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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Kveta's Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LB5uRklpRq4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He was always bothered by inequality in wealth between people. He had trouble accepting that there’s a class of people that’s very wealthy and a class of people that’s very poor. But I don’t think he actually actively did anything in that direction. But he supported equality or fair treatment: that was his objective. But I think what happened with him was that he was so extremely intelligent and knowledgeable that his frame of reference was horribly skewed, because I don’t think he understood that not everybody was as smart as him. So, he could easily… he didn’t care, he could easily give up what he had today, because tomorrow he would have double. Do you understand? He could easily earn money quickly. So, he didn’t understand the struggles of most people because he was definitely above an average person – he spoke four languages fluently, he was, you know, extremely good at what he did, at college his picture was on the wall way after he graduated as one of the best students they ever had, you know. But they did send him to Cuba and he was drinking with Castro. Yes, so, when he left for Cuba, he was already involved with someone else who would be my stepmother and my brother was born in Cuba.”</p><h4>House Troubles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9hWgIofG760?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They did want to take the whole house, and they would come every so often, I remember, when I was a little kid, people would come to our house and they would measure the whole house, because they had some rule, if your property exceeded some whatever square feet, or meters in our case, they had a right to take it. And they wanted to convert our house into a department store, but we were right on the money. Like, by just a centimeter – one more centimeter and it would be over, but they just couldn’t find that one centimeter! That’s what happened.”</p><h4>Immigration to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OmdkiRoEg1A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The idea was that I would come and visit them for summer vacation, and I got a passport, and I was pretty much set to go, but then my grandmother got an idea that I should not be traveling alone and she wanted to come too. And at that point… so she went to apply for a passport, and that triggered my stepfather’s sister saying she wanted to come too. And then everybody was applying for a passport, which delayed the whole thing. I was 16 years old. And by the time it was processed or anything could be done, they actually called me to the passport station and took my passport away. So, nobody went.”</p><h4>Reunited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wyXPV3z1EC8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I heard later, and I don’t even remember at what point that was, that when they finally released us, I was the second one to go and that the first child released was a child who was terminally ill. I don’t know for sure, the story goes that she got hit by a car crossing a street and so somehow, whether that triggered something, or whether she had an infection anyway, she had only six months to live, so they let her go, to die with her parents. And I guess she was only ten years old. Whether that is true or not, I really don’t have anything to substantiate that. And I was told I was the second one. But again, whether that’s the truth, I don’t know. And supposedly it was 35 of us they let go, from the whole country. So you have to imagine, it’s, you know, even though it’s not a big country, but still, that’s hard to find somebody else like, in your situation.”</p><h4>Politics or Family?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cAp-2S9EjrM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Of course, the sad part is that it’s bad enough to deal with family issues – you should not have to have politics interfere in your family life, because then, it’s almost like you have no place to go. And that’s what happened to me at that one point, you know, when I graduated from high school. I was completely stuck. I didn’t know if I could go to school, I did not know if I could leave the country, I just did not know. There was nothing. And I was, you know, becoming an adult. I did not know how to survive. I was really scared to death. I did not have any skills, any, any skills worth mentioning as far as who would hire me, you know… to do what?”</p><h4>News Conference</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bMYi3GcZXg4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We landed around 7:00 on February 10, in the middle of the winter. And of course, unknown to us, there were reporters waiting. So, when we were getting off the plane, the stewardess came and told us we had to wait, to be the last, because they already knew. You know, and at that time I’m already thinking ‘That doesn’t sound good!’ And sure enough, we get off the plane, and you know, there is my mother, my stepfather and a bunch of photographers and then they drag us into a room and I had a press conference, right off the bat. Yeah. I could answer questions, but I didn’t understand what they were asking so my stepfather had to translate for me.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Kveta Eakin
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Kveta Eakin was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1956. When she was 18 months old, however, she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents’ home in Brno, Moravia. Her father, Arnošt, was a successful agricultural engineer, who subsequently moved to Cuba to work for the government there. When Kveta was eight, her mother (also called Květa) remarried. Kveta’s stepfather was Dr. Vladimír Šimůnek, an economist who became one of President Alexander Dubcek’s advisors during the Prague Spring in 1968. Dr Šimůnek had been teaching economics in Brno, but shortly after marrying Kveta’s mother gained a fellowship in Prague, and so the pair moved there, while Kveta herself remained with her grandparents. In 1969, Kveta’s mother and stepfather moved to the United States, when the latter was offered a position at Kent State University in Ohio. The pair defected and Kveta was, in her stepfather’s words, ‘kept hostage’ for six-and-a half years in Czechoslovakia. Following the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Kveta was reunified with her mother in Cleveland in February 1976. She says she was the second person released from the country as part of a pledge to reunify families torn apart by the Cold War.</p><p> </p><p>That year, Kveta started her studies at Kent State. She graduated in 1980 with a major in psychology. Ten years later, she returned to university to gain a masters degree in rehabilitation counseling, which is her current area of work. Kveta is now settled in the Cleveland area, where she is active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the local Czech drama group, Včelka. She has one son, Paul.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Divorce
Education
emigrant
Helsinki Accords
Kankova
marriage
Prague Spring
refugee
Simunkova
Vcelka
Women workers
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1a089219fc988057135193888dc8b305
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Munich Agreement</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AtUadtBdvgE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When you are 16 or 15, you don’t know or feel that you are a participant in a great enterprise, but when you are hit, or when that enterprise is hit, as it was by the Munich crisis and what this implied for the future – because this was one event and, my generation, we were aware enough to see and to know what to anticipate… We were finishing at the gymnázium, the country became occupied by the Germans, we lost our building, we had to share a building with other schools which were not occupied. My gymnázium, which was a very modern building – opened, I think, in 1928 or 1929 – was immediately occupied by the German state security.</p><p>“But at the same time, you know, we were at that time when we were going to take dancing lessons, which meant for the first time to be with girls. It was a very important moment in a 17-year-old’s life, and then you didn’t know what was going to happen after that. You graduated, and after my graduation, the Germans began to recruit – to simply conscript, rather – young people to work in armaments factories.”</p><h4>Relations</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JSTs8000wMM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our neighbor was a decommissioned officer who had been in the Czechoslovak Army, who had two boys, roughly my age and my cousin from that same villa’s age. When we were kids we would play in the street, soccer and that, we had scooters and we would borrow and lend them and all that. The next neighbor was the principal of a German school in Czechoslovakia, his two daughters were teachers there. Come the crisis, the daughters turned out to be Nazis and very unpleasant. In my memory, the symbol of this was that they began to wear white stockings. The two boys appeared in the uniform of the SA [German Sturmabteilung], were immediately mobilized; that decommissioned officer was taken into the German Army. We never saw the boys again because, we learned, they were killed on the Russian front. So that’s a different kind of relationship, you didn’t hate them but they became alien, and I think that it was this alienation which was probably the worst part.”</p><h4>Liberation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rWeeK_nESuE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The pilots were very young boys, 21, 22 years old, you know, and cheerful kids. And they simply took a bedroom and slept in the bedroom until when they were going to leave. And you know you welcomed them, you were glad that they came. We had two of them, and one day the two of them came and left in the morning and locked their bedroom. My mother [normally] sort of made their beds and cleaned up after them and when they came back, mother said ‘Well, why did you lock the room?’ They said ‘Don’t worry about that, grandma, we will do it;’ she said ‘No! Leave it open! I want to clean the room.’ Well, the next day, again, it was locked. So she said ‘No, no, no – you leave the room open! I’m coming in,’ and she wedged her foot or something in the doorway. And then she smelt an unpleasant smell. And they sort of gave in. So she went to the armoire and they had two rabbits in it.</p><p>“So she said ‘Where did you get those rabbits?’ ‘Oh!’ they said, ‘we were given the rabbits.’ ‘Who gave you the rabbits? Nobody gives people rabbits!’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we found them in another house.’ ‘So you take them back!’ They were, you know, kids and she was a woman of 50. So she sent them to give the rabbits back, but then they left her a very touching thank you note written on a piece of paper, giving us the address to visit them at in Moscow.”</p><h4>Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x9lP4P3SpZo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had complete confidence in those people, we were working together. And so I was told ‘You be on this particular evening at the streetcar station, there will be a car and two people and they will take you to the border, and so I did go. So, I went there, there were two young men, one of them was in the [Beneš Party] youth movement, and we drove to the border. There was a border guard, who stopped us, got in the car and took us all the way practically to the border. We saw the barriers on the road and he said ‘Well, we’ll have to stop here. You get out, and walk about a quarter of a mile/half a kilometer along that road here, and then you will see on the other side the lights of the German village. You cross the fields, and in the German village report to the German police.’ The border guard wished me good luck and said ‘come back and don’t forget us.’</p><p>“Now, after the Communist regime fell, it came out that the escape was arranged by a branch of [Communist] state security, who wanted to get me out in order to eventually become their agent or something.”</p><h4>More American</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/szip2ohhVlg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother was afraid about me going to Chicago with all those gangsters and worried whether I would survive. Well, you know, at midnight after the last lesson and the last coffee we would walk to Jackson Park and the lake, and come back safe to start the morning fresh. And I had to study also, one of my fields was American diplomacy and diplomatic history and for that I had to look into the larger picture of American history. And I found it rather inspiring and encouraging, especially in the situation in which we found ourselves. Somehow I learned to understand America and its shortcomings and the way that it gets out of them, because the country, the people, the nation has a cushion, which is several layers. One is the cushion of values and ideals. One is the cushion of resources, and especially in those days, you know, 60 years ago, who would have questioned America not having the resources? And of the institutions, however imperfect they were, they somehow worked. So [my wife] Joy keeps saying ‘You’re more American than a native American.’ And I say ‘Well, it’s a compliment!’”</p><h4>Activism</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FqXFA4PMhyg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Hundreds and thousands of us left thinking that we are going to be back in five years time. People lived in this kind of provisional state for years and years. Now, as I said, I was young enough, I was lucky enough, I could study, I could establish myself. So the hope that fed you in the beginning of the homeland to which I’m going to return began to play a secondary role in your planning of your life, in your orientation. I think the trick is, under those conditions, to transcend from the provisorium. It is no longer, however limited it may be, a provisional phase of your life, but you do the best with your life that you can. The trick was then to combine it with a certain amount of living devotion to the cause for which you left. And you know, maybe if you lived in the provisional, maybe you would be more tenacious and more active and more this, but that’s not how life sort of works. And you know, I found a wife who was very supportive, we agreed when we met in 1955 that if I go back to Czechoslovakia, she will come to Czechoslovakia. But if you asked her 10-15 years later, when those little kids were all around running about here, then I don’t know.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mojmir Povolny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Mojmir Povolny was born in Měnín, a small village near Brno, in 1921. His father owned a local liquor store and his mother stayed at home, raising him and his younger brother, Bořivoj. When Mojmir was old enough to go to <em>gymnázium</em>, he was sent to Brno to study, where he lived with his aunt and uncle. Mojmir’s studies were interrupted by WWII. He was sent to work in the Minerva munitions factory in Boskovice for the duration of the War. In 1945, he enrolled as a law student at Masaryk University in Brno. As an undergraduate he became involved with the Czechoslovak National Socialist or Beneš Party and, within that, an influential group of students and professors called <em>Oddělení pro vědeckou politiku</em> [The Section for the Scientific Study of Politics].</p><p> </p><p>After his studies, Mojmir was invited to work for the Beneš Party at its headquarters in Prague. He worked there until just after the Communist coup d’état in February 1948. He left Czechoslovakia two months later; he says he found out afterwards that the Communist secret police had helped him escape. Mojmir was sponsored by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees to come and study at the University of Chicago in 1950. He became an American citizen in 1956. From 1974 to 1989 he was chairman of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia. Following a career in academia, Mojmir retired and lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife Joy. He died on August 21, 2012. He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Joy, and their two children.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Benes Party
Communist coup
Community leadership
German
Helsinki Accords
Morals
Munich Crisis
national
Nazis
Occupation
Politics
World War II