil engineering with the intention of starting an engineering design consultancy in Kenya (where his parents would remain for the rest of their lives). After a two-year apprenticeship in London, Lubomir planned to seek out jobs in Canada and Mexico before returning to Kenya; however, while in Toronto, he met his future wife, Tiree, and, in 1962, the pair married and moved to New York City.
Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
“We were in Baghdad and my father was recalled back to Zlín. He had finished his work in Baghdad, which was the setting up of a factory and he was going back to his new job in Zlín. So we packed up our things, my mother, my father, and I – I being an only child – and set off in this very beautiful car. It’s an old 8-cylinder Packard. It was a lovely ivory color with green leather upholstery. They had bought it for each other as a wedding present way back and had it shipped out from Czechoslovakia to Baghdad. The car was then driven from Baghdad to the port of Beirut. In Beirut, the car was put on a platform, covered in a canvas and hoisted onto the front deck of this boat which was called the S.S. Jerusalem, and off we sailed to go to Trieste. Trieste being the point where we were going to land and then drive the rest of the way through the Balkans and up back to Zlín.
“The journey was uneventful; when we arrived in Trieste, the crane began to unload the car, and as the crane was lowering this car on its wooden platform with a canvas cover, about four feet above the quay, one of the ropes broke and the car slid sideways and fell, sustaining damage. This was terrible for all of us – we weren’t expecting it. My father ran to the telegraph office and cabled back to Zlín saying ‘Looks like I’m going to be quite delayed. Car severely damaged in fall from crane.’ We went off, had coffee, had to plan what we were going to do next, waiting for the telegram. The return telegram came back – and I need to know the timing of this, but I’m going to tell you what I think is right. The telegram came back and said ‘Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what happened at 4:00 this morning?’ And it was Hitler marching into Prague. ‘You stay put until further instructions.’
“Well, it transpired that as a result of our staying put, for whatever it took – I don’t know, a week or so – to repair the car, my father was not taken back into the Czech Republic by the company, but they set him up in Serbia and, from there, Kenya. And as a result of that, our lives were all outside the terrible horror that so many of our relatives and so many of the countrymen of those nations that were first under Nazi rule and then all those years under the totalitarian state suffered. We, by the skin of our teeth, our lives were changed.”
“We first briefly went to a place called Borovo in Serbia where there was a Bat’a factory, and then my father was asked to work with the people in Zlín who were given carte blanche by the Wehrmacht to make shoes for the German Army. They were not going to close that place down. So the Czechs then had to bring in raw materials – rubber from Malaya, various hides, this kind of thing. So there was an import/export business going on between Zlín and various parts of Czech investment, and my father was told ‘Look, you’re going to be an import/export person, but one of the things, but one of the things we’re going to be doing is using you to get certain people out. So you’ll be able to petition for, let’s say, a doctor.’ And many of the doctors were Jewish. Many of the Bat’a doctors, and there were quite a huge number of them, maybe 20 or 30, working exclusively for Bat’a in Zlín. Zlín was an enormous population of Bat’a employees. Many tens of thousands. So he had to be very careful because there were quite a few sympathizers in this Borovo factory with what was going on in the Sudetenland of Czech. So he had to be very careful how he got people out and brought them to Borovo, where he was able to transfer them to various parts of the world. One of the lovely things is that the doctor he brought to Kenya, a man called Sanyi Gellert whose daughter became a doctor, they looked after my parents to their dying day. So in a way, it was a give back for this extraordinary time when the Nazis were already occupying Czechoslovakia, but still people could be brought out.”
“I went to Iraqi school; my first language was actually Arabic. Sadly, it’s gone out of the window supplanted by Swahili which is kind of a coastal Arabic.”
Yet you retained your Czech.
“My Czech, wonderfully, was spoken at home around me all my life and so I’m very grateful for that. That way I was able to go back after the [Velvet] Revolution and spend easy times becoming accepted in the various groups that I had to work with. Had I just come there purely as a Czech in name and not in language, it would have been much more tricky.”
“My first time back, after my very early departure at the age of one, was in 1961, just before I came to the States. I suddenly had an urge to go there, and I borrowed a little Lambretta motorbike and, with virtually no luggage, I went zooming off. It was okay; I was able to go through Čedok, but I had to stay at given designated place, and of course I didn’t, so I went to stay with relatives. I didn’t realize that this was a terribly silly thing to do. So on my way back, I stopped at the front and they said ‘Ok, fine. Let’s see your passport. These are the designated [places]. You never stayed there; I don’t see the stamp.’ I said ‘Well, you know, I have relatives and I was staying with friends.’ So I was held for a day while they verified all this. So I went back and it was very, very dark times. Very gray times.”
“1987 is the time that I saw the possibilities there of a lovely countryside for walking and biking and ecological tourism. So then when ’89 occurred, I’d already been thinking about setting up a trail, but of course, until communism fell it wasn’t practical. And in ’89, I got the idea of bringing the Hudson River Valley Greenway trail concept to a Prague-Vienna greenway trail, as basically a walking and hiking trail from castle to castle, from historic town to historic town, between these two lovely capitals. Got the idea, put it before a lot of funders and they loved it, particularly people like Rockefeller Brothers, German Marshall Fund, American Express Philanthropic. A very important fund was an environmental group called the Hickory Foundation. And so on and so on. We began to work with the World Monuments Fund and they used us and our office in Valtice to start their program. So that kind of snowballed into greenway, restoration of this very important landscape which later became, through World Monuments Fund efforts, a UNESCO designated landscape – the whole thing, 200 square kilometers. And then, from that time, which was about 1992, my wife and I went there and we lived there every year for six months. From 1992 until 2004. That was the period when it really bloomed into a growing thing and spread into neighboring Poland, Slovakia, and it’s now in Bulgaria and Romania. So it’s really a very flourishing concept of biking and hiking trails. But really it’s not so much the tourism, it’s also about community building and supporting heritage, so when you come to a town on the greenway trail, you can go to the local glassblower, artist, meet with them, go behind the scenes, so to speak. And it’s all about that.”
“That’s entirely due to my parents who left when they didn’t want to leave, adored – absolutely adored – their motherland, and if you think of the era of their upbringing, it was immediately after WWI; the first Czech[oslovak] Republic was created; the country was full of hope and vision, and industrious, successful; people were well-educated. What I call First Republic Czechs – a certain type, my father’s contemporaries – they’re wonderful. They have a particular quality to them.”
How would you describe that quality?
“Well, without sounding elitist, they’re very intelligent. They study, they read, they love music, but also they can garden, they can grow turnips. They’re rounded people. And it was a period of little Czechoslovakia industrializing itself. So many industrialists were also very rounded people. Many Czechs that I know of my father’s era had hobbies. Everybody had a koníček, as they call it. My father’s hobby was filming. And they became real experts on geology, anthropology, local law, that sort of thing. So they were very interesting people. Maybe I just hit the mother lode, but other Czechs I’ve spoken to remember this era.
“So then I’m abroad, and there are my parents talking about this place that I come from, over and over again. Showing me photographs; my mother, a lovely cook, teaches our African cooks to do vepřo zelo knedlo [pork, dumplings and sauerkraut], all the local Czech goulashes and stuff. I lived in a funny way in a Czech culture. We spoke a terrible patois at home, of Czech, English and Swahili all mixed up. So it was logical that when this place suddenly got its head above water that something inside me said ‘Come on! See what they were talking about.’”
“I have these ten grandchildren and my mission with them is to demonstrate that life doesn’t end at Montauk Point. So each year I take pairs – never three, you always get a triangle – you take them in pairs and they have to be pushing ten. We go to my place in Mikulov and we spend ten days there, basically meeting little Czech kids, swimming, there’s a little horse riding, bike riding a lot, eating fried cheese which they love (very unhealthy), and then we go to Vienna where I have friends. We stay with friends for three days, and then we go to Venice and stay there for three days. They have to keep a diary and have a little camera and take photographs, and I’ve got through six. This year I’m taking the two boys. I only have two boys, and eight girls. Amazingly, they remember everything.”
In 1993, Luboš’s mother moved to the United States on the advice of a friend. One year later, Luboš (who had been staying with his grandmother as his parents were divorced) joined her. He arrived in the Washington, D.C. area where his mother had first worked as a nanny and tutor, but when she found a new job, they moved to a suburb of Chicago. Two months later, they returned to D.C. and settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Luboš started ninth grade. He says that because he was ahead of his classmates in most subjects, he was able to concentrate on improving his English. After high school, he attended Florida Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to Virginia Tech, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Luboš lived in California for three years where he joined the Sierra Club and enjoyed hiking and climbing. He returned to Northern Virginia in 2008 to pursue his doctorate at George Washington University. Today Luboš works for NASA as an engineer and also runs his own computing consulting company. He is the creator of the web site SlovakCooking.com which shares traditional Slovak recipes. Luboš received his American citizenship in 2004, but says that he does not rule out the possibility of returning to live in Europe. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife Sandra.
]]>Luboš Brieda was born in Brezno in central Slovakia in 1980 and grew up in nearby Banská Bystrica. His mother Katarina worked in the local dom kultury [House of Culture] as an event organizer and his father Peter was an economist who worked as a restaurant inspector. Following the fall of communism, Luboš’s father opened his own restaurant. Luboš’s family owned a chata, or cottage, in a village outside Banská Bystrica, and he has fond memories of spending weekends gardening and hiking. In 1989, Luboš recalls traveling to Prague with his father to witness the speeches and happenings of the Velvet Revolution. Luboš joined the Boy Scouts and attended a language-focused school where he studied English and German.
In 1993, Luboš’s mother moved to the United States on the advice of a friend. One year later, Luboš (who had been staying with his grandmother as his parents were divorced) joined her. He arrived in the Washington, D.C. area where his mother had first worked as a nanny and tutor, but when she found a new job, they moved to a suburb of Chicago. Two months later, they returned to D.C. and settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Luboš started ninth grade. He says that because he was ahead of his classmates in most subjects, he was able to concentrate on improving his English. After high school, he attended Florida Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to Virginia Tech, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Luboš lived in California for three years where he joined the Sierra Club and enjoyed hiking and climbing. He returned to Northern Virginia in 2008 to pursue his doctorate at George Washington University. Today Luboš works for NASA as an engineer and also runs his own computing consulting company. He is the creator of the web site SlovakCooking.com which shares traditional Slovak recipes. Luboš received his American citizenship in 2004, but says that he does not rule out the possibility of returning to live in Europe. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife Sandra.
“Since a lot of Slovaks live in apartments, the chata serves a lot of the purpose that, for Americans, a house serves. We have a garden, so you go there a do some gardening. You have some trees. But it’s really just to get away from the city, just to go and relax in the countryside. Slovaks love nature; we love to go hiking. I think that’s the most popular activity in Slovakia, just to go for a hike. We have these awesome mountains and people love to go hiking, skiing or mushroom picking. So it’s very popular to go out for the weekend to the countryside.
“So this place is pretty old. There’s actually a beam that’s in the new section of this chata that has carved on it, with some fire or whatever, 1891. So that’s when the new section of the house was built. The older part is much older than this. It’s from the 1800s sometime. There’s running water now. I think there was always running water. There was a studňa, a little pump, but I think now that is actually hooked up to the village water system. But we never had canalization, so we didn’t have a toilet, so there was just a little outhouse on the outside that you’d go to. It gets cold there in the winter; I remember going there in the winter. It takes these houses a long time to warm up, and then they stay warm. Once they warm up, they stay warm, but it takes a long time for them to actually warm up. And the water freezes in the winter, so you have to make sure to turn the water off.”
“Most of the demonstrations were in Prague and a little bit in Bratislava; there was really nothing at all in Banská Bystrica. But my dad, he saw the news, so he told me, ‘Luboš, this is a big event,’ so we got in the car and drove to Prague. We actually went over to Prague to check it out. We got there a little bit after the demonstration happened, but I remember going to the big outdoor pavilion in Prague and we went there and there was a speech there by Václav Havel. He was giving a speech there, and that was before he became the president, so it was in the transition era when the demonstrations have stopped, but the government was still in the transition to form this new post-communist government. But I remember going and I’m really grateful my dad took me there because it was such an important event, so it’s good to be part of that.”
“So when I came to the U.S., I found it ridiculous how far behind American schools were. I think in Slovakia we were maybe three years ahead of everybody here. When I came to the U.S., I had a really hard time with English, with the language, so it was a little bit difficult to go to school. But the upside was that all I had to concentrate on was the language because, the actual material, we already had covered that. In Slovakia, I left after the eighth grade, so in seventh and eighth grade we had one full year of organic chemistry, one full year of inorganic chemistry. We had a full year of biology, a full year of geology. We got up to trigonometry, so we covered all the basic algebra in the school and I remember coming here to the U.S. and we were just covering the Pythagorean theorem in the ninth grade, and we had this, I think, in the fifth grade in Slovakia. There was a lot of big differences in the speed with which you covered the material.”
“The web site was just kind of a way for me to collect my own recipes. I never expected it to be some kind of popular destination for people, and I was really surprised to find out just how many second-generation Slovaks there were in the U.S. that have interest in these forgotten recipes. I guess that is really who the site became for. A lot of people really appreciate it and I’m glad that they do. I constantly get these emails saying ‘I remember from my childhood my grandmother making some dish, but nobody ever wrote down the recipe and it has since been long forgotten and I thought I would never know this again and I found the recipe here on your site.’ So it helps a lot of people out in this sense.
“I would say the audience for this web site is really the American population, not really the Slovak population. Sometimes I get these emails from people in Slovakia and they’re writing ‘Why is this in English, not Slovak?’ and I’m like ‘Well, I’m not writing it for Slovak people.’ There are a million Slovak[-language] web sites out there. I’m really trying to show people not in Slovakia, people who are not already familiar with the Slovak cuisine, what Slovak cuisine is. Slovak cuisine is really unknown in the world. People don’t really know anything about it and part of the reason is simply because there’s such a lack of English-language literature, books, on Slovak cooking.”
Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.
Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.
]]>Matt Carnogursky was born in Bratislava in 1960. His mother Isabella had a job as a chemical engineer and his father Ivan was a mechanical engineer working for a construction company. After the fall of communism, Ivan served in the Slovak parliament and held jobs concerning the business and economic development of the country. Matt’s uncle, Ján Čarnogurský, was a fairly well-known lawyer and political dissident who held the post of Prime Minister of Slovakia from 1991 to 1992.
Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.
Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.
“I was growing up in a suburb of Bratislava. Pretty interesting, because back then people had to struggle to get a place to live. My dad was working for a construction company, and somehow managed to get them to build him or to allocate him a three-room apartment. It’s not the same as a three-bedroom apartment, it’s three rooms, but it was great because it was on the outskirts of Bratislava. We had lots of fun there by the Danube. When the Russians invaded the country in 1968, there were tanks around our house. There were some wheat fields just across the street, so they dug themselves in, they made some trenches. Unfortunately the wheat field never came back after that so it turned into a garbage dump. Eventually my dad built a house at the other end of the town, so we moved there.”
“My parents were not from the politically favored class. Quite the opposite. So that limited them essentially to jobs as engineers. Engineers were always needed even though you may not have been politically favored, but the country always was willing to tolerate engineers. Of course, you couldn’t say much or do much, but at least you had a chance to get the education and practice that job. So, that was fair enough, so essentially everybody in my family is engineers – my mom was a chemical engineer, my dad was a mechanical engineer, my older brother graduated in engineering, and I got my engineering degree and my younger brother.”
“My parents put us – the two of us, the older two – in a school that taught German, that had some German classes. It was kind of tolerated. The German language was one of the de facto street languages in Bratislava, at least from previous years. So there were a lot of native German speakers in Bratislava in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I went to school. And through this education, it really opened a door. Through the Austrian radio, through the Austrian television which was across the border which broadcast all the way to Bratislava, we could receive coverage, so I listened to Austrian radio all the time and the TV, that was maybe not so good, but still. So we got enough exposure to what then we thought was Western culture – nowadays you look at Austria where it’s a socialist country, but still – a lot more western than Czechoslovakia was at the time.”
“Then when I was a teenager, my dad had opportunities to get me jobs at international trade shows in Slovakia, working for Western companies who came there to exhibit their products, because there was some foreign trade between the West and communist countries. So these companies came to Czechoslovakia, they had a booth, they needed somebody who can translate, who can speak the language and help them out.”
“When I was 23, in 1983 – it was one year from graduating from technical university in Bratislava – I got myself a two week trip to Italy through a travel agency, which, for people living in Czechoslovakia, these things were fundamentally possible. Even though they were expensive, very limited, very bare bones and you couldn’t get them too often, but they were fundamentally possible. If you were an East German, then this would be completely off limits to you, but different countries there had different levels of freedom, different degrees of freedom for citizens. The former Yugoslavia were pretty liberal, Hungary was fairly liberal in terms of movement, East Germany was completely restricted, and Czechoslovakia was somewhere in between. So I took this two week trip to Italy and just never returned. I spent six months in Italy living in Rome with a Catholic priest attached to a Slovak bishop who was there, was part of the Vatican. Essentially their mission was to help refugees – at that time there was a lot of refugees in the refugee camp south of Rome – so I was helping them out visiting the refugees. So I spent six months there until I got my immigration papers to Canada.”
“First time we went there was literally a few weeks after the revolution, and I could not even believe when my dad said ‘Come back, come and visit. It’s no problem’ because when I had defected it was some kind of criminal offense by the laws of Czechoslovakia of that time, which eventually got deleted. [I said] ‘Technically the police are looking for me there, so it would be especially kind of stupid to go there, right?’ ‘No, don’t worry. It’s completely different, nobody cares. It’s completely free, everything changed.’ It was really, really hard to believe.”
“The lasting memory of that trip – apart from the fact that everything was dirt cheap because the dollar had such great buying power at that time. But the lasting memory of that trip was that Slovaks were so relaxed, and Czechs for that matter too. But people in that country were just so relaxed, so at ease. Now, I must say, that was then, and I’ve been to Slovakia several times since, and this easiness more or less is gone. I don’t see it there anymore. No doubt, it’s far, far better than it was under communism, far, far better, no doubt. But I’m just saying that there was that one period where people were just so happy, so helpful, so friendly to each other.”