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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>Schooling & WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2Y5HJ3gCr8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We could sort of tell that something very unusual and very unlucky was happening to us. At the beginning of the next school year in 1939, we were asked to cut out the pictures of Presidents Masaryk and Beneš from our textbooks, and we got new students coming in, especially those who were expelled from Slovakia, or [who] left Slovakia in a very difficult position. Among them was a young man who became my good friend, whose father was a dentist in Bratislava and also had to leave.”</p><h4>Trouble with Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zI063PTqETg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was that one unfortunate, well, peculiar incident just one year before I went to gymnázium when I was on the street with a couple of my friends and one of them was eating, I think it was plums, and was spitting the pits out into the street. And suddenly a German who had a swastika attached to the fender of his car stopped and seized us, claiming that we were desecrating the German flag. And he called a policeman who then went and took us to the police station. And our parents had to come and take us out. It seems as if the matter was somehow settled without any further consequences, but needless to say we were very scared by the whole event.”</p><h4>Shocking Vengeance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fUx0ljKO9-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of them happened right under our windows where, in 1939, I saw the coming of the German tanks. This time, a large procession of German prisoners was being taken up the street, and occasionally one of the guards would shoot one of these Germans, about four or five during the time we watched, and I remember my mother got very upset about it and thought this was really bestial behavior. And the other one, even more gruesome, event which I witnessed, was the burning of two presumably Germans on Wenceslas Square, about two or three days after the Russians came in. And these two victims were hanging by their feet, with their heads down, in an arch which I think was used for advertising where Vodičkova ulice comes into Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square]. There were Soviet tanks close and it looked like both Soviet soldiers and members of these Revolutionary Guards were pouring gasoline over these bodies, which were still squirming and alive, and setting them on fire. So that was very shocking, but it was kind of in a way overshadowed by the rejoicing over liberation.”</p><h4>Fashion Mom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xdRoO2LjcB0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother actually did take on employment after essentially working at home after the Communist seizure of power. Women were supposed to, everyone was supposed to, work. And she found an interesting job for herself with a fashion magazine which also was designing knitting patterns, and that was one of her great hobbies. That was something she got some training in when she was going to the art school. So she continued there, and she enjoyed the people she worked with.”</p><h4>Wilson Center</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QU1IEJDW8M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mentor James Billington became the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1973, and a year later he brought me to the center to be on the staff. And it seemed particularly fitting that it should be an institution honoring Woodrow Wilson since Woodrow Wilson was so intimately involved in the creation, independence of Czechoslovakia and therefore also the Czech Republic. So I started working at the center, involved again in building up the library resources and, more importantly, surveying resources for the study of certain foreign areas available in Washington, D.C. And that resulted in a series of some 14 volumes discussing the resources in Washington for the study of various major areas of the world, such as the Soviet Union, China, the Near East, Africa and Latin America.”</p><h4>Palacký Medal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UYkOKvZmNSA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Because of my work on the Bohemian Reformation, especially for my book, I was awarded the Palacký medal for social sciences, which is given, I believe it’s annually, to a scholar who is to be honored for his contribution to Czech history. This happened in [September] 2009.”</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
Zdenek David
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zdenek David was born in Blatná, South Bohemia, in May 1931. He moved to Prague at age seven, however, when his father Václav (a judge) was appointed to the capital’s circuit court. Zdenek spent most of WWII in Prague and remembers his schooling changing under German occupation. He says students at his gymnázium on Husova Street were taught no history during the War and were expected to learn subjects such as mathematics in German. Zdenek remained in the capital at the time of liberation and remembers ‘chaos’ as reprisals were inflicted upon ethnic Germans and those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Zdenek left Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1947, when he gained a one-year American Field Service scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Putney School in Vermont. When the Communist takeover happened in 1948, his parents urged him not to return home in light of the political climate.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609043310/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=sf.profile&person_id=3405" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Zdenek on the Wilson Center’s pages</a></p>
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
Blatna
Child emigre
Czech-German relations
Education
emigrant
German occupation
gymnazium
Munich Crisis
Nazis
Palacky Medal
refugee
Teachers
Vaclavske namesti
World War II
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3afcc34846efcc61964bf5f58b7cfdd0
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>School Evacuated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vN6GK-K67C0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Actually, I had two aunts, so one was working and the other was supposed to take care of me. But she was partially deaf, so when there was an air raid announced, all children were sent home, and parents came – we were in the first grade, so all the parents came to pick them up – but because my aunt couldn’t hear, nobody picked me up. So I went home by myself. But it was only like two blocks, so it wasn’t so bad. And there was another boy on my street, in my school, and also nobody came for him. So we walked together and, you know, it was an eerie feeling because there was nobody, nothing. Only those airplanes overhead. And I remember it until today. And that bad feeling came in ’68 when Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, and I was home again alone because my daughter was born, and again nothing – nobody around, quiet and just those airplanes. And then I forgot about it, and then September 11 here, when they started to guard those cities – airplanes over Chicago – it came again!”</p><h4>Soup and Soap</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kbnnKDieqDo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember we got, when I was living with my aunts, they bought some beef bones, and we had soup on Sunday, and on Monday they mixed it with some chemicals or whatever and they made soap, because there was a shortage of soap. And it did not smell too good. It was like brown little bricks. We didn’t have to use it for baths but for washing clothes and stuff like that.”<br /><strong><br />
That was an example of making the most of everything you had?</strong></p><p>“Yeah, we ate lots of potatoes and plums. We made plum jam, it was <em>povidla</em> in Czech. And stuff like that. Actually I was malnourished; I had those bumps behind my ears. But it was mainly because I didn’t want to eat.”</p><h4>Happy Times</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qie37YiM-hw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Sixty-eight – I said it was the last time I was quite happy. Because I got my promotion, I was pregnant finally after ten years, between the two of us, we made enough money so that we could get furniture for our apartment. We even had enough money to buy a car. It was exactly ’68 – I remember it because you could not go like here to some place and buy the car, you had to put up the money first, and then wait, and wait and wait. And after years, they ask you if you want your car beige or green. But, another option was to get a used car. And I still remember we went to look at a used white Simca somewhere. And we sent Eva to summer camp, she was ten years old, we went to look at that car and where my parents live, behind them, there are beautiful gardens. Have you ever been in Prague? So they live under Petřín hill, close to that funicular. And we were walking through those gardens, and it was actually really nice, relaxing, beautiful, and I felt so good. And my parents were sitting in the park, so we were talking to them. And it was a Sunday or Saturday, and a few days later, Russians came.”</p><h4>Shortage of Food</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_4BJKz1vgjw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember standing in the line, because suddenly there was… everybody tried to get some supplies, some food, and they sent the Russian Army without any provisions. They told them ‘There is a contra-revolution’, and that they will find food and everything when they went to the town. And there was no food for Russians, nobody wanted to give them anything. And I was standing in the line with my mother to get some potatoes again, and they were in the street, all those tanks going, and I was crying and my brave mum said ‘Don’t cry! Don’t show it to them!’ Then again the next day I was sitting on a bench in the park looking at the bakery, waiting for bread. Because by that time the Russians got smart and they actually ambushed the delivery guys. So it was very important to get there first.”</p><h4>Impressions of America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2OhzkwhM-3w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We came from Vienna, from Europe, where everything was like nice and clean and everybody was dressed-up, civilized. And we ended up at JFK at some time of reconstruction and hippies. And there were hippies all over the floor, all over. And somehow I was still in my mind on vacation, until I saw what was around me. So I started to cry, what did I do?”</p><p><strong>Did you start to have second thoughts about the United States when you saw that?</strong></p><p>“Definitely! I definitely did. Those friends like that [engineer] Hana, they found us an apartment – besides a job for him they found us an apartment in Cicero. And they even found some second hand furniture and everything. They were waiting for us at the airport at O’Hare. So, it was really nice, but when I saw it, it wasn’t the America we knew from movies and books. Those houses and everything in Cicero – it was like, I was deeply, deeply disappointed. To me, America was behind.”</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
Vera Dobrovolny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vera Dobrovolny was born in Prague in 1938. Her father Jan worked as a quality controller for Škoda during WWII and then as a technician at Správa spojů (the state-owned telecommunications company). Her mother Aloisie, meanwhile, worked as a supervisor at a dorm for student nurses in the capital. Vera spent a part of WWII being raised by her aunts, as her mother was hospitalized following the birth of her younger brother. He was named Vladimír, which was (like Věra) deliberately Russian-sounding, as both of her parents were, she says, ardent Pan-Slavists. Towards the end of WWII, Vera’s family moved out of Prague to live in their summer house near Mokropsy, where she remembers attending school in the corner of a local pub, as the village schoolhouse was occupied by German troops.</p><p> </p><p>Vera attended commercial academy in Prague and then worked for Ferromet, a steel export company. In 1955, she met her husband, <a href="/web/20170609083217/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/pierre-dobrovolny/">Pierre Dobrovolny</a>, at a dance. The pair were married in 1958 and have two children, Eva and Lucie. Vera had been raised by parents who strongly believed in building socialism, but says her relationship with Pierre ‘spoiled her’ ideologically. She was repeatedly denied promotion in her job, which she says was most likely due to her relationship with Pierre. In 1968, Vera was finally promoted and says her family enjoyed a degree of financial stability. She refers to this time as one of the happiest in her life.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion, in 1969, Vera and Pierre decided to leave Czechoslovakia. They traveled to Vienna in the summer, where they applied for visas to the United States and registered at the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest child Lucie, however, fell extremely ill after a couple of days, and so the family decided to return to Prague and seek medical assistance. After a couple of months, on August 21, 1969, Vera and Pierre again left Czechoslovakia. They traveled with their children to Yugoslavia from which they crossed into Austria without the correct paperwork; Pierre says the border guards did not care. The family spent about one month in Traiskirchen refugee camp near Vienna before being sent to stay in Bad Kreuzen. They arrived in America in December 1969. Vera says her first impressions of the United States were less than flattering and did not live up to the expectations she had formed from films and books. The family first lived in a rented apartment in Cicero before settling in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois. Vera worked as an accountant for CSA Fraternal Life before taking a job at Bosch, where she remained for 26 years. She has played active roles in the Czechoslovak National Council of America (CNCA) and the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in Chicago. She makes frequent trips to the Czech Republic and has taken her grandchildren to Prague to show them where she was raised.</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
Community Life
emigrant
Family life
German occupation
marriage
refugee
Refugee camp
Skoda
Sprava spoju
Women workers
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f9759d447b3e7b529d51e1b75d5c0be6
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>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.</p><p>“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.</p><p>“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.</p><p>“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”</p><p>How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?</p><p>“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Peter Demetz
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</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
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
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
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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>Family Restaurant</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oRPCc00h--U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Up to a certain time, I think 8:00 or 9:00 in the evening, the regular soldiers could come in and eat, okay? By 10:00 they had to be in the camp. And after10:00 or 11:00 the big echelons with the stars [came]… And those are the ones, I remember how they used to, how could I say, enjoy themselves. They were dancing on the table and drinking from the glasses, and then they took those glasses and threw them into the corner, there was a pile of glass like this in the morning, you know? Honest to god, I’m telling you! Not only that but some of these guys, they had those long sabers on their side. And so when they got a little tipsy, a little drunk, you know, they’d pull out their sword and there were chairs and this guy, he’d start cutting the chairs and said ‘this is what we’re going to do to the Russians.’ And chips were flying all over the floor. But they didn’t hurt anybody, our people or anything, except they were against the Russians. But these incidents [happened] and when they were going to the washroom outside, the outhouse, my mother had wash-lines stretched across the yard and they were so – poor guys – they were so stupid with alcohol, there was one guy who was hanging his head over the wash-line and vomiting, you know.</p><p>“But they just had a good time, these people knew how to enjoy themselves. Next day, they came in, two of them and ‘Mr Sarvady, how much? What’s the damage that we did?’ And my father, he knew what to do, if it was $300, he said $600 or $700, a chair is so much or so much. And not even one word was said about it. Everything was undercover, undercover, yeah.”</p><h4>Stepfather Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uXIk9e-N8iQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Anybody who sided with the Germans, they rounded them up and they locked them up. My stepfather was locked up for 117 days. But they couldn’t find anything against him. Because he was strictly a businessman and had nothing to do with politics, you know. He never cared for it. So, after 117, they finally released him. But that wasn’t enough, it was a few months later and one of the gendarmes we knew, who used to be in our town, they had to turn Communist too, but they still were friends and one day he came over to our house and told may father, he says ‘Emil, we have orders to lock you up tomorrow.’ He says, ‘it would be the best thing if we wouldn’t find you here, if you know what I mean.’”</p><h4>Soda Truck</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZV52TkZK9_A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were going with this guy who picked us up, and we were going in this small paneled truck to Vienna, all four of us. So we were traveling, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes, it wasn’t too far from Vienna, where we were, and all of a sudden, right in the middle of the road, there was a soldier, a Russian soldier with an automatic [weapon] on his side – a brbka they call it, you know, with the bullets, you know. So anyway, the driver had to stop, because he was right in the middle of the road. So anyway, the way it turned out was actually our luck, you know, that this guy came with us, because he just wanted to get a ride. So he got up on the back of the truck with us and was riding with us all the way to Vienna. So we come into Vienna and they’ve got the whole set-up out there, they’re checking credential and Ausweis and everything, you know. And I say ‘Oh my god! Which way to run?’ you know? ‘What are we going to do?’ you know? And there were about five or seven cars and a couple of trucks, and these guys, they took their time, you know, these Russians checking this and checking this. And so it was only about two or three vehicles ahead of us and this guy who was sitting with us started swearing and saying ‘What the hell is the matter with you? What’s the hold up here?’ And he [the guard] says ‘Okay, davaj! Davaj! Davaj!’ So he let us go without checking our credentials or anything!”</p><h4>Soccer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzgMujKGz0Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He says ‘All three of you are soccer players and I’ve got a place for you, for all three of you to play soccer on the Hungarian team.’ So I remember, it was the Pannonia team and my two brothers and I, we joined them. There were 11 soccer players and seven of them were Slovak. So [there were] only four Hungarians, but they were a Hungarian team. But we were good. We played about a year or so. And then they got us jobs, I found a job working for Simpson, putting little scooters together, and little baby buggies and so on. They came with a shipment from overseas in little boxes and we put them together you know, and so on.”</p><h4>Learning English from the Bible</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/edoOT2KHuWI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I took the Slovak bible and the English bible and said ‘Well this word is this and this is this, and this word is this’ because the bible is usually word for word the same. And then I started reading newspapers and books and got interested in art and went to art schools and academies and other academies; the Chicago Academy, the American Academy and then the Palette and Chisel… And then I became a studio chairman at the Palette and Chisel, and these are my accomplishments right here – a silver medal, another one is a gold medal, another one is a diamond medal. I was judged by fellow artists, not by the public, by fellow artists – those are the tough ones. And then I started, with another friend of mine, he was a famous seascape artist, Charles Vickery, we started another club, I approached him if he would help me, because my problem was that I was foreign, I didn’t know that much English, I said ‘You’re established, you’re one of the top seascape artists and painters,’ I say ‘Would you help me?’ He says ‘Yeah, we will start it, okay.’ So that’s how we started the club Oil Painters of America; I was the original founder right here.”</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
Dusan Ciran
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Dusan Ciran was born in Brezová pod Bradlom, western Slovakia, in 1929. His father Martin died when he was only a few months old and his mother, Darina, subsequently remarried a widower called Emil Sarvady. Around the time that Dusan started school, the family moved to the nearby town of Senica, where his stepfather took over a restaurant which the whole family helped run. Dusan says that WWII was a particularly profitable time for the restaurant with the establishment proving popular amongst the 2,000 German soldiers stationed at the local barracks.</p><p> </p><p>Following the War, Dusan’s stepfather was arrested on charges of collaborating with the Germans, but was released, says Dusan, when such charges could not be proved. In 1949, a family friend who worked for the local police tipped Dusan’s stepfather off that a warrant was again out for his arrest, prompting Dusan’s family to flee the country that very evening. Dusan says he and his family crossed the Morava River into the Soviet Zone of Austria, from which the challenge was still to make it to Vienna and the American Zone of the country. Dusan’s family successfully did so when the truck they were riding in was stopped by a Soviet soldier, who traveled with the family and shouted at his colleagues at the border checkpoint to hurry up and let them through.</p><p> </p><p>From Vienna, the family was sent to Wegsheid refugee camp in Linz where they spent just over eight months. Dusan and his family arrived in Canada in 1950; they were sent first to Lethbridge, Alberta, to pick sugar beets before moving to Toronto, where Dusan and his brothers Emil and Milan played for the local Hungarian football club – Pannonia – and through this found work assembling scooters at Simpson manufacturers. Dusan moved with his family to Chicago in 1952, settling first on the city’s North Side. He quickly found work at the city’s Continental Can Company, where he rose through the ranks to work in the firm’s master plate department, designing and producing labels. Dusan says he made some extra money at this time by playing violin at Chicago Slovak and Czech events. He attended art classes at the Chicago Academy and then the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Together with artist Charles Vickery, Dusan founded the Oil Painters of America club, which to this day attracts a large membership. Dusan currently lives in Cicero, Illinois, with his second wife Anna.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170611035225/http://www.flickr.com/photos/32224489@N04/page2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to some of Dusan’s artworks</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
1948
Arrest
Arts
Brezova pod Bradlom
Education
emigrant
English language
Family business
German occupation
Political prisoner
refugee
Refugee camp
Restaurant/hotel industry
Sports
WWII