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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Labor Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-QpAi6WD7Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When the Communists came to power, nobody believed that it would last. It was very unusual; it actually had never happened before. So when they confiscated all our property, my grandma – being a smart woman – decided that since this wouldn’t last she would save some of the stock somewhere else. Save it. Just believing that one year or two years after she could resume the business. Well, they found it. So she was charged with all kinds of things: subversive activity, resisting the will of the working people – as if she wasn’t working! And she was sentenced to go to prison. My father, being a good son, volunteered to go instead of her. So he did. So he went to prison on behalf of her. But when he came back, he couldn’t find any job either. So for the rest of his life he was working as a menial worker in different factories. The lowest of the lowest jobs. Just oiling different machines and wandering around.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/byrM81d3b4s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was assuming that wouldn’t be any problem because I was a very good student. I was winning all mathematical competitions and didn’t have a B in my life, but surprise, surprise, it didn’t turn out that way. Not only they didn’t accept me to any high school, they wanted to prevent me from even entering to an apprenticeship. The communists didn’t want any education for me whatsoever. But at that time, my mother divorced. She found another gentlemen who started working as a miner in Ostrava and, since he was a premier representative of the working-class in Czechoslovakia, he somehow managed to get me into a mining school in Ostrava. So instead of going to high school, I started digging coal underground and going to school during the day, which I was doing for the next four years. Actually, not for the first two years, I must say. I got underground for the first time when I was 16. But for the next two years, between 16 and 18, every other Saturday and Sunday I was working underground. Sometimes 16 hours without interruption.</p><p>“Believe it or not, the most interesting part of that school was the practice and the work I was actually doing after school, on Sundays and Saturdays. That was fascinating for somebody who is 16 years old, or 17, going down half a kilometer and spending, let’s say, six hours lying on the ground, being sandwiched between the floor and the ceiling in a space which is between 40 and 60 centimeters high, and touching something that has been lying there for millions and millions of years. So this was an unforgettable experience. Especially when you experience things like part of the ceiling falling down next to you completely and severely injuring your co-workers.”</p><h4>CVUT Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jILhdHAYd5A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The director of the mining school was a very good guy. He knew how to play the game. He probably was a member of the Communist Party, but he had to. He very soon recognized that I really didn’t belong there. So when I applied for admission to ČVUT, he gave me such a good recommendation that they accepted me without the admission process. I just bypassed the admission process. Good for me, because I don’t think I would have been able to do it, having gone through this bad education in the mining school.”</p><h4>Apartment</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y_wVGN61HQ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Every day in the evening, using public transportation, I’d be going to the other side of Prague, find some building in progress, stole some malta [mortar], put it into a bucket and, using public transportation again, bring it back to my apartment, and bring it all the way up 144 steps and start building. So that’s how I did it. I just brick by brick – I didn’t build much, just one short wall – but I actually installed gas, I installed electricity, water, plumbing. I built a small shower in the hall because there was a small place in the hall, and when it was finished we moved in to this one room, 16 square meters.”</p><h4>Why Leave?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3QoCLIV0uVI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was not just my very private, professional career, because your being a human being doesn’t consist of your work alone. It is just a role that you play in your life. Your have other roles that you play in your life, and then you have yourself apart from your roles. I felt that all the other roles and myself were violated. Like if you don’t water a plant enough, the plant doesn’t grow. So all the other aspects of my life were not growing. That’s probably the answer.”</p><p>What other aspects of your life?</p><p>“Basic freedom of speech. It may not be important for some people, but it is an important part of feeling free. Freedom of movement. When somebody tells you that you cannot cross this line and if you try, there is a bunch of machine guns that could be activated, that somehow puts a really heavy damper on your feeling free. Information, also. Maybe some people don’t need it. But the quest for knowledge, in my view, is an innate feature of human beings – at least, in me. I cannot talk about other people, but I certainly have it. In addition to a very dreadful material life.”</p><h4>Munich & Asylum</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mcvFDvCrjdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We ended up in January in London, having an exit visa and entry visa for about two weeks. The next day, we showed up at the Home Office in London and tried to apply for asylum. I thought it was a slam dunk, no problem, because I had this history of discrimination – my father, I couldn’t study, all these things. No, no. They sent us home and told us to come next week. So we came next week and the answer was no. Not only no, but they explicitly told us that if we don’t leave England as planned, they would put us on the nearest plane and ship us to Prague by force. It didn’t matter to them that I already talked to the Canadian Embassy and they promised they would accept me if I could stay in England two months. It didn’t matter to them that we were willing to go to South Africa if England permitted us to stay for a few weeks. None of these things were of an importance to the great guys in the Home Office in London. They wanted us to go home. We didn’t want to go home. So we did something else.</p><p>“Not having any money – I mean, any – we borrowed 200 pounds from a remote friend of a remote friend of ours, but he was gracious enough to lend us 200 pounds. And with this 200 pounds, we went to the German Embassy and asked for a transit visa. Just a 24-hour visa going home, claiming that we wanted to see some countryside before we ended up back in prison. We bought two tickets for 200 pounds on a train to Prague, and 4:00 in the morning, two days later, maybe a week, we stepped out of the train in Munich and let the train continue.”</p><h4>Changing Opinions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8rSP_LXNo5k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s not quite fair, because while forming my opinion, I was too young and inexperienced and also influenced by the circumstances I was living in and the conditions I was living under. But when you leave a country where most of the people seem to be, at least on the surface, content with everything that’s around you, you start developing a certain contempt for the people. If you cannot do anything about it, at least talk about it or at least admit or at least express some dissatisfaction. Don’t behave like sheep all the time, 24/7. Consequently, when I left I didn’t have a chance to improve this opinion, but I must admit that I changed. The events in ’89 obviously changed something, and having lived in several countries after that, and having acquired experience with other nationalities, I realize that the Czechs are not that bad after all.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vladmir Pochop
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2533 size-full" title="Vladimir in 2012" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609195344im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/vladmir-pochop.png" alt="Vladimir in 2012" width="283" height="283" /></p><p>Vladimir Pochop was born in Lázně Bělohrad in northeastern Bohemia in 1946. He grew up in the town of Nová Paka where his grandmother owned a fabric shop. When her shop was nationalized following the Communist coup in 1948, she hid part of the stock so that it would not be confiscated; however, she was found out and arrested. Vladimir’s father offered to take the punishment for her and was sent to a labor camp in the uranium mines of Jáchymov. Vladimir (who was not told where his father was) says that once he was released, he had trouble finding work and ended up working menial factory jobs for the rest of his life. Vladimir himself had trouble getting into high school and, at the age of 14, moved with his mother and stepfather to Ostrava where he attended mining school. In addition to classroom studies, Vladimir worked in the mines on the weekends. On the recommendation of the school director, he was admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and began studying electrical engineering. After two years, however, Vladimir was put into a special program for computer science. He graduated in 1969 and, the following year, married Jana Pochop, whom he knew from his home town.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir worked for a technical consulting company which he said allowed him free reign to focus on his research in geometric modeling. In 1974, he was invited to spend one year at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Charles University in 1977. Although Vladimir was satisfied with his professional life, he says that living under communism was a struggle, as he and Jana had had trouble finding a place to live in Prague and he felt stifled by the lack of certain freedoms. In January 1980, the pair received visas to London for two weeks and, on their way home to Prague, got off the train in Munich and made their way to the American Embassy. Vladimir was questioned by U.S. military intelligence for four months. They were given asylum in Germany, Vladimir found a job at BMW and they moved into an apartment.</p><p> </p><p>In 1981, the Pochops received permission to immigrate to the United States, but they had to wait eight months as Jana was pregnant. Their son Jan was born in September 1981 and, in April 1982, the Pochops flew to Atlanta, Georgia. Two weeks later, Vladimir went to California in search of a job. When he found one at a start-up tech company in Silicon Valley, his wife and son joined him and the family settled in Mountain View. Vladimir and Jana had another son, Martin, in 1984. That same year, Vladimir joined the company Autodesk and, as a chief scientist there, helped to develop AutoCAD and other products. He became an American citizen in 1989 and today holds dual citizenship. As both of their sons now live in Prague, Vladimir says that he and Jana have considered returning to the Czech Republic. Today, they live in Concord, California.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Arrest
CVUT
Education
Engineers
Family life
Forced labor
Jachymov
Lazne Belohrad
Nova Paka
school
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X1H4l_DECtk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I took German but before you… when I went [to school] in the ‘60s… before you could take an elective language you had to do well in Russian. And if you wanted to be a cool kid, you would have As and Bs but you’d have a D in Russian because that was a sign of a little bit of a protest, you know. But if you had a D in Russian, then you couldn’t get in to the other languages. So I ended up having a C or something and just squeezing by, so they let me take some German and some English – I took English for five years. But that didn’t help much when we came to the States – that’s another story. Because, you know, you learned the British English and that was kind of harsh, you know.”</p><h4>The Explosive Group</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ucbaJpMvOs4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In eighth grade we started a rock and roll band, of which I was the lead singer and guitarist. And of course we played The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was seen like not only blasphemy but an anti-communist gesture, you know. So… we always had a lot of troubles, because of the long hair and everything else… But somehow it all sort of worked out, we squeezed by, you know. We had good grades, sort of. But my mother was frequently summoned to school by the principal and told ‘Have your son have a haircut!’ And of course I would fight it, and so they would cut a little bit, you know – the usual trials and tribulations of growing up. But for me, being in the music band changed everything because… this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with girls. Because, you know, older girls were interested in me, which is a big thing to a young boy pre-puberty or just when puberty comes in. And we left the country when I was 16, almost 17, so my formative years – I still have the accent, when we came to the States was maybe just a little bit, a year, too late, where it never went away – but, in the school, my self confidence, being surrounded by these fans, was great! And all the politics at those moments went aside, yeah.</p><p>“Everybody listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe was only… they had signals so that you couldn’t listen to the news, but they would let it go for the music. So like from two to four everyday you could listen to music on Radio Free Europe. So we would record the music on reel to reel tape recorders, so then we could then learn the music by phonetics. But it was not that difficult, you could buy records, people had collections, it was available for those who were interested, you know. And the quality wasn’t very good, because it was recorded over recordings, you know, there was a lot of hisses and scratches, but you could still listen to The Rolling Stones. So you could do that, yeah.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EhH-vI2K_w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Now, my dad was over six feet tall, he used to play soccer for Sparta, he was an athlete. Up until his late 70s when he passed away he had black hair, he never had grey hair. He was a good looking, good looking guy. And he walked upright, as opposed to… the people in our building signed a petition against his walking. They said ‘He’s walking too arrogant. He’s not saying hello to the neighbors.’ There was like a meeting of all these people who lived in this building, because every building had a caretaker… The caretaker was a member of the Party, they usually lived on the bottom floor. They were snooping around, they were the ones who knew… And this was the woman who made this official complaint that my dad comes home from work and… My dad worked 18 hour shifts, I mean, he worked like a slave to make money. So when he came home, it’s possible he didn’t say hello. But not because he didn’t like her, because he was dead beat tired. But he walked upright, so she thought that he was walking with his nose up. My dad was not. But that’s the kind of environment that we lived in. My dad, of course, when he had to come up and explain himself in front of these morons, you know. So he would never join that group on any level, let alone the Communist Party.”</p><h4>First Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tc23tc_Lr9E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They said to my mom ‘Go and apply for a job at Western Electric – a company that makes telephones – on Cicero and Cermak Road, in Cicero basically. They’re hiring.’ They told me ‘Since you’re a guy, go to a steel company called Seaco, and the chances are you’ll get a job there, they’re hiring.’ So my mom took one bus, I had to take like four or five buses to get to this location. So my mom got in, got hired. I walk into this place. I knock on the door, there’s a man who says, again, ‘How have you been?’ If he said ‘How are you?’ I would have said ‘Fine.’ But that phrase ‘How’ve you been’ I’d never heard. So again, there is this exchange, I’m a total idiot, I can’t… He says ‘I have no work for you. Go away.’ Just then, somebody comes in and says ‘I need one guy for my department.’ And the guy says ‘I’ve got no one.’ He says ‘Well, what about this kid here?’ He says, ‘He’s an idiot.’ So he says to me ‘Hey kid, you speak English?’ And I say ‘Yes!’ And he said ‘Well, if he speaks English… So, what’s your name?’ And so, somehow it came out that I am Czech and he says ‘Well, I’m Czech. My name is Ferjencik!’ He never spoke Czech, you know, but he was very proud of his… He said ‘I’ll hire this kid.’ So I got the job.</p><p>“So, to this day I don’t know what I was doing, I was in charge of some… some… something, I don’t know. But the footnote to this story is that people would always say ‘Where do you work?’ And I’d say ‘Well, a company called CECO. A sheet metal company.’ Every Friday we would get checks, and outside would come a Brinks truck and you would cash the check and you would come home with cash. One Friday we missed this truck and so I brought the check home. And on the check it said Sears. I went to the wrong place, I took the wrong bus. I thought I was working at CECO, I was working at… So, a true moron you know, but I was hired, I was working for Sears. Then I went to school. I realized that manual labor was not for me.”</p><h4>Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iLDWRo28B0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We wanted to appeal to the younger crowd, the people like us. And we were very much influenced by Dadaism and Jára da Cimrman, and we poked serious fun at the establishment. We poked fun at how badly they spoke Czech. How they mixed the English language into the Czech language. And we were ruthless. And little by little the advertisers started to check out. We finally decided to temporarily go off the air. But while it lasted we had a great time. I composed a song called ‘Emigrant’s Cry’… It was introduced by Jan Novak who said ‘<em>Vážení krajané</em>’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”</p><h4>Emigrants Cry</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7sMPEC9XxSM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’</p><h4>Student</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3PPYiFC-DMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My teachers at the Art Institute… the teachers were pretty much always far left, understandably perhaps and all that stuff. But it bothered me that they would not… that they saw communism as something so distant, something on another planet. A thing that really doesn’t affect us, you know. And there was this residue of McCarthyism – ‘We know what… let’s not stir up another round, you know, look where that got us, you know, just paranoia.’ So, it was troublesome, because my views were pretty much to the right of center when I came. Because I wanted to go to Vietnam and fight the communists. I actually was eligible to be drafted that one year, there was a lottery and they filled the quota two numbers before mine came up. So I came very close, but my mom would not survive it. She would do something not to let me go but it never had to come to that. So, having my American friends being completely oblivious to anything that was happening in Europe was and is still troubling.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQdSy03pG3s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1992, my wife and I and our two daughters go back to Prague, and I’m telling them how I grew up, I’m telling them all the stories, you know. So we go, and we visit the place where I grew up – the apartment building. We walk inside, and in all of these buildings there’ll be like a little plaque on the wall with the names of all the people who live there. Our name was still there. Nobody, this is after communism, and nobody cared to change it. Other people came and went, but ours was never removed or replaced. So that was a freaky thing seeing our name. So then as we go up, I knock on the door and nobody opened so… But I tell my girls the story of when I was little, and I would go down into the cellar to fetch the coal or whatever, right? As you open the door, you walk in the cellar, but you would never see the back of the door, because it was of course this way, right?</p><p>“But as a little kid, for some reason, I looked on the back of this door. And there was a poster from the Nazis. It had, you know, the big swastika, and it said in the left column Czech and the right column German, something about not stealing property from this cellar. And finally it said ‘This offense is punishable by death!’ So, I’m telling them this story and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’ So, I take them into the cellar, we open the door and… it was still there! Semi-decayed, you know, barely clinging on, because any time anybody would open the door would go… there was no reason to ever… So that was a kind of interesting experience, you know, how little had changed in all these years.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vladimir Maule
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.</p><p> </p><p>When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Alternative culture
Arrest
Branik
Child emigre
Education
Forced labor
Informants
Jiri Kolar
Refugee camp
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
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be1b6950b42bfa247a9021ae90fac0a0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Last of WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ISjHw8Q0KXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“For us, it was rather peaceful; we didn’t have too much going on. Some parts of Slovakia had more of a ‘war’ going on, but we didn’t. Actually for us kids, it was a great time. We were running around, our parents were worried, ‘What is going to happen?’ you know, how to feed us, and clothe us, and so on. Us kids, we had a great time.</p><p>“My dad was actually in the army during the War. Slovakia at the time was also a republic, by itself. When the army was disbanded, and was caught by the Germans, he was sent to Germany to work on the farms as forced labor. They needed it; all the German men were in the army, so there was a shortage. So he did work in Germany until the end of the war. Then he came home.”</p><p><em>What sort of years was he away in Germany? One year at the end of the war, or a couple?</em></p><p>“I think it was the last year of the war. I remember him coming home; he got a hold of a bicycle somewhere and peddled home.”</p><h4>Father's Land</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cUe5v59GwaY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1950, they came to our village, or town. They wanted to start collective farms. My father was one of the bigger landowners. So they were pressing on him to become a member of the collective farm. He refused, so he ended up being in jail for six months. And then after six months, they sentenced him to a forced labor in a coal mine. It [the farm] was supporting us very nicely. We had no problem, and we also employed people during harvest. That was one of the things that they threw at us. You were an exploiter of the working class.</p><p>Well, I guess it started little by little. Then I guess the early ‘50s were the most brutal. The regime really took hold and completely dominated. You went with them or else and faced the consequences.”</p><h4>Border Crossing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PE5KeTulxsk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We didn’t take the roads; we went through the fields, and the forest. We walked all night until we came to the border. We knew the border very well because we lived close by. So my dad and my uncle were watching the border guards for a few days to exactly where and when they crossed. And we came to the point where we saw them, they were crossing. And it was on the one at that time they didn’t have the mines yet. They mined the fields, and the one we escaped in had a wire with flares. And we also knew where the flares were so we came to those wires. And they slowly lowered them to the ground. And we walked between them one here and the other there. And my brother, who was only ten at the time, was dragging his feet and he kicked it and the flares went off. And then, night became like day. We were just a couple yards from the border. So we hit the ground and then took off for the border. We came to the border, and the border is divided by a river. We jumped in and crossed into Austria.”</p><p><em>What happened when the flares went off? Did the guards not react?</em></p><p>“We didn’t know. We just hit the ground and we didn’t know. Somebody thought they heard a dog. But later on, somebody else escaped from our hometown. And the captain of the border guard was living in their house. And they told the border guard and they said they saw them, they saw big groups but they didn’t want to engage.”</p><h4>Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tLJSI5xnK3E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had about 18 or 20 suburban newspapers. It was a nice job; actually, it was there where I met… Maybe the name Mr. Murdoch means something to you? [We were his] first acquisition, he was from South Australia, then he came to Sydney, and he bought our string of newspapers. He came to the shop, he talked to us, and I shook his hand. Then a few days later, he bought The Daily Mirror in Sydney. And then, of course, you know where he went from there…”</p><p><em>So, was he a good boss?</em></p><p>“We never saw him, except that one day when he came to introduce himself, so then he was gone!”</p><h4>Return to Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b8nlgjZhHLY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first time I went back was after 15 years, because it was very difficult to go. You know, since we left illegally, you had to apply for a visa and you had to pay and exchange so much money and everybody was watching you. But yeah, we went back quite a few times.”</p><p><em>So the first time was 1967?</em></p><p>“Yes… It was quite an eye-opening experience. I remember growing up as a young boy. In my home town I would get out of the house and I would look the end of the village and I thought that was so far away. And when I came back, Oh my god! That’s like looking at the end of this block! I guess when you are young, and little, everything seems to be a big deal. Especially once you start traveling, and you are exposed to so much in the world, you don’t even realize.”</p><p><em>Had it changed? Or had it remarkably not changed?</em></p><p>“When we were back the first time, it didn’t change that much. It was not a very pleasant experience. It was still under communism, and people were afraid to talk, they would close the doors and put the radio on, and would talk to you so no one would hear you. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But it’s different now of course.”</p>
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Title
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Valentin Turansky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Valentin Turansky was born in Stupava, Slovakia, in 1938. His father, Matuš, worked as a farmer, while his mother, Maria, stayed at home and raised Valentin and his seven siblings, of whom he was the oldest. In 1951, his father was arrested after refusing to incorporate his smallholding into the local co-operative farm. He spent six months in prison, and was then sentenced to a further six months of forced labor, which he spent working in a coal mine. Upon his release in 1952, the Turansky family decided to leave the country. They crossed the Slovak border – as part of a group of 15 people – into Austria. Valentin says the group hit a trip wire on their journey across the border, which detonated a large number of flares but, he says, there was no response from the border guards on duty, which he attributes to the large size of the group.</p><p> </p><p>In Austria, the Turansky family stayed in a refugee camp in Wels for 18 months. Around the time his family immigrated to Australia in 1953, Valentin went to Belgium, where he attended college and gained a qualification in printmaking. A keen soccer player, Valentin played for an amateur team in Brussels upon finishing school and moving to the Belgian capital. He joined his family in Australia at the beginning of 1958 and became an Australian citizen in 1959. There, he started work at the Dunlop shoe factory. He subsequently returned to his trade and worked as a printer for the Cumberland Newspaper Group in Sydney. In 1963, Valentin traveled to America and settled in Chicago. He found a job in a print shop in the city’s Printers Row district. In 1965, he married his wife, Margaret.</p><p> </p><p>Valentin became a U.S. citizen in 1968. He continued to play soccer for the city’s Slovak A.A. (Athletic Association) Soccer Club, which he says enjoyed a good deal of success at that time. Today, Valentin lives with his wife, Margaret, in Prospect Heights, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Arrest
Border patrol
Community Life
Forced labor
Refugee camp
Rural life
Sports
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4a80c5e948bd2aebd3a1f0893ee9e47d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>1951 Trial</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uOrBafTKKok?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“All of a sudden, they yanked me out the cell, brought me to a big room full of people, I did not know… nobody told me what it was about. I was there, there were some people up there on the podium, and I couldn’t make out what it was all about. In about 15 minutes they took me back to the cell. And later on somehow I was told that I was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. That was the whole trial! No defense attorney or anything. Absolutely nothing, nobody asked me nothing, nobody told me anything, you know. That was communist justice.”</p><h4>Pankrac Prison</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qzkrADDL_oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Cleaning the feathers – it came in bags. Goose feathers with chunks of skin on it and all that. All putrid, you know. So lots of dust around and there was a little cell that was meant for probably two people, there were three of us or four of us. It was cold there, you couldn’t… there was a toilet tight next to the door. We had to use the toilet, you know, to relieve yourself, we had to wash ourselves in the toilet and we had to drink out of the toilet because we were not given any water. In the morning you got a little cup of bitter tea, I mean coffee, and that was it. Otherwise showers, maybe they took you into the shower once every two months. We were supposed to be allowed to go out and walk around the yard every other day or so, so maybe once a week, once every 14 days. And the food was completely inadequate. It was so little I got so weak that going, I was on the second floor, I believe, so going up the stairs I couldn’t make it. I was climbing holding onto the railing.</p><p>“Once they threw me into the correction… that means in to the solitary…because, they couldn’t prove it of course, they did not have to prove anything, they just said I was communicating in Morse code through the walls. I was, you know, but they couldn’t tell, they just said ‘okay you, you go’ and they put me I think 14 days in that solitary in the basement. Well, that was real pleasant. You did not have your mat there, nothing during the day, not a blanket, just the very light whatever you had on – a shirt and breeches. Otherwise it was ice cold in there. In the morning, they gave you a bucket and you had to scrub the floor, the whole floor. So everything was wet. Then, the rest of the day, you had to stand under the open window at attention. And the snow was coming through the window. At lunchtime they opened the door and threw in a little bowl of red hot soup, or something, you know, you had to gulp it down, you burned your mouth, because in two minutes they were back taking the empty stuff out. And when I came out of it after 14 days, that cold and all that, so every joint I was moving was cracking.”</p><h4>Resistance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mXK0G409dRU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did not have any grandiose plans, you know, like ‘Oh we are going to overthrow the regime.’ That was quite obvious that you cannot do it. You just have to do whatever you can do. Even if it is small stuff, if everybody did a little, that regime could not have lasted six months, you know. But just a little. We tried to do our best under the circumstances. So we did not, we knew something about the second resistance during the War, where people were trying to organize large groups, lots of people, getting ready for big actions. That never worked out, because you have too many people involved, there will be somebody who will blow the whistle, and it is not going to happen. So we decided right from the beginning, knowing what was happening during the War, to keep it small, really tight, really strict security, and just do whatever we could, not trying to contact other people and all that, that was a recipe for disaster.</p><p>“There were lots of people, as I could see in the prison, who wanted to do something. They were there, they were connected to some group, big group, then it blew up, they wound up in jail before they could do anything, you know. But they were willing, if they had good leadership, those people would have fought. So, saying that the people did not want to do anything or risk anything, that’s incorrect. There were lots of people who were willing, but the thing is, most people need somebody who tells them ‘do this or do that.”</p><h4>Passenger Train</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7x3BKlRCmQs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The guys, Milan and Joseph, they got off the train at the train station before Berlin – well I thought that was the end of it, the end of them, you know, because I heard shooting and that. So I was under the train and kept going, stopped once or twice more in different stations but now I couldn’t see the names of the stations or anything, so I was thinking to myself ‘Well, I’ve got to get off the train because maybe the train is passing through Berlin, I might wind up in the Communist sector on the other side so, just take a chance…’ I decided the next stop, I’ll just drop and see where I am. That’s all that you could do, you know?</p><p>“So I dropped between the rails there and the train left. There was some guy looking through the door there, the glass, and he kind of dropped his jaw, because he saw me there. What he did after that I don’t know, the train was gone and I ran. I got from the railroad yard and I took a hostage there. There were like little shacks or sheds and people living there so I caught a half-drunk guy there and forced him to take me to the American barracks.”</p><h4>US Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6CNegVdgxzE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a completely wrong picture of the whole thing – what we thought the army should be like, you know, because the United States Army was something completely different from these national armies, like the Czechoslovak Army. We saw in the Czechoslovakian Army people were very highly motivated, you know, the officers corps and all that. It was the same in most of the… like in Germany, right? Or in France or in England. But here it was a completely different thing. Also, first I thought, prior to – well, it took me a while before I changed my mind but – I thought I would stay in the army. Because I couldn’t imagine being anything except an officer like father. And of course, I thought that was the thing to do. When I saw how it worked here I said ‘No, I don’t want any part of it.’ Because there was also nothing going on, it didn’t look, you see, that was the main thing… because the Korean War was over, nobody knew anything about Vietnam, and our enlistment was up and we said ‘What? We are going to run around here like jerks polishing boots and all this?”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Radek Masin
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Radek Masin was born in Olomouc, southern Moravia, in 1930. His father, Josef Mašín, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Army who was later executed by the Nazis, while his mother, Zdenka, was a civil engineer, who spent part of WWII in Terezín. Radek and his brother <a href="/web/20170609125243/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/joseph-masin/">Joseph</a> received bravery medals from Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War. According to Joseph, the brothers attempted to render German fighter planes traveling through their town by train unusable during WWII, and at one point helped a pair of Russian POWs escape.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609125243/http://www.radio.cz/en/article/130440" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Benes
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Forced labor
Jachymov
Nazis
Pankrac Prison
Podebrady
Political prisoner
Resistance
Solitary confinement
Terezin
World War II
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73425e41d8ce20316df65c65bceb68d0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Family Farm</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DUF2tmxmQLo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You know, on a farm, you kind of take care of yourself partly and partly the family. So, there was a time – my sister also died fairly young – there was one time when my middle brother Václav and I lived on the farm alone. So we kind of tried to cook. I was only about 12, and so after father passed away [Václav] was a brick-layer, that was his trade and he made good money, but there was nobody to take care of the farm so he came home and I was just school aged. That was about two years we did things like that, and then he got married, because he wasn’t even married at that time, he was about 20 years old. Well, every family goes through some difficult times.”</p><h4>Schoolteacher WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/W86JjlECUGk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Us young teachers were drafted – women teachers were drafted – there were about twenty of us and we were moved, all of us, to a small town, and our job was to repair German uniforms. It was like an assembly line, there were seamstresses who worked on sewing machines, and those of us who didn’t have sewing machines, we just sewed, you know, whatever. And sometimes there was even blood on these uniforms still, because they had taken it off a dead soldier. But then they decided that this was not enough. They sent us women teachers back to school and young men were drafted.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dx1SMxUP1Yc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“On the way, my husband had an idea that it would be good if he loaned part of his uniform to those three civilians who wanted to escape also. So on the way to Karlovy Vary, not too far away, we stopped the car and we got out and the men, one after another, were putting part of the uniform on. When we finally all assembled back in the car it looked like four policemen and me, and I sat on the floor in the back of the car so I wouldn’t be very visible, you know. We were leaving Karlovy Vary, and at the edge of the city, two policemen stopped us – ‘Stop!’ And oh my gosh, now what? That was bad. But my husband was kind of – he was always that way – quick thinking, you know. And he said ‘We’re going to Oldřichov’, because he knew the terrain. He worked there, on the border, you know.”</p><h4>Gunfire at the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/78u_Qb6Cr10?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a creek, and there was the border. And so then the terrain went kind of up. And so we ran and ran through that creek and then we thought ‘Oh, now we are free, we are free!’ But then we heard ‘tat tat tat tat’. They were shooting after us. Czech people were shooting after us! And it was a German policeman, a border patrol man, who saved us. He waved to them to go back, because we were on his land. And so, it is really an irony, that three years before that, Germans were our enemies, and then a German saved us from Czechs!”</p><h4>Husband Expelled</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J8j5GhGwF0Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They told my husband that he has to go to the police station, that they want to talk to him. This was Friday, towards the evening, and my husband didn’t want to do until the following day, but my brother said ‘No, you don’t make your own decision, they wanted you today so you have to go’. So he went. And he was told at the police station that he is not welcome there and that he has to leave in 24 hours. In other words, they threw him out. So, the following day, we had to be at the airport. They took him away and we had to wait. We waited and we waited and they never brought him back.</p><p>“I remember then when we walked away from the airport, somebody was watching us, they walked behind us. We went that Monday, that following Monday, to the American Embassy to tell them what happened, that they had taken my husband away and we didn’t know where he was. They asked if we had seen a plane leaving west or east. We hadn’t seen a plane even, when he left. So that last week we didn’t know where he was, we didn’t have any idea if he was at home. Because at the embassy they told us that cases happened that they took refugees like we were to Russia and nobody ever saw them again. So we were scared, you know. But luckily they just took my husband and kicked him out of the country and sent him home. So he was here when we came home. So that was kind of an experience.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Marie Cada
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Marie Cada was born in the small village of Komorovice, southeastern Bohemia, in 1919. She became an orphan at a young age and spent her early teenage years looking after the family farm with her brother Václav. Marie went to school in nearby Humpolec and then trained to become a teacher at a religious college in Kutná Hora. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1948, she was working at a three-teacher school in Petrohrad, near Prague. Her boss, the school’s principal, had strong anti-communist views. He was let go and Marie was asked whether she would take over his position. Her fiancée, Václav Cada, discouraged her from working for the communists and urged her to escape with him. The pair left Czechoslovakia in March, 1948. They were married in Dieburg refugee camp in Germany in the spring of that year.</p><p> </p><p>Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
American citizenship
Border patrol
Domankova
Education
emigrant
Family life
Forced labor
German
Nazis
Occupation
Oldrichov
refugee
Refugee camp
school
Secret police
Teachers
Women workers
World War II
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4f230680b0a0a61d01ec4737afc94dbd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Work & Success</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jD5XL5R9FQo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You have to check the blueprint for them, talk with them, you have to order materials all the time – order windows, doors, ceilings, and everything – and in advance you have to order trucks and cranes. And everything was too much pressure. Communist members didn’t like this kind of job because of all this responsibility. But they checked my job all the time because you know you cannot be against the government. And when I went one step up and had the 41 guys, this was really too much of a headache for them, because you have to have the knowledge and bricklayers – they can fool you, they can do something on purpose and you can be in trouble. And this knowledge I had from the base, because I was a bricklayer, then a foreman, then a supervisor. They don’t like this kind of stuff, they like easy jobs. But I still had to be careful, I could not be over the line and say something that was bad against the government, because you can stop in the office one day and have no chair and have no desk. They can say you have to go back and be a brick layer. But I was not afraid, because I finished up at my desk at 3:00 and then I always worked a second job as a bricklayer because I needed extra money.”</p><h4>Jail & Mother-in-Laws</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hp8FpGMoQbk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She was living at this time 20 miles from Liberec and one day she received a paper saying ‘can we talk to you?’ And what happened was she told a neighbor ‘can you watch my children?’ My wife, she was four years old and her brother was six. ‘Can you watch them?’ she said, ‘I’m leaving the city at eight o’clock and I’ll be back on the bus at four o’clock’. And she was back four years later. What happened was they charged her with talking with someone who crossed the border, the judge said ‘you are a traitor. I’ll give you 25 years’. She was in Rakovník, the city of Rakovník. They made tiles, which was a very rough time, they did everything – the ceramic tiles, they even made them in the factory at this time, which was the 1950s, and they even put them on the train. With her in jail were a lot of famous ladies, like movie stars who did something against the government, but, who she said were really the best in there with them were the prostitutes. They were living with them, of course, because they put everyone in the one room. But she had respect for them because if the political prisoners messed up something, the prostitutes – they took the blame, because they knew somebody else could be more punished. So a lot of those ladies said ‘I did it!’ because they knew the prisoners in there against the government would be treated worse and that’s why they took this stuff on and said ‘I did it’, and they were not punished.”<br /></p><h4>Liberation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CUADGKGZ_SU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had some history books in the school always, and on the front of the history books was a tank, a Russian tank, with a flower and it said ‘we liberated you’. And I found out in 1968, which was the Prague Spring, I bought every week a Slovakian magazine called Expres, and they started to put a lot of stuff in, and I found out the southwest of our country was liberated by General Patton! For 23 years I never knew it because, why? My father told me just this stuff about the Communists, but my mum, she was so scared she never… she knew it, but she was so scared I could talk and she would be punished! That’s why I had to find out when I was 23 years old, in 1968 I found out our country was liberated by General Patton! That’s why when I came to the United States I saw the General Patton movie about five times!”<br /></p><h4>Liverec Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_45gA55tY1Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I saw the blood and everything, I had a motorcycle, I drove home and I visited my mother in law and said ‘What do we do now? The situation is bad.’ She said, ‘You know what, go buy the main things’ – like milk, bread and this stuff, we had to support ourselves because nobody knew what would happen. So I went to the grocery store for this stuff and when I stood in the line I heard a gunshot and a lot of noise. And after I went back to the city (I brought the groceries home and said ‘Can you stay with my daughter?’), and I came back to the downtown, and what had happened was that they were still going the wrong way. Streetcars have steel tracks on the ground, and a tank had slipped on these and there was an underpass, where you walk under a building. There was a pillar and the tank had hit this pillar and the whole section fell down. And a lot of guys standing under this were killed. But we saw how people can really use their hands, they started pulling the bricks out and pulling people out. And the tank started moving out, the idiot who was leader of the tank said ‘Move out!’ And people said ‘Stay! Stay!’ because behind were the emergency ambulances. They said ‘Stop!’ and they almost killed a nurse and people there were mad. And they guy used a gun and shot in the air and said ‘Move, move, move!’ He was so scared too, and he started moving the tank finally out and there was big damage. And at this place there was another nine people killed. We had, they said, about 16-18 people killed and a lot of people injured.”<br /></p><h4>Child Left Behind</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Wu6m_XKAk0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At this time she was 14 and a half, and I even told her… I said ‘Honey, I’ll tell you one thing very serious – we are going to the United States, if the situation there is a little bit better, we’ll stay over there. But don’t listen to the people around – we haven’t forgotten you. You won’t be forgotten. We care about you. Stay here, we’ll do everything that we can to move you over there.’ She says ‘Okay Dad, okay, I trust you.’ And two years later, when I received a green card, I visited the Czech Embassy in Washington and it was Mr. Safka or whatever, he smelt of alcohol. But we visited him, we showed him the green card. They said ‘Write down everything about your daughter’. And we wrote where she went to kindergarten, when she was six and a half what kind of school she went to. They checked our papers and Mr. Safka said, because we asked him how long she can be over there, what kind of chance we have to see her, and he said ‘We signed the Helsinki Agreement, and when we talk about putting families together, we have to stick with that.’ We were really pretty surprised because really six months later we saw our daughter.</p><p>“Those two years were very tough. Mostly for my wife because she said ‘Did we do wrong, did we do right?’ And I said ‘No, no! It’s the United States and I think this is good we have to just be tough. But we have to look to the future, we have to look to the future!’ It was a tough two years, but, you know, everything is a risk and we are here.”</p><h4>Cleveland Spy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dz04muEvgeM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When [Joe] was in 1987 at the police station, they told him, ‘We’ll treat you very nicely and fairly, but tell us where you go – two days there, three days here, and everything – but we’ll give you some advice, we don’t want any problems.’ He says, ‘I won’t give you any problems’, and the guy who was in charge, some major or someone in some pretty nice position, says ‘Mr. Joe Kocab, we know about you very well, more than you think!’ He says ‘What? I haven’t said anything!’ The major says ‘You know what? You want to hear something? Come on over here.’ He says ‘Come on, follow me into this room’. He went to another room and he pushed the button and his speech was on the tape! This was 1987, the speech was made two years before. The major said ‘Whose voice is this?’ Joe said ‘That’s my voice; I had a speech ’85 or ’86 in the Czech Hall.’ And the major told him ‘Your speech is not for the Communist government, it is against us. Watch yourself, we don’t need problems, that’s why we know about you more than you think.’</p><p>“When Joe Kocab told us, our people here, what’s going on, we told the ambassador and Martin [Palouš] ‘Can you do us a favor, can you find out – somebody from our Czech environs has to be a black sheep who taped this stuff! Somebody amongst us had to have taped it, because it was all Czech people here at the speech. Somebody had to make the tape and donate the tape to the Czech Republic, to the Communists! Can you find out who is the guy, because he can’t be with us any more! Because we cannot do this to the United States government, especially with this Reagan stuff, you know, we owe them, with the FBI, the CIA, we can’t play this sort of trick.’ And they told us; ‘Oh, we have a problem, they are destroying all of the documentation that they can.’ This was a big shock for us, because we thought, finally, they cannot punish somebody, but we can punish somebody who worked with them. Because we thought this would be our duty to punish somebody who worked with them, because this was terrible, what they did. But we still don’t know, who was the guy!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Ludvik Barta
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="wp-image-2516 size-full alignleft" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ludvik-barta-SQ.png" alt="" width="240" height="240" /></p><p>Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a translator during WWII. Ludvik’s father became a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but changed his views completely in the early 1950s in light of the high-profile political trials taking place at the time. Shortly before his father’s death, when Ludvik was 12, he says his father urged him never to join the Communist Party. Later on in life, Ludvik followed this advice.</p><p> </p><p>When Ludvik was 17, he went to the local technical school to train to be a bricklayer. After two years he put his studies on hold to do his military service. Just before leaving for military training in Turnov, Ludvik married his wife Lenka in June 1964. The couple soon had a daughter, also named Lenka. Upon return from military service, Ludvik became a successful builder, and constructed the family’s own apartment. In August 1968, his wife Lenka finally had a chance to visit her father – who had left Czechoslovakia in 1948 – in his new home in Cleveland. When Lenka returned home, shortly after the Soviet-led invasion, the family decided to move to the United States. However, while arrangements were being made, the Czechoslovak government changed its passport requirements, which nullified the family’s existing travel documents. It subsequently took Ludvik and his wife 11 years to come to the United States. When they did, they had to leave their daughter behind. Two years later, having established residency in the United States, Ludvik and Lenka petitioned the Czechoslovak government to allow their daughter to come to America. The family was reunited in 1981.</p><p> </p><p>Today, the Bartas still live in the Cleveland area and are owners of ‘Hubcap Heaven’ – an emporium of wheel covers for automobiles.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815/http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=117360&catid=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Ludvik’s star appearance on WKYC’s program ‘What Works’</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
emigrant
Family life
Forced labor
Military service
Prague Spring
Prison
refugee
Sudeten Germans
Warsaw Pact invasion
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40037cb9cf21c4ac93a82e1184d0eb19
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Nymburk</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2xKcvCIKITA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We lived, initially, on the town square, where granddad had his law office. Dad had his law office together with granddad. And we lived on the same floor as the offices at the back. And my first childhood memory of that place was an explosion in the bathroom, where somebody was cleaning clothes using some explosive thing and somebody else lit the light for the water heater and the thing exploded. But the building was so solid that the outside walls didn’t fly out, I just remember as a little kid climbing over bricks in the hallway. We all survived except the nanny, poor soul, who was the one who lit the match. She survived and I believe that dad looked after her, because she was disfigured, I believe.”</p><h4>anti-Nazi</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sseu3N0aIwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had, we were forced to accept the German commandant of the small garrison they had in Nymburk – he lived in our house. He was actually a fairly pleasant guy as it turned out in the end. He could hear the BBC bim bim bim bim, because granddad was hard of hearing and upstairs he was listening to BBC. The German never said a word, except he mentioned to my dad that he was a reservist and really in real life he was an attorney in Hanover someplace.</p><p>“At the same time – this is in the dying days of the War, I was already 16 – we had an underground Sea Scout group. It was all illegal of course, scouts were not allowed. And we formed a… it was a dangerous endeavor because we connected with the partisans that were in the hills of Loučeň, north of Nymburk. And we were supposed to keep an eye on German military trains and road transports. To do that, we posted lookouts in the highest point of Nymburk – that was the cathedral… the major church.”</p><h4>Questioning</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iD5IToB83OI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then the last act of our wartime experience with the Germans was at night. A small group of us climbed under the main bridge and removed the German dynamite which was installed to blow the bridge to protect the German rear as they were retreating. And that was a foolhardy thing to do, because we didn’t know the first thing about disarming explosives. And all we had was just pliers to clip the wire, you know, hanging. And we didn’t blow ourselves up and the bridge survived the War.”</p><h4>Trenches</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wWhqQGFLoP0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“A very strong recollection from those days was a brigade, a working brigade, of the law students. The centuries-old law students club was called Všehrd, and Všehrd had a compulsory work brigade in Kladno, in the area of Kladno. Not in the coal mines, but something else that struck me as nothing short of horrendous. It was, we were transported by several buses from Prague to Kladno, without being told what we were expected to do. We were issued shovels and so on and marched outside town, where there was a newly constructed concentration camp – barbed wire around. And we were supposed to dig a trench on one side. It was in a sort of flood-prone area, so this was some sort of trench for the water. And it gave me hours… of course, we worked at a tempo of one shovel-full a minute, maybe, or every five minutes. We worked as slow as we could.</p><p>“We kept our eye on the occupants of the camp behind the barbed wire, and it was heart-rending. There was a lot of old people, a lot of young ones. There was one obviously feeble-minded youngster, who was making faces at us. I’ll never forget that face. It sort of dawned on me then that in a communist society, people who were not healthy and capable of physical labor for the state were not expected to live very long. And I remember the trip back to Prague on board the bus, I mean we were all joking on the way out, on the way back there was not a peep on the bus. We just sat there in shock.”</p><h4>Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cxLk54HFMVE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were marched to the county office, which was also the headquarters of the police. And there sitting in an interview room – not an interview room, a waiting room – were all the members of Buna’s group, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t know. And the other scout and myself were the only two outsiders, because we were only brought in because we were seen talking to him. So, we were the first ones, I guess we didn’t have to wait very long, because we were all seated far enough from one another so that, you know, no information could be exchanged. And one by one we were marched in this room, which was very small, and sat there with lights in our eyes, and it was a communist-style interview with hands – with spread fingers on top of a desk, and during the interrogation, something sharp like a pencil was stuck in the table between our fingers, sometimes hitting it, sometimes not hitting it – you know, it was just like some sort of Russian roulette with a pencil or some sharp object, you know, you were not allowed to look at it, you had to look in the bright lights in your eyes.</p><p>“And they couldn’t get anything out of me, because luckily they didn’t ask any questions having anything to do with my underground activity. They would have then gone, of course, to more severe torture immediately – this was just simply to make sure that I was not a member of this group, which I very clearly was not. So I was let go. And then, I remember walking across the bridge home, it was just almost like a rebirth. From that point on, my belief in what I was doing was so much stronger. I knew then that this was something that had to be fought and I did all the damage I could.”</p><h4>Freedom Train</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jKioFpXsI7Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I stood there with my back against the handbrake, hoping to make it invisible, and sort of studying the people on board, most of whom were actually high school students returning home to Aš, which was the town on the border – high school kids – and then the train started accelerating instead of slowing down. We could see the machine-gun towers, the minefields with the barbed wire around, all the beautiful sights of a police state. And me standing there alone, watching the beautiful hills, actually, other than that on the border.</p><p>“It was so close then, from that point to the border, there wasn’t much time to think of anything else. This enormously fat policeman approached me and tried to push me away from the brake, whereupon I jammed the gun in his stomach and tried to use him as a barrier between myself and his colleagues who were behind him, praying to God that I wouldn’t forced to pull the trigger. But the guy turned cowardly like all the defenders of totality and didn’t do anything, just stood there giving me a horrible look of hate. I could smell his breath smelling of beer and onion and buřty [sausages] and that’s how I crossed the border.”</p><h4>Tricks</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KA49rUW4g5Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mum was brilliant. I found that out later from [my sister] Eva. When we embraced for the last time, and she watched me drag my suitcase to the… She didn’t go with me but, I guess that either the same day or… she got on the phone to the police and said that she is worried. No, it couldn’t have been the same day, it must have been the next day that she [said] she’s very worried about her son who’s been depressed for a long time, and he’s now missing and she would like some help in trying to locate him because she’s afraid that he might want to commit suicide.</p><p>“And that was beautiful, when finally I got connected [with the Freedom Train], initially I’m certain that thanks to the Americans I was not connected, but unfortunately they would have to be absolutely stupid not to connect me with the press in Canada, which was only a month and a half after the escape. But by that time, it was on record that my mum reported me missing and… I was depressed then in Canada, but for different reasons!”</p><h4>Book</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YG8mH8qwyuY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know the main reason was that after a few trips to Prague, I came to the realization that the younger generation in Prague had to know more about the horror at the beginning of the communist era. They all knew a lot about the end of it. But the beginning was a terra incognita to them, they didn’t know bugger all, as they say. And already a lot of cynical people were discounting anything that really was horrible in the first years. It was just beyond description, the arrests, the concentration camps, and so on.”</p>
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Title
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Karel Ruml
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<p>Karel Ruml was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in the nearby town of Nymburk. His father was a lawyer while his mother stayed at home, raising Karel and his younger sister, Eva. Throughout his childhood, Karel was an active member of the Sea Scouts, which were outlawed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WWII. He and fellow crew members of the homemade boat Vorvaň (meaning ‘sperm whale’ in Czech) began to engage in anti-Nazi resistance, monitoring troop movements on behalf of the local partisans and disarming explosives planted by the Germans in the last days of the War. In 1947, Karel began his studies at Charles University’s Law Faculty in Prague. For reasons of his class background, he was expelled from school in 1949, one year after the Communist coup. He went to work in a knitting factory in the North Moravian town of Frýdek-Místek, where he was approached about becoming a courier of secret documents from the nearby Polish border to Prague. Karel says he was trained by a man called Paul in ways to avoid detection and target shooting.</p><p> </p><p>After about one year in northern Moravia, Karel moved back to Nymburk, but continued to work as a courier, using frequent visits to his uncle in Bohumín as an excuse to travel to the Polish border. In 1951, he received word that other participants in this network had been arrested and that he should escape Czechoslovakia as soon as possible. Through a crewmember of the boat Vorvaň, Karel learned of a plot to hijack a train and drive it over the border into Western Germany.</p><p> </p><p>On September 11, 1951, Karel and a number of other hijackers did successfully tamper with a passenger train’s brakes so that it hurtled across the German border, carrying them and a number of civilians, many of whom chose not to return home. The event was widely reported in the Western media and the locomotive in question was quickly dubbed ‘The Freedom Train.’ Those who escaped on the train spent some time in Valka Lager refugee camp in Bavaria before, in most cases, emigrating to Canada.</p><p> </p><p>Karel settled in Toronto where he lived until 1961, when he moved to California. His work in the insurance industry brought him to Ohio in 1978. After a time spent in Chicago establishing a new insurance company in the mid 1980s, Karel returned to Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife. They have one son. In 2001, Karel published a book about his experience of leaving Czechoslovakia entitled <em>Z deníku vlaku svobody</em> [<em>The Freedom Train Diary</em>].</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170710094631/http://www.meu-nbk.cz/www/index.php?sekce=1&zobraz=cestni-obcane" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A municipal list of Nymburk’s honorary citizens, in which Karel Ruml is counted (in Czech)</a></p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Bohumin
Concentration camp
Czechoslovak resistance during WWII
Education
Forced labor
Partisan
Refugee camp
Resistance
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>Cowards</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqUip6SS8Mo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She felt that the assassins were cowards and that they should have given themselves up. Or they should have immediately committed suicide. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘as a result of them hiding, we are the ones that suffered.’ So, I don’t know if everybody felt this way, but my mother felt that they were cowards and that they should have given themselves up.”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3_IF0JneBNg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So, the commandant said ‘Okay so, who knows… does anybody here know how to sew?’ And my mother said ‘I do.’ And so she was put into the detail, into the factory with the sewing machines and I think there were like 50 machines there, you know, and all these women lined up making… they were mostly making coats for the men on the Russian front. And they would get either old coats and they would take them and have to turn them inside out, and then sew in linings and stuff like that, or they would take confiscated fur coats and turn them inside out and make them into coats for the men. Oftentimes apparently they found money sewn in, jewelry sewn in, of course that all had to be handed over because otherwise they’d be killed.</p><p>“She got beaten quite a bit in the camps, because you had all this quota that you had to fulfill. Since she was a professional seamstress she was really very good. And she worked very hard, and of course they were on starvation food – they got watered-down beet soup, watered-down oatmeal – that was kind of the food of the day. So, a lot of the women got sick, a lot of the women refused to work, and because my mother was very good because that’s what she did for a living, she was made head of the division, which she absolutely hated, because she was responsible for everybody’s work. So if somebody didn’t want to work, or didn’t work very well, she was the one who got beaten, you know, because she was the one responsible. Oftentimes she would sit down and finish off the work or do extra work so that they would meet the quota. But it became so bad that she convinced the commandant, the head, the capo, that she really didn’t want to do this. I don’t know what happened but eventually at some point they let her not be head of the division.”</p><h4>Visiting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vENInl2_Q0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In terms of the children, no one really knew, except for my sister. My sister’s father, like I said, was František Kubík. Kubík had two siblings back in Berlin, one of whom was Ella, who is this remarkable woman. And she had the nerve – she had the chutzpah, that’s the only way I can think of… this good Yiddish word, chutzpah – to, after the tragedy, after June 10… she wrote to the Gestapo in Kládno and said ‘My brother was killed, you have my niece, I’m married to a German who’s a soldier on the Russian front. If you give her to me, I will bring her up as a German.’ And whoever was reading that letter that day must have been having a good day, because they said okay.</p><p>“At one point this crazy aunt of hers, whom I have met and who I absolutely love – she was like this short – an amazing woman… So she took my sister and Renata, with a bouquet of flowers, and went to Ravensbrueck, basically knocked on the gates of the camp and said ‘We want to see Anna Kubíkova.’ And the person who was at the gate basically couldn’t believe who this woman was with these two kids, and they sent her away. They said ‘You better get out of here, this is not a good place to be with two little kids.’ And so she was sent away. But she didn’t go. What she did was she basically started meandering around the perimeter of the camp, which of course had, you know, these fences and stuff, and was speaking very loudly. And the women that were working in the fields were Polish women. And they heard her, of course, and word got back somehow – there must have been this whole network in the camp – to my mother. Because the group of Polish women said ‘We saw a little girl and she looks like you, she resembles you,’ which of course caused… which was an amazing emotional thing for my mother. And so she knew that my sister was alive.”</p><h4>Mother Leaves</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dqD42GbOmSc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was an awful lot of hatred and jealousy towards my mother, for many reasons. First of all, my sister was the first one to come back. She was very healthy compared to the other children, she was cared for compared to the other children. She didn’t have to work as a domestic, as a few of the girls had to do. She was very well treated, she was with her aunt – albeit it was very difficult, because at one point they left Berlin and tried to make their way down through Poland, but that’s another story which I won’t get into. She had it much easier than the other children had.</p><p>“Since my mother had been married to František, who worked for ČTK, who was an announcer, she had a very good pension. So not only was she receiving concentration camp money for the government, the Czech government, she was also receiving a pension, which was a sizeable amount of money, apparently, from ČTK. She was receiving it, as was my sister. So she had money. And by the way, they relocated all the women, put all the women in Kládno, and every Lidice woman was given a home in Kládno, and we were given a home where my grandmother lived on the ground floor and we, my mother and sister, lived on the top floor. So, they were living in Kládno, and then they had money.</p><p>“And the third thing was that there was an awful lot of German hatred after the War. Totally understandable – there are hundreds of stories of retreating Germans being stoned and beaten to death by mobs. And the sentiment was so high that they started saying that [my mother’s late husband] František was German, that he wasn’t really Czech. He was German, and that’s why my sister had been saved, and that’s why she was getting all this compensation and blah blah blah. And you know how things get on and get crazy. So there was an awful lot of… my mother had a really very hard time. She constantly had to say ‘No, Frantisek wasn’t German. No, I’m really sorry, I don’t know where your other children are.’ It must have just been this intense, crazy time.”</p><h4>1st Birthday</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xGuD586niXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He was always looking for ways to make money. So, he played cards. And he was very good at it, but he was also very good at cheating. And my son, my son Max, whenever we’d go visit, my father would teach him how to play cards, and my father would always cheat. And of course he would cheat on purpose, and he would make it obvious he was cheating, because then my son – who was maybe six, seven, eight years old, whatever – would say ‘Děda, you’re cheating!’ And he’d say ‘No I’m not!’ And he’d say ‘Yes you are!’ And that would be the whole thing. But that’s what he did, right? So he cheated a lot, and he won a lot. And my mother was also really terrified, because you know, the guys that were there, you know, they were rough and tumble guys, right. And if they caught him, they’d beat the shit out of him. So it was my birthday, it was November 16, and of course, there was no money for anything, there were no kitchens, you couldn’t bake a cake or anything. So my father apparently comes in from the night before, and throws down a bunch of money – German marks, you know whatever, whatever else there was, including a Canadian 20 dollar bill, or maybe it was American, you know, I don’t remember now – and tells my mother ‘go buy a cake!’”</p><h4>Czech Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iZqDVG9YWR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They were never able to really, really get out of the country. Here they were in Canada, but they were never able to get out of Czechoslovakia, because there was little Czechoslovakia in our house. We spoke Czech, my mother made only Czech food. No other food but Czech, only Czech pastries and food. Great food, you know, can’t complain, especially the pastries, and she was a fantastic cook. But very limited, only Czech. I did not experience… we never went to other restaurants, my father traveled quite a bit with his work, so he was eating out a lot. He was away from home a lot, so when he came home, he wanted to be home so we never ate at restaurants. And if we went to the country or something, we packed food… Never went to restaurants.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zxqFPy-7I1s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And I felt, I think, for the first time… I mean I use the analogy that, and I think it’s pretty corny, that I was a flower ripped up by its roots with dirt still hanging on to it. And it really is, it’s not a unique thing to me… But at six months, I was ripped out of this culture, of this country, in very unpleasant, tension-ridden circumstances. But I still had this dirt attached. But my roots were just kind of dangling, you know, somewhere, and they would dry out, and then I’d be plopped in here, and then pulled out again, and then plopped down here. So I was always being shoved somewhere and then pulled out. And so you don’t really know where you belong. But what was interesting to me was going into the subway, the train, for example, or on a bus or a tram, and I’d sit there and everybody was speaking Czech in close quarters. And that’s all that I was hearing. And there was a kind of a bit of a comfort level – this total immersion. And I don’t know if it is genetic memory, you know, because being so young when I left. But it’s there – it was definitely there. And for years and years when I started to go back in the 1980s, I always had this kind of nervous energy before I went – this very nervous energy and then once I got there, there was like this calmness. Although now, having been there so many times, and being much more secure in who I am, and understanding more who I am, and being 62, having gone through a thing or two, I don’t have the desperate need to go back. I don’t have the desperate need to identify myself as Czech. Because before it was always ‘já jsem češka, já jsem Zbíral, já jsem češka.’ You know, and I don’t have that need anymore.”</p><h4>Rich?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JnJ7U5Oap6Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Especially when we first came to Canada, not as much Norway, but when we first came to Canada, this was 1954, and Czechoslovakia was in a bad state. A bad, bad, bad, state. And the Czechs back home had an image of us in Canada, and I can say Canada and U.S. too, because I’m sure it was the same here, that we’re wealthy, that we have an easy life, that we have a big car, that we have big houses, that we have, you know, fur coats and all this stuff. A couple of interesting things – and you’ll find this with almost any ethnic group – one of the photos that they send back… my father’s boss had a Cadillac, which my father was allowed to take home on weekends every now and then, because he would also tinker around in it and fix little things here and there. So, what did my mother do? She borrowed a fur coat and we all got nicely dressed up, and we stood in front of the Cadillac and took a family picture of us in front of the Cadillac and sent it back. You know, and you’ll find every ethnic group doing that. But even before we did that, as soon as we got to Canada, we started to get letters – ‘Oh, send me this, send me that, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme!’”</p>
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Jerri Zbiral
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jerri Zbiral was born in Prague in November 1948. Her mother, Anna, was a survivor of the Lidice tragedy in 1942, which saw one Bohemian village razed by Nazi troops in retaliation for the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The town’s women were separated from their children and transported to concentration camps, while all of the men were taken to a local farm and shot. Jerri’s mother spent the last three years of WWII in Ravensbrueck concentration camp, while Jerri’s sister Eva was sent to live with an aunt in Germany as part of the Nazi <em>Lebensborn</em> program. Jerri’s mother walked back to Czechoslovakia after the war and was reunited with Jerri’s sister. She subsequently met and married Jaroslav Zbíral.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Communist coup in 1948, pressure mounted on the women who had survived Lidice to come out in favor of the Communist Party, which Jerri’s mother refused to do. Jerri also says her mother faced the jealousy of her peers whose children had not returned from the Nazi camps. In May 1949, the family left Czechoslovakia, crossing the border from southern Bohemia into Germany. They spent one year in Murnau refugee camp before settling in Norway. Jerri says the three years she spent in Norway were extremely happy for her as a child. Her father, Jaroslav, however, did not take to the country, and when his brother in Canada suggested that the family move there he jumped at the chance. The Zbirals moved to Montreal in 1954. Jerri first attended English-language Catholic school and then received her secondary education in French. She came to the United States in 1971 to attend graduate school in Rochester, New York. It was her first job which brought her to Chicago, where she has lived ever since.</p><p> </p><p>In 1982, Jerri started to record the stories of her relatives and others who had survived the Lidice massacre. Ten years later, she created a film, <em>In the Shadow of Memory</em>, about the tragedy and her own relationship to the event. She has spoken with her husband Alan about Lidice on Studs Terkel’s show on WFMT Chicago. An art dealer, Jerri’s firm The Collected Image specializes in Czech photography in particular. As an adult, Jerri converted to Judaism. She became an American citizen in 2000. Jerri has two children.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Child emigre
Concentration camp
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Czech-German relations
Discrimination
Forced labor
Heydrich assassination
Judaism
Lidice Massacre
Nazis
Refugee camp
Sense of identity
World War II
Zbiralova
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father's Arrest</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Xz-NvXxwgA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Many people who fought with the Allies then became the enemies of the state. So my father was arrested three days after Christmas, on December 28, 1949. And I remember that they were turning the apartment upside down and looking for stuff, knowing that they wouldn’t find anything. I know that they confiscated his Air Force uniform and the flight jacket – that was the first thing they took – but they also took all our photographs. I do remember my father standing there and his face was white, like this wall… This wall is not as white as my father’s face was. That’s all I remember of that day and I remember asking one of the secret police agents ‘Where are you taking my daddy?’ And he said ‘Oh, we just need to ask him a few questions.’ And I can still remember my mother standing by the window waiting for my father to come back and of course we didn’t know… I learned later it took six months before they let us know where he was. And I just kept asking, I kept asking my mother later ‘How did I react?’ Because I adored my father. My mother was the disciplinarian, because I would kick my father and he would say ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ But she told me that I just kept asking ‘Where is daddy? Where is daddy?’ and she told me ‘Well, when he comes back he’ll be back.’ And I remember her crying a lot, but that’s about all I can remember.”</p><h4>Stalin</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t-etYIjWJ5U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother was working and I was home with tonsillitis listening to my beloved radio – we had two stations. And suddenly they announced that they would be singing Stalin’s favorite song, ‘Sulika,’ and we all knew from school that this was Stalin’s favorite song. I was in bed with scarves and everything around my neck to keep warm. I pulled them all off. I was maybe 10 years old, 11 years old. I stood to attention, nobody told us ever we needed to stand to attention when they sing ‘Sulika’ [but] I stood to attention and I was listening to ‘Sulika’ from the radio… Because Stalin in a way was my temporary father and I just never know how to explain it to people. I had no other input. That’s what I believe, that that guy, who sent my dad to prison, became my temporary father.”</p><h4>Prison Visits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kFBz5ZsE4R8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For me, it was like going on a school trip. Those hardboiled eggs never tasted so good like on the train to the prison camp! Of course, it took all night because they had special trains from Prague. We were lucky, we were from Prague – imagine the people coming from other parts of the country. It was an overnight train with all the people going to the same place. We would go to Jáchymov, Příbram, and I remember the train would arrive, let’s say, at 4:00 in the morning and then they would let us wait in that cold train station for the local little train to take us to the labor camps. And of course I have plenty of stories about that. But for me it was kind of an adventure. And I was very proud because when we visited the prisoners, every prisoner had a guard standing right next to him following our every word. The visits were about every half a year for about 15 minutes. And I was told by my mother to be sure to shove some food into my father’s pocket. So, I always had to watch for the guard not looking for a second and I was always very proud of myself when I managed to get something in.</p><p>“My father was taken away when I was six and he came back when I was 16. When I was 14, my mother had one of her migraine headaches and that was the only time that she could not go to visit him. She sent me alone, and it was Příbram. And today it may take an hour by train but I remember then it took forever. I arrived at the town square, got off the train and there were buses that would go to the labor camps, [but] I didn’t see anybody, except there was a bus with the driver kind of sleeping there and I said to him ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do! Where are all the buses? I must have missed them!’ And he said ‘Where are you going?’ I said ‘To see my dad; he’s in the labor camp, and my mother will kill me if I don’t get there!’ He said ‘Well, get on’ and he took me to the labor camp. I see that they were already closing all the gates because this was a place which was just for the visits, it wasn’t the real place. It looked kind of like when you see some of the wooden barracks in concentration camps. They were just for visits.</p><p>“So I come to the gate and the soldier is closing the gate and I start crying – I’m 14, I look like I’m 11, and I said ‘My mother will kill me if I don’t see my father!’ He says ‘Well stay right here.’ Actually, it was the commandant of the labor camp that came out and he said ‘Okay, here is a piece of paper, and you will go to the place where your father is and show them this paper.’ So, you need to imagine that this was in the middle of a field where there was nothing except, on the little hill, those watchtowers with, you could see, those soldiers with guns. But mainly you saw all those signs everywhere. In Czech it would be Nevstupovat! Střílení bez výstrahy! (Do not enter! Shooting without warning! Or something like that.) And it was everywhere. And I still remember running, with this piece of paper – holding it in front of me and thinking ‘Well, how do those soldiers there know that this paper says that I can be here?’”</p><h4>Hospital Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5biwutYnHmI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Maybe it’s my personality; I kind of always enjoy what I am doing so, you know I enjoyed when I learned the craft. I enjoyed it. And then when I worked at that hospital I left the operating room and they allowed me to work on the floor. It was the urology floor. And the nurses, I will always be grateful to them because some of them preferred to sit at the nurses’ station and talk and laugh and do nothing if possible. And of course I was all eager. So they taught me how to give injections and how to change dressings and of course, we didn’t have to worry that anybody would be sued! So I loved it, I enjoyed it and I had the best time. I loved my job and, I mean, I didn’t have a good title.</p><p>“I was also humiliated, interestingly, that also stayed with me, because there were now girls, women, 18 year olds, who had just finished, who’d become registered nurses at the age of 18, because it is a different system. So of course, they were basically my superiors, because they had the diploma and I didn’t. And I still remember one of the girls, and I was told that she hardly managed to get through nursing school, she wasn’t very bright, but she had the power, she had the diploma and I still remember how she told me ‘Go to the blood bank and bring the blood transfusion for the patient.’ And I still remember the tone of her voice – no please, no thank you – it stayed with me.”</p><h4>Parents Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jKhbkohpK_A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We arranged for him to come over and then when he arrived at Heathrow, the passport control officer said ‘Do you have a visa?’ And my father said ‘Well, when I came here to fight for you in 1939 you didn’t ask me “Do you have a visa?”’ And the official said ‘Welcome back, sir.’ It always kind of gets to me because my father was not happy in England. He was a Czech. He loved Prague. He was not happy in England; he used to tell me ‘holčičko’ (my little girl) ‘I would walk back if I could.’ The only reason he left was because there was a rumor in Prague that they will arrest the former political prisoners. And he was by then 54, because he was born in 1914, and he did not want to go through that again. And that’s the only reason he left, and he wasn’t happy.”</p><h4>Cosmetics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mq3_-ZCLwlY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Avon didn’t care whether you had a work visa or not so I became an Avon lady. And I didn’t know how to drive, so in the heat of the South; in Hampton, Virginia, I schlepped about in that little neighborhood with my Avon case. I didn’t make any money, because when I would walk in – and this was kind of a lower middle-class section – I mean, the women, all they wanted to know was about my background. So I didn’t make any money, and Jan would say ‘Well, you didn’t make any money,’ because at the end of the visit they would buy a lipstick just to kind of justify the visit. I’ve never drunk so much coffee and tea in my life!</p><p>“But anyways, then they opened a shopping mall in Hampton, and the most prestigious store at that Hampton mall was JCPenney. And I went to the manager of the cosmetic department and asked him if he would hire me. And he said ‘Well, you don’t have any experience’ and I said ‘Oh yes I do! I know how to deal with people because I was a nurse in England’ – I didn’t tell him those were sick people – ‘and I sold Avon’ – and I didn’t tell him I didn’t make any money! So he said ‘Okay, I’ll take you for three months.’ Well, he made me sell Zsa Zsa cosmetics. Now, young people don’t know probably who Zsa Zsa was – Zsa Zsa Gabor. But, I had an accent, and who would have known in Hampton, Virginia, that it wasn’t a Hungarian accent. Zsa Zsa didn’t advertise, and the only time that people knew who Zsa Zsa was was when she was on the Merv Griffin Show. That shows you how old I am! So, the next day people would come and buy her cream, and at that time, one ounce of her cream was $32.”</p><h4>PhD</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PpBOVkyJPso?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think the main impact that it had was that feeling of injustice, [about] what happened to the families, and the lack of recognition after the fall of communism. That’s what bothered them so much. They basically had this ‘Why doesn’t somebody come and say “You went through some awful stuff?”’ And nobody did. And suddenly everybody was a victim, and there was a lot of whitewashing. But it’s changing now because… You asked me if I wrote: I’m not much of a writer, I haven’t written too many articles, here is one in Slovo. But when I asked those 12 women [whom she interviewed for her thesis] whether they would like to meet the others, they said yes. So, from these 12 women is now an NGO, a non-governmental organization. There are over 100 of them. They meet once or twice a year in different places and mainly what they are doing now is they are going to schools and they are talking to schoolchildren about what they have been through. So not only that it is therapy for them, but also they are getting some recognition, and that’s what I am the happiest about.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Jana Svehlova
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jana Svehlova was born in Cardiff, Wales, in December 1943. Her father, Jan, was a Czech who had moved to England at the start of WWII to fight with the Royal Air Force (RAF). He met Jana’s mother, Eleonora (a German speaker originally from the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia), at the Air Force Club in Cardiff. The pair were married in May 1943. Jana lived in Wales until the end of WWII, when her father decided the family should return to Czechoslovakia and settle in Prague. One year after the Communist takeover, in 1949, Jana’s father was arrested because, she says, the new regime viewed those who had fought for the Allies with hostility. Jan was sentenced to ten years hard labor. He worked in the uranium mines of Jáchymov and Příbram, and spent time in prison in Bory and Ilava. Jana says that she and her mother were able to visit him about twice a year.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 14 years old, Jana was told that she would no longer be able to attend school and was sent to work for TESLA making televisions. Growing up, Jana says, her goal was to become a pediatrician, and so when the opportunity presented itself for her to work at Prague’s Bulovka hospital the following year she seized it. Jana’s first job was in the operating room, cleaning blood from the floor after surgery. She applied for nursing school on a number of occasions, but was refused each time on grounds of her family background. Following her father’s release in 1959 Jana says she was able to attend night school to gain a qualification in nursing. In 1966 she applied for a visa ostensibly to go and visit her birthplace in Wales, but she did not return home from that trip and settled instead in Vienna, where she became a nurse. At a preordained time and place in Vienna, she met her fiancée, Jan, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia separately. The couple were married in Austria and then moved to England, where Jan studied for his doctorate and Jana became a ward sister in a Brighton hospital.</p><p> </p><p>The couple moved to Hampton, Virginia, in 1974 when Jan was offered a job at NASA. Jana says her first job in America was selling cosmetics for Avon. She subsequently became a clinician at NASA. When the pair divorced Jana moved to Washington, D.C. She worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital for more than 20 years and studied for a master’s and doctoral degree at the same time. Her postgraduate work (in political psychology) focused on daughters of political prisoners in 1950s Czechoslovakia. With some of the women she interviewed for her doctorate, she founded an NGO called Dcery 50. let (known in English as Enemy’s Daughters). Members of the group regularly visit Czech classrooms to talk about their experiences. Today, Jana lives in McLean, Virginia, and works as a tour guide of Washington, D.C, and as an usher at the Kennedy Center.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609100320/http://www.enemysdaughters.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Website of Enemy’s Daughters – the NGO that came about as a result of Jana’s postgraduate work</a></p><p><a href="/web/20170609100320/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Jana_Svehlova_transcript.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Full transcript of Jana Svehlova’s interview (contains some graphic medical descriptions):</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Education
Forced labor
Healthcare professionals
Jachymov
Military service
Political prisoner
Roubikova
Secret police
World War II
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Czech Legions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eVyiC9owWjQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He was a Russian legionnaire. In Russia, the czar encouraged colonization, especially in Ukraine, and so lots of Czechs went there, and some ancestors of my father’s settled down there. They were very prosperous – they had a hops farm. Before the outbreak of WWI my father went there to work as an accountant on the hops farm of his relatives. And when the War broke out, he immediately joined the Česká družina – the cradle of the Czechoslovak Legions – and those people who joined so early were called the starodružníci (the old joiners). And so he fought from 1914; he went through the ranks, came back as a colonel, brought his regiment home – he was commanding the Second Rifle Regiment of Jiří z Poděbrad (George of Podebrady), and he didn’t come home until 1920 because he fought in what the legionnaires called the anabáze; they fought on the long stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway all the way from Ukraine to Vladivostok. And then he came back. When the legionnaires were demobilizing, he became a regular army officer and from then on he went up through the ranks.”</p><h4>Belongings</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vS58t9Op1ZM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He had his officer’s saber and some weaponry from WWI and, as a memento, it was mounted on a board and displayed in the room. And of course, you could not have any arms. Any pretext – any weapons found were punishable by death. [That was the case with a] friend of my father’s on that farm where we were during the mobilization. So, my mother was a tiny little lady, she was short, and she had lots of guts. And one day, she took these arms off, put them in a bundle, and at night – if they would have caught her, it would have been horrible – she went though Prague and dumped them in the Vltava River, because we didn’t want to [give the Nazis any pretext]. Since father was already in hiding, it would have been another pretext.”</p><h4>Action E</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nWkUrUL7djA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They called it Action E, the Gestapo – E as in exulants [exile]– you know? They rounded up most of the families who had anybody fighting abroad, to hold us as political prisoners to prevent us from giving aid to Czechoslovak parachutists sent from Great Britain to attack and sabotage the German occupation. Somebody had to hide them and they wanted to prevent that. So they arrested us all and put us in the camp.”</p><p><em>Do you remember that day when they came?</em></p><p>“Oh yes, and my sister, Milica, she was tiny. She was six years old – she’s what, six and a half years younger than I am. So, they took Milan, my brother, my mother and myself and then kicked Milica out of the apartment and left her standing with the keys to the apartment on the street. And that was it. They took us, and so some neighbors then contacted my aunt and she took her in.”</p><h4>Moravia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPVxveZm7uQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother was always so feisty and I don’t remember what she did but I think some of the gendarmes tried to help, and I guess they caught one smuggling out her letter. So, the punishment place was the morgue. When somebody died, they had the tables for dissecting – it was very primitive and filthy. She was put into the morgue for two weeks. She picked up there an infection in her leg which really was very nasty. But it didn’t break her spirit. And every so often, the Gestapo would come to the camp which they controlled from Brno. They would line us up, and these goons would go and touch our heads, and do some sort of a genetic exam of the shape of our heads to see whether we are Slavs or what we are – they were always looking for Jews. It was frightening.</p><p>“And finally in 1945, when the front was coming from the east towards Moravia, suddenly they opened the camp and I thought ‘Oh my god, they are going to shoot us!’ But they let most of the camp go except 120 people, among them was I and my mother, and they lugged us further north, again to keep us as hostages in another camp. We were there just a very short time and by May 5, when there was already the uprising in Prague, the partisans came and opened the gates, because sometimes the SS people were shooting people just as revenge. And they didn’t want that to happen to us. So they opened the gate and let us out.”</p><h4>Czechs in D.C.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6eQv1cRctvU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents lived on Park Road, our first ambassador Hanak (he used to be our ambassador to Turkey) – he bought a house there. And then all the Czechs suddenly started buying houses there. There were so many of them that they started to call it Prague Road. And it is just the sort of tail of Park Road before the bridge, and if you cross the bridge and go through Rock Creek Park, you come to the Czech Embassy. It’s right there. It’s a very beautiful place, and now the town, I mean Washington, D.C., about three years ago started to put historical markers everywhere to show how each section developed and the diversity of people living there. There is a large historical marker with my father’s picture, my daughter in the Czech national costume, and other photographs of all the Czechs living there to show why they started calling Park Road ‘Prague Road.’”</p><h4>Teaching</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MNTiWEFGPI0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Culturally at that time Colombia started to develop a wonderful symphony orchestra, as a matter of fact, lots of players came from Germany, the conductor was Estonian, and so they were just building up the momentum there – the cultural momentum – and it was wonderful. And I was sitting right in the middle of it!”</p><p><em>And do you remember what performances you had there?</em></p><p>“Two times I was a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, in one I was singing French impressionistic music, in the second one all Wagner like Elsas Traum and Senta’s aria and so forth. And then we had chamber music groups in the Museo Nacional. I had a television program with another Czech soprano, she was a coloratura and I was a heavy-type soprano, sort of leaning towards more dramatic, more mezzo. We had a television show sponsored by a Colombian tobacco company. The singer was Adela Geber, they ended up in the United States too, and her husband was a painter. So, when the announcer was telling the story, he was sketching the characters as the announcer was talking, and then we were singing the major arias or duets and so forth. And then we had another chamber music group with flute and harp and voice, so I was singing constantly.”</p><h4>SVU</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i_BHxQHoYkM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In a way, the time is sort of passing, I would say. The SVU was so important during the Cold War. It was practically your patriotic duty to get involved and be involved. But now that the republic is open, the travel of the artists and everything comes here unhindered. And we can go there at will whenever we want. I think the point has been taken out of it a little bit, and we just have to try to rope in somehow younger generations. You know, I know it with my children, or any of the children of the [exiles]. At this time, they are building their careers, They are so involved with their living and their careers that they do not have time for SVU. During the Cold War, we worked hard to uphold the good name of Czechoslovakia, we felt it our duty to work on this. We will see how long [SVU] is going to last.”</p>
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Title
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Dagmar White
Description
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<p>Dagmar White was born in Prague in 1926. Her father, Antonín Hasal, was a high-ranking officer in the Czechoslovak Army, and so Dagmar and her siblings grew up between Brno and Prague, depending upon where her father was stationed at the time. When WWII broke out, Dagmar’s father joined the underground resistance group Obrana národa [Defense of the Nation]. Dagmar says that when ‘things got too hot,’ her father escaped and joined the Czechoslovak Army in France and later the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. He served as President Edvard Beneš’s military adviser and chief of the military chancellery. In 1942, following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, Dagmar, her mother, Josefa, and brother, Milan were arrested in their Prague apartment as part of the Gestapo’s Action E. They were taken to internment camps for political prisoners so that they would not, says Dagmar, provide help and shelter to parachutists sent from Great Britain.</p><p> </p><p>Dagmar and her mother spent the next three years in Svatobořice internment camp in southern Moravia, where they tilled the land, washed the uniforms of wounded and dead German soldiers, and made grenades. Dagmar’s brother Milan was jailed in Brno, in dormitories which provided law students accommodation in peacetime. Dagmar says that towards the end of the War, many inmates at Svatobořice were released, but that she and her mother were moved north, alongside another 120 or so prisoners, to another camp at Planá nad Lužnicí. On May 5, 1945, partisans freed the prisoners at this camp. At the end of the War, Dagmar moved back to Prague and was reunited with the other members of her family. Her father returned from London as commander of the liberated territories and became transportation minister in the cabinet of President Edvard Beneš. Dagmar attended Charles University in Prague and the Prague Conservatory and trained to become an opera singer. Following the coup in 1948, her family found themselves under surveillance, says Dagmar, and decided to leave. They crossed the border on July 2, 1948, whilst a Sokol slet was taking place in Prague and diverting police attention. Dagmar says the family was helped by the U.S. Army in Germany; they were accommodated in Frankfurt at the IG Farben building (which served as U.S. Army HQ) until a special military plane flew the family to Washington, D.C. Dagmar’s parents settled on Park Road in the capital, while Dagmar went to University of Kansas to continue her studies.</p><p> </p><p>After completing her degree at KU in Lawrence, Dagmar graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and then received a master’s degree in music education from Columbia University. She moved to Bogota, Colombia, for her first academic post and found herself there at a period of great cultural activity, she says. It was in Colombia that she met her husband Lewis White – an American diplomat. The couple married in 1954. As a result of her husband’s job, Dagmar lived subsequently in New Caledonia, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (where she taught at the national conservatories) and Morocco. In each location, she conducted choirs and continued the pursuit of her musical career. She has two children. Today, Dagmar lives with her husband Lewis (Jack) in Vienna, Virginia. A long-time member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), she chairs the organization’s Christmas bazaar. She founded and directed the local Vienna Light Orchestra in which she sang many of the title roles. Dagmar continues to organize musical programs at the Czech Embassy.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Arts
Benes
Community Life
Education
Forced labor
Hasalova
Heydrich assassination
marriage
Military service
Obrana naroda
Plana nad Luznici
Political prisoner
Resistance
Svatoborice