After her stepfather’s death in 1979, Daniela and her mother made plans to leave the country. In July 1980, they joined a tour traveling to Germany, Italy and Austria, and left the group on the first night of the tour. Claiming asylum, Daniela and her mother had to wait to receive work permits before they could build their new life. Daniela’s mother eventually received her credentials and worked as a nurse for 15 years (today she continues to live in Germany). Because of her language skills, Daniela worked as an interpreter. At a trade show in Frankfurt, she met her future husband, Patrick Mahoney, who lived in Portland, Oregon. He invited Daniela to the United States and, in 1982, she traveled to Portland. The couple married the following year.
Since moving to the United States, Daniela has received a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in social work from Portland State University. Today she works as a case manager for the state of Oregon. Daniela has also had a successful career as a folk artist. She learned traditional egg decorating from her grandmother and, since arriving in the United States, has turned her hobby into a business, selling decorated eggs, giving lectures, creating children’s coloring and activity books, and promoting traditional folk crafts and culture. Daniela’s two children are also skilled egg decorators. Daniela has returned to the Czech Republic three times, most recently to research her family history and genealogy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Patrick.
]]>Daniela Mahoney was born in Prague in 1956. Her parents lived in Karlovy Vary at the time and Daniela spent much of her time with her grandparents in Prague. When her parents divorced, Daniela’s mother moved back to Prague where she worked as a nurse. Daniela says that she became interested in languages at a young age and enjoyed learning Russian and German in school. After finding out from her father that he spoke French, she began taking French lessons at a cultural center. Daniela studied international affairs and business; however, her plans to build a career in governmental foreign services were derailed as several of her aunts and uncles left Czechoslovakia for Switzerland. She found a job as a receptionist at a hotel in Prague.
After her stepfather’s death in 1979, Daniela and her mother made plans to leave the country. In July 1980, they joined a tour traveling to Germany, Italy and Austria, and left the group on the first night of the tour. Claiming asylum, Daniela and her mother had to wait to receive work permits before they could build their new life. Daniela’s mother eventually received her credentials and worked as a nurse for 15 years (today she continues to live in Germany). Because of her language skills, Daniela worked as an interpreter. At a trade show in Frankfurt, she met her future husband, Patrick Mahoney, who lived in Portland, Oregon. He invited Daniela to the United States and, in 1982, she traveled to Portland. The couple married the following year.
Since moving to the United States, Daniela has received a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in social work from Portland State University. Today she works as a case manager for the state of Oregon. Daniela has also had a successful career as a folk artist. She learned traditional egg decorating from her grandmother and, since arriving in the United States, has turned her hobby into a business, selling decorated eggs, giving lectures, creating children’s coloring and activity books, and promoting traditional folk crafts and culture. Daniela’s two children are also skilled egg decorators. Daniela has returned to the Czech Republic three times, most recently to research her family history and genealogy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Patrick.
“My grandma was from southern Moravia and she had several sisters, and one of the sisters became a maid for wealthy people who lived in Prague. There were usually women who came to the villages to recruit young, unmarried women to come to Prague to work for the wealthy people, and typically the young women would work for them for a few years and then they would get married and then they would find another woman to work for them. And so one of Grandma’s sisters got a job like that and then she brought several sisters to Prague and my grandma was one of the sisters. Typically the girls would be taking care of the children or they would work in the kitchen or they would clean the house. My grandma became involved in cooking, and she was a very good cook and she knew how to prepare all these fancy meals because in the old days people would organize large parties in their homes and everything was made in that home by the servants and so my grandma was one of those servants. My grandfather came from a farming family; he was the musician and he did amateur music, but he actually worked for the post office in the old days, so he had a full-time job. The way I understand it is that my grandma and my grandfather had been introduced to each other by someone, so it was like a blind date, and so this is how they got together in Prague, because they both worked there.”
“Grandma always would take me to Moravia for vacations because her sisters lived there, and we would spend the whole summer in the countryside and I have really fond memories from those times that I shared also with my daughter and my son, always referring to Moravia. I had really interesting memories because my grandma’s sisters were living in the farming communities and, certainly, the lifestyle there was very different than in Prague, and they always thought I was very skinny and they had to feed me because I am too skinny. So I recall that we would get up as children and my grandma’s sister would ask ‘What do you want for lunch? Do you want chicken or a rabbit?’ and she would just go and she would catch the chicken and actually prepare it for lunch, and so lunch preparation took like four hours and, of course, we would never do anything like that in Prague, so it was quite a cultural shock for me.”
“Ever since I was school age, my grandma encouraged me to communicate with my father in Karlovy Vary, so I found out that he spoke fluent French and he spent the time during the War in, actually, in France, and so I felt inspired to study French. It was not available in our school that I went to – I was already 11 or 12 when I decided to study French – and so I remember that Grandma would take me to a special cultural center where they would teach the French language, and we had to walk through a dark street and there was a cemetery on the side, and so I remember that Grandma would take me every Wednesday night. She would walk with me around the cemetery and she would take me to the cultural center and sit there and wait so that I could finish studying and take these classes. So as a child, I guess I was a small linguist and so I was very proficient by the time I was a teenager. I was very proficient in German and French and Russian languages.”
“We were a crafty family so I knew how to crochet and knit, and I remember that we had shortages of certain materials so when we wanted to buy clothes there was not really a big choice, so people would sew their own clothes; they would knit and crochet. I remember this unique experience that people would actually go to the stores and buy socks. They were woolen socks and you would actually take the socks apart and you would recycle the yarn, and so they would knit or crochet a sweater, and then, when I would grow, they would take the sweater apart and add more yarn, but they were still using these socks. I cannot actually explain it to anyone, but people who were born in the Czech Republic or grew up there would probably remember those times. I remember also that we would use old clothing that we would get from relatives from the United States. They would send us these packages, because my grandfather’s brothers and sisters all lived in the United States. So they would send this large clothing to us and we would actually take the clothing and put patterns over it, and I remember having clothing from those garments. Because of all these experiences, I actually became very resourceful and creative.”
“I had some contacts in Germany so we decided to sign up for a tour and, my mother and I, we would go on a tour and then we would essentially leave the tour, and so we went on a tour to Munich. It was a tour that went to Germany, Italy and Austria. It began in Germany and ended in Austria, and we actually chose to separate ourselves from the group already in Germany, on the first night of the journey. So we prepared for this escape for one year for sure – it was slightly more than that – so we sold most of our possessions and converted the money into Western currency and left. We left, literally, with a suitcase full of old clothes that we had to leave behind [with the tour] and my mother had a plastic bag and I had another plastic bag and that’s what we left with. But we had some friends who were able to travel across the border from the Czech Republic to Germany, and they were able to bring our documents and some valuables, but very little. So we had left not only our belongings, but all the memorabilia that had sentimental value – we had to leave all of it there.”
“For the first time in my life I was very relaxed. I didn’t have to be stressed out about what am I going to do, where am I going to work, how I am going to pay my rent. In the Czech Republic, as well as in Germany, there was always a fear. We always lived in fear of somebody or something. It is very difficult to disassociate yourself from the fear. There are certain fears that you have learned to somehow keep in your mind at all times – the alertness. So I think it’s some kind of a trauma actually, but that’s one issue that will never go away. So I’m always fearful of something, and I have learned to manage those fears but, still, there are times when I am afraid.”
“I love the Czech Republic. I absolutely loved visiting the Czech Republic; I felt like Alice in Wonderland. It was a beautiful, wonderful experience and I love the country and I love the people. I cannot see myself there anymore as a permanent resident. I remember coming back to Portland, and I was holding my passport in my hand, and all of the sudden this weird feeling came over me: ‘I am home.’ That still is sad; this is a very sad realization, where you basically have an identity problem, like ‘Who am I?’ and I think that is a problem that will never be resolved. But, I just am who I am. I’m a U.S. citizen; I work in the United States; I went to school here; I have a job here; my entire life is here. Of course, I could retire and then live with my retirement in the Czech Republic, but I have so many friends here and so many people I know and so many things I want to do here. So I think I can just go back as a visitor and I can embrace those opportunities but, sadly to say, this is my home, the United States.”
Eva graduated high school and enrolled in an international program through Comenius University which allowed her to study at affiliate colleges in the United States while traveling back to Slovakia to take exams. While in Richmond, Eva had been given a modeling contract and when she returned to the U.S. she settled in New York to pursue modeling. She also became a project manager and marketing director for a brand of luxury watches. Eva received an MBA from Columbia University. She now owns a branding and licensing firm and does PR consulting for luxury watches and jewelry.
Upon her return to the United States, Eva made friends with a number of fellow Slovak-Americans and émigrés and began organizing small cultural events and get-togethers. One of these events was attended by the newly-appointed Slovak consul general who expressed an interest in collaborating with Eva to formalize these events. She helped to form the non-profit +421 Foundation and is co-president of the organization, whose biggest event is Slovak Fashion Night. Eva says that while Slovakia will always be her home, she is glad to have had opportunities in the United States that have helped shaped who she is. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
]]>Eva Jurinova was born in Žilina in northwestern Slovakia in 1979. Her mother L’udmila is a pediatric neurologist and her father Vladimír is a nuclear physicist who, prior to the Velvet Revolution, worked in the Ministry of Health. He now heads the radiation protection section of the public health authority of Slovakia. Eva started school in Trnava and later moved with her family to Bratislava. She says that her childhood was ‘beautiful’ and ‘pure’ and that she spent a lot of time visiting her grandparents, who lived in more rural parts of the country. She was an active child and participated in sports, dance, and theatre. Eva was ten at the time of Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and says that although her parents’ careers improved, she did not notice any immediate changes. In 1997, Eva spent one year of high school studying abroad in Richmond, Virginia. Upon her return to Slovakia, she made plans to move back to the United States.
Eva graduated high school and enrolled in an international program through Comenius University which allowed her to study at affiliate colleges in the United States while traveling back to Slovakia to take exams. While in Richmond, Eva had been given a modeling contract and when she returned to the U.S. she settled in New York to pursue modeling. She also became a project manager and marketing director for a brand of luxury watches. Eva received an MBA from Columbia University. She now owns a branding and licensing firm and does PR consulting for luxury watches and jewelry.
Upon her return to the United States, Eva made friends with a number of fellow Slovak-Americans and émigrés and began organizing small cultural events and get-togethers. One of these events was attended by the newly-appointed Slovak consul general who expressed an interest in collaborating with Eva to formalize these events. She helped to form the non-profit +421 Foundation and is co-president of the organization, whose biggest event is Slovak Fashion Night. Eva says that while Slovakia will always be her home, she is glad to have had opportunities in the United States that have helped shaped who she is. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
“My grandparents lived in Kysuce and Orava, these two beautiful mountainous regions, so I spent most of my childhood there and the memories are just beautiful because it was the nature, the animals, the kindness and love of my grandparents. And of course my parents, but they were studying and getting their doctorates, so I was spending a lot of time with my grandparents and cousins. Both sets of grandparents had huge yards, animals – chickens, cows, geese, and ducks – so it was very farm-like and I loved it. I learned a lot about plants and animals and people and love.”
Were you allowed to run wild there?
“Oh yeah, of course! And we would go to the forest, mushroom picking, blackberry, blueberry picking. It was wonderful, really.
“Childhood in former Czechoslovakia was so pure. I was not touched by anything I learned later or read in newspapers about oppression during communism. I definitely felt very secure and safe and all those clichés about communism, that everybody is equal and there is no crime. I really felt that. It was a great level of security, and I really enjoyed that and I don’t see that anymore nowadays, I’m sorry to say.”
“Since my parents were scientists, they tried to be neutral. They were raised Catholic and both of my grandparents were active participants in the church, but since they were living in remote parts of Slovakia, it never really had an effect on my parents’ careers, and my parents were always going to church when we went to visit my grandparents; they went to mass and, yet, they had good positions. It never really impacted them. My dad had a leading position at the Ministry of Health; my mom was a very accomplished doctor. Back then, scientists didn’t really make much money and didn’t have recognition in our society, and I remember my parents complaining about that and my mom sometimes feeling like she was a rag that everybody was wiping their feet on. She would make more comments like that, especially dealing with patients who were workers, plumbers, and who were treating her not very nicely. I recall some memories like that.”
So did life for your family change for better after the Revolution?
“Yes, absolutely. My mom opened a private practice and my dad became a board member of all the multinational organizations, from the UN to the World Health Organization. They’d been traveling always because my dad had to travel for work, even before [the Revolution]. The government would send him on certain missions, and my mom would go along with him sometimes; she would get her visa permit. But, of course, after communism collapsed, my parents were taking full advantage of exploring the world and aligning it with their careers.”
Were your parents in the Communist Party?
“Yes they were. Not active participants, but they understood that if they wanted to advance, or even be functional somehow, they had to do that. It somehow worked out. We would still go to church when we went to visit my grandparents, and then they would be part of the Communist Party and somehow they didn’t think much about it. They just did what they had to do to survive and provide a healthy and happy environment for us.”
“It’s all about the people you meet and the activities you put yourself in, and I felt like that was my new home. Yes, I was very lucky. I met some people who are stimulating and a job that was very inspirational. So it was a flow. I didn’t make the cognitive decision ‘I am going to stay here.’ I just stayed because it was a no-brainer. Everything just fell into place, and with Grimoldi, it was a career that just…It was an international firm, so everything happened so fast. We were working with celebrities of the top format so it was just so exciting that one day you wake up and ‘Oh! It’s five years later.’ So it just felt very organic and natural to stay and be here.”
“I had some celebrity friends from Slovakia, so they would come and visit and they were always asking about possibilities of making it here or presenting their works here. So I had a lot of contacts in the music and entertainment industry, so I would try to help them and then through friends – I became friends with a lot of Slovak-Americans and Slovaks living or working in New York, especially – we started organizing little events for my friends coming from Slovakia. And it was very unofficial; it was always just a gathering for the community – the New York friends and the European friends. But then, I think the epiphany came when the first Consul General came to New York – Ivan Surkoš of Slovakia – and the Consulate General was opened, and the Consul General and his wife came to one of these concerts I organized. It was actually for my friend Misha who was a famous singer in Slovakia. And they were like ‘Wow, look at this. It’s so many people and an international crowd. How did you pull this together?’ And that was actually in cooperation with Slovak Info and a friend of mine, Otto Raček, who is also a very active Slovak-American. And the question was how can we institutionalize and enhance these activities? So the question was answered with two possibilities: one is to establish a non-profit organization that would help us obtain funding and would help to really attain volunteers and the whole community of artists and performers and other diplomats who are wanting to be active. And the second was for my ability to become part of a consulate team. So I’ve established, together with the Consul General’s wife, L’ubica, this non-profit organization called the +421 Foundation.”
“We organized many small exhibitions, concerts, book presentations, film festivals that the following year started to grow and they were not so small anymore. So one hundred people that were attending the first year became three to five hundred to fifteen hundred this year. And I do have to depict the biggest – and my favorite program – which is called Slovak Fashion Night.”
That’s the signature event, correct?
“That is. Not only because I used to be in fashion, but because it’s New York. Fashion is the breathing organism of the city, or one of the major industries in the city; and of course it’s very glamorous, models are always very attractive, and we have a very wide scope of guests, so we decided to organize a fashion show. I had to convince the Consul General and the whole team who, at the beginning, was very hesitant to do that, but eventually gave in, and the next thing you know, Slovak Fashion Night becomes a huge event where we get approached by our Austrian colleagues or other European consulates or non-European consulates or other colleagues in the cultural field to co-produce events with them, and it’s very pleasing. Also, since it’s such a popular program, it provides a platform where we can really introduce not just our upcoming and talented fashion designers from Slovakia, but also other performing artists like dancers, singers, photographers, visual artists, moderators. We’ve been able to compile a whole program of different art sections and put it all together and create one huge show that’s definitely, very surprisingly, great.
“It attracts Slovaks living here or other emigrants who have forgotten how Slovakia is and how it’s been growing and evolving, and this is an opportunity for them to come and see, and they’re like ‘Wow, we have all this? This is amazing!’ And I’m very happy to be able to provide this reality check, or this educational aspect in raising awareness about what’s going on in Slovakia and how Slovakia is growing. Also, culture, in my opinion – and this is my little phrase I use every time I promote Slovakia or what we do – culture is the best marketing tool to promote Slovakia as an economic or investment destination, and to help us form mutually beneficial relations, not only in the cultural sphere, but in the economic and beyond as well. So yes, we do invite all of the investors or potential business partners for Slovakia to these beautiful events, and strengthen their relationships. Show them how wonderful we are and what we can do.”
“It’s a constant aspiration of ours, and we do bring in the traditional aspect of Slovakia and all those features that you mentioned – the folklore, the beautiful traditional embroidery, the beautiful music and dances and traditional attires of Slovakia – but that’s not what we want to showcase only because that’s something that’s always been there and we’ve always been showing it in the past. But we bring the old and the new and bridge the modern, evolving, ascending culture and the arts that Slovakia is, as a modern, world-leading country. That we definitely are not stuck in the past or all we have are the wooden dolls and corn dolls and those beautiful, but yet older, traditions. So we bring the old and the new, and our fashion shows have folklore dances or the demonstration and presentation of the embroidery or the traditional costume, and I think it’s just a fun and very innovative way to connect both worlds. I think our guests can relate to that and have been relating to that very well. It’s refreshing, in my opinion.”
“It’s very simple and pure in a sense, because, when I come home to Slovakia, I just feel a sense of belonging. This really deep, gut feeling that that’s my home and that’s where I’m from, and the nature, the feel, the essence, the flair – that’s something that will always be me, my true essence. And when I am in the U.S., especially New York or Los Angeles – I’ve been spending a lot of time in Los Angeles because of my company that’s based there – I feel like this is great, this is where I have my house and my friends, but it’s sort of like a pied-a-terre. It’s not the true house, the true home. So, Slovakia will always be my home, and I hope I will be able to marry someone or find someone who will be either European or Slovakian or somehow will always be able to have that home with me there, too. I don’t have a vision how yet, but I know it’s possible to maybe have an international home, but always be able to spend a certain amount of time there.”
“I think it doesn’t matter whether it’s communism or it’s now or democracy or this era or the other era. It’s about individuality and who we resonate with or what we resonate with, and I as an individual definitely resonated with and found my perfect match in the USA and found my way to create another realization and self-actualization, and that’s what I think is wonderful about the world being open and the world being your oyster. But, my roots will always be in Slovakia and I will always come there and it’s always my home. But America really allowed to become who I am becoming. Who I feel that I can identify with. Who I can understand. And I’m very grateful for that.”
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.”
Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.
In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.
]]>Lucia Maruska was born in Cífer, a small village not far from Trnava, Slovakia, in 1953. Her father, Alfred, was an accountant at a poultry farm in the village, while her mother, Lydia, was a production manager in the knitting factory there. When Lucia was four, the family moved to Bratislava so that her father could take a job as a comptroller in the city’s municipal services bureau. Lucia says that she and her younger brother, Rastislav, continued to spend every summer in Cífer with her grandparents. Lucia’s father escaped from communist Czechoslovakia when she was nine years old. She says he did so in part because of the bigotry he faced (as he was Jewish), but primarily because her mother persuaded him to go, as she wanted the family to have better economic opportunities and to travel, ‘and we were being prevented from doing that.’ Lucia’s father first went to Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz, before being sponsored by relatives to come to the United States. He started out in Detroit before moving to Los Angeles.
Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.
In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.
“There were many things, and one thing she did say, which I do remember… occasionally things would come up about Jews and, Jews seemed to have gotten blamed for everything, but he never did though, it wasn’t him specifically, but I think there was always a worry. My father always used to say that Jews unfortunately always picked the line of people that was standing to get a beating. So, I think that had a little to do with it. The system, the communist system had much to do with it. But I think [it was] mostly economics. My aunt… My mother has a wandering soul, she loves to travel, she loves going places, and we were being prevented from doing that, and she wanted to travel, and also my father’s aunts came to visit in 1961. And they started telling him how ‘Oh, an accountant in America! You’ll make a lot of money! That’ll be just great for you!’ So, it was kind of a combination of things. And my father did not want to leave. He really did not want to leave. And my mother kept insisting and said ‘Try! Let’s try it! Let’s try!’ He was 40 and said ‘No, I’m too old.’ Well, no, no, no – try, try, try. So finally, they decided he was going to Vienna on business, and they started ahead of time orchestrating things: having fights, breaking plates in front of friends, all kinds of things so that people would believe there were domestic problems. And part of it was because if he was to escape then the family would be left behind and so there would be no repercussions if he escaped for personal problems – if your problems were political then it was different. So, in 1963, I believe it was March or April, he did stay in Austria.”
“We were trying to figure out how to legally emigrate, to reunite the family. I know she wrote to the United Nations, she tried the Red Cross, all kinds of organizations, no one was helping. And we used to go to Prague, she would go to the Foreign Ministry trying to get passports, all kinds of things. At some points she would go and sit on the palace steps of the presidential palace claiming that – at that time it was Antonín Novotný who was the president – he would eventually have to come that way and that she needed to talk to him. She would act up; have hysterical attacks, all kinds of things, hoping that they would release us just to get rid of her because she was an annoyance. But that didn’t happen. Meanwhile, my father was in Israel and he was sent to a kibbutz because Israel was a new country [but] he felt like ‘well, I’ve already built a new country – Czechoslovakia. But now, I really escaped to do better financially, not to get pocket money for cigarettes.’ But he did learn Hebrew and he was working as an accountant there, but his aunts, and again his mother’s sisters and brothers were all here in the United States, so his aunts finally did invite him; they sent an affidavit to invite him, and they sent him money and he went to Detroit. In Detroit, because he didn’t speak English much (my father spoke very good Hungarian and German but not English) he started sweeping factories at night until he learned English.”
“Finally she figured out that maybe if she moved to another city… She rented an apartment in Brno, and as soon as she registered at that apartment, she requested in Brno a vacation to Bulgaria. And she never did any paperwork in Bratislava. And it takes at least a week for them to figure out what’s going on. So she was registered in Brno, and within a week we had received a vacation to Bulgaria – a permit to travel to Bulgaria. It was Friday that it came in the mail, she sent me to tell my grandmother (my grandmother didn’t have a telephone) and my grandfather. So, I went to Cífer, my grandmother killed a goose, got it all baked and ready for us, [I] came back on Sunday morning, my mother packed up and on Sunday at midday, I think, we got on the train to travel to Bulgaria. She sewed all the documents we might need, including our report cards and whatever documents we had, birth certificates and marriage certificates; she sewed everything inside our bag. The goose went in there too. And we took damask sheets, because she knew that if we ran out of money we could sell those. And then we took crystal plates, small plates, a desert platter with small plates to go with it – again, so that we could sell that if we ran out of money. But inside the bag were sewn whatever dollars she had collected over the times that she was already beginning to save for this. And she had enough to bribe people if necessary.”
“We walked the hill, there was a little house out there, a man came out to pee and smoke, we had to duck and wait. And of course, in those days, the Karl May movies – Winnetou and all the films about Americans – they were very popular and they were filmed in Yugoslavia. And so we were pretending that maybe they were filmed over here and we weren’t scared for whatever reason. Oh, and just so you know, my mother and I weren’t wearing pants, we only had skirts on, and I guess at that time that I was 13 and my brother was 11. Or, my brother had turned 12 the day we left Slovakia, and I turned 14 when we came to this country. So we walked up the hill, and we walked quite a distance, and down the road we saw the checkpoint, the guard house, was way, way [behind] us, at least a kilometer; there was a small light so you could see it. So we thought ‘Wow! Maybe we’ve…’ And suddenly there were lights, dogs, and people yelling at us, soldiers screaming at us, and the soldiers had machine guns and German shepherds. And luckily my mother yelled, because they yelled ‘Stoj! Ne mrdaj!’ which is in Slovak a very dirty word, but in Slovenian it means ‘Don’t move.’ And I think they must have yelled ‘Kto tam?’ [Who’s there?] or something like that, and my mother answered ‘Women and children.’ And luckily she did, because they did not release the dogs.
“They had machine guns, but my mother kept yelling ‘Italiano!’ She thought they were Italians, she was hoping they were Italians. They were not, unfortunately. They took us back to that little house, and on the other side of the road they had caught a man who was Polish, trying to escape. And these soldiers were young kids; they were 18 to 21, they were kicking this man, they were beating him on the floor. Yes. And my brother and I, [it was] in front of us. They were being stupid. They were being stupid young kids, basically, but they had the upper hand. They had the power. A car came, they took him immediately, and I believe he went all the way to Poland, that was it, he went to prison. They had no idea what to do with us, they had never had a woman with children try to escape across the border on foot. They apparently had a lot of men trying. So, they kept trying to call the nearby village and figure out what to do. Finally, they said a car will come, nothing came, finally we had to walk back to the village.”
“We were put, it was in an area of Los Angeles that was very, very diverse, and the middle school, or at least the junior high school was at least one third Hispanic and mostly new emigrants, who did not speak English. There were Eastern European immigrants; there were eventually, not immediately, but in ’68, so within a year or so, there were kids that came from Czechoslovakia, there were Russians, because some Russian Jews were getting out, I think. The Russians were letting some Jews emigrate. And so I know I had Russian friends. There were kids from all over. And they had what they called ESL classes, which is English as a Second Language classes. So they put us in those. I think the biggest shock was… I was very novel. I had very short hair. In Slovakia, I was trying to be very fashionable and Mia Farrow who was at that time a big hit, I’m not sure what movie she made, but she had a very short, boyish haircut and I had that. We came to Los Angeles and all the girls had long, blond hair, or were trying to have long blond hair if they didn’t. And in Slovakia, I could pretty much wear anything to school as long as I looked decent. There was a dress code in public school in Los Angeles. And the girls were not allowed to wear pants in those days. Girls had to have stockings, they could not have nylons, they had to be opaque stockings, and we were not allowed to have sandals. Your toes had to be covered. And so there were things that we discovered as one day I came to school in sandals and ended up in the vice-principal’s office – I had no idea why! And I think my ESL teacher saw me in sandals and she knew immediately why, I think she sent a note that I didn’t know etc.
“But the first thing, when I did come in, because it was such a novelty, the kids took me, and they were trying to be very nice and help me – the first thing that I had to do was ‘I pledge allegiance,’ and that was a shock, because even back in Czechoslovakia, we no longer had to profess our allegiance to the country as much, I mean we did, but we took it as a joke, and suddenly I’m in a country where you’re supposed to be free to do whatever and I am being forced to pledge allegiance. That was difficult, that was difficult to comprehend.”
“She went to sew, and she went into a factory, and she was told she would get one dollar a shirt. And so she was hoping that, apparently, some of these women can make a shirt an hour. She said there was no way that she could make a shirt in an hour. It was a full shirt, it was just unbelievable. She said that some of these women that have been there for a while, they were like machines, I mean, they were just producing and they would not stop, they would not stop to go to the bathroom, they would not stop to talk, to do anything, because they had to make the money. She, after a few days that was it. She tried being a maid in a hotel, That I think lasted a day and a half. She had never worked as hard under communism. She said ‘I never worked! We always had coffee breaks!’ And suddenly she had to do labor. And she went from job to job until she finally found places that were a little less… that were a little more tolerant.”
“Oh now, on my first trip, my grandmother did embroider me a costume because she knew I was interested. So I felt like she embroidered this costume, it was beautiful, and I will wear it to church on Sunday. So I wore it to church, and my grandmother still, and her friends still wore costumes, but the old woman costumes, which were simple. But this was very fancy embroidered, so I wore it to church and got a lot of stares, but on the way back from church, on the street, a car screeches and stops, and a French couple runs out and wants to take my picture. I was laughing, I said ‘If they only knew that I was American wearing this costume!’ But hey, they were just so delighted that they saw costumes, that we were wearing costumes.”
“We always aim, if there is some event that we need to prepare for, then that’s how we work. We start from that, and they always prepare for St. Nicholas’ feast. There, it’s Czech, Moravian, Slovak carols. Dana Sablik is still helping me and she knows the Czech and Moravian [songs]. She is a professional teacher from the Czech Republic, from Moravia actually. And then I prepare or help out with the Slovak things. The costumes are basically Slovak because that is what I had. I do have some Czech costumes. It is very difficult with a small group for 15 minutes on Friday nights to prepare much, so the other thing we have been asked to do is perform at the European Union Open Doors Day [in May 2011] at the Slovak Embassy, so for that we’ve prepared Slovak dances. I have spoken to Jana Racova about doing something at the Czech Embassy. She was interested, but it is always difficult to work out the time slots. I have Czech dances that I could prepare, and the kids would be interested. But of course, the way it works with the kids is that they want to be very good and perform, but they don’t want to rehearse. And their parents also don’t have the time. And so everyone comes for a little bit on Friday nights. They want to learn. We have language classes from about 7:00 to 7:45, and then we rehearse. Everything is tight, but mainly the kids really want to do the gymnastics. So, by 8:30 they need to be in the gym doing gymnastics, and it is Friday night, they’re tired and they’re antsy. They just want to jump around and have fun.
“But I think in the long run, kids do appreciate it, I know my children are very heavily interested and involved in Slovakia, they appreciate the folklore and the culture, they enjoy it, and they understand that in today’s society, that’s pretty much the only thing that’s different from culture to culture and that it’s something you treasure and keep, you don’t live it anymore, that’s not how today’s world is, but it identifies you with a group – it’s something that you’re part of, and that has been important for them. I think that those kids who have that, it is good for them, for their soul and actually, it’s just for their mental health.”
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
]]>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s chata [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
“I was young. I was probably ten or even less, and times sometimes were really tough. And I remember there were days, for example, there was a real shortage of milk and then when milk arrived, the kids would run in front of the block and they would yell ‘Mom, milk arrived!’ and everybody kind of looked and then everybody just grabbed the reusable shopping bag and all went down and stood in line for milk. It was the same thing for oil, like cooking oil, or butter, I remember, or there was the winter season before Christmas and it was any tropical fruit like bananas and oranges or, my goodness, if there was a pineapple, it was like ‘Wow!’ So as a child, I pretty much used to stand in line for food, which I really dislike. If there’s anything going on, like a picnic, and there’s food involved, I really refuse to stand in line for food.”
“Yes, we did have a chata, or summer home, or záhrada [garden] and we pretty much spend almost the entire summer there. There was always something to do. My dad was very much an avid gardener and we grew everything. I didn’t know such a thing as to go to a store and purchase potatoes or carrots or even things like jam or ketchup or anything. My mom pretty much made everything from scratch at home and in our apartment building, downstairs, there was a place where everybody had a teeny storage space. We called it a pivničný priestor or pivnica, and everybody just had this little nook with a door and you open it and it looked like a pantry. It was a pantry of everything like a large bag of potatoes, sauerkraut that was made in this huge barrel, jams, and syrups, and preserved fruit. I mean, it was just like living goodness down there. I very much clearly remember Sundays mom would make traditionally rezne, or schnitzels, with potatoes and then would say ‘Oh we are out of pickled cucumbers,’ or she said ‘What do you want? Do you want cucumbers or peaches in syrup?’ And when we were out of it at home, we had to take the elevator all the way downstairs. Sometimes we were really lazy and we’d just say ‘I’ll just stick with pickles,’ because I was just too lazy to go down and get it.”
“My dad was the person who had a lot of friends. He was very outgoing and he knew a lot of people. I remember one day he came home with this huge suitcase and it was quite late in the evening and he said ‘Ok, are you up for it?’ and I said ‘Dad, what are you talking about?’ and he opened this suitcase and it was filled with these LPs of all these Western artists. So I remember holding the Madonna LP in my hand, Material Girl. I would read it and I had no idea what it meant, but I was just so excited. I said ‘Dad, where did you get this?’ He said ‘Don’t ask any questions. We have until morning to go through all these LPs and to record them on cassettes. So whatever you want, just go for it, girl.’ I was up with my dad listening to all these LPs and I remember Falco; I remember Nana, Bananarama, Rick Astley, Aha – all these bands from the ‘80s. Later on I learned that dad had to schmooze up this local DJ to be able to bring these LPs home, and it was literally just for several hours we had them and then he had to return it.”
“I remember my very first trip when I was ten. My sister and my grandmother, we traveled to Bulgaria. We were very excited because we were finally going to see the Black Sea. So traveling, it was quite a journey. It took us pretty much two and a half days on the bus, and I remember clearly crossing the borders. It was terrifying. It was standing in a long line, being afraid that they might send you back for whatever reason. There were policemen or soldiers with guns. There were dogs. There was nowhere to go; there were no restrooms at all, so you had to really hold or just go out there wherever. It was usually just a field, like open fields. Yeah, it was kind of terrifying for us as kids. We didn’t know what’s going to happen, and we could just see all the adults, the way they reacted to it, and that was terrifying because, as a child, you depend on the adult being able to help you.
“The Romanian border was probably the worst. There were a lot of small Gypsy children that would come and be knocking on the bus and they would be asking for anything, money or candy. There were so many of them and they would be looking so poor. Sometimes they were not even dressed; dirty little kids. So that was kind of hard to see. But then when we arrived in Bulgaria, we were like ‘Wow!’ It was just like a different world, being able to see the Black Sea and eating different foods and people speaking different languages. That was really nice.”
“I was looking forward to seeing something different and pretty much when they were saying that we are opening borders, all I could think of was ‘Wow, we can actually just go somewhere else than Bulgaria?’ So that was my first thought in my head: travel. Travel and see the world. I don’t know if the seed of coming to America was planted back then, but it might have. I really just wanted to know where the beautiful napkin with Strawberry Shortcake came from. It was something that I think a lot of people my age wanted to do. They wanted to go out West – not necessarily to the United States – but just experience and learn.”
“There were definitely a lot of things happening in Košice. For example, the Východoslovenské železiarne [Eastern Slovakia Iron Works], where my mom worked for many years, all of the sudden they have a new owner. U.S. Steel, from Pennsylvania is coming and taking over. So that was huge. This is a company that has years of history in the metallurgical industry. The import/export business has always been there – and heavy. We’re talking, this company employed thousands and thousands of people, so that was the very, very strong talk.
“My mom stayed in her current job but then changed positions, and with the U.S. Steel coming as part of the new wave, there were a lot of changes that even for my mom were hard to digest. Because people lived this life day by day for so many years and not everybody is very good with change, and this was very strong. This was very strong. I remember my mom, so many times she would come home really exhausted and she was like ‘You know what these Americans have come up with again?!’ I can’t remember quite exactly what, but she was in charge of – U.S. Steel had internal dry cleaning/laundry because there were a lot of workers who had uniforms and those were the people that the service was for, but then my mom also had clients like local hotels or motels and accommodations for the workers, and so there were a lot of changes in the technology of how the business was run. [It was] much more strict. Not too many coffee breaks; not too much smoking cigarettes and a lot of people didn’t like that. So the capitalism was definitely, slowly but surely, getting in, and a lot of people lost jobs because they were not flexible enough, I would say.”
“This social group was created purely out of my own curiosity and maybe a little homesickness. I kind of wanted to create a sense of community of Slovaks in this area, to learn who is out there, who may be interested to get together and talk about our upbringing and culture, eat the food and just have a simply good time. And slowly but surely, since 2006 when I started this group, the meet-up has over 230 members. Not everybody is active, which is fine with me, but we do a lot of different things and I have met so many wonderful, wonderful friends through this meet-up. Great friendships; we help each other if we can. So it is almost like my own little family that I have here in D.C.”
Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.
]]>Olga Prokop was born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1949. Her father was an officer in the military and her mother stayed at home and raised Olga. Later, her mother would become the director of a nursery school and her father worked for Škoda. Olga’s family moved to České Budějovice when she was two and, a few years after that, to Prague where she started school. Olga says that when she was growing up, her head was ‘full of the West.’ She loved movie stars, music, and fashion, and especially enjoyed borrowing Seventeen magazines from friends. While at gymnázium, Olga says that she wanted to study medicine, but that she was offered a spot in the school of dentistry instead. By the time she was to enroll, however, Olga had decided to move to Britain to marry her high school sweetheart. She arrived in London in the summer of 1968, with her wedding planned for August 28. Her mother arrived on August 19 and, on August 21, they received word of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Olga says that the two did not receive word of her father for several days.
Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.
“I was very lucky. My mother used to make dresses for me and everything so I used to have really nice things. Also, some people had friends or family abroad and the family sent them some dollars or marks or whatever, and they would buy so-called bony and they could buy things in Tuzex. We didn’t have this chance, but we would sometimes borrow a magazine and it was called Seventeen. I have a funny feeling it was an American magazine for teenagers. We would borrow it from these people and we would, with my mother, say ‘Oh look, this is a nice dress. Make me a dress like that.’ So it was nice. In this Tuzex – maybe this will be interesting to say – when I was a teenager, the coolest thing was to have blue jeans and you couldn’t get blue jeans here. You could get them in Tuzex or otherwise you didn’t, so it was a good that was very much in demand.”
“This gymnázium was a very good one, but I remember I went through it like in a dream because I had a head full of the West. I was aware that we can’t travel, we can’t have things that we want. It was the ‘60s, the Beatles. You couldn’t get records and my head was full of it. And then of course when I fell in love, I was just looking out the window, and I don’t know how I managed to have good marks, quite honestly, but I did.”
“I was very much into fashion and all this, so I was very much aware that you couldn’t get cosmetics. There was Twiggy, there was Brigitte Bardot. I had some pocket money and I would either use it to buy one good thing – I’ve always preferred to buy one good quality thing that just anything – or I would spend this money on buying pictures of film stars. I had this scrapbook of Brigitte Bardot – I still have it somewhere – and I would look at her and think ‘I wish I could buy these things. I wish I could wear them. She looks fabulous.’ Then, of course, there was Twiggy, and because I was so skinny I could identify with her because it wasn’t fashionable to be skinny. Then the Beatles, the music. The ‘60s here in Prague I think was a pretty open time. Jazz. My father liked jazz. So there were these cultural things which were seeping through and I was always upset that I couldn’t be part of it and that it was so closed.
“We couldn’t travel and we couldn’t say what you wanted to say. It was just terrible. I remember, actually, when I first visited Greece, I was sitting at the Acropolis and just looking at the sea and I remember I thought ‘This is just so beautiful. If I die now, I don’t mind.’ Because for me, it meant so much to be there and actually experience that beauty because I never thought this would happen.”
“At first I was frightened; I was overwhelmed because it was just too much. The skyscrapers, the people, the noise. At the same time, it was wonderful, but I was scared. I remember I was staying at some Czech’s apartment in the Upper West Side and I decided I had to go to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. I went to through the park [Central Park] and I got to the museum and I thought ‘I wasn’t killed, thank God.’ Because you heard all those stories about Central Park, I thought ‘My God, it’s so dangerous,’ but of course then you realize it’s not. I found the people, people who didn’t even know me, they were so helpful. It was just so different. It took me, I would say, after I returned there with a green card – because I picked up the green card in London – it took me about six months when I got used to New York and I realized that it’s a city where you feel anything can happen. Any minute, anything. Anything good, anything bad. And it was an excitement that kept you on your feet, in a sense.”
“When I first came to New York and I lived there, I felt the ocean. I felt the distance between America and Europe; I really did. When I was in London, I didn’t seek the Czech community, but I did at first when I was in New York. There was this Czech girl who took care of me. I met her in the church somewhere in Astoria, so I was friendly with her and sometimes there used to be some veselka [social gathering], this sort of thing, so I used to meet other Czechs. But to be honest, very often I used to come back quite depressed. After a while I decided that I prefer to be with Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are lots of interesting Czechs there, but you don’t necessarily get to see them. Initially, it was an impulse because you feel so far away from home and really, at least I felt, that Europe was far. I felt a great distance.”
Upon graduating, Vilma had difficulty finding a job in her field and settled for working at TESLA as an elementary draftsman. Also at this time, Vilma married her husband, Bob Rychlik. They had two sons, Mark in 1972 and Bobby in 1974. Vilma recalls that the first few years with their sons were difficult, as they both were working and did not have child care. Vilma was also unhappy with her job, as it was very easy and she was not working in the field she had studied. She tried many times to secure a better position, but says that she was not successful because of her undesirable political background. Vilma was finally given a position as a materials accountant in the construction department of TESLA and was able to work her way up as a utility pipe designer, eventually becoming a specialist on reverse osmosis systems. Although she was frustrated with the obstacles in her professional life, Vilma recalls day-to-day life being very pleasant in Czechoslovakia. Her sons took music and art lessons and the family regularly went on camping and biking trips. Vilma says that she had to be resourceful and learn to make the best out of what was available.
In August 1983, Bob was able to secure travel visas to Yugoslavia for the whole family. Once there, the Rychliks made their way to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Belgrade. After an interview and a six-week wait, Vilma and her family were given papers allowing them to leave Yugoslavia and enter Austria. They spent about seven months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Ramsau; in Ramsau they lived in a guesthouse (with a number of other refugee families) and both Vilma and Bob found jobs. Although Bob received asylum status and they could have stayed in Austria, they decided to go to the United States. The family arrived in Baltimore on May 17, 1984, and Vilma found a job shortly after as a sprinkler system designer. Even though she took English classes at a community college, she says that it was difficult for her to learn English, as the family spoke Czech at home so that the boys would not forget the language. Vilma says that she was very proud when they received American citizenship in 1990 and does not regret their decision to leave. Today, she lives with Bob in Mount Airy, Maryland.
]]>Vilma Rychlik was born in Zubří, Moravia in 1952. She grew up in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm with her father, Vilém, an electrician, her mother, Zdeňka, and her brother, Tomáš. When she was six years old, Vilma’s father was sent by his employer to China for one year. The rest of the family joined him for six months; however, Vilma says she did not get to enjoy China because she was hospitalized for most of the trip. She remembers her childhood as very free and simple. Vilma says that once a week, she would help her grandmother in Zubří, from whom she learned to bake, sew, and knit. At school, she was a good student and enjoyed most subjects, but she was especially fond of chemistry, as she loved her teacher. When it was time for Vilma to go to high school, she hoped to attend medical school, but realized she would not be accepted. Instead, her parents convinced her to attend a technical school focused on construction. Although she wanted to be in the architecture program, she was placed in the plumbing and piping program and eventually graduated with honors.
Upon graduating, Vilma had difficulty finding a job in her field and settled for working at TESLA as an elementary draftsman. Also at this time, Vilma married her husband, Bob Rychlik. They had two sons, Mark in 1972 and Bobby in 1974. Vilma recalls that the first few years with their sons were difficult, as they both were working and did not have child care. Vilma was also unhappy with her job, as it was very easy and she was not working in the field she had studied. She tried many times to secure a better position, but says that she was not successful because of her undesirable political background. Vilma was finally given a position as a materials accountant in the construction department of TESLA and was able to work her way up as a utility pipe designer, eventually becoming a specialist on reverse osmosis systems. Although she was frustrated with the obstacles in her professional life, Vilma recalls day-to-day life being very pleasant in Czechoslovakia. Her sons took music and art lessons and the family regularly went on camping and biking trips. Vilma says that she had to be resourceful and learn to make the best out of what was available.
In August 1983, Bob was able to secure travel visas to Yugoslavia for the whole family. Once there, the Rychliks made their way to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Belgrade. After an interview and a six-week wait, Vilma and her family were given papers allowing them to leave Yugoslavia and enter Austria. They spent about seven months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Ramsau; in Ramsau they lived in a guesthouse (with a number of other refugee families) and both Vilma and Bob found jobs. Although Bob received asylum status and they could have stayed in Austria, they decided to go to the United States. The family arrived in Baltimore on May 17, 1984, and Vilma found a job shortly after as a sprinkler system designer. Even though she took English classes at a community college, she says that it was difficult for her to learn English, as the family spoke Czech at home so that the boys would not forget the language. Vilma says that she was very proud when they received American citizenship in 1990 and does not regret their decision to leave. Today, she lives with Bob in Mount Airy, Maryland.
“I was a straight-A student, and at that time I was 14 and I was firmly decided that I wanted to go and study medicine, I wanted to go to medical school. Then it suddenly became a problem that my father and mother were not members of the Communist Party. Actually, my father hated the regime back then and he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, so all of that was already part of my secret profile, that I was coming from a family that were not loyal communists. That meant the schools of my choice were closed to me, same like to my husband. In Czechoslovakia there was no tendency at the time just to be pretty and marry some guy who has a good profession, [and] he’ll take care of you. Over there, both needed to have an income and career, even women. So it was necessary that I would have any education possible, doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. So the opportunity arose that medical school was closed for me. I would not be accepted even though I had good grades.
“We had to select a school where I would have a chance to get in to, and at that time there was a tendency in technical schools to want more girls. There was this construction school, architectural school which had two parts – architectural part and plumbing part, like piping in the buildings, heating systems, water supply, sewage and all that. So my parents convince me. They said ‘You have no other choice, you need to go to this school,’ and I didn’t like it. My father played on that I liked to design and said ‘Well, you’ll be designing lobbies, interiors of buildings,’ and that sounded nice to me, so I said ok. So I did tests, I was accepted, I passed the tests. I wanted to be in the architectural class; of course I ended up in the plumbing class. There were two plumbing classes and one architectural. Again, the architectural class was for special people, people which had green at the time. So I got these mechanics and physics, all these technical books, brought it home, realized what I was up to and I cried. And my father said ‘Well, you have to have a maturita exam, you have to have any possible education because you have to have some profession, and you have to fight. You are a good student.’ So I did.”
“We would do lots of trips, short trips, because in Czechoslovakia at the time, normal people didn’t have a car. Gasoline was very expensive and it simply didn’t fit your budget to have a car. You had to live within a smaller scale, with biking distance. So the boys had small bikes, we had bikes, we used to do bike trips. We used to go to the woods and do bonfires and fry the sausages, so as far as that, the childhood the boys had was very nice. Also, when they were older, they would go out and for a half day I wouldn’t know where they were. They would just come for dinner, and I would have a peaceful time to make dinner for them. In a way, we lived through very simple and happy socialistic years. We didn’t have all these luxuries young people and everybody has here, but you really don’t need them for a normal, happy life. You can do with less and still be happy.”
“You could buy material cheaper at the time, and if you made stuff yourself, you could do something modern, something upgraded, very nice, special, nobody else had it. So that’s how I used to dress because I had a knitting machine and a sewing machine, and I was dressing up myself and my family, too. It was funny, my husband would bring me from the factory these pieces of cloth, like squarish cloth in pieces. A couple of them were the same color, so I sewed a shirt for my boys, and I decorated it a little bit and they had a free shirt. It was free material, right. It was stolen in socialism in the factory. Also, I could go to a secondhand shop and bought fabric which couldn’t be cheaper, or pieces of fabric, but you could put them together and do nice designs and I used to sew jackets. Actually, I have a few things here just for memory, just for nostalgia.”
If you were making things that were different than anybody else, that was important to you.
“It was because I was a woman who took after my mother, I liked to dress nicely. If I had something done myself and I wore it and somebody said ‘Oh this is nice, where did you get it?’ I could say ‘Well, I did it myself.’ It was something extra, it had more value, I was more proud of it.”
“The problem was still that we both had to work and we couldn’t get kindergarten. So we had to change the shifts. And one of us would be with the kids in the morning, then would bring the kids to the factory entry, waiting when the other one was coming out, he would grab the kids, the other one would go to work. And that’s how we lived for two years. We were still trying hard to get kindergarten. I think after two years or two and a half years we finally got it, but that was a very, very difficult life.”
“Me, as a young girl, I went to visit my uncle in West Germany with my father. So I was aware about how it looked outside. I was not fooled by socialistic propaganda, that things in the west are bad, because that was not true. They lived much happier and easier lives than we were. So I knew I would love to go out, but I didn’t realize when Bob was studying English that maybe he was already planning something like that, because I thought he was studying English because he loved all these folk songs, you know, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and he was always in contact with the western side through music. So when he told me that we got tickets to Yugoslavia, and then we will not go back, I instantly agreed.”
“We went to that office without the kids and they always asked us ‘Do you have money?’ We said ‘Yes;’ they said ‘Come tomorrow.’ We came tomorrow, and the same thing. Then I realized it led nowhere and meanwhile, some other people were accepted. So I said to my husband, ‘Hey, we’ll take the boys, baggage, everything what we have, we’ll stay in that waiting room, we won’t leave until they take us.’ So that’s what we did, and they threatened us. They said ‘We will call the Czech embassy,’ and I started to cry. I run into the office and I was crying, and Bob ran after me and he was saying that we were persecuted, so then finally they gave us the interview. Both of us had to write reasons [why we should be accepted as refugees]. We didn’t write some horrific reasons, we wrote reasons why we escaped – all those reasons that I told you – these little ones, one after another one, but in a row, and added up, your life becomes impossible there. And you realized, ok we suffered because of our parents, because our parents were not politically correct, they were not communists. But I don’t want my sons, my bright kids to work for communists. They would not go to school like we could not. So, we were accepted.”
“Until we left, everywhere I went on the bike, in a skirt, no hardhats, never fell, never had an accident, all these years, all the time on a bike, my kids, my husband. Here when I see those bikers, I just have to laugh. All these helmets, all these special clothing for hundreds of dollars, and then in order to bike, you have to put your bike on the car, drive somewhere that you do biking just for the sake of biking. For me, biking was a way of life. I went to the market with my bike, I went with my boys on my bike when they were little, later on they had their bikes. So, that’s the one thing which I miss here, the biking.”
Upon graduating, he was sent to a military airfield in Hradec Králové where he was an electronic communications specialist. After the split of Czechoslovakia, Vlado returned to Prešov to work at a military base there. At this time, he became interested in psychology and decided to pursue a degree in the subject. In 1997, he began studying psychology at Charles University in Prague after being discharged from the Army. One year he spent studying abroad in Finland. While at university, Vlado spent several summers working on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and met his future wife, Rebecca, there. After he graduated, Vlado decided to move to the United States. He and Rebecca settled in the Milwaukee area where Vlado found a job as a case manager. He is now a licensed therapist with his own practice. In 2006, Vlado began a training program at the C G Jung Institute of Chicago where he is studying to be a Jungian psychotherapist. Vlado and Rebecca have two children, a son named Emanuel and a daughter named Veronika. Although his daughter is not yet talking, he says that his son is learning Slovak and that they keep several Slovak traditions at home. Vlado lives in Glendale, Wisconsin, with his family.
]]>Vlado Šolc was born in Prešov in eastern Slovakia in 1972. He grew up with his mother, Anna, who was a sewing teacher, his father, Julius, who taught at a military school, and his older sister, Martina. Vlado’s family had a cottage near Lake Domaša, and many of Vlado’s fondest memories are of his time spent in the countryside where he loved to camp and fish with his friends. Vlado says that when he was younger, he loved animals and dreamt of being a zookeeper; he owned many pets, including snakes, mice, and guinea pigs. When Vlado was 14, he began attending a military school. His first year was spent in Košice, and he lived in a dormitory in Prešov for his final three years. The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 broke out during the time Vlado was at school; he says that he and his friends snuck out of the barracks to join the demonstrations in the city.
Upon graduating, he was sent to a military airfield in Hradec Králové where he was an electronic communications specialist. After the split of Czechoslovakia, Vlado returned to Prešov to work at a military base there. At this time, he became interested in psychology and decided to pursue a degree in the subject. In 1997, he began studying psychology at Charles University in Prague after being discharged from the Army. One year he spent studying abroad in Finland. While at university, Vlado spent several summers working on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and met his future wife, Rebecca, there. After he graduated, Vlado decided to move to the United States. He and Rebecca settled in the Milwaukee area where Vlado found a job as a case manager. He is now a licensed therapist with his own practice. In 2006, Vlado began a training program at the C G Jung Institute of Chicago where he is studying to be a Jungian psychotherapist. Vlado and Rebecca have two children, a son named Emanuel and a daughter named Veronika. Although his daughter is not yet talking, he says that his son is learning Slovak and that they keep several Slovak traditions at home. Vlado lives in Glendale, Wisconsin, with his family.
“You have to imagine this beautiful nature. This crystal-clear lake with cottages around. We are all friends. We knew each other so visited each other. At night we made fires in a fire pit – the stones in a circle. We’d play music; we’d sing; drink beer. We’d have fun. We’d grill a goat or a little pig on a fire and it took hours, and we’d go fishing and bring fish. We’d go to a pub and buy a lot of alcohol and celebrate. Or we’d go in a pub – and we all are friends – you have imagine, we’d go this plechač [disco], you’d go there and you know everybody, and guys come and bring their guitars and drums and violins and everything and we’d start singing, and we’d dance on the tables and drink beer. It was just so unbelievable and transformative. I can’t even describe the experience; it was just great.
“We would go camping. Right at Domaša there were cottages, but we would go camping in the woods, and we would stay by the lake and be fishing for three, four, five days. It would be raining and we would still be sitting and catching fish. We just ate the fish we would catch. It was really a connection with nature. It was a pure nature experience.”
“She’d get to travel because she was very good at what she was doing and they were designing new clothes. So she would have her students design new clothes and they would compete and they would go to these international competitions. She won a lot of prizes actually.”
Was she really fashionable?
“She was fashionable, yeah. That was the thing about it; they would have to be fashionable and they would have to design something new, and that’s how they would compete and win the competition. She was great. Right now, when I’m thinking about my mom, I think how much she was able to do. Taking care of the family, having a full-time job, catching up with the food. Our cottage was always clean and taken care of. Bringing up two children and basically sewing clothes for the whole family. Once in a while we would buy something, but most of the clothes we had, she would actually make it. Even things like a blazer or nice pants or complicated vests. Amazing. She still does it; of course, much less.”
And did she also sew for friends?
“Oh yeah. Doctors. We had a family doctor. She would sew for them and it was for exchange for the good stuff. For example, good meat, if we wanted to get good meat, there was the exchange.”
“I was kind of oblivious to what was going on in politics. I think I started paying attention to it when I was 14, 15, 16. I remember sitting in a pub in Domaša, drinking beer and having a discussion with friends. My older friends, three years older were saying ‘Communism is going to fall. I am telling you guys, it will end.’ I was like ‘Wow, so there is something wrong with the system that communism is going to fall.’ We had very lively discussions about it and two, three years later, it really happened.”
“It was prohibited to leave the base, but we would hide our civil clothes – non-Army clothes – in the bushes. So after 10:00, we would dress, jump the fence, run down to the city, and we would [jingle keys] do the Revolution like everybody else.”
Were lots of people out in Prešov? Because you see pictures of Prague and Bratislava, but what was the Revolution like in Prešov?
“Oh yeah, there was a revolution like everywhere else. Thousands of people in the streets. Full streets..”
Was it exciting?
“Of course! It was so exciting. That was the time people were so full of ideals and the revolution spirit. So peaceful. That’s why it was called ‘Velvet.’ Not an aggression. We were just connecting one with the other in spirit. November, October, that’s when it was happening, so it was cold out, so you would be out, bundled up, with the keys and shouting slogans.”
“I believe this is a part of who their father is and I’m trying to preserve that piece at least for a little bit. I know it’s sort of an illusion because it’s going to disappear in a few generations. You meet these people who say ‘My grandfather was a Czech. I know, say, ‘Dobrý den’ and that’s about it.’ So I know it’s going to disappear. My son is not going to teach his children Slovak, but he’ll speak about it. More, it’s not really to preserve the culture; it’s not really about it. I think it’s more about having exposure to the language and the culture and having this different fabric of experience. The passing on to him something very special, which he otherwise wouldn’t get.”