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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Higher Education</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jo3ve1tlXIU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It wasn’t a difficult life economically, but it was really very much supervised by the totalitarian regime, so if you weren’t politically recognized as approving of the system, all kind of difficulties would arise. I remember when I was graduating from gymnázium, there was some case as two of my classmates were accused of stealing some money from the Pioneer organization but I knew they were not guilty, that somebody from the faculty was putting it on them. There was an election [to determine] if they should be expelled from school or whatever. In our class, we had a vote and I was one of three – nobody voted against it – we were looking for proof and proof didn’t come, so I abstained. The director of the school took it so seriously that she made a personal phone call to make sure that we couldn’t continue higher education.”</p><h4>Communist Effect</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-PKfoi0OOCc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We never collaborated with the system, but I think the system kind of subconsciously wrote off a certain percentage of the population as ‘We will not bother them much. We will not let them study, but besides that, they won’t do anything subversive.’ So we were not really under terrific scrutiny. There was a lady across the street who made sure we didn’t…She reported anything on us but, still, it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t life threatening. So we could kind of adjust our lives, and we were church-goers. We were known for that and it was probably held against us, but we just wouldn’t change our lifestyles.”</p><h4>Small Things Help</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xZiqvJQ-x7k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For example, if you were newlyweds, where do you live? To get an apartment was difficult. You waited years for an apartment. To have money to build a house, you had to be really cooperating with the system or stealing left and right. There were many people like that. But my wife, she was already working at the time for six years and she was saving money and she was a member of the cooperative where eventually you were entitled to a certain apartment in a certain area. So she had already saved enough money; she was on the list that year to get an apartment and everybody knew about it: ‘Oh the Biseks are getting an apartment. They are lucky. They are getting a two plus one apartment in the new apartment house in Podolí’ – which was a very nice area. So nobody thought that we would be leaving, having this opportunity. She had the money saved in a savings account, so that was one thing that worked for us. No suspicion. Second thing, every place of work, if it’s a factory or a publishing house, has it’s workers’ committee that’s supposed to be ruled by the Communist branch in that place, which decides what’s done and wasn’t done. So it was a kind of fake, self-governing body, and in that printing plant where I worked, I represented youth on that committee, even though I wasn’t a Communist member – not all were members of the Communist Party. So again, everybody thought ‘Hey he’s going up; he’s starting his career.’ There was no suspicion that I was going to leave. And also, I played basketball and I broke my pinkie finger playing basketball, so I was on medical leave. So for about two weeks, I wasn’t going to work so I couldn’t even hint at it. They had no clue.”</p><h4>Sailing to NYC</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kFOjLDb1DeU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We bought a one-way ticket by cargo ship and we were one of the last ones who came on a ship and landed on a dock in Brooklyn. Docks were still functioning docks at the time, so I remember after we got off the ship early in the morning, we are standing in the middle of the [docks], longshoremen all around. Standing there with two bags, $180 in our pockets and [thinking] ‘What are we supposed to do?’ We had a sponsor who we never met. The sponsor went bankrupt before we arrived, so we were standing there: ‘What am I supposed to do? Should we take the same boat going back?’ But there was another passenger on the ship. She was a young American lady who just graduated from architecture design in Rhode Island [Rhode Island Institute of Design] – I remember quite a bit – and when she saw us she took us in, and it was quite a shock because she lived on Fifth Avenue. She had a limousine with a chauffeur waiting for her. So the first week we spent on Fifth Avenue, just across the street from the Metropolitan Museum [of Art].”</p><h4>Czech Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fyHJg2q7HfI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We wanted to, first of all, inform, because information was, at that time, was most important. Phone calls and faxes just wouldn’t do it and the internet was only beginning. So information, and then slowly we grew from eight to twelve pages, and then sixteen pages, and we filled those extra pages with more than just information. Once in a while we would publish a new book, something that wasn’t on the market yet. At first we had a contributor who was writing a children’s book, so each issue we would have a terrific short story for children. We had one page devoted to children. We had a page that grew professionally and became first rate in sports, because we were very close friends with a professional sports journalist. Very educated and broad-minded; he traveled around the world. We had several pages devoted to the history of Czechoslovakia. We had sections which were strictly Slovak and we had sections for jokes and cooking. Every issue. And crossword puzzles. We had a commentary of course. We had a lady who was a founder, in 1968 in Prague, of the independent party and was even running for Czech parliament at the time. They left in 1968, they stayed here until 1993 and then they went back and she would write to us a letter from Prague. It was very beautiful and short. So they became the basics of our paper. Sixteen pages filled in very nicely.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Bisek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Bisek was born in Prague in 1941 and grew up in the Braník district of the city. His father was a civil engineer and his mother, who had studied philosophy and philology at Charles University, stayed home to raise Peter and his sister and two brothers. Peter enjoyed sports and was an avid basketball player. He recalls spending summers at a camp run by his Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren.</p><p> </p><p>Peter attended gymnázium but says that he was denied the opportunity to continue his education after abstaining from a vote to expel two of his classmates wrongfully accused of cheating. He found employment at a print shop in Prague and worked several manual jobs there before entering into an apprenticeship in typography. Peter was told that he would be sent to study graphic arts at Leipzig University, but four years later, he was denied the opportunity and instead offered membership in the Communist Party. He says that these events led him to make plans for leaving the country. In 1963, Peter married his wife, Vera, who worked in a publishing house. In May 1965, Peter and Vera took a bus tour to East Germany. They then changed their destination on their paperwork and traveled to Sweden, where they stayed for six months on a work visa. Peter says that although they could have easily stayed in Sweden, they both wanted to leave Europe, and he hoped to continue his education in the United States. In November 1965, Peter and Vera sailed to Brooklyn, New York, and settled in Astoria.</p><p> </p><p>Peter’s first job in the United States was as a linotype operator for Americké Listy, a Czechoslovak newspaper printed in Manhattan. He took English classes at NYU and, after joining the typographical union, decided not to return to school. In 1971, Peter and Vera moved to Long Island. There they had two children, Veronica and Jonathan. In 1986, after working for The New York Times and Newsday, Peter and Vera started their own typography studio called Typrints. The original Americké Listy folded in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution and, after a few months, Peter decided to revive the publication. The first issue of their Československý Týdeník (in 1997 renamed Americké Listy) came out in April 1990 and, for the next 20 years, Peter and Vera published each issue, until June 2010 when they retired.</p><p> </p><p>Peter has been active in the local and national Czech community. He is a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and on the board of directors of the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR). For six years, Peter served as president of the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, which runs the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden. During Peter’s term, the organization increased its visibility and membership, and added new students to its Czech and Slovak language school. In 1997, Peter received the Presidential Medal of Merit First Class from then-president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, for the role his paper played in the Czech Republic’s early acceptance into NATO. In 2005, Peter and Vera also received the Gratias Agit award from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs for “spreading the good word of the Czech Republic abroad.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In addition to his activities in the Czech-American community, Peter is an avid, internationally-recognized rowing coach and veteran oarsman. He has coached three U.S. junior national champions and is considering returning to his old rowing club in Prague to take a coaching position which, he says, would bring him closer to his son Jonathan’s family, now based in Plzeň. Today, Peter lives in Glen Cove, New York, with Vera, who is enjoying her new role as a grandmother.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americke listy
Branik
Ceskoslovenske tydenik
Community Life
Education
gymnazium
Journalism
Religion
Sports
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Born to Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WoV6DuhoCGg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I was one year old and Hitler got the Sudetenland, my parents had to move. Today you would say they were refugees, and they were. My mom was 24, 25, and suddenly there she was with my sister who was three years old and I was one year old, and she had to leave that town within 24 hours, with two kids and whatever she could carry, because my father was still in the Army; they didn’t release them yet. So she did. She didn’t have any place to go being from Slovakia and her husband’s parents were relatively – from the Czech point of view – far away. But there were more people who had to leave, so they said ‘There is a parish there the small town of Městečko and we know that that monsignor is ready to accept refugees.’ So this is where she landed with us, and they had to move three or four times within six months. Then finally my dad got another position as a teacher in small town or large village – a rich town, a lot of hops – which was called Kněževes , close to the town of Rakovník, and this is where we spent the War.”</p><h4>WWII Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iNezdE4Z6YU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of my first remembrances is the middle of the night and we were awake because there was that very deep sound, and there was a pinkish or yellowish shine all over the sky and my father was standing close to the window and said ‘Has to be Leipzig or Dresden. This is where they are bombarding tonight, but it’s terrible; it’s very, very intense.’ So it was the night that Dresden got bombarded.”</p><h4>Joining the Communist Party</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WGjvsxP_0hc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was joined to the Communist Party when I was two months at the university. No, actually, the first semester. After the first semester, Jiří Dienstbier and myself had the best results, and the professor who was in charge of the department called us both and told us ‘Congratulations, you are good students, you will be good journalists, and let me tell you that I am ready and I am supporting you’ – you had to have a grantor – ‘I am your grantor so you can join the Communist Party.’ And then he left, and we were sitting there in the lobby. Both of us were from sort of old democratic families. His parents were treating poor people during the depression and so on, so they were socially oriented. So we were sitting there because we didn’t expect it, and you could say ‘thank you, no’ and you wouldn’t get a job in a factory, and then Jirka said ‘Maybe it will be good for something. We will at least be part of the people who make decisions.’ So this is what happened, but nobody ever asked us to sign anything, any petition or whatever. We were just… this was it. It might be part of why Jiří was later on sent to that internship to Czech Radio and why I was accepted there. And in the foreign broadcast the Communist Party wasn’t the main point there, and when ’68 came I said ‘I’m so sorry; I cannot take it anymore.’”</p><h4>Happy in U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WvCgFOog5Sc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We got Americanized quite quickly I have to say. Maybe next generation. But we are very happy to live here. There are plenty of things we like about America. Nobody whines; people understand that they come somewhere and they have to take care of themselves. That’s your business; that’s your problem. Which is not that much… The Communists were telling you ‘The state will do it. The country will do it. You don’t do it.’ People got used to it. We never liked it and we are happy that mood is not in the air. And our children are happy here, so we would never left. Of course, if we never left we would be living in Prague and being happy there, but we prefer to be here. We prefer to be Americans.”</p><h4>Return Home?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YBLFPn5_A00?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Nobody will take Prague out of our hearts and heads. We know it and we’ll always feel it. And it’s nice to see that it’s changing and so on. But also, the country has changed a lot and we would have to start again. For the third time? No. I really like the spirit of America, I have to say.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Zelmira Zivny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zelmira Zivny was born in the village of Blšany in 1937. Zelmira’s mother grew up in Komárno on the Slovak-Hungarian border and had met Zelmira’s father while he was stationed here with the Czechoslovak Army. He then took a post teaching at a Czech school in Blšany, which was in the Sudetenland. When this area was annexed by Adolf Hitler as part of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Zelmira’s family was forced to leave. After moving several times in six months, Zelmira’s father found a teaching job in Kněževes, a town near Rakovník. Following WWII, Zelmira’s family moved to the nearby town of Jesenice where she attended school.</p><p> </p><p>Zelmira went to high school in Rakovník and then studied journalism at Charles University in Prague. Zelmira was an excellent student and, along with Jiří Dientsbier (who became a close friend), was offered membership in the Communist Party after her first semester. Zelmira had several summer jobs, including at a county newspaper in Podbořany, very close to where she had been born. During her last year in university, Zelmira worked at Czech radio (Český rozhlas). She and her husband, Milos Zivny, married during this last year as well and the pair stayed in Prague.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2564" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609102642im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/e-IMG_3268_WinCE.jpg" alt="e-IMG_3268_(WinCE)" width="400" height="299" /></p><p>Zelmira worked as a journalist for the magazine Svět v obrazech for many years and traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc, including to Uzbekistan. Zelmira says that things began to change after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She gave up her Party membership and helped Jiri Dientsbier publish a book. Coupled with her connections in the West (professional contacts as well as distant family members ), Zelmira began to feel a lot of ‘pressure,’ and she was taken in for questioning several times. When her daughter did not get into the high school she had hoped to attend, Zelmira and Milos began to think seriously about leaving the country. In 1984, they received passports and permission to take a vacation in Yugoslavia. Zelmira, Milos and their two children crossed the border into Austria and spent several months at Bad Kruezen refugee camp. With the help of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California, in February 1985.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1985, Zelmira was offered a job with the International Rescue Committee as a refugee resettlement worker. She later joined her husband who had started his own cabinetry business. Zelmira and Milos have been heavily involved in the local Sokol organization since their retirement. Although she says that Prague will always be in her ‘heart and head,’ she is very happy in the United States. Today she continues to live with Milos in the house they bought shortly after arriving in Oakland.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Blsany
Communist Party members
Education
Jiri Dienstbier
Journalism
Knezeves
Komarno
Munich Crisis
Prchalova
Rakovnik
Sense of identity
Svet v obrazech
WWII
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Munitions Factory</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MJHDcoQSCKU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“After the War, you know, the Germans left, there was no more need for ammunition so the plant was kind of idled. But the electrification was very damaged, we had a lot of work to get this thing under control – to get this thing back into operation. Although we had our own generating plant, but the Germans were smart, they took the exciters. So we could not use the generators. But we had extra exciters buried in the ground. So we got those out and in about five days we had one generator running, so we could provide the power for the city and some of it for the plant. So we were not that much damaged. But the electrification from outside was totally disturbed. You know, the towers were knocked out… were blown out… the poles and stuff like that. So that took time, but we had power about three weeks after the War was over.”</p><h4>Cinema</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/naxmxTsOH60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had several American pictures, but we had them hidden, we couldn’t play them because under the Germans, they wouldn’t let us play them. We had some Czech, we had a couple of Slovak films, but these came from Bratislava, you know, we always got a new film every week. And I don’t know what kind of film we were preparing because we never –played it – the Russians came and they wanted to… First of all, we got new machines, new projectors, Zeiss, from Germany, very good machines. And how they found out, we don’t know. But they wanted to take those machines to Moscow. They wanted to dismantle them and take them. But we got smart. We knew about this thing, that they wanted to come in and take these machines. So we dismantled them and buried them in the ground. So they were looking for them. Well, when they came in there were no machines and we said ‘well, the Germans took them’. They couldn’t believe it that the Germans had the time to dismantle them but we put them away, the Germans didn’t take them. They were brand new machines. We used them about six, seven, months, that’s all we had them, because we’d just put them up. And we had these old Phillips machines and so, while the Russians were over there, we didn’t want to put these new machines, we put these old Phillips machines up and we used those.</p><p>“Well, they didn’t care too much for them, because they were not as good machines as the Zeiss ones were. So, anyway, that was the experience we had with the Russians. Well, you know, the bad problem was we had movies projected on a wide screen, you know, wide and large. So they came drunk and they shot the screen and everything, shot the audio speakers behind the screen – they did that! Oh, how many times they did that! We couldn’t do nothing about it. We just shut it down and that was it! So this is the way it was. So many times we went without a movie three, four, weeks!”</p><h4>Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/StlVSKs0q6E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to Prague by night train, you know, the express night train. I got to Masarykovo Nádraží and I got right away to the consul, and the consul told me ‘We have no time’, he says ‘You better get out of here fast, because they are checking everyone coming in and out of these offices.’ That was the American consul. So, they put me on a train from there and he says ‘Let’s get you out of the country before they close the borders.’ So, when I come to Aš, which was the border town, the officer that came to check the various paperwork, he says ‘Well’ – he says, ‘according to my instructions, you should be held up over here. But…’ he says, ‘you want to go, you go. I didn’t see you. If anybody comes to check on me, I did not see you!’ So I got out, and I went through Germany on a train, all the way to Paris. From Paris, we were going to go to Calais. We got to Calais and we could not get onto the Queen Mary – the Queen Mary was the ship that was going to take us to the United States – because there were too many wrecks in the Channel. They did not have it all cleaned up yet. So they were not going to take a chance with that big boat going through the Channel. So they put us on a small boat and took us to Dover, England.”</p><h4>Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jbjioOHK31c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Father was always a <em>narodovec</em> – he wanted to go back home, he wanted to go back home. Well, at that time, Masaryk came over here and he was kind of soliciting for citizens. He wanted to have them go back home, he said ‘You know, you don’t have to be in America, we can make America at home, you’ve got the opportunity to make America in Czechoslovakia.’ At that time Czechoslovakia was kind of building up, sprouting up. And so he went over there, he went back. Mother was very much against it, she didn’t want to go. But they finally went in 19… I think it was just before the Depression, I don’t know exactly what year it was. So, through the Depression, they were already there. And father brought a lot of money over there and he lost it all. He lost over a million dollars in investments, because he got into politics. And he got on the wrong side of politics. So there were, you know, we were Catholics, and we got into a village where there were a lot of Lutherans. They were wealthy Lutherans, there were a lot of farmers. So, when he got this mill, he was expecting that he was going to get a lot of business from them. Well, they made a point of not giving him the job because they were so against the Catholics at that time. There were only seven Catholics over there in that village. The rest of them were all Lutherans. So he lost everything over there. That’s the time, like I said, that he moved to Považská Bystrica.”</p><h4>Vist to Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/40rcZvS5PR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I came to Považská Bystrica, I heard the PAs, you know, we had a PA system everywhere. And the first thing they said was ‘So-and-so and so-and-so have these working hours. They did not show up and we want to know why.’ This was on the public address system! I said ‘What will they do? What will they do? Put them in jail or what?’ ‘Ah!’ they said, ‘they’re supposed to be in work and they didn’t show up.’ They said ‘They’re looking for them’. How do you like that? This was in 1984 when I came over there. A lot of things surprised me, which were never there before. You know, the Germans were very tough on us as far as working. If you didn’t show up for work they believed that you are sabotaging their process. So you had to have the right excuse why you weren’t there. But this? I thought that things had changed. They actually got worse – because they looked for you. Because they planned on you, that you were going to be working there. How much they worked, I don’t know.”</p><h4>Old House</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VxGo5_zoKFY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, when the communists took over, that mill never got repaired. It was just a shambles, let’s put it that way. There was still machinery that my father built for that mill. It was still there, it was never removed, but it was all cobwebbed and everything and a lot of rats were in the basement and the lower floor. And as a matter of fact there was a generator that we installed for ourselves, for our own electricity for the mill. That was still there but it was all, you know, never used. So for the whole era of the Communists taking over, this was never used. So somebody was living in the upper quarter but the mill was totally destroyed.”</p><h4>Public Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nssuA8euB_c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1984, Public Radio came to life, and they were looking for something to fill the time. Because public radio didn’t have all that many opportunities. They didn’t have any money to pay for the program, and secondly they didn’t have any volunteers either. So finally they came up and said ‘Would you want to originate any ethnic programs on this station?’ So we organized a group and we got 13 nationalities. And we started up.</p><p>“The only problem is now that everything is digital. And we have to do everything ourselves. We have to prepare the program right down to the second. If we don’t, the computer cuts us off. So we’ve got to figure out very well how to do it now. My son, he’s an expert on the computers, I’m not. Anyway, so we cut the program on a Thursday. We’re not getting paid, but we’re producing a lot of money for the station. We had the highest, I believe, this is what they told us, we had the highest turnout of donations for that one hour. Even their programs didn’t turn out that much money!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Vladimir Mlynek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vladimir Mlynek was born in the small village of Hamry, in northwestern Slovakia, in 1926. His parents, although both Slovak, had met in Cleveland, where they were married and had already raised two children, Vladimir’s brother and sister, Steve and Irene. Just before the Great Depression, the whole family returned to Slovakia. They bought a mill, from which Vladimir’s father, Štefan, operated a cabinet-making business. When they were old enough, just before WWII began, Vladimir’s brother and sister returned to the United States. When the family cabinet business failed towards the end of WWII, Vladimir moved with his parents to the more industrial town of Považská Bystrica. There he trained to become an electrician and started working for the local arms factory, later known as Československá zbrojovka.</p><p> </p><p>After the War, Vladimir’s parents returned to the United States and, in 1947, Vladimir himself followed. He settled in Cleveland, working first as an assistant to his father, who was making cabinets for televisions at the city’s DuMont plant. In 1952, after a number of deferments, Vladimir was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was supposed to be sent to Korea, but in fact spent most of the Korean War stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In 1955, Vladimir married his wife, Clara, an American of Polish extraction. The couple have two children, Gerald and Jeanette. A life-long radio enthusiast, Vladimir has been involved in Slovak-language broadcasting in Cleveland for over half a century. He has hosted the Slovak Radio Hour on Cleveland’s WCPN with his son Gerald every Sunday since 1985.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808010411/http://www.wcpn.org/WCPN/about/personality_bios" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A biography of Vladimir on WCPN’s website</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Catholics
Engineers
Family life
Journalism
local
Lutherans
Politics
Povazska Bystrica
Public address system
Slovak Language
Slovak-German relations
World War II
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985bab0c42174ddbdf9c00ee5bf28e13
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKda885FPwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is <em>srazka</em>, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”</p><h4>Cleared</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HFlNKVM3Dm4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p class="wp-caption-text">Tony’s father Antonin in 1946</p><p>“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”</p><h4>The War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Gw6EEIWZBU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”</p><h4>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTltUpQjLKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”</p><h4>Escape into Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHWxyBuqBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”</p><h4>Refugee Camps</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_s8N3S9mQ8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.</p><p>“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”</p><h4>American Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1BbEXNzJ24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tony Jandacek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.</p><p> </p><p>Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czech language
Education
German
Journalism
Mushrooms
Nazis
Occupation
Prison
Refugee camp
school
Smichov
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
World War II
Zelezna Ruda
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/atqndUlLUt8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“At the time, she [his mother] was working as a press attaché at the Dutch embassy. This is under the communist regime. And the communists had a spy in the Dutch embassy, and they identified my mother’s boss as a spy. So she was under pressure. And she told me, already, under the communists, she had all kinds of pressure – things were being stolen. They didn’t particularly appreciate middle-class, bourgeois people. So there was pressure, but this embassy situation increased the pressure, and so she negotiated with the secret police to be able to leave. The standard of leaving was you get one suitcase; she was able to take a couple of crates. And the Dutch government helped, because she was working for the Dutch government. They arranged for a ship, and at that time there was very little shipping, so [we took] a freighter from Holland to Australia, six weeks. And I have some vague memories of that. I’ve got sort of a King Neptune certificate for crossing the equator.”</p><h4>Australia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/USqHqMGQkoU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Initially, when I came to Australia – I think partially under my mother’s influence; she literally was disgusted with Europe, with the Nazis and the communists, and I, reflecting that, my attitude was ‘I want to learn English, I want to assimilate and to hell with the background.’ Yes, my father was a famous guy, so what? And so in Australia, I had virtually no connection with anything Czech.”</p><h4>Newspaper in Baltimore</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3MgVo938_Bg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Baltimore, at that time, was really the pits. This was post-‘68 riots, but, I was going to the paper of H.L. Mencken, and that swayed me. And I felt I needed some metropolitan newspaper experience, because I was working for a small newspaper in Beirut, and that’s how I ended up here. After moving here, we said, ‘Oh we’ll stay here a couple years.’ But then, part of my assignment was to write about, back in the early ‘70s, [William] Donald Schaefer was mayor, and they made efforts to revive the city, and I was writing about that and I got into it. I got interested in urban affairs. Also, I liked city living. That’s one thing rubbing off on me from Prague was liking living in the city. And my wife was from Westchester County, New York, so she’s rebelling against suburbia. So basically, living in the city suited us, walking to work. And then in ’75, we moved here.”</p><h4>Father's Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qa575jAuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Radan Dolejš organized another concert at Lucerna where leading contemporary Czech musicians played my father’s music. And to me that was a revelation. Compared to in ’72 when I found the records which made the whole sound very schmaltzy, who cares – now we had contemporary musicians giving it a real contemporary interpretation. I said, ‘Wow. This is something.’ Suddenly energized me into the music. Plus, I learnt that he composed jazz music, and dance music. I mean, he was no fuddy-duddy. And, the leading Czech rock group, called Olympic, play one of his songs. So one of his songs was adapted to rock music.</p><p>“And this reconnecting process is multifaceted. From seeing my father, a stony figure in the movie which I had no connection [to] – and my wife said she saw an eerie resemblance, they way she put it. I didn’t see it at all – to hearing <em>Česká Písnička</em> [one of his father’s best-known songs] for the first time and not understanding one word and being hit by it emotionally, to starting to find documents, to mama’s memoirs, to reconnecting to the music through these concerts in Prague, to the documentary, and going through the process of that.”</p><h4>Father's Story</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/niCNaqnDVm0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And Arnošt [Lustig, the author who featured in <em>The Immortal Balladeer </em>with Tom], the interesting thing is, he saw my father as a symbol of the non-Jewish victims. Which, to me, elevated that. And he appears in the documentary, and he adds a sort of philosophical level, a humanistic level to it. Which is above and beyond my father, and that’s the part that so fascinates me. So one of the things I’m really interested in now is to use my father’s story, not for itself, but in conjunction with other people – not only Czechs – other people who are musicians, artists, writers, who defy oppression. And oppression doesn’t have to be Nazis or Communists; it can be anywhere.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thomas Hasler
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Thomas Hasler was born in Prague in 1941. His mother, Charlotte Jurdová, was a linguist with a doctorate in philology from Charles University, and his father, Karel Hašler, was a very popular Czech songwriter, actor, director, and playwright who, before his son’s birth, was arrested by the Gestapo because of the patriotic nature of his songs. Karel Hašler was killed at Mauthausen concentration camp one month after Tom was born.</p><p> </p><p>Tom says he does not have many memories of Czechoslovakia, as he left the country when he was only seven years old. His mother was able to secure exit visas in 1949 when the department she worked for at the Dutch embassy came under scrutiny after her supervisor was named as a spy. Tom and his mother moved to Australia, where, he says, he did not make an effort to retain his Czech heritage. In 1958, Tom and his mother were sponsored by an acquaintance to come to America.</p><p> </p><p>They arrived in Santa Barbara, California, but shortly thereafter moved to Connecticut. Tom began college at age 16, due to the differences in the American and Australian education systems. He studied political science at Hobart College (in New York) and received his master’s degree in journalism from University of Michigan. Tom interned at<em>The Daily Star, </em>the English-language newspaper in Beirut, in 1968, where he remembers hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also met and married his wife, Bonnie (a New Yorker) while in Beirut. Upon returning to the United States, Tom accepted a job offer from the Baltimore <em>Evening Sun</em>. He became an American citizen in 1975, but says he recently also got his Czech citizenship back.</p><p> </p><p>While growing up, Tom knew little about his father. However, more recently he says he has made an effort to discover as much as possible. In 2007, Tom was the co-producer and subject of a documentary titled <em>The Immortal Balladeer of Prague</em> <em>[Písničkář, který nezemřel</em>] which chronicles his search for his father’s work and legacy. He says he is fascinated by the ‘political side’ of his father’s music, which, he adds, led ultimately to his father’s death. He also discovered his mother’s memoirs and diaries which has given him insight into his father’s personal character. Tom has visited Prague several times and says that he no longer feels like a tourist there. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Arnost Lustig
Arts
Ceska Pisnicka
Concentration camp
Education
emigrant
Journalism
Jurdova
ktery nezemrel
Pisnickar
Radan Dolejs
refugee
Sense of identity
Tomas Jurda
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Christmas in Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YWJN_Zvkg8A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I liked Christmas, Christmas dinner was on the 24th – the night before – we had always carp and once in a year a glass of wine (which I wasn’t allowed to touch until I was quite a lot older). And the gifts were distributed, I was usually disappointed because there were mostly things that they would buy for me anyway like socks and shirts and pants and things like that. And when my father discovered that, he asked me always what book I would like to get and that changed Christmas. I loved Dumas and so I was getting all his books, stories and so we finished eating and right away I started to read!”</p><h4>Communist Takeover</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aBqPxu3ZGXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was one of the few people who expected that there would be a Communist coup d’état in February. Somehow I had a good political instinct or something! So I went to see a prominent Czech publisher and writer, Ferdinand Peroutka, and I was just a student and I came to see him. His mistress <a class="ApplyClass" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609122502/http://www.pametnaroda.cz/witness/index/id/1380/#en_1380" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Slavka Peroutkova</a> introduced me to him, and I told Peroutka whom I liked to read – he didn’t know me, but he trusted me immediately – I told him I expected the Communists would create a putsch before the elections, and he said ‘I am afraid of that too.’ And I told him I would like to create some kind of a magazine-journal, which would be led by Jan Masaryk, who was a very popular politician and no-party man. And he said ‘Yes, I agree with you, I will give you 200,000 Czech crowns for it and try to persuade Masaryk to take over the editorial job and give you more, 200,000 [crowns.]’ So that was one of the actions – incredible, that he trusted me right away like that.</p><p>“So I started to build up a group of people who would publish the journal. It was supposed to become not only for the members of the young elite, of the cultural society that I founded at the same time with the help of my professor Jan Kozák, but it would be a journal that would represent the whole society of cultural leaders of the Czechoslovak Republic, who were not only Communist, but non-Communist too. But unfortunately when we had a meeting with Jan Masaryk in February, [Soviet Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Valerian] Zorin was faster than we – he was already in Prague in order to lead the coup d’état. And so the journal was never published.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SIKCpUnSx7g?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First I had to persuade the man in charge of passports. And when I came in (which wasn’t allowed, I just marched in his room and he said ‘What do you want? What do you want?’), he looked up my papers and he said ‘You know, I have a problem with getting proper shoes…’ So I brought him shoes and got a passport – I never did anything like that before! My father knew more about what to do in a world that’s corrupted. So I gave him shoes, but then they introduced a new special permission by secret police…</p><p>“So again, that was the so-called <em>kachlikarna</em>, because it was a gray building of the Ministry of the Interior on Letná, and there were large groups of people there, but I saw that some people were coming by the side door bringing food. So, I used the side door and went straight to the top man. Again, he started to shout at me and I said ‘They invited me, they insist on me coming, it would be a scandal…’ He said ‘We will never give it to you!’ And I said, ‘What do I have to do in order to get it? It would be a scandal!’ He said ‘If you bring from the factory a confirmation by the action committee that you are progressive…’ The action committees were always three people, devoted Communists, that were leading then the whole country everywhere. So I took the night train to Chotěboř where I worked during the War and I was lucky. They opened 7:00, I went in, and there were three members of the committee; one was a friend who knew that my girlfriend was a worker and he was a relative of hers, another was a worker with whom, as a worker, I founded a chess club and theater, so he signed it too – I don’t remember the third one. So they said that I was socially progressive, which I was!</p><p>“There was a misunderstanding, they believed only Communists were socially progressive, I thought that was retrograding, that was never really social progress. So I brought it to this man again by the side door, he gave me the stamp and the next day I was in Austria going to Switzerland.”</p><h4>Journal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CQnE_uDY8Kw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1948, in August, several months after the coup d’état I left for Geneva and started a journal there, which I couldn’t have done in Prague. And the journal became very important. It started as a student type of a magazine, but became really the leading journal for a new program, not pan-Slav, not pro-Soviet, but pro-European, Atlantic-oriented. And gradually older people joined us, even Ferdinand Peroutka and so on. And that became… for five years that was really showing the way to European unification when it wasn’t yet so clean. It was still being discussed, for example, the problem of German participation. And again, Truman and Atchison and so on realized that Germany should be allowed to rearm to create a European force. So that was… I’m quite proud of that achievement; that was quite a successful journal.”</p><h4>Czech Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TothkbG6gx4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started to discover by reading local papers from Ostrava, Moravská Ostrava… because they started to have a problem with miners, because the miners were paid very well, but it was very dangerous work, so many of them died. Because the Soviet Union was very much interested in all of the coal and all the steel that they could get from Czechoslovakia. So that was crucial for the Soviet Union – and uranium mines – so I discovered that there was a lot of trouble there; people were dying and trying to leave. So I concentrated on starting to write programs for Moravská Ostrava. So one really got to know quite a lot when one read carefully the communist papers.”</p><h4>US Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RtG2gLtzg7g?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I couldn’t get my American citizenship for a fortnight. And finally, the head of the [diplomatic] mission in Munich asked me to come and said ‘you know…’ You have to understand, under the McCarthy era, we were worried about intellectuals, we didn’t want to have them in America. ‘Just answer me one question,’ I said ‘Sure, I’ll answer any question.’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said no. He said, ‘How can I give it to you when you don’t believe in God?’ I said ‘I knew if I told you I believed in God I would get it, but I didn’t want to lie.’ You know, you get so many spies in America by asking such simple questions that communist agents can answer the way they are supposed to answer them – which later was proved to be true, you know. So he said ‘I have to think about it.’ I said ‘If you explain to me your idea of God, not just somewhere in the clouds and so on, but a vital force and life and so on, I would agree.’ He said ‘I have to think about it,’ and in two weeks I received citizenship.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Hruby
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Hruby was born in Prague in June, 1921. His father, Petr, owned a shoe shop in the Prague district of Karlín (which Peter says went bankrupt as shoemaker Tomáš Bat’a cornered the local footwear market), while his mother, Marie, stayed at home raising him and his younger brother Jiří. Peter graduated from high school in 1939 and planned to study at Prague’s Charles University, but with all Czech universities shut by the occupying Nazis that same year, he went to work in a factory making military equipment in the nearby town of Chotěboř. Upon liberation in 1945, he did enroll at Charles University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, literature and languages.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3517" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609122502im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-118.jpg" alt="Peter's ID card at Radio Free Europe" width="400" height="266" /></p><p>He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal <em>Skutečnost</em> [<em>Reality]</em>, which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as <em>Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia</em> and <em>Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature.</em> He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.</p><p> </p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948
American citizenship
Chotebor
Cultural Traditions
Education
emigrant
Journalism
Karlin
refugee
Secret police
Skutecnost
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f9759d447b3e7b529d51e1b75d5c0be6
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
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<h4>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><p>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?</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p>
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Title
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Peter Demetz
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<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
World War II
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f2f8657aeda5c9efb17be5e8fe474341
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Schooling</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dmo5KxeVLTk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I went to school in the 1950s, you know. So this was an era when you still had some teachers that came from the older system; the more Germanic, more authoritarian system. So, there were a number of teachers like that, including the principal. And then there was… I remember our favorite teacher – because it was only elementary school that I went to – [she] was a young teacher who had just gotten out of whatever college and become a teacher, it was her first year teaching. And it was much more in the progressive sense, so she was more open, more creative, and so that [made] a big difference. So in a way it was on the cusp, because it was still the pretty difficult Stalinist years of the mid-‘50s.”</p><h4>Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N6ptcPbZWzg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My grandfather always listened to Radio Free Europe and always fell asleep. So we had Radio Free Europe on all the time because he snored through it. And I would say, I do remember actually listening to Radio Free Europe when I was a kid and I always thought it would be really interesting for someone to really do an academic study of the content of the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, because I remember the sense of hearing the same propagandistic tone in reverse. Because you’re so used to, in a way, one thing that you are so used to is listening to all of the crap – pardon me – about five year plans and all of this Marxist, Leninist whatever, which you don’t quite understand what it is, but you see the slogans, the sloganeering and all of this kind of stuff. And so hearing it inverted to the capitalist side, because you distrust the one, you kind of distrust the other. Just like I remember my geography book in which there was this line which I will always remember; in talking about North America, [it] said ‘Florida is the place where American millionaires live.’ And that was the definition of Florida. And so it’s this kind of this kitsch attitude, and that’s why I think it’s really interesting – the people who do examine Nazi propaganda for example, like Slavoj Žižek, the philosopher. It’s quite interesting, because we think about it in very overt terms and it’s really not that, it’s more about value terms and moral terms and the way that character is defined and all of these kinds of things are really in play much, much more so than just this rah, rah, rah stuff. It’s much more complicated.”</p><h4>Australia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fcvT9_q6jZM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First of all it was complicated by the fact that my father had left Australia for America. In 1961, emigrating to America was out of the question. Australia [was] not much better but a little better – at least a little bit more neutral – it was not going into the heart of the imperialist enemy. So… the issue was that there was nobody to pay for the trip, and there was nobody to sign a landing permit which you have to have on the Australian side to guarantee that you are not going to become a ward of the Australian state. So fortunately friends of my father’s, who were actually not Czech, who were Australian, came through and that was, I would say, quite daring and miraculous that they actually stepped forth and signed the landing permit and advanced the money for the journey. So we left in May of ’61 on a train to Vienna and then ultimately Genoa and then on a ship to Sydney.”</p><h4>Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yk81yh2MTSc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember going, with my parents, to these quote unquote ‘Czech events,’ which were pretty embarrassing.”</p><p><em>So what were they, these events?</em></p><p>“You know – national singing, ethnic blah, blah, blah which was just horribly executed. And it really led… It was a part of my whole turning away from all of the Czech stuff because it was so kitsch, it was like stuff that would not pass off in the smallest village [in terms of] how badly executed kitsch it was. But not to be harsh about this, because this was obviously people who were very far removed from the culture, and the other thing is that that element of immigration or emigrants were all economic emigrants, so they were not political refugees, they were not intellectuals who had been forced out of somewhere, they were not highly-cultivated people; they all came because they were poor, they needed work and they needed to survive. So that, however, also defines the way… the culture to which they aspire.”</p><p><em>So was it especially the quality of these events, in terms of the quality of singing, the quality of dancing, that you didn’t like – or was it something else? And if so, what?</em></p><p>“Well, it would all be overweight, aging, matronly pseudo-suburbanites dressing up in national folk costume to sing some national song, not particularly well executed, semi-out of tune. So it wasn’t like pretty girls. I mean, it’s the stuff that you really find in Hrabal or Menzel films. I mean, in a way, that is really reflective of that – it shows that kind of a small-village mentality; it’s My Sweet Little Village. The well-meaning, nice people who unfortunately are unabashed and embarrass themselves without knowing it.”</p><h4>Disinterested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JB90hXzaYU4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I personally think of it in terms of how you, or how people, adapt when they live – it’s the same thing as in marriage: when there’s divorce or the death of a significant somebody – how you get through situations that are really stressful. I think that instinctively you really focus on, if you’re lucky to be able to do that, you really focus your energies on whatever it is that’s going to get you through that most immediate situation. So, my most immediate situation was getting through school, learning to speak English, succeeding in school, becoming a part of that process, and to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. It wasn’t that I stood there and consciously said ‘Well, I want to be American, I don’t want to be Czech anymore.’ That was not the case at all. It was just – how much energy do you have and where does this energy go? How do you understand it, get through it, understand American music or whatever? Because the world of 1962 America and before that 1961 Czechoslovakia was quite different, the gap in culture was quite significant. So that’s how I think of why that happened. You know, ultimately, when did I go back to it? It was really much, much later, pretty much through film.”</p><h4>Film</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vgim7unv9SY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was not until I was in my twenties when I first owned a bookstore with a partner where we started to show films, not on a regular basis, but kind of literary-related film events like Dostoevsky’s birthday, kind of as a promotion, so that was the first active element in it. And then I got into it in a more formal way when… The bookstore was on Halsted and Webster and down the street, two blocks down, was this very small theater company called the Drama Shelter, and they were always complaining about their audiences or whatever – finally I said ‘Why don’t we show films on your dark night? I want no money for it, we’ll just do it. I’ll program it and then whatever money comes in, just pay for the expense and then the rest you can keep.’ And that was really my first active film series on a very, very low budget on a very low scale – you know, 16mm, bed sheet, very, very old cranky projector. That was really the beginning.”</p><h4>Czech Film</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ixBT6jHg2Fk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I guess you could say the ‘intellectual collapse’ of film-making in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic and elsewhere (in pretty much all the other former communist countries) is something that I don’t think anybody was prepared for. I mean, just the way that, very quickly after reexamining [ideas] and going back and looking at all of the things that you couldn’t say about those years for so long – you could make those films and so some good films were made in a period of one or two years – but then nobody wanted to see that anymore, because that was in the past and they were not focused on all of those horrible years which they all knew about, so now the focus was on… and they were left without any ideas. That’s I think really the most shocking thing that I think nobody was really prepared for.”</p><h4>Revisited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9UyjV9NvcPU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, yes of course, you have those memories and associations, but is it some kind of an idealized, background-music, lots of violins [experience] standing looking at your house, and immediate flashbacks? No, it’s not. It’s in a way awkward, because you really realize that time goes by and your life is someplace else – that’s only part of you, that’s only what you lived through, that’s only where you went to school or whatever. But whatever you took from there, you have. Going back is not going to change it.”</p><h4>Freedom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tRV-kupITaQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think [Czech children] are more free; they are given more freedom in a way. I mean, there is structure in the sense of school and all of that stuff, but there is also a lack of structure and an encouragement of letting kids be kids more. I see this with friends of mine who have kids there, and their kids seem to be much more natural and happy doing kid things instead of being shoved into this class, that class – go here, go there, you know, start thinking about your career when you are seven years old.”</p>
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Title
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Milos Stehlik
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<p> </p><p>Milos Stehlik was born in Slaný, central Bohemia, in 1949 but raised in the nearby town of Plchov. His father (also called Milos) emigrated before he was born and so he was raised by his mother, Jindra, and his maternal grandparents. Milos’s mother was determined to follow legal procedures to leave Czechoslovakia with her son; she applied three times for passports, was refused three times, appealed on each occasion, and on the third appeal was granted permission to leave. The whole process took around 11 years, with Milos and his mother leaving Czechoslovakia in May 1961. Milos’s father had initially settled in Australia, but moved to Chicago, Illinois, just before Milos and his mother were granted permission to travel. This meant that it was friends of Milos’s father who paid for the pair’s boat trip to Sydney and who signed their landing permit upon arrival. Milos refers to this behavior as ‘daring and miraculous’ on the part of these complete strangers. He and his mother spent one year in Australia before securing American visas and arriving in San Francisco in 1962, where Milos met his father for the first time. The family settled in Chicago on 23<sup>rd</sup> Street and Holman Avenue, in a part of town which is today referred to as Little Village. Milos says that this was a particularly Slavic neighborhood at the time, and remembers there being a selection of old Czech books in his local public library. Growing up, Milos remembers being taken to various Czech events in Chicago, which he says were, at times, ‘embarrassingly’ bad. According to Milos, it was only later, and through film, that he became more interested in his own Czech background.</p><p> </p><p>According to Milos, it was in his 20s that he became interested in film. At the time he owned a shop called Action Bookstore, where he occasionally showed films to link in with literary events. After a while, he took his film programming to a nearby theatre called The Drama Shelter, where he met his future business partner, Nicole Dreiske, with whom he founded Facets. When it began in 1975, Facets was an organization presenting alternative film and theatre. Over the years it added a rental component to its operations, and now distributes a number of world cinema titles as well. Milos says he received encouragement from a number of Czech and Slovak émigré directors when he was working on establishing Facets. He mentions in particular Ján Kadár (<em>The Shop on Main Street</em>) and his friendship with Jan Němec (<em>A Report on the Party and the Guests</em>), who lived with him for a while in Chicago. As well as directing Facets, Milos works as a film critic for WBEZ – Chicago Public Radio. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1991 and travels to the Czech Republic regularly to attend film festivals.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609043345/http://www.facets.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Facets Multi-Media’s website</a></p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
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NCSML Archive
Americanization
Arts
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Jan Kadar
Jan Nemec
Journalism
Kvilice
school
Slany
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d1805ab3ff30b4bfbf3566e21df48e3d
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Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
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Transcription
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<h4>Horse Cart</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EZropicbPkU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“In those days, even though cars were already in existence and trucks, we did not use them. We used just horses to pull the wagons with flour. We went as far as Mladá Boleslav, I don’t remember how many kilometers it was, but we had to go to Mnichovo hradiště – that was seven kilometers – and then normally you would take a train. So I don’t know, it must have been about three hours, I would say. So, we would go as far as that, but we had one person who was handling the horse and he had a sort of system whereby, at every village, his wagon would stop in front of a pub and he would go to get a beer. I remember this. I was quite young then, but it was sort of curious.”</p><p><em>And you would go along as well?</em></p><p>“Oh yeah. I was frequently… not frequently, but sometimes I went along. It was just interesting, you know? At the time when I didn’t go to school, obviously, in summer time. It was an interesting experience.”</p><h4>Illegal Food</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c3RAyJwH76I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Under the Nazi era, I think the farmers in a way, I would say quite often illegally, supported people in the cities. And I know that for instance in our mill, my father had a reputation that he would give flour to even people that he did not know that came from Prague. And he would give them, as I recall – I remember even the number – five kilos of flour, which was at that time quite sizable for the period. Because otherwise you had to purchase four using tickets – you had special tickets. But my father made this flour available to them for good prices. He didn’t ever overcharge them. And I did not know about this, I learned only about it in the last maybe 30 years. When I established some contact [with the Czech Republic] people started coming to me and saying ‘I remember your father from WWII, this is what he did.’ So, I know that this was not unique, because people in the countryside were very helpful.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8viCQjPK0JQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was not doing it on my own, but somebody was helping. I did not even know the person, nothing, because we called him ‘mister engineer,’ and I don’t know what he was.”</p><p><em>Was he a colleague of your father?</em></p><p>“Yeah, he was a friend of him. Anyhow, then there were problems of some sort, and he was supposed to take me over the border, and he didn’t. At the last minute he sent me on my own. And I was in the middle of nowhere. I ended up – he just pointed me in one direction, and I ended up in a house which was still on the Czech side. And they called the police and whatever else, so I ended up in jail where I was actually, according to the Czech laws, I was quite young. I was below the age or whatever. I was never tried, I don’t know how many months they kept me there. And then they let me go because of my age, because the newly-elected president, Gottwald, issued an amnesty for young people. And I sort of fell under that category and they released me. And fortunately at the time… prior to that I was going to gymnázium, and fortunately, the gymnázium let me come back, although, for a price as I found out later. I received for my effort to escape; they gave me a so-called dvojka z mravů, which meant, in Czechoslovakia you got a grade for behavior, either good behavior or bad behavior. And so for good behavior you got one, and for bad behavior you got two. So I got two; I got dvojka z mravů. And that was pretty bad, you know, to have dvojka z mravů, that didn’t look good on your record. But nevertheless, I have a feeling that maybe this was some kind of a compromise some of my professor friends were able to do so that I could get back. This was maybe one way of doing it – they gave me a dvojka z mravů and I was able to come back.”</p><h4>6 yrs in Prison</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYNfKs479no?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I made efforts lately to clear her name. And I went through the process, [sent the request to] the Ministry of Justice or whatever it was called, and they wrote me an official letter telling me that according to then-existing laws, she committed a crime. According to then-existing laws. So they still, unfortunately, recognize communist laws today. To date, I have not been able to clear her name. It is incredible. And, I mean, she is not the only one. There are many people who are in the same category, for instance, let’s say people that crossed the border and didn’t go to the armed services. That was considered a crime. This still, on their books, is considered a criminal offense. Even these people could not clear their name, because according to the laws that existed at that time, this was a criminal act. So, this is one bitter thing I have against even the current Czech Republic – they cannot rid themselves of the past and get rid of these communist laws. It is incredible to me, absolutely incredible to me.”</p><h4>State Dept.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MgeOOMdrNYc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was hired initially as a senior nutrition adviser. And then I was there a few months and they said ‘Well’… They offered me a job to be the chief of a research division which, in a way, had responsibility for handling and the research sponsored by AID in various developing countries in different fields. And eventually from this job I was elevated up to a director of whatever else. And my job had a number of facets, because we were responsible for not only research but we were also responsible for supporting institutional grants to various universities in a given field in our area. And this covered a number of fields, and interestingly, my background was very helpful to me in as much as I was involved in agriculture initially, and in the medical field at NIH. That gave me a fantastic background, because AID was supporting projects in agriculture; they were supporting projects in medicine and health, and of course they were supporting projects in education.”</p><h4>SVU in D.C.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vBZkcL5Y3qw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After I came to Washington I became… They established a Washington chapter at that time. And they made Dr, Feierabend, whom you probably know, Ladislav Feierabend, became the chairman of the local chapter. And I was elected the secretary of the chapter. So that was my first entrance into the society, which eventually grew into more and more responsible positions. And I was, from the very beginning, I was in constant contact with Dr. Nemec, Dr. Jaroslav Nemec, who worked for the National Library of Medicine, which in the meantime was transferred to NIH, and I worked at NIH, so we used to meet quite regularly for lunch. I don’t know, once a week or whatever, we met for lunch. So we talked and talked and talked. So, in the process I obviously learned quite a bit about it. And I had some ideas of my own. And eventually, I guess, it must have been within two years, I came up with the idea of the society holding these conferences, which we then renamed congresses. So actually, originally, it was my idea. And I sold Dr. Nemec about it, and he sold others, and we indeed proceeded and had the first congress. The first congress – I ended up being the person who was responsible for the program. So I prepared the program for the first congress, and I ended up being responsible for the second congress, and so I was the one who was inviting all of these people and the first congress was quite decisive. It was an important milestone because it, in some ways, put the society on the map, because then people took it more seriously and then… In the first congress I know we had 60 speakers, which was unheard of at the time. And these people came from different universities or whatever. And again, my contribution at the time was an insistence upon English. I said it has to be in English, because until that time it was all in Czech.”</p><h4>SVU Founded</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AAmknUA8CaE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Many people don’t realize why the SVU actually started and under what conditions. The reason was that at the time, there were lots of political disputes in the Czechoslovak community. And there were numerous organizations and clubs. And the politicians, if they belonged to one particular group; they wouldn’t talk to politicians in another group. They just wouldn’t talk to each other. And it was sometimes quite nasty, you might say. And at this time, the situation in Czechoslovakia was going from bad to worse. So this was the time when the intellectuals of Czech or Slovak descent and Czech or Slovak intellectuals decided ‘Enough! Let’s focus on something positive which unites us instead of dividing us!’ That was the society. We created a society where anybody can talk who wishes and explore different issues and what have you. And from the very beginning, it was meant to be a non-political organization.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Mila Rechcigl
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Mila Rechcigl was born in Mladá Boleslav in 1930. His father (also named Miloslav) was a miller who became the youngest member of parliament in Czechoslovakia when he was elected as a representative of the Agrarian Party in 1935. Mila was raised in and around the family mill in Chocnějovice and remembers traveling by horse and cart to nearby Mladá Boleslav in order to sell flour in town. During WWII, Mila says his father was unable to continue his political work, but became president of the Czech Millers Association and was active in the resistance group Obrana národa [Defense of the Nation]. Mila himself remembers people traveling to the mill from Prague to buy flour there on the black market.</p><p> </p><p>Between 1945 and 1948, a period which he refers to as a time of ‘illusionary democracy,’ Mila attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Mladá Boleslav. Following the Communist coup in 1948, his father escaped Czechoslovakia when a warrant was issued for his arrest. Mila also tried to leave the country, but was caught at the border and jailed for a number of months. Mila says he was released as there was an amnesty announced which affected those legally considered to be minors, and he was allowed to return to <em>gymnázium</em>, though he received a <em>dvojka z mravů</em> – a poor grade for personal conduct. In 1949, Mila tried again to leave Czechoslovakia and this time succeeded. He was reunited with his father at Ludwigsburg refugee camp in West Germany, where he stayed until February 1950. Mila says he never saw his mother, Marie, again. In the late 1950s, she was imprisoned for taking grain from the Rechcigl mill (which had been nationalized) and feeding it to her chickens. She received a prison sentence of ten years, though was released after six. Mila came to New York City with his father in 1950. The pair’s first job was at a small jewelry factory, making earrings and bracelets using Czech glass beads. After a couple of years, Mila’s father started working for Radio Free Europe in the city, while Mila himself received a Free Europe scholarship to attend Cornell University. He gained his BS, MNS, and PhD degrees there, specializing in biochemistry, nutrition, physiology and food science.</p><p> </p><p>Mila worked for the National Institute of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and then the State Department, where he became chief of the Research and Institutional Grants division. His involvement with the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) dates back to 1960 when he became the secretary of the society’s Washington, D.C. chapter. He was president of the international organization between 1974 and 1978 and again between 1994 and 2006. One of his proudest achievements was the establishment of the biannual SVU World Congress, which began in Washington, D.C. in 1962 and continues to this day. Today, Mila lives with his wife of 58 years, Eva, in Rockville, Maryland.</p><p><a href="/web/20170609150111/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/e-Rechcigl_Final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Full transcript of Mila Rechcigl’s interview</a></p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609150111/http://www.authorhouse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000419564" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Mila’s personal memoir ‘Czechmate: From Bohemian Paradise to American Haven’</a></p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609150111/http://www.rozhlas.cz/svobodne/kdobylkdo/_zprava/miloslav-rechcigl-1904-1973--866956" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Mila’s father Miloslav (in Czech)</a></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Chocnejovice
Community leadership
Community Life
Education
gymnazium
Journalism
Mlada Boleslav
Mnichovo hradiste
Obrana naroda
Political prisoner
Resistance
Rural life
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cc48e7fa263cc04a1541d841bcf911db
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rox4yCr0dZ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“They wanted to give me more chances in life. People were really… on the one hand, people living in a communist country – or at least in communist Czechoslovakia – were on one hand isolated, they didn’t have access to information and they were definitely not making a lot of money, that’s why they couldn’t travel etc. etc. But on the other hand, education and languages were important, even if they were not very important practically, because you couldn’t travel. It was something that was actually quite wise of my parents to open this gate for me – that was good.”</p><h4>Psychology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CF0jMzRhe5c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I tried to get to Charles University and that was a typical communist-era anecdote. You know, the whole thing was that I was not accepted, although I had all the best scores with the exception of Russian, where I had a slightly… I had a dvojka z ruštiny [a B for Russian]. But still, you couldn’t get into these quotas. And so, funnily enough, I didn’t even… send an appeal – as far as I remember, I didn’t even do this. And that’s actually when I realized that I want to leave the country; if I cannot study, I will leave. But strangely, my stepfather, he met as it happens – there was this school maybe gymnázium, (secondary school), gathering of people. You know, from time to time, they have this anniversary gathering – and there was this guy who must have been a big-shot whatever in the Ministry of the Interior or wherever – something like this – and he said ‘If you want some help just call me.’ So my dad did, and suddenly I received an answer to an appeal that I never posted, that yes, I am accepted to university, which was rather surrealistic; people had already started university, I came a week later. And that’s how I started psychology, but in my head, in a way, this was the breaking experience, I felt like ‘No, I don’t need this, I want to see the other side.’”</p><h4>Baptized</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QasHK-1kfAY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Maybe a year before leaving the country – so when I was 20, 21 – I got baptized at home, at my friend’s home, where we were meeting regularly, reading evangelical, but, you know, very modern guys, like Bonhoeffer and these freedom evangelists – you know, people who were rather avant-garde in terms of their theological thinking.”</p><p><em>Why did you decide to get baptized at that age?</em></p><p>“That was something that, at the time, was very meaningful to me. It was a very rich (and enlightening to me) alternative to the philosophy that was being served to us politically – Marxism, and those things. And as all religion, it was also obviously because there was a community of people who were very interesting and very strong. You know, people with whom I am friends until today.”</p><h4>Church</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/olP18RDIV3Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was tolerated, now of course, when you were… you know, the fact that I got baptized in an apartment – that would be already a big problem for the friend of mine who made the ceremony, and who actually later on became a professor of theology at the Prague faculty etc. That was really forbidden, but for the rest, it was tolerated. Obviously, a lot of people in these circles were people who were also politically active in their position, but it was not necessarily the same thing. Some people were very far… were clearly opponents to the regime, other people, like my father, were actually, you know, in the Party, as many people were, and still going to church, and somehow he could manage…</p><p>“You know, small towns were always worse, in Prague you could hide somehow, there was so much going on. In a small town like this of 20,000 people, it was actually a little bit more dangerous or you needed more courage, because everybody knew you and you were going to church. But people were going to church, some people were going to Catholic church, it was not exactly like in Poland, where church was really strong and the regime… These churches – the communists did not like them, but it was okay, at least they knew who they were – these people. And as long as you didn’t cross a certain limit, a certain red line, which was basically to be publishing and spreading information of not just religious, but even religious, it was not encouraged… but that was the line.”</p><h4>Coach Tour</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IX0UJ25IumI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“People were queuing in a queue, as I did, for three days, you know, making shifts – there was this self-organization of the people. You know, you came for two hours, and then you left, and then the day after, you came for another two hours and people were helping themselves in the line like this, because – they knew why – because on the day, D-Day, when the sale was open, even though I was eleventh in the line, after these three days, five minutes before the opening of the store, some people from the store came, opened the door and suddenly, even when you were eleventh in the line, there was not enough seats for me on the trip to, what was it? France or Western Europe, which was supposed to have a number of 14 or something. So clearly, things were going on. So I ended up in the trip to Greece – a wonderful country – and I spent my two weeks there. And what happened was that I sold my record collections, my parents gave me some money; it cost 20,000 crowns, which was a lot of money at the time! A lot of money! So, there were not many 20 year olds, young people, taking this trip. And this didn’t escape the people traveling. You know, on this day I came to the meeting point and they would say ‘Oh yes, there were young people like you last year – they didn’t return!’ And I was like ‘Oh no! That’s not my case!’ And you know, I have my sleeping bag with me – a sleeping bag for a trip in a hotel! You know, there were things…</p><p>“And then I was selling these albums, so obviously I had to tell these people, because otherwise they wouldn’t understand why I was selling these albums. So I think I was very lucky, there must have been at least maybe 40-50 people who knew I was emigrating. Nothing ever happened to me; nobody ever denounced me, because there were cases when this happened. People were all ready with their luggage, and two hours – that’s the way they were doing it – they were coming to the house two hours before you were leaving, and they just took your passport and you go nowhere.”</p><h4>Paris</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S4PPOoq_OUw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It just happened that at the time, this was the time that computers were becoming more important, especially, among other things, in the printing business and the publishing business, and they just needed someone in the rédaction to take care, not of IT (I would not be the right person), but someone who could use it – that was the breakthrough, to be able to use it. And it happened to be me – so I started like this: I was actually basically just typing one of Mr Tigrid’s books on the computer – you had people for this at the time – and then from this it moved on and suddenly I was among the inner circle of Svědectví, which was a very small, family owned kind of operation. And this was quite exciting, I was a little bit afraid that it might really affect negatively my family back in Czechoslovakia, but suddenly it happened. And so, after a few years where I was working at the Centre Pompidou, you know, to make my living during my studies, I was offered a job at Svědectví and I took it, and I think I was what you call the deputy editor, or in France they call it secrétaire de rédaction – you know, the guy who is taking care of collecting the manuscripts, keeping to the deadlines and getting the issue together. And I stayed there from 1986, I think, until 1990.”</p><h4>Skeptical</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLFvczEKJkI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Every emigrant, with the time you are [away]… your idea and your image of your homeland – where you are coming from – gets frozen in what you left. Just this very idea that life and changes could continue after you… that there even could be changes, is an abstract thing for you. In your deeper way of thinking, you believe it’s like it was. I mean this was a rather short time, I only left in 1983, we were in 1989, so it was six years, but still, I was not exactly following and realizing that things that were not possible before were [now] possible. But on the other hand, I was actually following Gorbachev and I think I was the only one in the whole editorial committee who probably naively believed that Gorbachev is maybe bringing something… I was not wrong on this, that it was actually opening new opportunities, so it is not that I was totally pessimistic or disconnected, but I was very skeptical specifically about Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Cut Ties</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B5ceNfZg63U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I thought that I would never, ever return to the country unless things changed, and I didn’t believe that they were going to change. It was really like a tabula rasa, which was important, I think. Again, it is something I would recommend to everybody if you jump like this – if you want to really emigrate – I think that’s the mentality. I always believed this; I was not looking specifically to… well, I did have Czech friends, and I worked, actually, with Czechs, which was something, but I was really not looking for it. It was an accident. And this whole time, basically these eight years that I spent in Paris, I was doing my best to become French. I mean, as ridiculous as it might sound or look, that was the philosophy. The philosophy is: you cannot do this halfway. And there is a wisdom in this, the challenge of living a new life wherever in the world is quite huge, and if you stay halfway, I… I always pitied these people who were living in Paris, and actually I had friends like this, and they are friends until today, some of them returned, and I understand them, it’s their point, but in a way I pitied them…</p><p>“I don’t like this ambiguity, you know, I think at some point in life you can overcome this and you, you have [your] identity built enough, and it can be a double identity, and then no problem. But, when you struggle for life, and you start a new life, I think it is definitely more conducive to success and to even some kind of logic, to focus on the world where you live and that was my philosophy – I mean, you can do it both ways, all kinds of ways, there is not one way.”</p>
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Title
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Marek Skolil
Description
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<p>Marek Skolil was born in Slaný, central Bohemia, in March 1962. His mother, Jaroslava, was a nurse who later worked for the national chain of record stores Supraphon, while his father, Pavel (whom he did not see very often following his parents’ divorce), served in the Czechoslovak Army. Marek started primary school in Slaný before being sent to nearby Kládno to attend a special language school where he learned German, Russian and French. After attending the local secondary school in Slaný, he decided to spend his last year of schooling as a boarder at a school in Žd’ar nad Sazavou, which prepared students to go to university in Moscow. Marek says he had no intention of studying in the USSR, but that this year away from his family did subsequently help him live abroad. In 1980, after being rejected and then accepted in a series of events he refers to as ‘surreal’, Marek began a degree in psychology at Charles University in Prague. He left the country before finishing his studies in June 1983.</p><p> </p><p>Marek settled in Paris, where he began by working as an au pair. He resumed his psychology studies at Paris X – Nanterre and, in 1986, started working at the legendary Czech exile publication <em>Svědectví </em>[Testimony], run by Pavel Tigrid. He worked at the quarterly as the deputy editor until after the Velvet Revolution. After a couple of years working as a journalist and lecturer in Paris, Marek was invited to join the new Czech Foreign Ministry (following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992). He did and started his diplomatic career on the French desk in Prague. He was subsequently sent to Paris as the deputy chief of mission, and then to Vietnam and Lebanon as ambassador. It was on a posting to the latter that he met his Slovak wife, Lydia, with whom he has two children. Marek was the first ever consul general of the Czech Republic in Chicago between 2005 and 2010.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Communist Party members
Diplomatic service
Divorce
Education
Journalism
Kladno
Marxism
national
Politics
Religion
Sense of identity
Slany
Svedectvi
Underground
Zdar nad Sazavou