Vlado Simko
<p><img class="alignright wp-image-4000" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808051742im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/vlado-sis.png" alt="vlado-sis" width="250" height="370" /></p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Viera Noy
<p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Vera Plesek
<p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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 <em>Hlasatel</em> 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.</p>
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Thomas Gral
<p>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 <em>gymnázium</em> in Nitra.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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 <em>previerka</em>, 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.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3399" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609054041im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_(WinCE)" width="500" height="488" />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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Stan Pechan
<p> </p><p>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 <em>gymnázium</em> 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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Rudy Misurec
<p>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 <em>gymnázium</em> 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 finished<em>gymnázium</em> and passed his <em>maturita</em> 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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Paul Ort
<p>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 <em>gymnázium</em> 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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Ondrej Krejci
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Milos Krajny
<p>Milos Krajny was born in Kroměříž, eastern Moravia in 1941. His father, a doctor who practiced internal medicine, changed the family name from the German-sounding Kreuziger to Krajny following WWII. His mother, who had studied philosophy and spent one year at the Sorbonne, stayed home to raise him and his two younger brothers, and later taught music lessons. Milos has early memories of WWII, including the burning of the town’s castle at the close of the War. In 1953, Milos’s father’s practice was nationalized, and he was placed in a factory as the company doctor, caring for thousands of employees. Milos enjoyed school and extracurricular activities; he especially looked forward to a cycling trip that he made each summer to a school in Slovakia. Although he was an excellent student, Milos says that his ‘bourgeois upbringing’ hindered his acceptance to medical school. He was accepted to Palacký University in Olomouc four days before the start of the term after a patient of his father’s intervened on his behalf. After graduating in 1964, Milos practiced internal medicine in Přerov, and then, the next year, he returned to Olomouc where he began training as an allergist.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos was urged by a former professor to apply for a fellowship in Montreal. He was awarded the position in 1968 and says that he almost did not accept it because the stipend was so low; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year changed his mind. He left for Montreal in September 1968. Two months later, his wife and young daughter joined him. After completing the two-year fellowship, Milos started his internship at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. He was also in constant correspondence with his parents back in Czechoslovakia, and they often sent him LPs of classical Czech music. He says that although music was always an integral part of his life, these records inspired his love for classical music. Milos began attending Czech concerts and theatre in Toronto which brought him contact with the Czech community there. As a member of the board of directors of a chamber music group, he was instrumental in bringing Czech groups to the city. Recently, Milos has started a series of classical music concerts called ‘Nocturnes in the City,’ which aim to bring Czech music and musicians to a Toronto audience.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos currently holds dual citizenship and travels to the Czech Republic twice a year. He has made a habit of reading Czech-language newspapers and stays on top of Czech current events. His son and daughter are both fluent in Czech and he says that his son is especially enamored with his Czech heritage. Today, in addition to his work as an allergist, Milos is the president of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Mila Kyncl
<p>Mila Kyncl was born in Trhový Štěpánov, Bohemia, in 1935. her father was a businessman and worked the land that their family owned while her mother stayed at home to raise Mila. During WWII, Mila says German troops occupied her home, which was very large. Overall, she recalls having a happy childhood, sprinkled with trips to Prague to attend the ballet or opera with her parents. A student at the village school until the age of ten, Mila then transferred to a larger school in Čáslav. At age 14, Mila was chosen by her teachers to assist the local doctor. She attributes receiving this opportunity to her good student record and her background in math, physics, and chemistry.</p><p> </p><p>Mila attended Masaryk University’s medical school in Brno which she refers to as one of the “best times of her life.” She says she graduated after her father signed his property, which included several businesses, over to the state. Her family was moved into a much smaller building on their property which her father renovated. Mila worked at a hospital in Strakonice for two years, then, in 1961, married her husband, <a href="/web/20170609131424/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/john-jaroslav-kyncl/">Jaroslav Kyncl</a>, and that same year moved to Prague. They had two children, Marketa and John. Mila found a job in a hospital in Prague, but was not allowed a specialty because of her anti-communist views. However, she says this ultimately worked in her favor as she received training in all departments.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After attempts to leave the country legally by applying for jobs abroad (in places such as Tunis), Mila and her family left Czechoslovakia on August 30, 1968, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion. They lived in Vienna as refugees for a few months before moving to Heidelberg when Jaroslav was offered a Humboldt scholarship. Mila also found work as a physician in Heidelberg and stayed in that position until 1972, when she and her children joined Jaroslav, who had moved to Cleveland a year earlier, in the United States. They settled in Lake Bluff, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Mila retrained as a doctor and eventually opened her own practice. Both of Mila’s children speak Czech, and she and Jaroslav regularly visit the Czech Republic. They are active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), and Mila retains many Czech cultural traditions.</p><p> </p>
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