Ondrej says that a lack of career opportunities for scientists in the Czech Republic led him to study medicine at Charles University. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician at Motol Hospital (FN Motole) for a short time before beginning a doctoral program in biology – also at Charles University. In 2003, Ondrej was offered a cancer research fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and moved to Ohio. After his four-year fellowship, Ondrej accepted the position of research fellow in a joint program with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Although he is happy in the United States, Ondrej says that his plan was never to settle here and, in fact, he had only planned on being in the U.S. for one year. He says that in the future he will go wherever his research takes him and is always eager to experience different places. Ondrej returns to the Czech Republic several times a year to visit his family and currently lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.
]]>Ondrej Krejci was born in Prague in 1974 and grew up in the Smíchov district of the city. His father was a scientist while his mother worked in the accounting department of a Prague hospital. Ondrej was the oldest of two boys. While growing up, frequent trips to an airfield with his father (who flew gliders) inspired him to take up flying; he received his pilot’s license when he was 14 years old. He was also interested in science and belonged to a biology club that was part of the Pioneer youth organization. Ondrej says that while growing up he had trouble deciding whether to become a scientist or a pilot and, though he ultimately chose science, flying has remained a passion of his. Ondrej was 15 when the Velvet Revolution took place; he remembers following the events of the Revolution and participating in a student strike at his high school. One year later, he had his first introduction to the United States when his family traveled to DeKalb, Illinois, to visit his father who had found work there.
Ondrej says that a lack of career opportunities for scientists in the Czech Republic led him to study medicine at Charles University. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician at Motol Hospital (FN Motole) for a short time before beginning a doctoral program in biology – also at Charles University. In 2003, Ondrej was offered a cancer research fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and moved to Ohio. After his four-year fellowship, Ondrej accepted the position of research fellow in a joint program with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Although he is happy in the United States, Ondrej says that his plan was never to settle here and, in fact, he had only planned on being in the U.S. for one year. He says that in the future he will go wherever his research takes him and is always eager to experience different places. Ondrej returns to the Czech Republic several times a year to visit his family and currently lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.
“I was born in 1974, so it was like the heavy, heavy communism. Not as cruel and not as raw or tough as in the 1950s, but it was still the deep normalization era, and being born as a child of that time, you actually don’t notice. Of course you get from your parents that things are not really okay, or ‘Yeah, it’s different in the West,’ but as a child, I think you are flexible; your mind is very flexible, unfortunately. So I guess I didn’t really mind. There are things you don’t like, but you don’t have the experience from the other side, so I could say I didn’t really mind.
“Speaking about the Pioneer movement, everybody speaks of the Pioneer movement as being very bad and influential, and definitely the idea behind it and the politics behind it was of course planned by the communists. But at the same time, I would say I think it’s a great idea – not a great idea, don’t get me wrong – but the attention the kids got was quite good. I was in a Pioneer biology club and the leader, I’m not sure if she was communist or not, but she didn’t really enforce any communist ideas. We were basically learning biology and she was very keen. She was showing us nature. She was showing us microscopes, how the cells look under microscopes. We were doing some fun experiments with chemistry, and so I actually did like this part of how, as kids, we had a chance to do something more than just go home.”
“I have fun recalling how my person was sucked into the anti-communist changes. So the student demonstration was on Friday, November 17, 1989 and the strike of the students was supposed to start on Monday. However, we had an early-bird class at 7:00 so we came to school – I was a sophomore in high school at the time – we came to school and we were sitting near the lockers. Actually, we didn’t know what was going on, so we were preparing for our classes and suddenly one of my colleagues came and she said ‘Ok guys, stay here. Don’t go anywhere. We are on strike.’ And we thought ‘Ok, is she joking? What’s going on?’ We had no clue. So we stayed at the lockers and we actually started debating and discussing what happened and what are the possibilities. At that time, we didn’t believe anything would happen to the Communists. We just thought it would be another strike and probably nothing would happen, but we didn’t go to class and our teacher didn’t know what was going on, but she didn’t force us to go to class, so we stayed at the lockers all day, talking and debating, and then all the changes slowly unfolded over the course of the week when there was a strike in the theatre and universities and high schools, and finally all over Prague and the surrounding areas and the whole Czech Republic and Slovakia started the movement against communism.”
“I came to the U.S. for the first time for a visit with my father – actually the whole family. My dad was a scientist and he was working west of Chicago in the small town of DeKalb. I remember more of how we left the Czech Republic. We took our luggage, we took the subway to a bus station, and from the bus station we took a bus to Munich, Germany, and then from Munich we flew to Chicago. The first time I came here, it was very different, I have to say. Coming from Prague, which is a big and busy city, to the small city of DeKalb, where the houses are small and made out of wood and there was so much field. Our first meal was in a gas station because it was Sunday morning and we didn’t know where the shops were so we just went to a gas station to buy some chocolate and crackers.
“It was of course a big difference between the Czech Republic and the U.S., but as a kid – I was a junior in high school – I was quite flexible and I think I blended with the American kids very well, and this made my second trip to the U.S. much, much easier. So when I came to Cincinnati, I knew what to expect, I knew about the mentality of the people and it wasn’t such a huge cultural shock, I guess, compared many other people who had to leave and had no chance to prepare and not an exact idea of what to expect.”
“When I first saw the lab, I wouldn’t say that it was really that different. The equipment in the labs in the U.S. and in the Czech Republic is surprisingly quite comparable. We are always whining that we don’t have enough money in the Czech Republic; we are always whining that we have no good equipment, but that’s not true. I think we do have definitely comparable equipment and we do have money to work. Sometimes what we are lacking is the drive. The motivation to work hard, to find new things. I hope it’s not true anymore, because always when people ask me what the difference is between work in the U.S. and work in academia in Czech Republic, I start to talk about these differences and then I stop myself and say ‘Hey, but my experience from Czech Republic is from eight years ago’ and I bet and I hope that it’s not true anymore. So I think the differences are probably more subtle than what I recall and now many people who did research in the U.S. are going back to the Czech Republic. I think the differences are kind of more and more subtle than what I would say.”
“Flying is our family hobby. As many people know, Czech Republic is, together with Poland and Germany, very well known for flying gliders – the airplanes with no engines – and it always has been supported by the government. So there are many fields in the Czech Republic and many of the kids, like me, went to the airport when they were two or three years old with their father, and then hang around for another 12 years. When I was 14, I got my pilot’s license and I started flying gliders and I’ve stuck with that basically until now, and I think it always helped me simply because it’s a great way to relax – it’s a great hobby – but also for making contacts. For example, when I came to Cincinnati, I didn’t have any friends and I just knew the people in the lab, but you don’t always stay with your co-workers all the time, so the first thing I did was I went to the local soaring club. I remember the first day I went there and I saw all those people. I didn’t know any of them but I heard them talking about flying, and talking about flying is like a different language, which I do understand well, so we started chatting and within a few minutes I was hooked up with them and I became a member of the Caesar Creek Soaring Club in close-by Dayton, Ohio. And I would say my best friends in Ohio were from the soaring club.”
In 1962, Paul received a tourist visa for a trip to Tunisia. While on the beach with his tour group, Paul left the group and hitchhiked to Tunis where he made contact with a diplomat from the West German Embassy who helped him claim asylum. Paul eventually received permission to immigrate to the United States and, in 1963, moved to New York. He took a qualifying exam which would allow him to work in the United States, and then traveled to Venezuela to visit family members. While there, he was offered a job as an expedition doctor, and spent one year in the Venezuelan jungle. Paul returned to New York in 1964 and completed an internship at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center. When Paul was offered a residency in orthopedics at Bellevue Hospital (in conjunction with NYU), he moved to Manhattan. He worked as an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years and, in 2005, was offered the job of chief of orthopedics at the VA NYC Medical Center. Paul believes that his career has flourished thanks to his move to the United States.
Paul’s first visit back to Czechoslovakia was after the Velvet Revolution; he says that his acquaintance with Václav Havel (with whom he attended elementary school) prevented him from being allowed to return under communism. Since his arrival in the United States, Paul had been involved in the Czechoslovak community in New York. In 2011, he served as president of the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. Today, he lives in Manhattan.
]]>Paul Ort was born in Prague in 1936. His father, Miloslav, was a surgeon, while his mother, Ludmila, stayed home to raise Paul and his two older brothers. When Paul was three, his parents divorced and his mother soon remarried. In 1942, Paul’s family became involved in the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich when his grandfather, a lay official of the Russian Orthodox Church in Prague, helped hide his killers – Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. Paul’s grandfather was executed by the Nazis, and his grandmother, mother, and stepfather were sent to Terezín and Mauthausen, where they died. Paul and his brothers went to live with their father, who later married their governess. At the age of 15, Paul was sent to work at a chemical factory in the small town of Křinec for one year. He then attended gymnázium in Nymburk. Paul was admitted to the medical school at Charles University and graduated in 1961. He worked for one year as a trainee in orthopedics in Teplice.
In 1962, Paul received a tourist visa for a trip to Tunisia. While on the beach with his tour group, Paul left the group and hitchhiked to Tunis where he made contact with a diplomat from the West German Embassy who helped him claim asylum. Paul eventually received permission to immigrate to the United States and, in 1963, moved to New York. He took a qualifying exam which would allow him to work in the United States, and then traveled to Venezuela to visit family members. While there, he was offered a job as an expedition doctor, and spent one year in the Venezuelan jungle. Paul returned to New York in 1964 and completed an internship at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center. When Paul was offered a residency in orthopedics at Bellevue Hospital (in conjunction with NYU), he moved to Manhattan. He worked as an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years and, in 2005, was offered the job of chief of orthopedics at the VA NYC Medical Center. Paul believes that his career has flourished thanks to his move to the United States.
Paul’s first visit back to Czechoslovakia was after the Velvet Revolution; he says that his acquaintance with Václav Havel (with whom he attended elementary school) prevented him from being allowed to return under communism. Since his arrival in the United States, Paul had been involved in the Czechoslovak community in New York. In 2011, he served as president of the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. Today, he lives in Manhattan.
“Her portion of the family became involved in the Heydrich affair. My grandfather was a lay president of the Russian Orthodox church in Prague and it was really his idea to hide the parachutists who killed Heydrich in the Russian Orthodox church in Resslova Ulice. So the Heydrich assassination took place in 1942 and the whole portion of my family on my mother’s side perished. My grandfather was executed shortly after the assassination. There was a mock trial staged by the Nazis where all the members of the Russian Orthodox church were sentenced to death and they were shot in Kobylisy, and my grandmother and my mother and her new husband, they went to Terezín, and from Terezín to Mauthausen, and my mother perished in Mauthausen.”
So your grandfather was an activist.
“My grandfather was an activist in the sense that he was a patriot. He was a member of Sokol and similar nationalistic organizations, and because of his involvement in these organizations he was approached when these parachutists who killed Heydrich needed to be hidden or sheltered. He provided the shelter in the Russian Orthodox church, which is now a museum.”
“They not only killed the people who assisted directly, but also the family members. Often people ask me how come I survived and my brothers, and the only reason why we survived was because my parents were divorced. So even though it was a painful thing, it really saved our lives. My mother remarried and her husband also perished. The Gestapo did come a few times to our house, but my father, who was educated under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spoke German and he always managed to turn the Gestapo away. Sometimes he claimed that we were sick with infectious diseases which the Nazis were afraid of. Three times, he said that the Nazis came to get us as children, but he always managed to turn them away.”
“I do remember the revolution. I was nine years old. I remember we didn’t go to school because there was already some unrest, but we went to the island Žofín, which is right near the Národní divadlo [National Theatre]. We were there with my brothers and then we saw that people started to hang Czech flags – the tricolore – and so my oldest brother, who was 14, said ‘It sounds like trouble,’ so we ran home, and the shooting started. I remember there was a Protestant church right across from the house where we lived and one of the Nazi snipers holed himself up in the tower of the church and was shooting at people, but eventually he was also annihilated.
“But then I have memories of driving through the streets of Prague and there were Nazi sympathizers. I remember a woman walking barefoot with a huge picture of Hitler hanging from her neck, covering her entire body, and she was holding a wooden pistol, like a mockery, and pointing it to the picture of Hitler. So they tortured her, humiliated her, etc. And then I remember the Nazis hanging from the lampposts. As a nine-year-old I was very impressed by that picture, even though as soon as we passed that kind of scenery, my father pushed my head down under the car seat.”
“When I was 15 years old, the communists decided that I couldn’t continue my education. It was interesting because I lived in a neighborhood where also lived the later president [Václav] Havel. As a matter of fact, we were classmates in the same public elementary school for five years. That was a fate that I shared with Havel. He was in the same predicament when the communists came; he was also not allowed to go to school, and he worked in a brewery from what I remember. I think for a while in a chemical factory and later in a brewery. Some of his plays refer to this.
“When I was 15, the communists said that my education was finished and my parents – my father and my stepmother – they put up a tremendous fight. Everything failed, but then of course my stepmother prevailed because she figured out a way to move me out of Prague and to the village where she was schoolteacher and she knew everybody and everybody knew her. I worked in a chemical factory too, in a lab, Spolana Neratovice, a chemical factory in a small town called Křinec. I worked there for a year and, after a year, I was no longer a bourgeois element, but the working class decided that I needed to further my education, so they sent me to a gymnázium. But the only concession I had to make was that I couldn’t return back to Prague, so I went to a gymnázium in Nymburk.”
“We were 400 Czech tourists and we didn’t know who was an agent. Probably for every bus there was an agent, or maybe two, so I didn’t know if it would be possible to escape. But then one day, they took us to the beach, which of course was a tremendous treat for all of us who grew up in a landlocked country, and then at the beach I decided that I’ll make my escape. I felt the agents lost control of us – who was in the water, etc. – so I left from the beach, and because I was afraid that I would be conspicuous I didn’t have anything with me except my pants and a shirt and a bathing suit. So I made a clean break. The communists gave us pocket money worth six dollars, so I had less than six dollars because I already spent a little bit of it. Even though I brought my diploma onto the ship, at that point, when I was on the beach and I felt I had the opportunity to leave, I didn’t even have the diploma.”
“It’s very interesting because here we decided not to split into two nations. Even though the official name of that organization is the Bohemian Hall, we feel that Slovaks are our brothers, and I always felt that they should be encouraged. As far as I’m concerned, we didn’t split; I consider it still a Czechoslovak organization. Naturally, there is some conflict and controversy about that too, because there are people who perhaps don’t like the Slovaks and there are some Slovaks who don’t like the Czechs, but as far I’m concerned, it’s one nation.”
“In my opinion, it would have been a horror. I mean, I did experience it a little bit in Teplice, where I worked after my graduation. But the subservience that we were forced into, the insincerity, the inability to trust anybody, to be able to speak freely; in my opinion, it was horrible. Destruction, really, of a human spirit. This is why I treasure this country most because, quite to the contrary, it encourages you. And I would say I am probably a little bit of an individualist, but this country kind of appreciates it.”
Following WWII, Rudy immediately entered medical school at Masaryk University in Brno. He graduated in 1950 and began his internship at the state hospital in Děčín in northern Bohemia. Shortly thereafter, however, Rudy was drafted into military service. Although the compulsory term of service was two years, Rudy was promoted and required to remain in the army. After five years, Rudy returned to Děčín where he worked as a general surgeon and, later, a thoracic surgeon.
In 1966, Rudy was invited to visit friends in France and was given permission to make the trip. He did not return to Czechoslovakia and spent one year in a refugee camp in Nuremberg, Germany, where he also worked in a U.S. Army hospital. He arrived in the United States in 1967 and settled in Chicago (where a cousin of his lived). Rudy did the requisite training and worked for many years as a urologist with the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospital (now University of Illinois Medical Center). Today Rudy lives in Oak Brook, Illinois with his wife.
]]>Rudy Misurec was born in Dobré Pole, a small village in southern Moravia on the Austrian border, in 1924. His father, Gustav, was a railroad worker while his mother, Hildegarde, worked part-time selling tickets at the railroad station. Rudy had one older brother, Karel. Rudy went to elementary school in Dobré Pole and started gymnázium in the nearby city of Břeclav. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and start of WWII, Rudy’s family moved to Brno where Rudy finishedgymnázium and passed his maturita exam in 1943. He was then recruited to work in a plant making plane engines for the German war effort. Rudy says that his factory was targeted by Allied forces and bombed while he was working there.
Following WWII, Rudy immediately entered medical school at Masaryk University in Brno. He graduated in 1950 and began his internship at the state hospital in Děčín in northern Bohemia. Shortly thereafter, however, Rudy was drafted into military service. Although the compulsory term of service was two years, Rudy was promoted and required to remain in the army. After five years, Rudy returned to Děčín where he worked as a general surgeon and, later, a thoracic surgeon.
In 1966, Rudy was invited to visit friends in France and was given permission to make the trip. He did not return to Czechoslovakia and spent one year in a refugee camp in Nuremberg, Germany, where he also worked in a U.S. Army hospital. He arrived in the United States in 1967 and settled in Chicago (where a cousin of his lived). Rudy did the requisite training and worked for many years as a urologist with the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospital (now University of Illinois Medical Center). Today Rudy lives in Oak Brook, Illinois with his wife.
“It was a place which was known, evidently, to the Allies that there is a possibility of building something and making some engines for the Folke-Wulf, so they then one day came with their planes and bombed it.”
Were you working when it was bombed?
“Yes, yes. The American planes were coming through that area, going most often to bomb Austria, mainly Wiener Neustadt, where there were some factories which they considered important, and we many times had an alarm and we were so pleased because they had to chase us out of the buildings. But the day when it really came to the point where the bombing fleet was bombing the factory, it was so sudden that we didn’t actually have much time to get out. So we were actually still in the buildings of the factory and just trying to run out when the bombs were falling. It was quite frightening, you know, because you can hear the bomb coming from 5,000 or 10,000 feet – I don’t know how high – so you can hear the bombs coming down, the whistling sound, but you don’t know where it comes down and if it will kill you or not.”
Well, was everyone ok?
“Oh yes, there were people killed.”
“Right away after the end of the War when the universities were opened. So at first, we had a flat wagon and they used us to go to the city. They knew where the German professor was living – there was a German university and a Czech university [which was closed during WWII], and the Germans were gone – and we were collecting the books from them and bringing them to a place to be saved. That is what we were doing right away before the university was fully functional, and then once the university was fully functional I was visiting [and studying at] the university. It’s amazing; in the beginning there was a big interest and in the first meeting, I remember, there was a gentleman saying ‘There are more than 300 students here, but don’t think all of you will finish; only about half of you will finish,’ because it’s difficult to study, a lot of studying.”
“In 1950 I was promoted as a doctor of medicine, and then I went for residency training into the hospital at Děčín, which is in northern Bohemia on the Elbe River. There I started an internship but, after several months of the internship, I was drafted and I had to go into military service although I didn’t like the military at all! Unfortunately, at the time there was a law in the General Assembly that – the military service was two years – but the government had the option to use Paragraph třicet devět [39], and they could put you in an additional three years of military service and there was no way that you could say no. So then after two years of military service in the army, I was promoted as a captain and I spent an additional three years in the military service, which I was very unhappy about because my friends had the opportunity to go and study additional medicine, because that was my goal, and I had to be in the military and I didn’t have any way out. So then after three years I was finally able to go again to the residency in the hospital.”
“The French were always friendly to Czechoslovakia and they were actually considered as big allies, and there was a gentleman with a family and other French people who decided to go to the Czech Republic to spend the winter vacation there. Because we were skiers we met there in the winter time and Christmas time and, this way, we had friends in Paris. So that’s how I met them, and then they did invite me to visit them and at the time I said ‘I most surely will not be able to use the invitation’ because it was impossible to get from Czechoslovakia to the Western part of the world. But, possibly because the gentleman whom we met there, the Frenchman, was a member of the Maquis – the Maquis was the underground group of the French resistance, and if this was the reason, or what was the reason, I don’t know – but I got permission to go to France, and then I decided not to come back.”
“My wife is from the old country and she keeps some of the Czech customs, but most of that blends together with the life in America because the country will not adjust to you; you have to adjust to the United States. And we were fairly successful. It was not for free; we had to work very hard, but we succeeded.”
Stan Pechan was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1951. His father was an engineer who became head of the local road-building department, while his mother stayed at home with Stan and his brother, Marcel. After graduating from the local gymnázium in Michalovce, Stan went to medical school in Košice, studying at the Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika, at first general medicine and then dentistry in particular. A keen handballer, Stan continued to play for his home team Michalovce throughout his studies, as well as making it to the university world cup in the sport in Prague. Upon graduation, Stan was conscripted into the military for one year, which he spent in the Army Medical Corps, mostly at a clinic in Olomouc in southern Moravia. Following discharge in 1975, Stan returned to eastern Slovakia to work as a dentist in Budkovce. He met his future wife, Julie – an American of Slovak extraction – during a trip she made to Czechoslovakia at this time. The couple were married in Slovakia and Stan embarked upon the process of legally moving to the United States. The paperwork took one-and-a-half years, says Stan, who eventually arrived in Cleveland in March 1977.
After a number of years spent learning English and retraining as a dentist in the U.S., Stan became progressively more active in Slovak and Czech societies in the Cleveland area, such as Krajanský výbor, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Zemplin Club. To this day, he is an active member of the Cleveland chapter of SVU. Stan has his own dental practice and counts a large number of Slovaks and Czechs in Cleveland amongst his patients. He has two children, Michael and Nicole. He lives with his wife, Julie, in Avon Lake, Ohio.
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Stan Pechan was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1951. His father was an engineer who became head of the local road-building department, while his mother stayed at home with Stan and his brother, Marcel. After graduating from the local gymnázium in Michalovce, Stan went to medical school in Košice, studying at the Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika, at first general medicine and then dentistry in particular. A keen handballer, Stan continued to play for his home team Michalovce throughout his studies, as well as making it to the university world cup in the sport in Prague. Upon graduation, Stan was conscripted into the military for one year, which he spent in the Army Medical Corps, mostly at a clinic in Olomouc in southern Moravia. Following discharge in 1975, Stan returned to eastern Slovakia to work as a dentist in Budkovce. He met his future wife, Julie – an American of Slovak extraction – during a trip she made to Czechoslovakia at this time. The couple were married in Slovakia and Stan embarked upon the process of legally moving to the United States. The paperwork took one-and-a-half years, says Stan, who eventually arrived in Cleveland in March 1977.
After a number of years spent learning English and retraining as a dentist in the U.S., Stan became progressively more active in Slovak and Czech societies in the Cleveland area, such as Krajanský výbor, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Zemplin Club. To this day, he is an active member of the Cleveland chapter of SVU. Stan has his own dental practice and counts a large number of Slovaks and Czechs in Cleveland amongst his patients. He has two children, Michael and Nicole. He lives with his wife, Julie, in Avon Lake, Ohio.
“My dad – as a little kid, I remember – he actually, the building wasn’t even… there was scaffolding, and he moved, so as to secure, so that nobody could take this apartment. So he lived with no heating, there was nothing, there was not even a façade finished, it was just this brick or whatever, and [he] lived there so that nobody could come and steal this. Because that is how difficult it was to get an apartment!”
“We did fine, as a kid growing up, we did fine. We accepted the food was rationed, the dwellings were rationed, you know, you had only so much money, so yeah, but it was fine. There’s only so much food you need and then… you didn’t go hungry. We had to eat certain foods over and over, you know? Still today, I couldn’t eat cabbage for many, many years! But you adjust, you were able to adjust, and yeah, it was tougher. Occasionally we didn’t have hot water, maybe once a week, and those little conveniences that you have nowadays. So you can’t tell somebody… you got bread every day with lard on top of it and that’s it, that’s what you… nobody worried about nutrition, you worried that you were full, that’s all. So yeah, you can’t tell somebody if they didn’t have the same experience, yeah.”
“It was interesting, it was something and, you know, all of a sudden you think, well, all of a sudden you were more interested in your country than I was living there, you know? Because you tried to think, well, the country should… the country should be better, better off than… When you live there, you accept it. And when you look from the outside, you look at all of those inequities in the country and you think ‘this country should be much better, it’s got so much potential.’ You tried to, sometimes you were able to – not too much later on – but give certain donations to certain organizations to spread the word or help refugees. We always gave at the Krajanský výbor some money towards refugees. And politically, certain people tried to go there and get some information through so, you supported them.”
“That was the time when the Germans were going through, escaping East Germany, going through Hungary. So already things were, something was going on, or there was a big influx of Germans going to West Germany through Hungary, and Hungary allowed them to go. And you talked to different people, and at the time I talked to some, you know, Communism was still… on the surface it looked like nothing would change, to me the country looked the same. But you knew that… you talked to several people and they said that they… they talked to some in Prague and they said that the Communists already have their suitcases packed. They’re just ready to go, they knew that time was over for them.”
“Obviously, when I came, it was more cohesive. And I think the grouping took a lot of knowledge and hoping for change of the system, regime, and so people were coming together just to get some gossip or some information – if somebody traveled, [to ask] if they knew if maybe it’s getting better or worse. So there was some, people were together, and there was still this ethnic… there were a lot of programs. Even in the Zemplin Club, actually, the programs were very nice. At the time we had a, they made me MC a couple of times, of the Zemplin Club, and a little side note; I had to make a speech. And so I wrote the speech, I had to, for this one there was Cardinal Tomko who was, I think, third or fourth in the hierarchy in the Vatican – he was from Zemplin. And there was a General Čatloš, who was a big general, a Slovak general, and so, you know, I introduced it, and I made a little, kind of political, speech. Well, behold, this my speech ended up on Radio Free Europe. And my mum, she listened to Radio Free Europe, and there’s my speech being, at this time… and this was still communism so…”
“We talked about communism, even during communism. You know, in groups you talked, sometimes alcohol was involved, and then you started to talk, you know. People did talk. Sometimes you were unlucky and somebody maybe turned you in, you know? But this did not happen too much, it did not happen too much. Because we exchanged and we knew what was going on, later on, the abuse of power – we talked about it right openly. And the funny thing is afterwards, not being there but, it’s like a closed chapter, it’s over. Communism is done. Maybe some people do talk about it, but it seems like – what I read – that a lot of people just don’t want to talk about it, and I think that that’s historically, a lot of people don’t want to talk about certain things which happen. When there was war, they didn’t want to talk about it.”
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
]]>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical gymnázium in Nitra.
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
“The biggest problem was that we had to move from our apartment, because we lived on the main street and Jews were not permitted to live on the main street. That was making the city ugly, if you had Jews living on the main street. So we had to find an apartment in a side street, which we did and it was actually pretty good. But then, of course, we couldn’t visit swimming pools, public places. We couldn’t visit parks, we couldn’t go to the movies, we couldn’t travel without a permit, and we had to wear the Star of David. So you had to be marked. And that was not a very pleasant thing, and not necessarily because of the fact that you had to deliver your sporting equipment. You had to give to the state. You had to donate it to the state. Of course all kinds of jewelry. Your bank accounts were frozen. And finally, my father was prohibited from being an attorney, so he had to find another job. It couldn’t be an attorney; it had to be some clerk, which we finally found. He was a clerk in a shoe factory and he did some clerical job there. But that gave him an exemption that we would not go into an concentration camp – at least not initially.”
“We all went to Auschwitz together and except for me, everybody perished. There was tremendous famine there. We had practically no food, so I lost – I was never a big guy – but I lost at least 40 pounds. So when I was liberated I weighed about 80 pounds. So if this would have taken a longer time I certainly wouldn’t have survived, because it was not only the lack food, but also hard labor. We had to work – which I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t stand that Auschwitz. I remember that smoke and the fire and the smell of burning bodies. So I reported myself that I am an expert electrician, which of course I was not. But I was taken as an electrician to a neighboring little camp where they had some electrical work; I never did anything electrical because it turned out that was a different camp – they mixed me up. But it doesn’t matter; it was still a labor camp, where the food wasn’t much better but at least we had to work and we were occupied and tired and came home and went to bed and slept. So I didn’t have too much time to think about things. So that’s why I was able to survive, and don’t forget that Auschwitz, and the neighboring camps, was liberated much earlier than the rest of the camps because the Russian front was so close. So actually, Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. I was liberated a little later because I was in a slightly more Western camp, but still it was the beginning of February.”
So which was the camp you were moved to?
“It was called Gleiwitz – Gliwice in Polish. That was an industrial city, as most of them there, in the same area of Auschwitz, maybe 35-40 miles from Auschwitz. Very close. And that was the sister camp because they didn’t have gas chambers in Gleiwitz, only in Auschwitz. So if somebody was too weak to work, then they sent him back to Auschwitz from Gleiwitz. There was no crematorium and no gas chamber, so there was a big difference.”
“I had a prověrka, previerka in Slovak, and I was given a condition that I can study, but I have to finish in the proper term. The fact that there was a previerka is horrible, but they way they acted toward me I would say is reasonable. They gave me a condition. They gave me another condition, which was given not on the university side but on the civilian side, that they suggested to me to be more in touch with the working people. That I was much of a high-nose, snobbish guy who is an intellectual who is studying medicine; that I should go to the folk, to the people, and I did. I immediately reported to become a factory physician for one month, to be close to the workers, and then I became a company physician later at the university, to become more united with the working class.”
“When I came back from the [concentration] camp, and it was not a communist state yet, I joined the Czechoslovak youth organization, which very many people joined. But that was good only until I was 27; after 27 it automatically became the Communist Party. So that’s how I became a member of the Party, but for three years I didn’t even pay my dues. But when I had my previerka, I was ordered to be more active as a member and after three years I paid my dues backwards and became more active, meaning I attended Party membership conferences and meetings and that’s it. But I was never a functionary or any office holder. So that was Party membership, which may have helped me a little bit in my difficult life as the son of a bourgeois who was in jail – maybe, I’m not sure.”
“It’s an insane system, that communism. That’s why it never worked any place, and it can be maintained only by terror, by secret police and by forbidding this and forbidding that and censoring the mail and censoring the newspaper. That’s why I felt it acutely that I had to go to the evening meeting of the Party, that I had to go on May 1 to manifest for Stalin, which I didn’t want to. So that’s why I was very anxious to get out, and when I did get out, suddenly I had all the possibility for doing research, doing what I wanted to do all my life. I had a laboratory, I had my mice and rats for experiments, I had a professor who took care of me – specifically had several fellows and I was one of them; excellent teacher – and I said ‘For goodness sake, now I’m going back to that Czechoslovakia.”
“Los Angeles is just a chapter, like Miami is a chapter, and we had a very good president who really arranged all kinds of lectures. And at that time we were lucky because, for instance, Milos Forman was there in Los Angeles and he gave a number of lectures. There was another guy who was chair of a filmmaking institute; I forgot his name, but he was a member of SVU. Then we had a painter, quite famous locally; he was a member. So it was interesting company: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professionals, filmmakers. And it was interesting to go to because it was a social club more or less, and it was not only lectures but also parties – beer and wine and some cookies and some good Czech cooking, because we went usually from one house to another – we didn’t have an official meeting place – or we met at the Beseda Sokol. They had one in Los Angeles.”
Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
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Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”
“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”
“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”
“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.
“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”
“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”
“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?
“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”
Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
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Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
“There was no rabbi or synagogue to really practice the religion. My parents were Holocaust survivors. They didn’t go to any concentration camp, but they survived in hiding and they were afraid to practice, but we always knew from people that we are Jews because kids in school made fun of us and even the teacher would not favor us, knowing that we were Jewish.”
How did you take it?
“Up until 12 years old, not terribly bad, but when I was 12 years old, all the children went to religious school on Wednesdays, and around Easter time, I think, the subject was the Jews drink Christian blood during Easter, and all of the sudden my best girlfriend didn’t want to sit with me, nobody wanted to walk to and from school with me, because I was the only Jewish kid – and my sister, but we were two classes apart, so we had different schedules. So it was very difficult, because at 12 years old you want to have a girlfriend. We used to walk and do things together – on the bicycle, after school we had fun things to do – and all of the sudden I’m all by myself. Nobody wanted to associate with me. Until high school, and then I went to Piešt’any for high school and things were a little different.
“In the first grade when our teacher was giving us our school certificate, she asked every student where they were going for summer vacation. Since my name started with ‘N,’ I heard the words ‘grandma, grandpa, cousin, aunt.’ I never heard these words at home, so when I came home I asked my mom ‘How come I’m not going for vacation to some relatives?’ So my mom was crying and said ‘Oh, we don’t have any relatives.’ But then she found some family in Nitra – friends – it was also a Jewish family that had no children, and they became our aunt and uncle, so we used to go there practically regularly for summer vacation to Nitra.”
“I really did believe in it until the invasion of Czechoslovakia because I think my parents kind of taught us to believe in communism, knowing that this is the only system you can live in. I think they believed in communism out of fear. I really believed that this is the best because you don’t have any other literature and you’re really not connected with the world, so you really believe that this is what it is and the Russians are the best, and American imperialism is the worst and they’re enslaving people or hurting people and they’re really not good for people, and how wonderful we have a life in a communist country. So I really did believe it until it was the invasion. I was shocked. I was just finished with physical therapy school, worked for a couple months, and one morning you have Russian tanks in the city and you say ‘How could that be? They were such people?’ and ‘Why did they do that to us?’ I was just so unhappy.”
“We had a choice to go to Israel the next day due to our professions. My sister was a biochemist, I was a physical therapist, and they looked for professional people and the agency was right there in Vienna. But [I wanted] some kind of adventure. I just wanted to come to America. And they wanted to send us to California because New York was full of Czechoslovak refugees who had a lot of family here since WWII, or before WWII, so they had preference, and somehow they kind of squeezed the two of us to bring us to New York, so we came to New York.”
“In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the job I had as a physical therapist was a place where a lot of influential people came – politicians, economists, artists – so I was able to provide jobs and accommodations for almost everybody. Even the legal papers, the senators, ambassadors. All different people. But even people I didn’t know would ask me. My parents were even scared that somebody was going to arrest them because somebody would knock on the door and bring a present for my father: ‘Oh your daughter in New York let my son stay for two weeks or found him a job.’ My parents didn’t even know who these people are. Yeah, always.”
“I had to phone my parents to get them to Vienna and from Vienna to fly to Israel, but I cannot tell this on the phone because Czechoslovakia and Israel had no communication; they didn’t have any contact at the time. This was 1984. So I told my parents on the phone ‘Come to Vienna. We are changing the wedding to Vienna.’ So my parents were hysterical and came to Vienna. They said ‘Where is Eli? Where is my sister?’ so I had to whisper and say ‘They went to Israel.’ So my parents almost fainted at the bus station where I met them. Because also this rabbi got me all these connections. His daughter was married in Vienna to the Minister of Finance, and I needed a visa for my parents to fly from Vienna to Tel Aviv, out of the passport. They cannot come back to Czechoslovakia with an Israeli stamp in a passport. He also told me to be careful who to contact. ‘Vienna is full of Czechoslovak spies and your parents are going to be followed all the time.’ We needed to get to the embassy which is a little bit on the outskirts of Vienna, and not to be followed. But we got to the embassy and they already knew everything about us. They issued [a visa] on tissue paper for my parents to go to enter Israel and exit Israel. But they needed another visa to enter Austria again because they had already used it used. Everything needed to be out of the passport, so all this was issued. We happily went to Tel Aviv and quickly got married. My sister was there, her husband was there, and so we got married in Tel Aviv.”
Vlado Simko was born in Bratislava in 1931 to a Slovak father and Czech mother. His parents, Miroslav and Mária, were both educators; his mother taught at a high school in Bratislava while his father served in the Ministry of Education. His sister, Olga, was born five years after Vlado. Vlado says the onset of WWII was difficult for his family, as his mother lost her job because of anti-Czech sentiment in the newly-independent First Slovak Republic. Towards the latter half of the War, Vlado and his family were evacuated from Bratislava and sent to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town in northwestern Slovakia. Upon their return to Bratislava, Vlado resumed his schooling. He spent the summer of 1947 in London as part of a student exchange program. After graduating high school in 1950, Vlado enrolled in Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine. While studying, he worked part-time in a physiology research lab. He met his future wife, Mary, who was also a medical student, while attending a concert. After finishing graduate school, Vlado and Mary married, and he found a job in the physiology department of the Research Institute for Human Nutrition where he eventually became director of the laboratory.
Vlado says that he and his wife were given permission to travel outside the Eastern Bloc to attend conferences and present papers; however, they were not allowed to take their son, Daniel (who was born in 1959), with them. In the late 1960s, Vlado joined the Communist Party. He says that faith in the leadership of Alexander Dubček spurred this decision; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 led him to rescind his membership. It was at this time that Vlado began searching for ways to leave the country and sent out letters to his contacts in the West. He was offered a two-year visiting professorship at Cornell University in the School of Nutrition and, on April 1, 1969, left Czechoslovakia with his family. After three years at Cornell, Vlado completed a two-year fellowship at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, and was then offered a job as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Simkos lived in Cincinnati from 1974 until 1982 when they moved to New York City where Vlado became head of the gastroenterology department at the Brooklyn V.A. Medical Center.
Vlado became involved in the Czechoslovak community shortly after arriving in the United States. He served on the board of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and is the current president of its successor, the Czech and Slovak Solidarity Council. Vlado is currently on the board of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Relief and is the executive vice-president of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU). Vlado refers to his immigration as ‘the best decision of [his] life’ and considers himself an international citizen. Today, he lives in Staten Island, New York.
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Vlado Simko was born in Bratislava in 1931 to a Slovak father and Czech mother. His parents, Miroslav and Mária, were both educators; his mother taught at a high school in Bratislava while his father served in the Ministry of Education. His sister, Olga, was born five years after Vlado. Vlado says the onset of WWII was difficult for his family, as his mother lost her job because of anti-Czech sentiment in the newly-independent First Slovak Republic. Towards the latter half of the War, Vlado and his family were evacuated from Bratislava and sent to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town in northwestern Slovakia. Upon their return to Bratislava, Vlado resumed his schooling. He spent the summer of 1947 in London as part of a student exchange program. After graduating high school in 1950, Vlado enrolled in Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine. While studying, he worked part-time in a physiology research lab. He met his future wife, Mary, who was also a medical student, while attending a concert. After finishing graduate school, Vlado and Mary married, and he found a job in the physiology department of the Research Institute for Human Nutrition where he eventually became director of the laboratory.
Vlado says that he and his wife were given permission to travel outside the Eastern Bloc to attend conferences and present papers; however, they were not allowed to take their son, Daniel (who was born in 1959), with them. In the late 1960s, Vlado joined the Communist Party. He says that faith in the leadership of Alexander Dubček spurred this decision; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 led him to rescind his membership. It was at this time that Vlado began searching for ways to leave the country and sent out letters to his contacts in the West. He was offered a two-year visiting professorship at Cornell University in the School of Nutrition and, on April 1, 1969, left Czechoslovakia with his family. After three years at Cornell, Vlado completed a two-year fellowship at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, and was then offered a job as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Simkos lived in Cincinnati from 1974 until 1982 when they moved to New York City where Vlado became head of the gastroenterology department at the Brooklyn V.A. Medical Center.
Vlado became involved in the Czechoslovak community shortly after arriving in the United States. He served on the board of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and is the current president of its successor, the Czech and Slovak Solidarity Council. Vlado is currently on the board of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Relief and is the executive vice-president of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU). Vlado refers to his immigration as ‘the best decision of [his] life’ and considers himself an international citizen. Today, he lives in Staten Island, New York.
“It did not start too well because my mother was Czech and the Slovak government made a strong anti-Czech movement and anybody who was a Czech national, and who didn’t have a [Slovak sic.] passport, couldn’t get a job in then-Slovakia. So my mother lost her teaching assignment at the high school in Bratislava and she became a housewife. My father actually was limited because his wife was Czech. That was not a good kind of evidence or proof, at that time, because he worked for the government. He also had a difficult time because he was not Catholic. He was Lutheran; he was Protestant. So our family had a dual label – mother, Czech, and father, Protestant. But somehow we managed. My father, actually, managed to get through this, but it was not very pleasant.”
“Toward the end of the War, we were evacuated because the big cities were prone to bombardment. So we were in a small spa city which is called Trenčianske Teplice – there are mountains around – and one day there was this kind of an air raid situation. All of the sudden, I remember, I heard this wailing sound of an aircraft approaching which was louder and louder, and then all of the sudden I heard a big boom and nothing, and we knew something happened. So the older villagers, including me as a boy, started running in that direction and, true enough, when we came to a hillside we saw smoldering debris of a four-engine Liberator which crashed there. Maybe two or three of those airmen happened to jump out and, I remember now, they wound up with their parachutes hanging from the branches of the trees around that smoldering ruin of the aircraft. Unfortunately, there were also just remnants of a body around the smoldering aircraft, and I’m still deeply moved by what I found there. There was a residue of a New Testament in English which was all burnt around. I took that relic. I cherished it with big respect all my life and when we moved to the United States I lost that piece of a relic and I’m very sorry about it. It was very important to me. This was my, probably, first direct contact with the West and with the United States.”
“While I was at the medical school I never knew when I would be thrown out of the medical school. Somehow I managed to graduate and I was a very good student. I graduated with the best marks and the best index [transcript] – one out of only four people in my class. Despite all this, they considered me to be unreliable, an unreliable element. They didn’t make it impossible for me to finish my medical education, but after I finished the medical school, they assigned me a job in a small village just at the border of Slovakia with the Soviet Union – Ukraine – and this would have been the end for me. I don’t even recall what was the name of the village. I did everything possible not to go there. Because I had good contacts with the Institute of Physiology where I worked as a student volunteer doing a little student research, I managed to get a job in the physiology department at the Research Institute of Nutrition in Bratislava. So that was a big, big deal for me because I could stay in the big city of Bratislava.”
“I did fairly decent research and my papers were published in fairly prestigious journals in Switzerland and in Sweden. I had a paper published in Hungary in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Science. I got permission to attend from time to time an international convention in the West. That was a big deal but, by the time, we already had our first son Daniel, our only son, and when we went for instance to a congress of diabetes in Sweden, where I had a report because I did some research on diabetes in experimental animals. We were permitted to go to Stockholm, but we had to leave our son behind, for obvious reason. They knew that we were good parents; we would never leave our son alone and stay out in the West. The same thing happened when we went to an endocrinology convention in Marseilles, France. Imagine what it meant for me. I always longed for distances and for travel. By the time, we already had our first car, a little Škoda, and that car was loaded with food, with cans. We had a tent and we would camp out all the way to Marseilles and back, eating through our forage of canned food. But we were in the world.”
“About two or three months before the Prague Spring, because at that time everybody was siding with Dubček. Because everybody thought ‘This is something that is going to pull us out of the misery.’ There was this reform movement and people wanted to help the reform movement. With me, I also had several of my colleagues who did the same thing. As soon as the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, in August ’68, I simply cancelled that thing, and that was also a very bad mark on my profile. This was one of the reasons why I started to do everything possible to get out of the country.”
“After I came to the United States, I started to write my diary. By today, I’ve already written about 2,682 pages of my diary which are very carefully indexed so when you mention a name or something, I can immediately find out at what page of my diary I have a note about that entry. People laugh at me and they say ‘Listen guy, you think anyone ever will be interested to read what you write? You think anybody will try to look at those slides, those thousands of slides that you made on your trips around the world?’ And my answer is ‘It’s obvious. If not for good recording, we would know nothing now about human history. Whether anybody’s going to read it or not, it’s part of civilization; it’s part of human culture to keep records.’ And this is also what you are doing with me right now.”