Zdenka Novak was born in Prague in July, 1931. She lived there until the outbreak of WWII when her parents (who owned a delicatessen in the capital) decided to return to their native Kokšín in western Bohemia. In Kokšín, Zdenka’s father Václav set up a feather processing business with a Jewish partner, Emil Goldscheider. Zdenka says her family came under scrutiny because of this partnership and that she remembers the day the Goldscheiders were taken away (none of them returned from the concentration camps they were sent to). During the War, Zdenka remembers attending secret dancing lessons, as dancing was outlawed in the Protectorate in 1941. She says young people had to be ‘inventive’ due to shortages in goods, but that on the other hand they had ‘less expectations.’ At the end of the War, Zdenka’s family moved to Tašovice, near the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, where Zdenka started attending ceramic school. She says one of her proudest moments was being selected to paint a vase for President Edvard Beneš on an official visit to the academy. She studied there until one year after the Communist coup in 1949, when she was arrested on charges of helping smuggle secret documents across the border to the CIC in West Germany. She was interrogated and found guilty without a trial. Zdenka spent 18 months in Prague prisons such as Pankrác and Čtyrka (the StB headquarters on Bartolomějská Street). She escaped through a bathroom window en route from one prison to another in 1951 and went on the run – making her way to territory she was familiar with near Karlovy Vary by train and then walking across the border into Bavaria through the woods.
Zdenka reported at a police station in Mehring, Germany, and was sent to Valka Lager refugee camp. She says she was not there long before she was approached by the American government with a job offer. She moved to Oberursel near Frankfurt to work and it was there, in 1953, that she married her husband Frank (a Czech émigré whom she had met at Valka Lager). At the end of 1953, the couple moved to the United States. They settled in New York City. Zdenka first worked as an office hand at an import/export company but soon became a clerk at an insurance firm. She says that she had many Czech friends in the city and that she enjoyed socializing at Sokol New York in particular. In 1956, she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, when her husband gained a job as a mechanical designer at Beloit Corporation – a factory producing papermaking machines. There, Zdenka and Frank started raising their two children before moving to neighboring Rockton, Illinois. While her children were growing up, Zdenka ran a landscaping business. Today, she continues to live in Rockton. She has traveled to the Czech Republic with her children and grandchildren and says she tries to impress the value of her Czech heritage upon them.
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Zdenka Novak was born in Prague in July, 1931. She lived there until the outbreak of WWII when her parents (who owned a delicatessen in the capital) decided to return to their native Kokšín in western Bohemia. In Kokšín, Zdenka’s father Václav set up a feather processing business with a Jewish partner, Emil Goldscheider. Zdenka says her family came under scrutiny because of this partnership and that she remembers the day the Goldscheiders were taken away (none of them returned from the concentration camps they were sent to). During the War, Zdenka remembers attending secret dancing lessons, as dancing was outlawed in the Protectorate in 1941. She says young people had to be ‘inventive’ due to shortages in goods, but that on the other hand they had ‘less expectations.’ At the end of the War, Zdenka’s family moved to Tašovice, near the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, where Zdenka started attending ceramic school. She says one of her proudest moments was being selected to paint a vase for President Edvard Beneš on an official visit to the academy. She studied there until one year after the Communist coup in 1949, when she was arrested on charges of helping smuggle secret documents across the border to the CIC in West Germany. She was interrogated and found guilty without a trial. Zdenka spent 18 months in Prague prisons such as Pankrác and Čtyrka (the StB headquarters on Bartolomějská Street). She escaped through a bathroom window en route from one prison to another in 1951 and went on the run – making her way to territory she was familiar with near Karlovy Vary by train and then walking across the border into Bavaria through the woods.
Zdenka reported at a police station in Mehring, Germany, and was sent to Valka Lager refugee camp. She says she was not there long before she was approached by the American government with a job offer. She moved to Oberursel near Frankfurt to work and it was there, in 1953, that she married her husband Frank (a Czech émigré whom she had met at Valka Lager). At the end of 1953, the couple moved to the United States. They settled in New York City. Zdenka first worked as an office hand at an import/export company but soon became a clerk at an insurance firm. She says that she had many Czech friends in the city and that she enjoyed socializing at Sokol New York in particular. In 1956, she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, when her husband gained a job as a mechanical designer at Beloit Corporation – a factory producing papermaking machines. There, Zdenka and Frank started raising their two children before moving to neighboring Rockton, Illinois. While her children were growing up, Zdenka ran a landscaping business. Today, she continues to live in Rockton. She has traveled to the Czech Republic with her children and grandchildren and says she tries to impress the value of her Czech heritage upon them.
“No dancing. It wasn’t allowed. I know that we had at one family’s house, they knew somebody who was before a dance instructor, so he would come there occasionally and we gathered and we danced, but that was… if we were caught, we would be in trouble. So that was one of those things, and a lot of things were… you know, we were young girls; we would like to have nylon stockings, we couldn’t get them, you know. With a lot of things you had to be very inventive – to make things interesting and fashionable. You know, from old to new.
“But I think otherwise we were happy. Maybe we were even happier young people than they are nowadays. You know, we didn’t have any expectations. We were taught that we have to work, either physically or mentally, to accomplish things – that nothing comes free in life, and that you should deserve it and be proud of anything, whatever you do. It doesn’t matter how important or unimportant the job is, but you should be always proud of the things you are doing and do it at your best.”
“You know, more or less, I think it was a tradition. You know, nobody talked about it, nobody was so aware of what you are or not. You were a neighbor, you were a friend, you were an ‘Oh, terrible! I wouldn’t talk to him or to her!’ And the kids, we didn’t have any way to get in trouble if we went to Sokol, you know, we didn’t get in any trouble. We got [rid of] our energy, you know, that way.”
“Oh, everything was more open and free. There were more goods to buy and you could plan. You know, I think you do not know what freedom means unless you lose it. You know, we are talking about freedom, but nobody knows what it is, really, until you lose it. You don’t have it, you cannot decide things for yourself, you know. There are so many things which you don’t think about if you live in a free world. And so we were enjoying all those things, and I think we were happy, but it didn’t last too long and then the Communists took over.”
“That was a horrible thing, because you were in a tiny little cell and even when I went to the bathroom I had to leave the doors open. I don’t know what they thought that I will do. It was terrible. Then they interrogated me there, of course, and in Čtyrka too. And I think at Čtyrka they were very rude, very rude. Actually, that was when I learned how to smoke. They brought me from the interrogation and I was completely out, and the girls in the cell gave me a cigarette so, that’s how… Then I had to undo that habit.”
“We had a good time in the bad times too. We used the toilet as a telephone, because we found out that if we empty it, then we can talk to the people downstairs. And we were sending letters through the windows on a thread. So we had all kinds of excitement. But you know every day somebody had to go through the interrogation, and that was tough. So you had to make it nice.”
“Once you take that step, you are in the middle, because you miss certain things from the country you came from, and if you are there, you miss the things from where you are: you have comparison. If you live and stay in the same country, you don’t have any comparison. You know, you can see it on TV or whatever, but you have to live it. It’s like if you go for vacation some place, it’s not to live there. It’s different.”
Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
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Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
“There was no rabbi or synagogue to really practice the religion. My parents were Holocaust survivors. They didn’t go to any concentration camp, but they survived in hiding and they were afraid to practice, but we always knew from people that we are Jews because kids in school made fun of us and even the teacher would not favor us, knowing that we were Jewish.”
How did you take it?
“Up until 12 years old, not terribly bad, but when I was 12 years old, all the children went to religious school on Wednesdays, and around Easter time, I think, the subject was the Jews drink Christian blood during Easter, and all of the sudden my best girlfriend didn’t want to sit with me, nobody wanted to walk to and from school with me, because I was the only Jewish kid – and my sister, but we were two classes apart, so we had different schedules. So it was very difficult, because at 12 years old you want to have a girlfriend. We used to walk and do things together – on the bicycle, after school we had fun things to do – and all of the sudden I’m all by myself. Nobody wanted to associate with me. Until high school, and then I went to Piešt’any for high school and things were a little different.
“In the first grade when our teacher was giving us our school certificate, she asked every student where they were going for summer vacation. Since my name started with ‘N,’ I heard the words ‘grandma, grandpa, cousin, aunt.’ I never heard these words at home, so when I came home I asked my mom ‘How come I’m not going for vacation to some relatives?’ So my mom was crying and said ‘Oh, we don’t have any relatives.’ But then she found some family in Nitra – friends – it was also a Jewish family that had no children, and they became our aunt and uncle, so we used to go there practically regularly for summer vacation to Nitra.”
“I really did believe in it until the invasion of Czechoslovakia because I think my parents kind of taught us to believe in communism, knowing that this is the only system you can live in. I think they believed in communism out of fear. I really believed that this is the best because you don’t have any other literature and you’re really not connected with the world, so you really believe that this is what it is and the Russians are the best, and American imperialism is the worst and they’re enslaving people or hurting people and they’re really not good for people, and how wonderful we have a life in a communist country. So I really did believe it until it was the invasion. I was shocked. I was just finished with physical therapy school, worked for a couple months, and one morning you have Russian tanks in the city and you say ‘How could that be? They were such people?’ and ‘Why did they do that to us?’ I was just so unhappy.”
“We had a choice to go to Israel the next day due to our professions. My sister was a biochemist, I was a physical therapist, and they looked for professional people and the agency was right there in Vienna. But [I wanted] some kind of adventure. I just wanted to come to America. And they wanted to send us to California because New York was full of Czechoslovak refugees who had a lot of family here since WWII, or before WWII, so they had preference, and somehow they kind of squeezed the two of us to bring us to New York, so we came to New York.”
“In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the job I had as a physical therapist was a place where a lot of influential people came – politicians, economists, artists – so I was able to provide jobs and accommodations for almost everybody. Even the legal papers, the senators, ambassadors. All different people. But even people I didn’t know would ask me. My parents were even scared that somebody was going to arrest them because somebody would knock on the door and bring a present for my father: ‘Oh your daughter in New York let my son stay for two weeks or found him a job.’ My parents didn’t even know who these people are. Yeah, always.”
“I had to phone my parents to get them to Vienna and from Vienna to fly to Israel, but I cannot tell this on the phone because Czechoslovakia and Israel had no communication; they didn’t have any contact at the time. This was 1984. So I told my parents on the phone ‘Come to Vienna. We are changing the wedding to Vienna.’ So my parents were hysterical and came to Vienna. They said ‘Where is Eli? Where is my sister?’ so I had to whisper and say ‘They went to Israel.’ So my parents almost fainted at the bus station where I met them. Because also this rabbi got me all these connections. His daughter was married in Vienna to the Minister of Finance, and I needed a visa for my parents to fly from Vienna to Tel Aviv, out of the passport. They cannot come back to Czechoslovakia with an Israeli stamp in a passport. He also told me to be careful who to contact. ‘Vienna is full of Czechoslovak spies and your parents are going to be followed all the time.’ We needed to get to the embassy which is a little bit on the outskirts of Vienna, and not to be followed. But we got to the embassy and they already knew everything about us. They issued [a visa] on tissue paper for my parents to go to enter Israel and exit Israel. But they needed another visa to enter Austria again because they had already used it used. Everything needed to be out of the passport, so all this was issued. We happily went to Tel Aviv and quickly got married. My sister was there, her husband was there, and so we got married in Tel Aviv.”
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
]]>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical gymnázium in Nitra.
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
“The biggest problem was that we had to move from our apartment, because we lived on the main street and Jews were not permitted to live on the main street. That was making the city ugly, if you had Jews living on the main street. So we had to find an apartment in a side street, which we did and it was actually pretty good. But then, of course, we couldn’t visit swimming pools, public places. We couldn’t visit parks, we couldn’t go to the movies, we couldn’t travel without a permit, and we had to wear the Star of David. So you had to be marked. And that was not a very pleasant thing, and not necessarily because of the fact that you had to deliver your sporting equipment. You had to give to the state. You had to donate it to the state. Of course all kinds of jewelry. Your bank accounts were frozen. And finally, my father was prohibited from being an attorney, so he had to find another job. It couldn’t be an attorney; it had to be some clerk, which we finally found. He was a clerk in a shoe factory and he did some clerical job there. But that gave him an exemption that we would not go into an concentration camp – at least not initially.”
“We all went to Auschwitz together and except for me, everybody perished. There was tremendous famine there. We had practically no food, so I lost – I was never a big guy – but I lost at least 40 pounds. So when I was liberated I weighed about 80 pounds. So if this would have taken a longer time I certainly wouldn’t have survived, because it was not only the lack food, but also hard labor. We had to work – which I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t stand that Auschwitz. I remember that smoke and the fire and the smell of burning bodies. So I reported myself that I am an expert electrician, which of course I was not. But I was taken as an electrician to a neighboring little camp where they had some electrical work; I never did anything electrical because it turned out that was a different camp – they mixed me up. But it doesn’t matter; it was still a labor camp, where the food wasn’t much better but at least we had to work and we were occupied and tired and came home and went to bed and slept. So I didn’t have too much time to think about things. So that’s why I was able to survive, and don’t forget that Auschwitz, and the neighboring camps, was liberated much earlier than the rest of the camps because the Russian front was so close. So actually, Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. I was liberated a little later because I was in a slightly more Western camp, but still it was the beginning of February.”
So which was the camp you were moved to?
“It was called Gleiwitz – Gliwice in Polish. That was an industrial city, as most of them there, in the same area of Auschwitz, maybe 35-40 miles from Auschwitz. Very close. And that was the sister camp because they didn’t have gas chambers in Gleiwitz, only in Auschwitz. So if somebody was too weak to work, then they sent him back to Auschwitz from Gleiwitz. There was no crematorium and no gas chamber, so there was a big difference.”
“I had a prověrka, previerka in Slovak, and I was given a condition that I can study, but I have to finish in the proper term. The fact that there was a previerka is horrible, but they way they acted toward me I would say is reasonable. They gave me a condition. They gave me another condition, which was given not on the university side but on the civilian side, that they suggested to me to be more in touch with the working people. That I was much of a high-nose, snobbish guy who is an intellectual who is studying medicine; that I should go to the folk, to the people, and I did. I immediately reported to become a factory physician for one month, to be close to the workers, and then I became a company physician later at the university, to become more united with the working class.”
“When I came back from the [concentration] camp, and it was not a communist state yet, I joined the Czechoslovak youth organization, which very many people joined. But that was good only until I was 27; after 27 it automatically became the Communist Party. So that’s how I became a member of the Party, but for three years I didn’t even pay my dues. But when I had my previerka, I was ordered to be more active as a member and after three years I paid my dues backwards and became more active, meaning I attended Party membership conferences and meetings and that’s it. But I was never a functionary or any office holder. So that was Party membership, which may have helped me a little bit in my difficult life as the son of a bourgeois who was in jail – maybe, I’m not sure.”
“It’s an insane system, that communism. That’s why it never worked any place, and it can be maintained only by terror, by secret police and by forbidding this and forbidding that and censoring the mail and censoring the newspaper. That’s why I felt it acutely that I had to go to the evening meeting of the Party, that I had to go on May 1 to manifest for Stalin, which I didn’t want to. So that’s why I was very anxious to get out, and when I did get out, suddenly I had all the possibility for doing research, doing what I wanted to do all my life. I had a laboratory, I had my mice and rats for experiments, I had a professor who took care of me – specifically had several fellows and I was one of them; excellent teacher – and I said ‘For goodness sake, now I’m going back to that Czechoslovakia.”
“Los Angeles is just a chapter, like Miami is a chapter, and we had a very good president who really arranged all kinds of lectures. And at that time we were lucky because, for instance, Milos Forman was there in Los Angeles and he gave a number of lectures. There was another guy who was chair of a filmmaking institute; I forgot his name, but he was a member of SVU. Then we had a painter, quite famous locally; he was a member. So it was interesting company: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professionals, filmmakers. And it was interesting to go to because it was a social club more or less, and it was not only lectures but also parties – beer and wine and some cookies and some good Czech cooking, because we went usually from one house to another – we didn’t have an official meeting place – or we met at the Beseda Sokol. They had one in Los Angeles.”
Peter was separated from his family and transferred to six different camps before ending up in Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945. With the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans liquidated Sachsenhausen and started the prisoners on a forced march. Peter says that he and his compatriots were given food packets by the Red Cross which kept them alive during the 12-day march. On May 2, his group was liberated, and they made their way to Schwerin (in northern Germany) where American troops had taken over the city. With the help of an American soldier, Peter made contact with his father who, in New York City, had not heard from his family for several years.
Although Peter’s grandmother died in Bergen-Belsen, he found his mother on the streets of Prague shortly after liberation. Peter had contracted tuberculosis while in the concentration camps and spent one year in a sanatorium. In November 1946, he and his mother moved to New York City and were reunited with his father. Peter studied European history at Queens College and attended graduate school in Lausanne. He joined the import/export business that his father had started and, when his father died in 1963, took over the company. Peter and his wife Edith (a Czech émigré who was born in Prague) have two daughters and three grandchildren. After retiring in 2001, Peter became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012, he published his memoirs, titledMemories of Evil: A World War II Childhood. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.
]]>Peter Kubicek was born in Trenčín in northwestern Slovakia in 1930. His father, Andrej, owned a drugstore in town and his mother, Ilka, who was from the Sudeten part of Moravia, often worked there. Peter attended a Jewish school in Trenčín; he says that only a handful of his middle-school classmates survived WWII. In August 1939, Peter’s father traveled to Geneva for the World Zionist Congress. As a result, he was not in Slovakia when WWII officially broke out. He made his way to France and Portugal and, in March 1941, to New York. His attempts to obtain visas for his family were unsuccessful and, by December 1941, travel to the United States was impossible. Peter, his mother and his grandmother were deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in October 1944.
Peter was separated from his family and transferred to six different camps before ending up in Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945. With the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans liquidated Sachsenhausen and started the prisoners on a forced march. Peter says that he and his compatriots were given food packets by the Red Cross which kept them alive during the 12-day march. On May 2, his group was liberated, and they made their way to Schwerin (in northern Germany) where American troops had taken over the city. With the help of an American soldier, Peter made contact with his father who, in New York City, had not heard from his family for several years.
Although Peter’s grandmother died in Bergen-Belsen, he found his mother on the streets of Prague shortly after liberation. Peter had contracted tuberculosis while in the concentration camps and spent one year in a sanatorium. In November 1946, he and his mother moved to New York City and were reunited with his father. Peter studied European history at Queens College and attended graduate school in Lausanne. He joined the import/export business that his father had started and, when his father died in 1963, took over the company. Peter and his wife Edith (a Czech émigré who was born in Prague) have two daughters and three grandchildren. After retiring in 2001, Peter became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012, he published his memoirs, titledMemories of Evil: A World War II Childhood. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.
“In 1940, they started to promulgate a series of anti-Semitic laws whereby businesses were expropriated. First they started in a small way; for instance, Jews were not allowed to own luxury goods. My father already had a car, which was unusual in those days, so no car. No furs. My mother had to give up jewelry, and there was no sports equipment. So I, at the age of ten or eleven, had to give up my skis, my ice skates, my sled and my most prized possession of all, which was my red bicycle. I loved the red bicycle and I had to give that up. My mother told the story that I once came home crying because I saw a boy riding my bicycle.”
“My father was a great Zionist and in August 1939 he was a delegate from Slovakia to the World Zionist Congress, which took place in Geneva. He was there when the War started and wanted to rush home, and everybody said ‘Hey, hey, don’t do that. You can help your family better by staying out here and trying to get them out.’ Well, that was easier said than done. He was in Geneva; after his visa expired the Swiss kicked him out and he moved to Paris, and when, in 1940, the German troops overran Paris, he moved down south in France, ultimately to Portugal, and in Portugal he applied for a visa to the United States. It took quite awhile. So he left Trenčín in August 1939 and in March 1941 he arrived in New York. So he immediately applied for visas for myself, my mother and my grandmother – my mother’s mother – who lived with us at the time, but that was a rather complex procedure which took a lot of time. So this was in 1941 and then in December 1941 you had Pearl Harbor, and that was the end of all civilian travel across the Atlantic and we were trapped there.”
“Sachsenhausen was liquidated and we were forced on what was called the Sachsenhausen hunger march, which started – this, of course, I got from my later research – started on April 20. They announced that the camp is going to be blown up and whoever remains will die in the camp. The camp at that time contained I think about [35,000 prisoners], and about [32,000 of us] started on this hunger march and about 3,000 stayed.* In the event, two days later the Soviet troops liberated Sachsenhausen and all these prisoners who were too sick and feeble to walk were actually liberated at that point.
“We marched for what turned out to be 12 days in a northerly direction. The food that we received were packages of the International Red Cross, which kept us alive. That was totally amazing. The International Red Cross, which was run by Count Folke Bernadotte from Sweden, had these Red Cross trucks – they were white with huge red crosses painted on the sides and painted on the top. They approached the German lines and they more or less talked their way across German lines and they said ‘We are here just on a humanitarian mission’ and somehow they got permission to cross, and the second day after we left we were stopped by these Red Cross trucks and given food packages. For the next 12 days this happened several times and we basically survived on the food packages given to us by the International Red Cross.”
Peter adds that “during the march, whoever was unable to walk was directed to sit down in a ditch along the road and shot dead by SS guards. It is estimated that around 6,000 prisoners died in this fashion.
“First we discovered that there was a field of potatoes there, so we dug up some new potatoes in May and we made ourselves a fire and we boiled a milk-can of potatoes. There was a small group of us. There was a profusion of German military equipment lying around, so we got some German helmets and we ripped out the leather that fastened it to their chins and we used that as a bowl and we helped ourselves to the potatoes, and kept eating potatoes and eating potatoes until we couldn’t eat anymore. We just couldn’t believe that here was still some more of this delicious food and we were sated. We couldn’t eat anymore. This stays in my mind; we just sat there grinning at one another sort of sheepishly. I mean, this was such an incredible feeling.”
“I wanted to become American and I had the benefit of education here, which was American, and I feel American. To some extent I’m still a displaced person, but also, due to the fact that I’ve worked in the art museum for the last eight years where I give the lectures in English and I try to enunciate clearly, it’s interesting that most of my audience are tourists from out of town. The tourists come from various parts of the United States mainly, and some from foreign countries. The American tourists who come here think of me as a New Yorker because they are used to all kinds of New York accents here and they don’t realize I have an accent. New Yorkers every once in awhile will stop and say ‘Well, where do you really come from?’”
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
]]>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”
“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”
“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”
“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.
“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”
“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.
“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.
“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”
“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”
How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?
“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”
“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”
Following his graduation, Peter began working as a freelance musician, performing, conducting and composing. He married and had a daughter. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Peter took the opportunity to travel. He says that he applied to seven countries for permanent residency; as he received permission from Canada straightaway, he and his family moved to Toronto in 1992. He visited New York for the first time when the American Ballet Theatre put on a performance of his works; later Peter applied for and received a green card. He moved to New York City in 2007 and, today, lives in close proximity to the house where Antonín Dvořák lived while in New York.
Peter is a prolific and renowned musician. He has conducted nearly every major orchestra, and his arrangements and recordings are especially popular. Peter is currently working on a multimedia program based on his orchestral piece called ‘Slovak Dances, Naughty and Nice’. He is also a writer, authoring a column for a popular Slovak newspaper. Since his childhood, Peter has been an avid soccer player and plays in the city four times a week. Today he lives in Manhattan.
]]>Peter Breiner was born in Humenné, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1957. His parents, Ernest and Edita, were both Holocaust survivors and his father also spent many years in a labor camp. His father managed several restaurants while his mother was a teacher. Peter and his younger brother and parents lived with his paternal grandparents, who attempted to maintain Orthodox Jewish traditions – a task which Peter says was not easy during the communist era. Peter began music lessons at a very young age and, by the time he was nine years old, he was taking the train to Košice once a week to study piano with a professor. Following his eighth grade year, Peter moved to Košice to study piano, composition and conducting at the conservatory. He continued his musical education at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. While at university, Peter worked as a train conductor and as a music producer for Czechoslovak Radio. Because he failed his Marxist-Leninist exam, says Peter, he was required to spend one extra year at university to repeat the class.
Following his graduation, Peter began working as a freelance musician, performing, conducting and composing. He married and had a daughter. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Peter took the opportunity to travel. He says that he applied to seven countries for permanent residency; as he received permission from Canada straightaway, he and his family moved to Toronto in 1992. He visited New York for the first time when the American Ballet Theatre put on a performance of his works; later Peter applied for and received a green card. He moved to New York City in 2007 and, today, lives in close proximity to the house where Antonín Dvořák lived while in New York.
Peter is a prolific and renowned musician. He has conducted nearly every major orchestra, and his arrangements and recordings are especially popular. Peter is currently working on a multimedia program based on his orchestral piece called ‘Slovak Dances, Naughty and Nice’. He is also a writer, authoring a column for a popular Slovak newspaper. Since his childhood, Peter has been an avid soccer player and plays in the city four times a week. Today he lives in Manhattan.
“I remember spending some enjoyable time, at four or five years old, at a music school in Slovakia with a particular teacher who, for some reason, decided that I am worth investing his time into. So I, on occasion – as I have been told – I even ran away from home to go to music school. So when they couldn’t find me they went ‘Oh, he’s probably at the music school again.’ That is a memory other people have; I don’t quite recall it. I just remember that particular teacher, Mr. Fecura, who was a very nice and friendly person and who was one of my first contacts with music-making.”
“For obvious reasons my parents were too scared to be Jewish after what they’d been through. We lived with my paternal grandparents and they were very religious. They were almost Orthodox Jews, to an extent that was possible during communism, because there was no synagogue left in Humenné and not much kosher food available, if any. So they really tried and, on top of that, my parents maintained general Slovak cultural traditions, including [having] a Christmas tree and Easter, so it was quite confusing for me. Even when I went to school there was still religion taught – it was one of the last years – and so, Friday afternoon, a local Catholic priest arrived, looked at the grade one kids and saw me, and said ‘Oh, my son. You can go home.’ I was terribly upset because I wanted to take part in everything all the other kids did, but I wasn’t allowed to, and without any explanation. At home I wasn’t told why I was sent home, so I had no idea. Monday, again when we all got together, it was discussed: ‘Why was I sent home?’ Nobody knew; I didn’t know until one of my classmates came with an explanation and said ‘Oh, I know why it happened. Because his father is a communist.’
“So it was rather confusing and, the same way as I learned about the past of my parents, the same way I picked up information about our religious background, or whatever it was, and it was up to myself to figure out by reading and by putting things together that ‘Hey, it looks like we are Jewish, even with a Christmas tree and Easter eggs and everything. We probably are Jewish.’”
“As a child you have many different interests, so there moments when it was quite difficult and overwhelming to cope with the fact that I had to spend four hours every day practicing piano at the age when all the other kids were running around outside and having fun. But somehow that fascination with music that I had since I can remember – plus the perks, in the form of skipping school once a week and being on my own for an entire day as at ten or eleven years old I was taking the train to Košice and going to the restaurant for lunch on my own – kept me going, because it was quite unusual and had a sense of adventure in it and a sense of being different and doing things other kids didn’t; and I was entering competitions and I was meeting great musicians who were on a very different level and I was competing with people that were much older. So that all played together to the extent that it wasn’t overly difficult to overcome that aversion that naturally developed after awhile when it became clear that there has to be time spent in order to get any further.
“I think my mother was quite ambitious for me and then I adopted that ambition as well, and once I entered the conservatory the fascination with all things musical I was able to do all the time was too strong to even think about a different career or a different direction in my life. It was just very straight and very clear to me that there is nothing else I want to do.”
“Turned out that the best thing out of it was freedom to travel, which I used immediately, and I asked for permanent residency in seven different countries. I didn’t care where I would go, I just wanted where I didn’t want to be. Despite the fact that I was already a fairly prominent figure in Slovak music and had some success, it was so severely limited by people that would make an effort to consciously hurt me or my career, and I thought ‘This is not going to get any better.’ I was aware that at that time I had and exclusive contract with a recording label in Hong Kong [and] I knew that was taken care of for at least two years, financially, so I said to myself and my family ‘Let’s go somewhere. Whether it’s New Zealand or Australia or Holland or England or Germany or Canada or U.S.A…’ I applied to seven different countries, and Canada replied positively and first, so we went to Canada. I didn’t know anyone there; I just decided to go and be there, and it worked.”
“My grandmother’s cousin immigrated to the United States, I think, shortly after the War – or even during the War – I’m not sure, but they lived in Cleveland and, about once a year, she would send a package from America. The famous package from America: chewing gum, jeans, and, of course, being myself, I had special requests, which were scores. I wanted Gershwin’s scores because they were completely unattainable, like any American scores. So I was 14 when, in one of those famous packages, there were jeans made of stars and stripes – the American flag. Of course the first thing I did was wear it on the street. After ten minutes I was stopped by a policeman and sent home to change. I realized I can’t walk on the street, but I took it to school and I changed at school. So after ten minutes I was stopped by the director of the school and sent home too. That was my first American experience, and the other was West Side Story. When the movie arrived in Slovakia I went to see it eight times in one week. I was completed fascinated by it, and so on some unconscious level that was always my final destination, even if consciously I was aware that it’s just impossible.”
Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.
Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.
]]>Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.
Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.
“It became clearer and clearer that the Communists would take over, and we were very fortunate that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – was living already in Israel, and her best friend was the mother of the person who was Israel’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. This lady told my grandmother that if she wants her children to get out of Czechoslovakia, she needs to get there and bring them, because the phones and the mail and everything was censored already. So she did do that exactly, she took a plane and came. Within a very short time my parents put together what they called a lift, which was filled with whatever belongings they could put in. And by the way, my mother had taken courses in photography, so one of the things they put in there was a camera because they thought that maybe she would be able to make a living in Israel as a photographer, and a few other very valuable things because we were well off in Czechoslovakia.
But when the lift came to Israel, instead of all these wonderful possible resources, there were rags. So on the way or wherever, these things were stolen or taken.
“So anyway, this is what we did to prepare to go, and because of this terrible experience of flying from England after the War, I developed a very high fever and they had to postpone the trip to the last plane that left Czechoslovakia for Israel. The plane that we were supposed to go on was one that was shot at, and it fell over, I think, Bulgaria. So that forever was kind of a shock to us that we could have been on that plane.”
“My father had had an uncle who lived in the United States when he was a little boy, and this uncle – as uncles from the United States often did – would come to Czechoslovakia and bring for him and his brothers gifts, he always bore gifts for them. He was one of the co-owners of a large shipping company, so he was able to bring them goodies. And from that time on, my father had this dream to come to the United States. My mother and he had papers to leave, but when the War broke out of course there was no way to leave, and as I said, he joined the Army and so forth and so that fell through.
“So as soon as they came to Israel he started thinking about going to the United States, but it took about seven years until the papers were arranged and we left for Rochester because there was a family friend living there, which is an incredible story.
A man whose roots were Czech but he studied medicine and lived in Vienna. Evidently, he took care of my mother who was a tennis player and had some problems with her knee, and he took care of her and fell in love with her and wanted her to marry him, but by that time my mother knew my father already. I don’t know exactly what the story was, but he sent his wife to Israel and she came and saw how we lived and she said ‘Oh, we’re going to send you an affidavit, we will bring you to the United States, we will take care of you.’”
“First of all, it was my formative years, but it also was the beginning of the state of Israel. That was a very exciting period and everybody was very nationalistic and so forth. I think that in those years, I just did not feel so much of the connection to Czechoslovakia as much as I did later on because my parents were so busy making a basic living, and everyone was trying to assimilate. There were people who came to Israel from all over, and everybody wanted to find a common denominator, so the language was an important factor, and the songs, and the dances and so on.”
“You know, I never think that you have to choose, especially here because our loyalties to the United States, to Israel, to Czech Republic, they’re not conflicting. We all have very basic, democratic values, so it’s not like if I had to choose between Russia. So I don’t see them conflicting. I also think that religion is one thing, but as I said, I don’t think there’s any conflict between being an American and a Jew, and in the same sense, I don’t see any of it as conflicting. Fortunately, I never had to make big choices between ‘I believe this, or I don’t believe that.’ So I think in a way I look at it as very very enriching, rather than otherwise.”
“The wronging, if you will, when you think about it from the economic point of view, yes I know that if it hadn’t happened for it, I’d be living a totally different life because my parents on both sides came from very well-to-do families and I would not have had to struggle with my education, et cetera. But that is not so important. The fact that I never got to meet my grandparents and other relatives; it’s a very painful thing. It’s one thing if a person is taken because they’re ill, but to know that they died such horrible deaths, and with my uncle and aunt and cousin, I really don’t know exactly what happened, because they – the uncle and aunt were young people – they could have been used for forced labor, they might have lived for three, four years, who knows, and who knows what awful life they might have had.
“It’s a pain that does not go away and it’s a pain that all of humanity has to carry, not just for the Holocaust, but for other genocides, for other wrongdoings that just don’t make sense, not fathomable, not understandable.”
Ludmila Anderko was born in the small mountain town of Kolačkov, northeastern Slovakia, in 1949. Her mother stayed at home and raised Ludmila and her three sisters, while her father worked in a textile factory in nearby Kežmarok during the week, coming home to visit the family on weekends. According to Ludmila, who had to help out with farm work from an early age, the hilly ground around Kolačkov was hard to farm, so no attempts to collectivize agriculture were ever made in the village.
Ludmila’s aunt Alžbeta had left Kolačkov in the 1920s and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1966, she made a visit back to Slovakia and met Ludmila and her sisters for the first time. Following this visit, Ludmila maintained contact with her aunt, and was invited to come and stay with her in Cleveland in 1969. By this time, Ludmila had already finished her training to be a shop clerk and was working in the local store in Kolačkov. She decided to visit Cleveland and make a decision about whether to stay or not once she had spent some time in the city.
Ludmila did decide to stay, living first with her aunt Alžbeta in Maple Heights, an eastern suburb. After two years, she moved by herself to Lakewood, renting a property just opposite what was then a Slovak Church – Sts. Cyril & Methodius (now known as Transfiguration Parish). It was here that Ludmila says she became much more involved in the Slovak community, frequenting Slovak dances, starring in Slovak Dramatic Club plays and attending the local Slovak Civic Club in Lakewood. It was at a dance at Česká síň Sokol on Clark Street that Ludmila met her husband Frank. The pair were married in 1973 and have four children. Ludmila encouraged all of her children to participate in the local Slovak dance troupe Lucina and, as a consequence, several of them traveled to Slovakia to perform with the group at a folk festival in Detva in 2008. In recent years, Ludmila has been making a number of public appearances as one third of the trio Slovenské mamičky [The Slovak Mothers], performing traditional Slovak folk songs as well as original works written by accordion player Monika Smid. Ludmila lives not far from her sister Marie, who came to the United States in 1980.
An NCSML recording of Ludmila performing with the Slovenské mamičky in Cleveland in May 2010
]]>Ludmila Anderko was born in the small mountain town of Kolačkov, northeastern Slovakia, in 1949. Her mother stayed at home and raised Ludmila and her three sisters, while her father worked in a textile factory in nearby Kežmarok during the week, coming home to visit the family on weekends. According to Ludmila, who had to help out with farm work from an early age, the hilly ground around Kolačkov was hard to farm, so no attempts to collectivize agriculture were ever made in the village.
Ludmila’s aunt Alžbeta had left Kolačkov in the 1920s and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1966, she made a visit back to Slovakia and met Ludmila and her sisters for the first time. Following this visit, Ludmila maintained contact with her aunt, and was invited to come and stay with her in Cleveland in 1969. By this time, Ludmila had already finished her training to be a shop clerk and was working in the local store in Kolačkov. She decided to visit Cleveland and make a decision about whether to stay or not once she had spent some time in the city.
Ludmila did decide to stay, living first with her aunt Alžbeta in Maple Heights, an eastern suburb. After two years, she moved by herself to Lakewood, renting a property just opposite what was then a Slovak Church – Sts. Cyril & Methodius (now known as Transfiguration Parish). It was here that Ludmila says she became much more involved in the Slovak community, frequenting Slovak dances, starring in Slovak Dramatic Club plays and attending the local Slovak Civic Club in Lakewood. It was at a dance at Česká síň Sokol on Clark Street that Ludmila met her husband Frank. The pair were married in 1973 and have four children. Ludmila encouraged all of her children to participate in the local Slovak dance troupe Lucina and, as a consequence, several of them traveled to Slovakia to perform with the group at a folk festival in Detva in 2008. In recent years, Ludmila has been making a number of public appearances as one third of the trio Slovenské mamičky [The Slovak Mothers], performing traditional Slovak folk songs as well as original works written by accordion player Monika Smid. Ludmila lives not far from her sister Marie, who came to the United States in 1980.
An NCSML recording of Ludmila performing with the Slovenské mamičky in Cleveland in May 2010
“I was very close to my maternal grandparents. They died a few months after I left Slovakia, and I really loved them. At one point, we lived across from my maternal grandparents, so I was very close to them; I always sat in their house. And my grandmother was very religious, she would go every night with a candle to pray in the church. Of course, the church was closed, but she would stay, you know, outside the church, by the door with the candle praying every evening. And sometimes I would go to church with her too and she had all kinds of holy books and she had all kinds of mission magazines that were like illegal in Slovakia. And I would just read them, you know, I just loved to read and I was there all the time and reading, and I loved to be there with my grandmother, so…”
“They didn’t say too much, they just said it was bad, you know, and they were saying about the Jewish people… and there was a cemetery, a Jewish cemetery, behind the little river in our village. And I never met a Jewish person until I came to America. I never knew there were any Jewish people alive in Slovakia. I never knew, but there was so… Apparently there were some Jewish people, but I never met anybody, until I came here.”
“When I was going to school in Stará Ľubovňa, and when we were, when I was, learning my trade, they would take us, and we had to go to Hniezdne, that was like a city next to Stará Ľubovňa, and mostly in the fall we would go and pick up potatoes – yeah. Which was a lot of fun because we were happy to be outside, instead of being, sitting, in the classroom or stuff like that, and they gave us food so we ate, and you know it was like… it was fun.”
“It just, you know, I saw that life was a lot easier over here, that you could get money faster than there. You have to, you have to work, you know, but it’s like it seems to be easier than in Slovakia. And, I really missed my family – the first two years I would cry every weekend. I missed my, you know, everybody, and then later on I met some young people that came from Slovakia and we made a… we started singing and performing and dancing and stuff like that, which was a lot easier and I felt like I was at home, you know, not in America, but like I was in Slovakia. And we also made a play, you know, we had a play also in Slovak over here so… And I was, actually, I played the same part in the play that I played in Slovakia as I did in America, in the same, same play.”
“The first two years I worked in Joseph & Feiss, which was a factory making men’s suits. Now it’s called Hugo Boss. And mostly European people worked there. Mostly they were from Eastern Europe, like Slovaks and Czechs and Ukrainians and Polish. And how it happened? One lady from our village, she worked there, she was like a supervisor there, and that’s why she got me a job there. And so what happened was that I got a Ukrainian boss. So, the first two years, I didn’t speak any English, because I spoke Slovak and he spoke Ukrainian and we understood each other, with everybody else I could speak, so I didn’t learn any English, I understood everything. My cousin was telling me ‘Speak English, speak English,’ and I said ‘No, you’re going to laugh at me if I say something in English because I’m not going to say it right.’ So, he was always telling me, and his wife was Polish
– my cousin’s wife was Polish – so, I spoke with my dialect with her. So I didn’t have to learn any English.
“But after being here two years, when I moved to Lakewood, I started working somewhere else, and there were mostly who didn’t speak, you know, European, they used to speak English. And there were two Puerto-Rican sisters, and they had been here for like 20 years. And when I heard them, how they speak English, I’m thinking ‘Why should I be ashamed? I mean, they have been here for 20 years, I have been here for a few years, if they have an accent, why should I be afraid?’ And so I just started speaking and that’s how I speak!”
“Well, when the changes first started in 1989, my favorite store was K-Mart. And then they opened a K-Mart in Slovakia. So I said ‘I don’t want to go to Slovakia, because they don’t have a K-Mart over there.’ And so there, when they opened a K-Mart, so they said ‘Okay, so now they have K-Mart over there, so you can, you know, live there!’ And for some reason, I still feel like, I don’t know, it’s still not, you know, I’m so used to being like… I lived one-third of my life there, and I have lived two-thirds of my life here, so, I’m so used to it, I feel like my home is over here. I mean I still love my country, I still love my heritage, that’s what I try pushing onto my kids, which they appreciate, they really love it. Like [my daughter] Anita went to an American wedding, and she… you know, at a Slovak wedding, you would come home at 1:00 in the morning, or until they let you, how long they let you stay in the hall.
She came home at 10:00. It was her friend from grade school who was getting married. And she comes home and she says ‘Mum, I am so happy to be a Slovak.’ We’ve got so much more, a lot more fun than those people over there. She said ‘I didn’t like the music, I didn’t like anything over there. I liked the food, but I didn’t like the music, that’s why I came home. Because we have a lot more fun, we like… you know, that’s why I’m happy to be Slovak.’ So you know probably a lot of different nationalities feel the same way, you know, but that’s what she said, that’s what she told me, so…”
“In Slovakia, they bless the baskets on Sunday morning, over here in America, they bless on Saturday afternoon. And, when we first got married, I would not let my husband eat the food on Saturday until the Sunday. So he would wait until midnight, and after midnight, he would start eating. But later on I gave up and I just let him, so ever since then, after we bless the food on Saturdays, since Lent is gone, he still fasts in the morning on Saturday and then after I bless the food, he comes home in the afternoon, and we make this huge platter of klobásy [sausage] and eggs and cheese and this stuffing I make, and ham and all the traditional stuff. And the beets, the beets with horseradish. And I make everything homemade; I make the homemade bread, the pascha bread, with raisins and all the other stuff so… And the cheese, I make the cheese and the stuffing with eggs and bread and ham and bacon in it, and I bake it in the oven.”
Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.
In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.
]]>Lucia Maruska was born in Cífer, a small village not far from Trnava, Slovakia, in 1953. Her father, Alfred, was an accountant at a poultry farm in the village, while her mother, Lydia, was a production manager in the knitting factory there. When Lucia was four, the family moved to Bratislava so that her father could take a job as a comptroller in the city’s municipal services bureau. Lucia says that she and her younger brother, Rastislav, continued to spend every summer in Cífer with her grandparents. Lucia’s father escaped from communist Czechoslovakia when she was nine years old. She says he did so in part because of the bigotry he faced (as he was Jewish), but primarily because her mother persuaded him to go, as she wanted the family to have better economic opportunities and to travel, ‘and we were being prevented from doing that.’ Lucia’s father first went to Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz, before being sponsored by relatives to come to the United States. He started out in Detroit before moving to Los Angeles.
Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.
In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.
“There were many things, and one thing she did say, which I do remember… occasionally things would come up about Jews and, Jews seemed to have gotten blamed for everything, but he never did though, it wasn’t him specifically, but I think there was always a worry. My father always used to say that Jews unfortunately always picked the line of people that was standing to get a beating. So, I think that had a little to do with it. The system, the communist system had much to do with it. But I think [it was] mostly economics. My aunt… My mother has a wandering soul, she loves to travel, she loves going places, and we were being prevented from doing that, and she wanted to travel, and also my father’s aunts came to visit in 1961. And they started telling him how ‘Oh, an accountant in America! You’ll make a lot of money! That’ll be just great for you!’ So, it was kind of a combination of things. And my father did not want to leave. He really did not want to leave. And my mother kept insisting and said ‘Try! Let’s try it! Let’s try!’ He was 40 and said ‘No, I’m too old.’ Well, no, no, no – try, try, try. So finally, they decided he was going to Vienna on business, and they started ahead of time orchestrating things: having fights, breaking plates in front of friends, all kinds of things so that people would believe there were domestic problems. And part of it was because if he was to escape then the family would be left behind and so there would be no repercussions if he escaped for personal problems – if your problems were political then it was different. So, in 1963, I believe it was March or April, he did stay in Austria.”
“We were trying to figure out how to legally emigrate, to reunite the family. I know she wrote to the United Nations, she tried the Red Cross, all kinds of organizations, no one was helping. And we used to go to Prague, she would go to the Foreign Ministry trying to get passports, all kinds of things. At some points she would go and sit on the palace steps of the presidential palace claiming that – at that time it was Antonín Novotný who was the president – he would eventually have to come that way and that she needed to talk to him. She would act up; have hysterical attacks, all kinds of things, hoping that they would release us just to get rid of her because she was an annoyance. But that didn’t happen. Meanwhile, my father was in Israel and he was sent to a kibbutz because Israel was a new country [but] he felt like ‘well, I’ve already built a new country – Czechoslovakia. But now, I really escaped to do better financially, not to get pocket money for cigarettes.’ But he did learn Hebrew and he was working as an accountant there, but his aunts, and again his mother’s sisters and brothers were all here in the United States, so his aunts finally did invite him; they sent an affidavit to invite him, and they sent him money and he went to Detroit. In Detroit, because he didn’t speak English much (my father spoke very good Hungarian and German but not English) he started sweeping factories at night until he learned English.”
“Finally she figured out that maybe if she moved to another city… She rented an apartment in Brno, and as soon as she registered at that apartment, she requested in Brno a vacation to Bulgaria. And she never did any paperwork in Bratislava. And it takes at least a week for them to figure out what’s going on. So she was registered in Brno, and within a week we had received a vacation to Bulgaria – a permit to travel to Bulgaria. It was Friday that it came in the mail, she sent me to tell my grandmother (my grandmother didn’t have a telephone) and my grandfather. So, I went to Cífer, my grandmother killed a goose, got it all baked and ready for us, [I] came back on Sunday morning, my mother packed up and on Sunday at midday, I think, we got on the train to travel to Bulgaria. She sewed all the documents we might need, including our report cards and whatever documents we had, birth certificates and marriage certificates; she sewed everything inside our bag. The goose went in there too. And we took damask sheets, because she knew that if we ran out of money we could sell those. And then we took crystal plates, small plates, a desert platter with small plates to go with it – again, so that we could sell that if we ran out of money. But inside the bag were sewn whatever dollars she had collected over the times that she was already beginning to save for this. And she had enough to bribe people if necessary.”
“We walked the hill, there was a little house out there, a man came out to pee and smoke, we had to duck and wait. And of course, in those days, the Karl May movies – Winnetou and all the films about Americans – they were very popular and they were filmed in Yugoslavia. And so we were pretending that maybe they were filmed over here and we weren’t scared for whatever reason. Oh, and just so you know, my mother and I weren’t wearing pants, we only had skirts on, and I guess at that time that I was 13 and my brother was 11. Or, my brother had turned 12 the day we left Slovakia, and I turned 14 when we came to this country. So we walked up the hill, and we walked quite a distance, and down the road we saw the checkpoint, the guard house, was way, way [behind] us, at least a kilometer; there was a small light so you could see it. So we thought ‘Wow! Maybe we’ve…’ And suddenly there were lights, dogs, and people yelling at us, soldiers screaming at us, and the soldiers had machine guns and German shepherds. And luckily my mother yelled, because they yelled ‘Stoj! Ne mrdaj!’ which is in Slovak a very dirty word, but in Slovenian it means ‘Don’t move.’ And I think they must have yelled ‘Kto tam?’ [Who’s there?] or something like that, and my mother answered ‘Women and children.’ And luckily she did, because they did not release the dogs.
“They had machine guns, but my mother kept yelling ‘Italiano!’ She thought they were Italians, she was hoping they were Italians. They were not, unfortunately. They took us back to that little house, and on the other side of the road they had caught a man who was Polish, trying to escape. And these soldiers were young kids; they were 18 to 21, they were kicking this man, they were beating him on the floor. Yes. And my brother and I, [it was] in front of us. They were being stupid. They were being stupid young kids, basically, but they had the upper hand. They had the power. A car came, they took him immediately, and I believe he went all the way to Poland, that was it, he went to prison. They had no idea what to do with us, they had never had a woman with children try to escape across the border on foot. They apparently had a lot of men trying. So, they kept trying to call the nearby village and figure out what to do. Finally, they said a car will come, nothing came, finally we had to walk back to the village.”
“We were put, it was in an area of Los Angeles that was very, very diverse, and the middle school, or at least the junior high school was at least one third Hispanic and mostly new emigrants, who did not speak English. There were Eastern European immigrants; there were eventually, not immediately, but in ’68, so within a year or so, there were kids that came from Czechoslovakia, there were Russians, because some Russian Jews were getting out, I think. The Russians were letting some Jews emigrate. And so I know I had Russian friends. There were kids from all over. And they had what they called ESL classes, which is English as a Second Language classes. So they put us in those. I think the biggest shock was… I was very novel. I had very short hair. In Slovakia, I was trying to be very fashionable and Mia Farrow who was at that time a big hit, I’m not sure what movie she made, but she had a very short, boyish haircut and I had that. We came to Los Angeles and all the girls had long, blond hair, or were trying to have long blond hair if they didn’t. And in Slovakia, I could pretty much wear anything to school as long as I looked decent. There was a dress code in public school in Los Angeles. And the girls were not allowed to wear pants in those days. Girls had to have stockings, they could not have nylons, they had to be opaque stockings, and we were not allowed to have sandals. Your toes had to be covered. And so there were things that we discovered as one day I came to school in sandals and ended up in the vice-principal’s office – I had no idea why! And I think my ESL teacher saw me in sandals and she knew immediately why, I think she sent a note that I didn’t know etc.
“But the first thing, when I did come in, because it was such a novelty, the kids took me, and they were trying to be very nice and help me – the first thing that I had to do was ‘I pledge allegiance,’ and that was a shock, because even back in Czechoslovakia, we no longer had to profess our allegiance to the country as much, I mean we did, but we took it as a joke, and suddenly I’m in a country where you’re supposed to be free to do whatever and I am being forced to pledge allegiance. That was difficult, that was difficult to comprehend.”
“She went to sew, and she went into a factory, and she was told she would get one dollar a shirt. And so she was hoping that, apparently, some of these women can make a shirt an hour. She said there was no way that she could make a shirt in an hour. It was a full shirt, it was just unbelievable. She said that some of these women that have been there for a while, they were like machines, I mean, they were just producing and they would not stop, they would not stop to go to the bathroom, they would not stop to talk, to do anything, because they had to make the money. She, after a few days that was it. She tried being a maid in a hotel, That I think lasted a day and a half. She had never worked as hard under communism. She said ‘I never worked! We always had coffee breaks!’ And suddenly she had to do labor. And she went from job to job until she finally found places that were a little less… that were a little more tolerant.”
“Oh now, on my first trip, my grandmother did embroider me a costume because she knew I was interested. So I felt like she embroidered this costume, it was beautiful, and I will wear it to church on Sunday. So I wore it to church, and my grandmother still, and her friends still wore costumes, but the old woman costumes, which were simple. But this was very fancy embroidered, so I wore it to church and got a lot of stares, but on the way back from church, on the street, a car screeches and stops, and a French couple runs out and wants to take my picture. I was laughing, I said ‘If they only knew that I was American wearing this costume!’ But hey, they were just so delighted that they saw costumes, that we were wearing costumes.”
“We always aim, if there is some event that we need to prepare for, then that’s how we work. We start from that, and they always prepare for St. Nicholas’ feast. There, it’s Czech, Moravian, Slovak carols. Dana Sablik is still helping me and she knows the Czech and Moravian [songs]. She is a professional teacher from the Czech Republic, from Moravia actually. And then I prepare or help out with the Slovak things. The costumes are basically Slovak because that is what I had. I do have some Czech costumes. It is very difficult with a small group for 15 minutes on Friday nights to prepare much, so the other thing we have been asked to do is perform at the European Union Open Doors Day [in May 2011] at the Slovak Embassy, so for that we’ve prepared Slovak dances. I have spoken to Jana Racova about doing something at the Czech Embassy. She was interested, but it is always difficult to work out the time slots. I have Czech dances that I could prepare, and the kids would be interested. But of course, the way it works with the kids is that they want to be very good and perform, but they don’t want to rehearse. And their parents also don’t have the time. And so everyone comes for a little bit on Friday nights. They want to learn. We have language classes from about 7:00 to 7:45, and then we rehearse. Everything is tight, but mainly the kids really want to do the gymnastics. So, by 8:30 they need to be in the gym doing gymnastics, and it is Friday night, they’re tired and they’re antsy. They just want to jump around and have fun.
“But I think in the long run, kids do appreciate it, I know my children are very heavily interested and involved in Slovakia, they appreciate the folklore and the culture, they enjoy it, and they understand that in today’s society, that’s pretty much the only thing that’s different from culture to culture and that it’s something you treasure and keep, you don’t live it anymore, that’s not how today’s world is, but it identifies you with a group – it’s something that you’re part of, and that has been important for them. I think that those kids who have that, it is good for them, for their soul and actually, it’s just for their mental health.”
Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
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Lubomir Chmelar was born in Zlín in 1935. His parents both worked for the Bat’a shoe company, his father, Josef, as an executive and his mother, Anna, as a designer. His mother would eventually start her own fashion design business. At the age of one, Lubomir moved with his parents to Baghdad, where his father was tasked with opening a Bat’a factory. The Chmelars lived in and socialized with the small Czech community there. In March 1939, Lubomir’s father finished his work in Baghdad and planned toreturn to Zlín; however, the day they arrived in Trieste, Italy, and planned to drive to Czechoslovakia was the same day that Hitler occupied the country. They were instead sent to Serbia for a short time before moving to Kenya. Lubomir lived with his parents on the outskirts of Nairobi until he went to boarding school in Britain following the War. He attended Oxford University where he studied civil engineering with the intention of starting an engineering design consultancy in Kenya (where his parents would remain for the rest of their lives). After a two-year apprenticeship in London, Lubomir planned to seek out jobs in Canada and Mexico before returning to Kenya; however, while in Toronto, he met his future wife, Tiree, and, in 1962, the pair married and moved to New York City.
Lubomir and his wife bought a run-down townhouse in the Chelsea neighborhood which they restored and raised their four children in. Lubomir says that this project and his neighborhood piqued his interest in historic preservation. He worked as a civil engineer and developer in New York before retiring in 1990. Lubomir first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961, but a visit in 1987 led him to found Prague-Vienna Greenways, a group of hiking-biking trails connecting the two capitals. The project progressed to include the restoration of the gardens at Valtice, a palace and estate in Moravia, and has focused on partnering with artisans, restaurateurs, and bed-and-breakfast owners to support community and heritage building along the trail. Prague-Vienna Greenways is now administered by the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe in Brno, and Lubomir heads the Friends of the Czech Greenways organization. He owns a 15th-century house in the Moravian town of Mikulov and has restored several other houses there. Lubomir lives in Manhattan; however, he frequently visits his native country and enjoys traveling there with his grandchildren and sharing his heritage with them.
“We were in Baghdad and my father was recalled back to Zlín. He had finished his work in Baghdad, which was the setting up of a factory and he was going back to his new job in Zlín. So we packed up our things, my mother, my father, and I – I being an only child – and set off in this very beautiful car. It’s an old 8-cylinder Packard. It was a lovely ivory color with green leather upholstery. They had bought it for each other as a wedding present way back and had it shipped out from Czechoslovakia to Baghdad. The car was then driven from Baghdad to the port of Beirut. In Beirut, the car was put on a platform, covered in a canvas and hoisted onto the front deck of this boat which was called the S.S. Jerusalem, and off we sailed to go to Trieste. Trieste being the point where we were going to land and then drive the rest of the way through the Balkans and up back to Zlín.
“The journey was uneventful; when we arrived in Trieste, the crane began to unload the car, and as the crane was lowering this car on its wooden platform with a canvas cover, about four feet above the quay, one of the ropes broke and the car slid sideways and fell, sustaining damage. This was terrible for all of us – we weren’t expecting it. My father ran to the telegraph office and cabled back to Zlín saying ‘Looks like I’m going to be quite delayed. Car severely damaged in fall from crane.’ We went off, had coffee, had to plan what we were going to do next, waiting for the telegram. The return telegram came back – and I need to know the timing of this, but I’m going to tell you what I think is right. The telegram came back and said ‘Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what happened at 4:00 this morning?’ And it was Hitler marching into Prague. ‘You stay put until further instructions.’
“Well, it transpired that as a result of our staying put, for whatever it took – I don’t know, a week or so – to repair the car, my father was not taken back into the Czech Republic by the company, but they set him up in Serbia and, from there, Kenya. And as a result of that, our lives were all outside the terrible horror that so many of our relatives and so many of the countrymen of those nations that were first under Nazi rule and then all those years under the totalitarian state suffered. We, by the skin of our teeth, our lives were changed.”
“We first briefly went to a place called Borovo in Serbia where there was a Bat’a factory, and then my father was asked to work with the people in Zlín who were given carte blanche by the Wehrmacht to make shoes for the German Army. They were not going to close that place down. So the Czechs then had to bring in raw materials – rubber from Malaya, various hides, this kind of thing. So there was an import/export business going on between Zlín and various parts of Czech investment, and my father was told ‘Look, you’re going to be an import/export person, but one of the things, but one of the things we’re going to be doing is using you to get certain people out. So you’ll be able to petition for, let’s say, a doctor.’ And many of the doctors were Jewish. Many of the Bat’a doctors, and there were quite a huge number of them, maybe 20 or 30, working exclusively for Bat’a in Zlín. Zlín was an enormous population of Bat’a employees. Many tens of thousands. So he had to be very careful because there were quite a few sympathizers in this Borovo factory with what was going on in the Sudetenland of Czech. So he had to be very careful how he got people out and brought them to Borovo, where he was able to transfer them to various parts of the world. One of the lovely things is that the doctor he brought to Kenya, a man called Sanyi Gellert whose daughter became a doctor, they looked after my parents to their dying day. So in a way, it was a give back for this extraordinary time when the Nazis were already occupying Czechoslovakia, but still people could be brought out.”
“I went to Iraqi school; my first language was actually Arabic. Sadly, it’s gone out of the window supplanted by Swahili which is kind of a coastal Arabic.”
Yet you retained your Czech.
“My Czech, wonderfully, was spoken at home around me all my life and so I’m very grateful for that. That way I was able to go back after the [Velvet] Revolution and spend easy times becoming accepted in the various groups that I had to work with. Had I just come there purely as a Czech in name and not in language, it would have been much more tricky.”
“My first time back, after my very early departure at the age of one, was in 1961, just before I came to the States. I suddenly had an urge to go there, and I borrowed a little Lambretta motorbike and, with virtually no luggage, I went zooming off. It was okay; I was able to go through Čedok, but I had to stay at given designated place, and of course I didn’t, so I went to stay with relatives. I didn’t realize that this was a terribly silly thing to do. So on my way back, I stopped at the front and they said ‘Ok, fine. Let’s see your passport. These are the designated [places]. You never stayed there; I don’t see the stamp.’ I said ‘Well, you know, I have relatives and I was staying with friends.’ So I was held for a day while they verified all this. So I went back and it was very, very dark times. Very gray times.”
“1987 is the time that I saw the possibilities there of a lovely countryside for walking and biking and ecological tourism. So then when ’89 occurred, I’d already been thinking about setting up a trail, but of course, until communism fell it wasn’t practical. And in ’89, I got the idea of bringing the Hudson River Valley Greenway trail concept to a Prague-Vienna greenway trail, as basically a walking and hiking trail from castle to castle, from historic town to historic town, between these two lovely capitals. Got the idea, put it before a lot of funders and they loved it, particularly people like Rockefeller Brothers, German Marshall Fund, American Express Philanthropic. A very important fund was an environmental group called the Hickory Foundation. And so on and so on. We began to work with the World Monuments Fund and they used us and our office in Valtice to start their program. So that kind of snowballed into greenway, restoration of this very important landscape which later became, through World Monuments Fund efforts, a UNESCO designated landscape – the whole thing, 200 square kilometers. And then, from that time, which was about 1992, my wife and I went there and we lived there every year for six months. From 1992 until 2004. That was the period when it really bloomed into a growing thing and spread into neighboring Poland, Slovakia, and it’s now in Bulgaria and Romania. So it’s really a very flourishing concept of biking and hiking trails. But really it’s not so much the tourism, it’s also about community building and supporting heritage, so when you come to a town on the greenway trail, you can go to the local glassblower, artist, meet with them, go behind the scenes, so to speak. And it’s all about that.”
“That’s entirely due to my parents who left when they didn’t want to leave, adored – absolutely adored – their motherland, and if you think of the era of their upbringing, it was immediately after WWI; the first Czech[oslovak] Republic was created; the country was full of hope and vision, and industrious, successful; people were well-educated. What I call First Republic Czechs – a certain type, my father’s contemporaries – they’re wonderful. They have a particular quality to them.”
How would you describe that quality?
“Well, without sounding elitist, they’re very intelligent. They study, they read, they love music, but also they can garden, they can grow turnips. They’re rounded people. And it was a period of little Czechoslovakia industrializing itself. So many industrialists were also very rounded people. Many Czechs that I know of my father’s era had hobbies. Everybody had a koníček, as they call it. My father’s hobby was filming. And they became real experts on geology, anthropology, local law, that sort of thing. So they were very interesting people. Maybe I just hit the mother lode, but other Czechs I’ve spoken to remember this era.
“So then I’m abroad, and there are my parents talking about this place that I come from, over and over again. Showing me photographs; my mother, a lovely cook, teaches our African cooks to do vepřo zelo knedlo [pork, dumplings and sauerkraut], all the local Czech goulashes and stuff. I lived in a funny way in a Czech culture. We spoke a terrible patois at home, of Czech, English and Swahili all mixed up. So it was logical that when this place suddenly got its head above water that something inside me said ‘Come on! See what they were talking about.’”
“I have these ten grandchildren and my mission with them is to demonstrate that life doesn’t end at Montauk Point. So each year I take pairs – never three, you always get a triangle – you take them in pairs and they have to be pushing ten. We go to my place in Mikulov and we spend ten days there, basically meeting little Czech kids, swimming, there’s a little horse riding, bike riding a lot, eating fried cheese which they love (very unhealthy), and then we go to Vienna where I have friends. We stay with friends for three days, and then we go to Venice and stay there for three days. They have to keep a diary and have a little camera and take photographs, and I’ve got through six. This year I’m taking the two boys. I only have two boys, and eight girls. Amazingly, they remember everything.”