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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Magda Mraz
<p>Magda Mraz was born in Liberec in northern Bohemia in 1948 and grew up in Chomutov with her parents and younger brother. Magda’s mother, Milada, was of Czech ethnicity but grew up in southern Slovakia where her father owned several successful hotels. Milada studied hotel business in Lausanne, Switzerland, and later worked as an accountant in a spa/hotel in Jáchymov. Magda’s paternal grandfather owned a large manufacturing business and her father George (born Jiří) was sent to Britain to study. When WWII broke out, George joined the British Army. Magda says that upon his return to Czechoslovakia, he had a hard time as a result of spending the war years abroad. Magda was ten when her family moved to Ostrov nad Ohří, as her father lost his job as an engineering professor at a technical school because of his ‘bourgeois’ background.</p><p> </p><p>From a young age, Magda was interested in painting and drawing and joined an art club. She attended a high school in Karlovy Vary that specialized in decorative china and ceramics. After her graduation, Magda’s uncle, who had emigrated shortly before, invited her for a visit to the United States. Magda says that her parents were encouraged when she received a visa without any trouble and also requested permission to travel abroad. In July 1967, Magda and her family traveled to Switzerland and applied for permission to immigrate to the United States. Shortly thereafter, they flew to New York City and settled in Queens where Magda’s parents quickly found employment: her father as an engineer and her mother in the UN gift shop. Magda herself got a job designing plastic plates. She took classes part-time at Queens College and received an MFA with a concentration in painting. Magda worked for many years as a freelance textile designer. With her then-husband, Magda bought an old barn in Connecticut and converted it to art studios. She recently received a doctorate in divinity studies from Wisdom University and today focuses on broadening her drawing and painting techniques while occasionally exhibiting her work and teaching art.</p><p> </p><p>Although Magda describes the Czech community in New York as ‘divided’ at the time of her arrival, she became close with a group of fellow émigrés who often played soccer and went skiing together. Her first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in the early 1980s; she next returned after the fall of communism with her parents, who briefly considered returning there to live. Magda visits the Czech Republic each summer and says that she hopes to retire there someday. Today she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.</p>
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Miro Medek
<p>Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.</p><p> </p><p>At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.</p><p> </p><p>Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.</p><p> </p>
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Radek Masin
<p>Radek Masin was born in Olomouc, southern Moravia, in 1930. His father, Josef Mašín, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Army who was later executed by the Nazis, while his mother, Zdenka, was a civil engineer, who spent part of WWII in Terezín. Radek and his brother <a href="/web/20170609125243/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/joseph-masin/">Joseph</a> received bravery medals from Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War. According to Joseph, the brothers attempted to render German fighter planes traveling through their town by train unusable during WWII, and at one point helped a pair of Russian POWs escape.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Radek graduated from high school in Poděbrady and, having been rejected from military academy, began studying mechanical engineering at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist takeover that same year, he and his brother formed a small, nameless, anti-Communist resistance group. In 1951, the brothers planned to escape with a number of associates to West Berlin, in order to make contact there with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and return to Czechoslovakia, where they would step up their anti-Communist activity. The plan was foiled and resulted in Radek spending two years in jail. Radek was first interned in Prague’s Pankrác prison before being sent to Jáchymov to work in the uranium mines.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release from jail, the brothers again decided to make contact with the CIC in West Berlin. They set off with three associates in October 1953. Their journey through East Germany took one month and saw two of the Masin brothers’ friends captured and later executed by the Communist authorities. The brothers’ escape sparked a national manhunt staged by thousands of German Volkspolizei [people’s police] and resulted in several bloody shoot-outs.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Radek enrolled in the U.S. Army, in which he served between 1954 and 1959. He became a U.S. citizen upon discharge in 1959. After periods spent living in Miami and Long Island, New York, Radek moved to North Ridgeville, Ohio. In 2008, Radek and his brother Joseph were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2011.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609125243/http://www.radio.cz/en/article/130440" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Radio Prague article about Masin group member Milan Paumer, who died on July 22, 2010.</a></p>
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Stan Skokan
<p>Stan Skokan was born in Prague in 1942. His father, Vladislav, worked as the chief technical officer for his grandfather’s HVAC business, while his mother, Zdeňka (who had studied electrical engineering), worked for a lighting company in Prague. In 1947, Stan’s father traveled to the United States for an official business trip. Although the 1948 Communist coup occurred while he was there, Stan says that he decided to return on behalf of his two sons. Stan’s grandfather’s business was nationalized and his father was sent to work in a labor camp at Jáchymov for 18 months. Stan’s mother, who had stopped working when her sons were born, returned to work designing appliances. When Stan’s father was released, he began working on a construction site and eventually made his way back up to designing heating systems.</p><p> </p><p>Stan himself was not allowed entrance into university and began working as an electrician at the JAWA factory. After one year there, he began his mandatory two-year military service. He returned to work for JAWA and, as his skills as an engineer were noticed, he was offered the opportunity to study electrical engineering at a technical school. Stan took night classes and received his four-year degree. He then became the assistant to Dr. Tomáš Horňák, the technical director at the computer research institute [Výzkumný ústav matematických strojü – Research Institute of Mathematical Machines] in Prague.</p><p> </p><p>In the fall of 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion, Stan and his then-girlfriend, Wendy, decided to leave the country. They received visas to visit family in Vienna for one week and crossed the border. Dr. Horňák, who had left the country earlier that year, helped them find a place to live and helped Stan secure job at Siemens. In February 1969, Stan and Wendy (who had since married) were sponsored by an aunt and moved to the United States. The pair settled in Mountain View, California (they later moved to Redwood City), and Stan got a job at HP where he worked for 25 years. Among other accomplishments, he received a patent and industry-wide recognition for digital computer circuitry.</p><p> </p><p>Stan and Wendy received American citizenship and had two sons. Stan’s hobby of electric cars turned into a business and he ran an electric car dealership for many years. Stan often visits the Czech Republic and says that he ‘feels at home’ when in Prague; however, he has no plans to return there permanently. Now widowed, Stan lives in Redwood City, California.<br /></p>
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Vladmir Pochop
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2533 size-full" title="Vladimir in 2012" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609195344im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/vladmir-pochop.png" alt="Vladimir in 2012" width="283" height="283" /></p><p>Vladimir Pochop was born in Lázně Bělohrad in northeastern Bohemia in 1946. He grew up in the town of Nová Paka where his grandmother owned a fabric shop. When her shop was nationalized following the Communist coup in 1948, she hid part of the stock so that it would not be confiscated; however, she was found out and arrested. Vladimir’s father offered to take the punishment for her and was sent to a labor camp in the uranium mines of Jáchymov. Vladimir (who was not told where his father was) says that once he was released, he had trouble finding work and ended up working menial factory jobs for the rest of his life. Vladimir himself had trouble getting into high school and, at the age of 14, moved with his mother and stepfather to Ostrava where he attended mining school. In addition to classroom studies, Vladimir worked in the mines on the weekends. On the recommendation of the school director, he was admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and began studying electrical engineering. After two years, however, Vladimir was put into a special program for computer science. He graduated in 1969 and, the following year, married Jana Pochop, whom he knew from his home town.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir worked for a technical consulting company which he said allowed him free reign to focus on his research in geometric modeling. In 1974, he was invited to spend one year at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Charles University in 1977. Although Vladimir was satisfied with his professional life, he says that living under communism was a struggle, as he and Jana had had trouble finding a place to live in Prague and he felt stifled by the lack of certain freedoms. In January 1980, the pair received visas to London for two weeks and, on their way home to Prague, got off the train in Munich and made their way to the American Embassy. Vladimir was questioned by U.S. military intelligence for four months. They were given asylum in Germany, Vladimir found a job at BMW and they moved into an apartment.</p><p> </p><p>In 1981, the Pochops received permission to immigrate to the United States, but they had to wait eight months as Jana was pregnant. Their son Jan was born in September 1981 and, in April 1982, the Pochops flew to Atlanta, Georgia. Two weeks later, Vladimir went to California in search of a job. When he found one at a start-up tech company in Silicon Valley, his wife and son joined him and the family settled in Mountain View. Vladimir and Jana had another son, Martin, in 1984. That same year, Vladimir joined the company Autodesk and, as a chief scientist there, helped to develop AutoCAD and other products. He became an American citizen in 1989 and today holds dual citizenship. As both of their sons now live in Prague, Vladimir says that he and Jana have considered returning to the Czech Republic. Today, they live in Concord, California.</p>
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