Anna Balev
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2339 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609072058im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/SQ-Anna-Balev.png" alt="" width="235" height="235" /></p><p>Anna Balev was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, in 1950. She grew up outside the city in the small village of Březce with her parents, three siblings and grandparents. Prior to the Communist coup, Anna’s father, Jaroslav, was a language professor at a nearby <em>gymnázium</em>. Anna describes him as an ‘avid Catholic’ who ‘went out of his way to provoke’ the communist authorities. He was arrested and sent to prison for two years. Anna’s mother, Blažena, returned to school to become a nurse in order to support the family once her father ran into trouble. Anna says that she was the only one in her class who was not a Pioneer and was instead sent to religion classes. Each year Anna spent the summer with her maternal uncle and aunt in Krnov, times she fondly recalls. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Anna’s brother left the country and settled in Canada.</p><p> </p><p>Anna attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Šternberk and hoped to study languages at Charles University (she was taught French, German and Latin by her father), but was not accepted. She instead decided to study nursing, recognizing that a practical profession would make it easier to start a life elsewhere if she left the country. Anna studied for two years in Olomouc and moved to Prague where she worked at a psychiatric hospital. She then took a job in Karlovy Vary, where she was hired because of her German language skills. In 1975 Anna reconnected with her future husband, an American who had emigrated from Ukraine. The pair had met while she was living in Prague and he was visiting the capital city. They decided to marry in order for Anna to legally leave the country. After getting married in Karlovy Vary, Anna immediately set about getting permission to immigrate to the United States. She arrived in New York City in May 1976 and was handed her green card at the airport.</p><p> </p><p>Anna says that she ‘fell in love immediately’ with the city and was astonished at the freedom she now enjoyed. While studying for her RN exam, Anna found a job at a women’s clinic. She subsequently worked at Roosevelt Hospital and for a plastic surgeon. Anna stopped practicing nursing when her first daughter was born in 1980. Her second daughter was born two years later. Anna also attended Hunter College part-time from her first year in New York. In 1985 she received degrees in English and theatre arts. Today Anna is the owner of a rental company and owns property in the Czech Republic as well as New York.</p><p> </p><p>Anna has returned to the Czech Republic nearly every year since she left and has recently become a dual citizen of the Czech Republic and the United States. She is active in the Czech community in New York as a member of Sokol and the local chapter of SVU (Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences). Today, Anna lives in New York City with her husband.</p>
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Eva Jurinova
<p>Eva Jurinova was born in Žilina in northwestern Slovakia in 1979. Her mother L’udmila is a pediatric neurologist and her father Vladimír is a nuclear physicist who, prior to the Velvet Revolution, worked in the Ministry of Health. He now heads the radiation protection section of the public health authority of Slovakia. Eva started school in Trnava and later moved with her family to Bratislava. She says that her childhood was ‘beautiful’ and ‘pure’ and that she spent a lot of time visiting her grandparents, who lived in more rural parts of the country. She was an active child and participated in sports, dance, and theatre. Eva was ten at the time of Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and says that although her parents’ careers improved, she did not notice any immediate changes. In 1997, Eva spent one year of high school studying abroad in Richmond, Virginia. Upon her return to Slovakia, she made plans to move back to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Eva graduated high school and enrolled in an international program through Comenius University which allowed her to study at affiliate colleges in the United States while traveling back to Slovakia to take exams. While in Richmond, Eva had been given a modeling contract and when she returned to the U.S. she settled in New York to pursue modeling. She also became a project manager and marketing director for a brand of luxury watches. Eva received an MBA from Columbia University. She now owns a branding and licensing firm and does PR consulting for luxury watches and jewelry.</p><p> </p><p>Upon her return to the United States, Eva made friends with a number of fellow Slovak-Americans and émigrés and began organizing small cultural events and get-togethers. One of these events was attended by the newly-appointed Slovak consul general who expressed an interest in collaborating with Eva to formalize these events. She helped to form the non-profit +421 Foundation and is co-president of the organization, whose biggest event is Slovak Fashion Night. Eva says that while Slovakia will always be her home, she is glad to have had opportunities in the United States that have helped shaped who she is. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, California.</p>
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Helena Stossel
<p>Helena Stossel was born in Prague in 1946. Helena’s parents both worked at a small silk-screening operation – her father as the manager and her mother as a silk-screener. Helena and her younger brother, Tomas, were watched by her grandmother and spent a lot of time at the <em>chata</em> her grandfather built outside the city. Helena says that she learned to ‘appreciate nature’ from camping, canoeing, and white-water kayaking. She also enjoyed reading and poetry. Helena went to <em>gymnázium</em> where she focused on the sciences and then studied chemistry at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. She married her first husband, Lev, in 1967. The Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 left an impression on Helena, as she congregated on Wenceslas Square with other young people and talked with the Warsaw Pact troops. Her parents and brother immigrated to the United States in July 1969 and, although Helena was reluctant to leave as she wanted to ‘fight for freedom,’ she joined her husband when he decided to leave in the autumn of 1969. The pair lived in Vienna for one month and then flew to New York City in December 1969.</p><p> </p><p>After spending two weeks with family friends in Ossining, New York, Helena moved to the Boston area where her parents had settled and opened a Czech restaurant. Helena spent a few months becoming comfortable with the English language and then began working in a hospital kitchen. Her next job was in the lab of Glover Memorial Hospital and, at the request of a pathologist, she transferred to what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she worked for 40 years, retiring only a short time ago. Helena gave birth to her daughter Johana in 1974 and bought a house in Holliston (a suburb of Boston) in 1976. She married her second husband, Frank Stossel, in 1981 and first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1987. She has visited her home country many times since. Helena says that it is only recently that she became ‘at peace’ with her emigration, citing her reluctance to leave Czechoslovakia in the first place as preventing her from feeling at home in the United States. In her retirement, she hopes to travel more and go on a canoe trip in the Czech Republic. Today, Helena lives in Holliston with her husband Frank.</p>
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Jan Vilcek
<p>Jan Vilcek was born in Bratislava in 1933. His father, Julius, was a business executive and his mother, Bedriška, was an ophthalmologist. Prior to WWII, Jan recalls often traveling to Hungary, where his mother was raised, to visit family. In 1942, when deportations of Jews began in the Slovak Republic, Jan’s parents sent him to a Catholic boarding school and orphanage. Despite the family’s Jewish heritage, for a while Jan’s father was permitted to continue to work in Bratislava, although in a lower position, and his mother was sent to work in Prievidza in central Slovakia. Jan joined his mother in Prievidza and, in 1944, his father left Bratislava and came to Prievidza as well; however, when the Slovak Uprising of that year was crushed, Jan’s father joined the partisans while Jan and his mother went into hiding. As the Soviet Army advanced into central Slovakia, the family was reunited and lived in Košice for a few months before returning to Bratislava.</p><p> </p><p>Jan attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Bratislava and was accepted to medical school at Comenius University. He became interested in microbiology and immunology research and, after graduating, started working at the Institute of Virology (part of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) where he earned his doctorate. Jan married his wife, Marica, in 1962. In October 1964, the pair was invited by a colleague of Jan’s to spend a weekend in Vienna. At the American Embassy in Vienna, they were given permits to travel to Germany where they claimed asylum. A little more than two months later, Jan and Marica received visas, and they flew to New York City in February 1965. After a short stay with Marica’s brother, the couple moved into an apartment in Manhattan and Jan started his job (which he had arranged overseas) at the NYU School of Medicine. Jan has spent his entire professional career in research and has done important work with the proteins interferon and tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Together with his colleagues, he created an antibody to block TNF and helped develop the drug known as infliximab or Remicade, used for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and several other inflammatory disorders.</p><p> </p><p>In 2000, Jan and Marica started the Vilcek Foundation, an organization that recognizes the contributions of immigrants to the United States in art and science. Jan has received several awards and recognitions for his professional and philanthropic achievements including the Gallatin Medal from NYU. In 2013, he was presented with a National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama. Today, Jan is a professor of microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine. Although he visits Slovakia often, he considers himself a ‘true New Yorker.’ He lives in the city with Marica.</p>
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Jana Pochop
<p>Jana Pochop was born in Hořic v Podkrkonoší in northeastern Bohemia in 1947. She grew up on a farm in the village of Bukinova u Pecky with her parents, Jaroslava and Josef, and her two brothers and one sister. Jana says that her village was self-sustaining, but that after the farms were collectivized she remembers shortages of food and other goods. Because her father was in the hospital for several weeks, her farm was one of the last in the area to be collectivized. Jana attended elementary school in her village, but after fifth grade she had to travel to nearby towns. She says that high school was an especially difficult time as she struggled to balance travel, homework, and housework, and her mother was in the hospital. Her mother died when Jana was 16. After graduating high school, Jana attended the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague for one year. She returned home to help take care of the farm for one year and then moved to Hradec Králové where she worked in the accounting office of a company that brought entertainment from Prague to the city. In 1970, Jana married Vladimir Pochop, whom she had known since she was 16, and moved to Prague.</p><p> </p><p>Jana received a degree in physical therapy from a vocational school and, in 1975, began studying psychology at Charles University. Jana says that in order to be accepted, she applied for membership in the Communist Party; however, her application was not processed. She received her degree in 1979 and, in January 1980, she and Vladimir traveled to London for two weeks. When they were not granted asylum there, on the way home, the pair got off the train in Munich and went to the American Embassy. Jana and Vladimir were granted asylum and found an apartment; Jana says that she loved their time in Munich. When they received permission to immigrate to the United States, Jana was eight months pregnant. Their son Jan was born in September 1981. Eight months later in April 1982, the Pochops flew to Atlanta, Georgia. Jana stayed with Jan in Atlanta for six weeks while Vladimir found a job and a place to live in California. Once settled in Mountain View, California, Jana says that the language barrier was very difficult for her. She took many ESL classes and raised her sons (Martin was born in 1984) speaking English in order to improve her own language skills. In 1990, the Pochops returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time and Jana was able to retrieve her transcript from the vocational school she had attended for physical therapy. A few years later, she began working as a physical therapist at a hospital. In 2011, Jana completed a program in psychology at St. Mary’s College. As both of their sons now live in Prague, Jana and Vladimir have considered returning to the Czech Republic. Today, they live in Concord, California.</p>
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Jana Svehlova
<p>Jana Svehlova was born in Cardiff, Wales, in December 1943. Her father, Jan, was a Czech who had moved to England at the start of WWII to fight with the Royal Air Force (RAF). He met Jana’s mother, Eleonora (a German speaker originally from the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia), at the Air Force Club in Cardiff. The pair were married in May 1943. Jana lived in Wales until the end of WWII, when her father decided the family should return to Czechoslovakia and settle in Prague. One year after the Communist takeover, in 1949, Jana’s father was arrested because, she says, the new regime viewed those who had fought for the Allies with hostility. Jan was sentenced to ten years hard labor. He worked in the uranium mines of Jáchymov and Příbram, and spent time in prison in Bory and Ilava. Jana says that she and her mother were able to visit him about twice a year.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 14 years old, Jana was told that she would no longer be able to attend school and was sent to work for TESLA making televisions. Growing up, Jana says, her goal was to become a pediatrician, and so when the opportunity presented itself for her to work at Prague’s Bulovka hospital the following year she seized it. Jana’s first job was in the operating room, cleaning blood from the floor after surgery. She applied for nursing school on a number of occasions, but was refused each time on grounds of her family background. Following her father’s release in 1959 Jana says she was able to attend night school to gain a qualification in nursing. In 1966 she applied for a visa ostensibly to go and visit her birthplace in Wales, but she did not return home from that trip and settled instead in Vienna, where she became a nurse. At a preordained time and place in Vienna, she met her fiancée, Jan, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia separately. The couple were married in Austria and then moved to England, where Jan studied for his doctorate and Jana became a ward sister in a Brighton hospital.</p><p> </p><p>The couple moved to Hampton, Virginia, in 1974 when Jan was offered a job at NASA. Jana says her first job in America was selling cosmetics for Avon. She subsequently became a clinician at NASA. When the pair divorced Jana moved to Washington, D.C. She worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital for more than 20 years and studied for a master’s and doctoral degree at the same time. Her postgraduate work (in political psychology) focused on daughters of political prisoners in 1950s Czechoslovakia. With some of the women she interviewed for her doctorate, she founded an NGO called Dcery 50. let (known in English as Enemy’s Daughters). Members of the group regularly visit Czech classrooms to talk about their experiences. Today, Jana lives in McLean, Virginia, and works as a tour guide of Washington, D.C, and as an usher at the Kennedy Center.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609100320/http://www.enemysdaughters.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Website of Enemy’s Daughters – the NGO that came about as a result of Jana’s postgraduate work</a></p><p><a href="/web/20170609100320/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Jana_Svehlova_transcript.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Full transcript of Jana Svehlova’s interview (contains some graphic medical descriptions):</a></p>
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John Jaroslav Kyncl
<p>Jaroslav Kyncl was born in Prague on August 16, 1936. He spent his early childhood in the northern Bohemian town of Liberec, where his father, Jan Kynčl, was the president of the local branch of Živnostenská banka. In 1939, following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, the family was thrown out of Liberec and moved to Německý Brod (nowadays Havlíčkův Brod), where the Kynčls spent the duration of the War. They returned to Liberec in 1945, but moved away again three years later following the Communist coup, when Jaroslav’s father ‘bartered’ his post at the bank in Liberec for a more modest position out of the spotlight in Aš. Jaroslav attended secondary school in Aš, Cheb and then Čáslav before beginning his studies at Masaryk University in Brno in 1954. In 1961, Jaroslav moved to Prague, where he started his pharmacological research, developing new drugs in collaboration with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the company SPOFA. In this same year he married his wife, <a href="/web/20170609132740/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/mila-kyncl/">Mila Kyncl</a>.</p><p> </p><p>In May 1968, Jaroslav was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to deliver some lectures on the work that he was doing. He was urged by one of his hosts, Dr. Hans Heller – himself a Czech émigré – to ‘put his papers in order’ in the event that Soviet troops were to invade Czechoslovakia and put a halt to the Prague Spring. Dr. Kyncl, his wife and two children duly left Czechoslovakia for Austria a week after the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. The family spent a brief period as refugees in Vienna before Jaroslav was offered an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.</p><p> </p><p>In 1971, Jaroslav came to America alone, to accept a research position at the Cleveland Clinic. Upon securing a job one year later at Abbott Laboratories in Lake Bluff, Illinois, Jaroslav moved to the Chicago area with his family, where he has lived ever since. Among other professional accomplishments, he is credited with inventing the drug Hytrin, the first medicine to treat BPH (a frequent and serious prostate condition). An art enthusiast, Jaroslav focuses on archiving and promoting the work of Czech exile artists in particular. To this end, he has made a documentary about the late poet and artist Jiří Kolář and operates a small non-commercial exhibition space, called Gallery 500ft².</p>
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Ladislav Fedorko
<p>Ladislav Fedorko was born in <span class="aCOpRe"><span>Spišské</span></span> Tomášovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1946. His father, Jozef, worked as an engineer on the railroad passing through the town (which linked Prague to the Soviet Union), while his mother, Žofia, stayed at home raising Ladislav and his brothers. The family kept a number of animals and produced a lot of their own food, says Ladislav. Growing up, Ladislav says he wanted to become a forest engineer, but when his application to university was rejected, he decided to become a military doctor, as he knew such individuals were in demand and this gave him the chance to obtain a degree in science. Ladislav started his medical studies in 1964 in Hradec Králové. He studied there until Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, after which he quit the Army and transferred to the Prague campus of Charles University to finish his degree as a civilian medic.</p>
<p>Upon graduation, Ladislav worked for one year in Karlovy Vary before marrying and accepting a job in Levoča, not far from where he was raised. Ladislav enjoyed a deal of professional success at the hospital, becoming the vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department. In 1986, he decided to visit the United States as a tourist with his wife. During this visit, he met some of his cousins who lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the first time. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav says the secret police took an interest in the fact that one of his relatives was working for GE. In 1988, Ladislav says he was approached by an StB agent who told him that the secret police would fake his escape from Czechoslovakia and that he should move to Connecticut to infiltrate GE. Ladislav and his family fled Czechoslovakia shortly before his faked escape was due to take place in September 1988.</p>
<p>The Fedorko family spent 22 months in Austria, in the course of which communism fell in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav says his family did not want to return as they no longer had a home, and all of their belongings had already been seized and redistributed. He found it difficult to work with the American Embassy in Vienna, which he says insisted there was no longer any political reason for him to seek asylum in the United States. Eventually though, in 1990, the Fedorkos did receive U.S. visas and settled in Youngstown, where they remained for the next seven years. Ladislav says it was a slightly more active Slovak community which attracted his family to Cleveland, among other things. He now works as a family doctor in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, and lives with his wife in nearby Strongsville. The couple have two children.</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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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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