Zdenka Novak
<p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Viera Noy
<p> </p><p>Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.</p><p> </p><p>Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.</p><p> </p><p>On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.</p><p> </p><p>After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.</p>
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Thomas Gral
<p>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical <em>gymnázium</em> in Nitra.</p><p> </p><p>Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a <em>previerka</em>, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3399" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609054041im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-Gral_Thomas_photo_his_lecture_book_from_university_4_-_Copy_(WinCE)" width="500" height="488" />In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.</p><p> </p><p>Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.</p>
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Peter Kubicek
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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, titled<em>Memories of Evil: A World War II Childhood</em>. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.</p>
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Peter Demetz
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Peter Breiner
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Michlean Amir
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2336 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609111851im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Michlean-Amir-SQ.png" alt="" width="260" height="260" /></p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Ludmila Anderko
<p><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2287" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609091403im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Ludmila-Anderko-235x300.png" alt="Ludmila Anderko Oral History" width="235" height="300" /></p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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 <a href="/web/20170609091403/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/monika-smid/">Monika Smid</a>. Ludmila lives not far from her sister Marie, who came to the United States in 1980.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609091403/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXVYQSrjEHo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">An NCSML recording of Ludmila performing with the Slovenské mamičky in Cleveland in May 2010</a></p>
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Lucia Maruska
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Lubomir Chmelar
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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