Peter Demetz
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</p>
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Jerri Zbiral
<p>Jerri Zbiral was born in Prague in November 1948. Her mother, Anna, was a survivor of the Lidice tragedy in 1942, which saw one Bohemian village razed by Nazi troops in retaliation for the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The town’s women were separated from their children and transported to concentration camps, while all of the men were taken to a local farm and shot. Jerri’s mother spent the last three years of WWII in Ravensbrueck concentration camp, while Jerri’s sister Eva was sent to live with an aunt in Germany as part of the Nazi <em>Lebensborn</em> program. Jerri’s mother walked back to Czechoslovakia after the war and was reunited with Jerri’s sister. She subsequently met and married Jaroslav Zbíral.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Communist coup in 1948, pressure mounted on the women who had survived Lidice to come out in favor of the Communist Party, which Jerri’s mother refused to do. Jerri also says her mother faced the jealousy of her peers whose children had not returned from the Nazi camps. In May 1949, the family left Czechoslovakia, crossing the border from southern Bohemia into Germany. They spent one year in Murnau refugee camp before settling in Norway. Jerri says the three years she spent in Norway were extremely happy for her as a child. Her father, Jaroslav, however, did not take to the country, and when his brother in Canada suggested that the family move there he jumped at the chance. The Zbirals moved to Montreal in 1954. Jerri first attended English-language Catholic school and then received her secondary education in French. She came to the United States in 1971 to attend graduate school in Rochester, New York. It was her first job which brought her to Chicago, where she has lived ever since.</p><p> </p><p>In 1982, Jerri started to record the stories of her relatives and others who had survived the Lidice massacre. Ten years later, she created a film, <em>In the Shadow of Memory</em>, about the tragedy and her own relationship to the event. She has spoken with her husband Alan about Lidice on Studs Terkel’s show on WFMT Chicago. An art dealer, Jerri’s firm The Collected Image specializes in Czech photography in particular. As an adult, Jerri converted to Judaism. She became an American citizen in 2000. Jerri has two children.</p>
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Ivana Edwards
<p>Ivana Edwards was born in Prague. Her mother Pavla owned a perfume shop in the city (on Na Příkopě) and her father Eduard (upon arriving in Canada he changed his own name to Samuel and the family name to Edwards) owned a leather manufacturing business. In 1949, Ivana’s father, whom she calls a ‘capitalist at heart,’ decided to leave the country. Ivana’s father falsely claimed Jewish heritage, which allowed him and his family to move to Israel with all their belongings. Ivana attended nursery school in Tel Aviv, where she and her family lived for several months before they received permission to immigrate to Canada. In 1950 Ivana and her parents arrived in Montreal.</p><p> </p><p>Her father quickly found a job working in the Canadair manufacturing plant; later he owned a furniture manufacturing business. Ivana’s mother stayed home and raised Ivana and her three younger siblings, all of whom were born in Canada. Ivana says that her mother spoke less English than the rest of her family and so socialized predominantly in the Czech community where, in particular, she participated in local bazaars. Ivana attended a small private school in Montreal and credits her love of history to one of her high school teachers as well as her birth in Prague, which she calls ‘a very historically valuable city.’ In 1964, she returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time since leaving the country, the first member of her family to do so. She says the trip had a ‘tremendous impact’ on her life, as she reconnected with her relatives and discovered a fascination with Prague.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Ivana studied journalism at Boston University and completed an internship in Rome for the Rome <em>Daily American </em>newspaper during the summer of 1968. Her plans to visit Prague during that time were derailed by the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21. After her graduation in 1969, Ivana returned to Montreal and began working for the<em>Montreal Gazette</em> where she wrote features and worked on the copy desk. In 1971, Ivana’s mother was killed in a car accident, and she and her siblings moved to Florida to be with their father who had started a business there (and later in Haiti). Ivana worked in a few jobs in Miami, including as an office manager and for Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. In 1980 she moved to New York City where she stayed on at the bank for a couple of years until she started writing again and found a job as assistant to the editor of <em>Lear’s</em> magazine. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Ivana spent several years traveling between New York and Prague while freelancing. She wrote several pieces for the <em>New York Times</em> and the book <em>Praguewalks</em>, published in 1994, which concentrates on the lesser-known attractions of the city. Currently she is under contract to a New York publisher to complete the second half of a social and cultural history of Prague. Ivana is an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and has, for many years, been involved on the steering committee of the Dvorak American Heritage Association.</p>
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