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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>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q-6u81otRVU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“His way out of the city, of the country, in those days, which he embarked on in 1949 when the Communists took over – it was sort of an odd maneuver in some ways, an ironic maneuver. He said he was Jewish, which he wasn’t. He acquired some forged documents and told the authorities that he needed to immigrate to Israel. And this was his way of leaving the country without having to escape or swim across the Vltava [River] or something, with all his property, including the equipment from his workshop which, when we eventually got to Israel, he was able to sell, and so he had a little capital. Actually, his intention wasn’t to immigrate to Israel; it was to immigrate to Canada, but that was his route.”</p><h4>Two Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cig9oiOh0Tw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Czech community in Montreal decided to start Saturday morning Czech lessons – Czech classes – at some school, but I wasn’t too interested in going to school on a Saturday morning. I was in school all week. Who wanted to go to school on Saturday morning? I thought that was very bad timing. They should have had it Saturday afternoon or something. So I kind of dropped out very soon which is too bad actually. So I had to learn Czech on my own. I mean, I had to fill in the gaps on my own. The kind of Czech that one needs beyond childish, household Czech.”</p><h4>Trip to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vWqy1KgF0ZA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I flew to Prague from London, and I remember having my hair done at a beauty salon in London, because I wanted to look really nice and I had it put up. And there I was met at the airport with this big entourage of grandmothers – they actually got together because I was coming, so that was unusual – and my uncle and I think my cousins were there. And it was very grand. They brought me flowers; it was like visiting royalty or something. So I was so glad I had gone to the hairdresser because I looked very photogenic.”</p><h4>Lasting Effects</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F8SOYNLvMQk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was terribly exciting to be there and to stay in the old apartment. My uncle treated me like a princess. He took me everywhere, and I was just stunned by this beautiful city. I couldn’t believe I was born there. It was so emotional. I guess it was unfamiliar enough that it was new, in a way. But I must have remembered something of it, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly. I do know that it had a tremendous impact on me.</p><p>“The city was so old, and the building stones, the buildings, they always sort of spoke to me and they were trying to tell me things about the city and it was so fascinating. I was just transported, in a way, and I wanted to know what it was trying to tell me. It was a great introduction to learning the history, which I proceeded to do by writing about it eventually. It was like a before and after in my life. It was a major milestone for me to go back to Prague. Not just because of the family thing – although that was huge; that was probably half of it – but the other half was being introduced, or reintroduced, to this stunning city where I was born. I had a real connection to that city which was so startling to me.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GUKQjFJCLQI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I hadn’t registered with the police. I did the first time. My uncle took me to the police station and we registered, but the second time I think I didn’t. They were furious. The guy at the customs and immigration desk, he treated me like I was a criminal. He was like ‘How dare you defy our laws.’ I don’t remember why we didn’t do it. My uncle, I left him in charge of me because he knew what had to be done. But I was shocked by his treatment of me. It was so uncivil. Here he was, a representative of the government, and he was acting like I was a terrorist or something and he was a prison warden. How dare I defy their rules? I barely got out of there alive, barely got on the plane alive. It made quite an impression, and it sort of illustrated the way communists treated people.”</p><h4>New York Czech</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VD-rzV0iUrE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, because it’s part of my heritage which, to me, has been very important because I was born there and because the city and its history had such a huge impact on me when I first returned there. I was never the same since. I felt like at least part of me belonged somewhere, and I didn’t seem to have those roots in Canada. I didn’t have them. So I realized where my roots really were, and that’s important to me. It may not be important to everybody, but for some reason it was very important to me. Maybe because of my affinity for history and the study of history.”</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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Ivana Edwards
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948
Child emigre
Czech language
emigrant
Family business
Journalism
Judaism
Na Prikope
refugee
Sense of identity
Smejkalova
Unitarians
Women workers
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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>Cowards</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqUip6SS8Mo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She felt that the assassins were cowards and that they should have given themselves up. Or they should have immediately committed suicide. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘as a result of them hiding, we are the ones that suffered.’ So, I don’t know if everybody felt this way, but my mother felt that they were cowards and that they should have given themselves up.”</p><h4>Concentration Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3_IF0JneBNg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So, the commandant said ‘Okay so, who knows… does anybody here know how to sew?’ And my mother said ‘I do.’ And so she was put into the detail, into the factory with the sewing machines and I think there were like 50 machines there, you know, and all these women lined up making… they were mostly making coats for the men on the Russian front. And they would get either old coats and they would take them and have to turn them inside out, and then sew in linings and stuff like that, or they would take confiscated fur coats and turn them inside out and make them into coats for the men. Oftentimes apparently they found money sewn in, jewelry sewn in, of course that all had to be handed over because otherwise they’d be killed.</p><p>“She got beaten quite a bit in the camps, because you had all this quota that you had to fulfill. Since she was a professional seamstress she was really very good. And she worked very hard, and of course they were on starvation food – they got watered-down beet soup, watered-down oatmeal – that was kind of the food of the day. So, a lot of the women got sick, a lot of the women refused to work, and because my mother was very good because that’s what she did for a living, she was made head of the division, which she absolutely hated, because she was responsible for everybody’s work. So if somebody didn’t want to work, or didn’t work very well, she was the one who got beaten, you know, because she was the one responsible. Oftentimes she would sit down and finish off the work or do extra work so that they would meet the quota. But it became so bad that she convinced the commandant, the head, the capo, that she really didn’t want to do this. I don’t know what happened but eventually at some point they let her not be head of the division.”</p><h4>Visiting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vENInl2_Q0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In terms of the children, no one really knew, except for my sister. My sister’s father, like I said, was František Kubík. Kubík had two siblings back in Berlin, one of whom was Ella, who is this remarkable woman. And she had the nerve – she had the chutzpah, that’s the only way I can think of… this good Yiddish word, chutzpah – to, after the tragedy, after June 10… she wrote to the Gestapo in Kládno and said ‘My brother was killed, you have my niece, I’m married to a German who’s a soldier on the Russian front. If you give her to me, I will bring her up as a German.’ And whoever was reading that letter that day must have been having a good day, because they said okay.</p><p>“At one point this crazy aunt of hers, whom I have met and who I absolutely love – she was like this short – an amazing woman… So she took my sister and Renata, with a bouquet of flowers, and went to Ravensbrueck, basically knocked on the gates of the camp and said ‘We want to see Anna Kubíkova.’ And the person who was at the gate basically couldn’t believe who this woman was with these two kids, and they sent her away. They said ‘You better get out of here, this is not a good place to be with two little kids.’ And so she was sent away. But she didn’t go. What she did was she basically started meandering around the perimeter of the camp, which of course had, you know, these fences and stuff, and was speaking very loudly. And the women that were working in the fields were Polish women. And they heard her, of course, and word got back somehow – there must have been this whole network in the camp – to my mother. Because the group of Polish women said ‘We saw a little girl and she looks like you, she resembles you,’ which of course caused… which was an amazing emotional thing for my mother. And so she knew that my sister was alive.”</p><h4>Mother Leaves</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dqD42GbOmSc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was an awful lot of hatred and jealousy towards my mother, for many reasons. First of all, my sister was the first one to come back. She was very healthy compared to the other children, she was cared for compared to the other children. She didn’t have to work as a domestic, as a few of the girls had to do. She was very well treated, she was with her aunt – albeit it was very difficult, because at one point they left Berlin and tried to make their way down through Poland, but that’s another story which I won’t get into. She had it much easier than the other children had.</p><p>“Since my mother had been married to František, who worked for ČTK, who was an announcer, she had a very good pension. So not only was she receiving concentration camp money for the government, the Czech government, she was also receiving a pension, which was a sizeable amount of money, apparently, from ČTK. She was receiving it, as was my sister. So she had money. And by the way, they relocated all the women, put all the women in Kládno, and every Lidice woman was given a home in Kládno, and we were given a home where my grandmother lived on the ground floor and we, my mother and sister, lived on the top floor. So, they were living in Kládno, and then they had money.</p><p>“And the third thing was that there was an awful lot of German hatred after the War. Totally understandable – there are hundreds of stories of retreating Germans being stoned and beaten to death by mobs. And the sentiment was so high that they started saying that [my mother’s late husband] František was German, that he wasn’t really Czech. He was German, and that’s why my sister had been saved, and that’s why she was getting all this compensation and blah blah blah. And you know how things get on and get crazy. So there was an awful lot of… my mother had a really very hard time. She constantly had to say ‘No, Frantisek wasn’t German. No, I’m really sorry, I don’t know where your other children are.’ It must have just been this intense, crazy time.”</p><h4>1st Birthday</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xGuD586niXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He was always looking for ways to make money. So, he played cards. And he was very good at it, but he was also very good at cheating. And my son, my son Max, whenever we’d go visit, my father would teach him how to play cards, and my father would always cheat. And of course he would cheat on purpose, and he would make it obvious he was cheating, because then my son – who was maybe six, seven, eight years old, whatever – would say ‘Děda, you’re cheating!’ And he’d say ‘No I’m not!’ And he’d say ‘Yes you are!’ And that would be the whole thing. But that’s what he did, right? So he cheated a lot, and he won a lot. And my mother was also really terrified, because you know, the guys that were there, you know, they were rough and tumble guys, right. And if they caught him, they’d beat the shit out of him. So it was my birthday, it was November 16, and of course, there was no money for anything, there were no kitchens, you couldn’t bake a cake or anything. So my father apparently comes in from the night before, and throws down a bunch of money – German marks, you know whatever, whatever else there was, including a Canadian 20 dollar bill, or maybe it was American, you know, I don’t remember now – and tells my mother ‘go buy a cake!’”</p><h4>Czech Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iZqDVG9YWR0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They were never able to really, really get out of the country. Here they were in Canada, but they were never able to get out of Czechoslovakia, because there was little Czechoslovakia in our house. We spoke Czech, my mother made only Czech food. No other food but Czech, only Czech pastries and food. Great food, you know, can’t complain, especially the pastries, and she was a fantastic cook. But very limited, only Czech. I did not experience… we never went to other restaurants, my father traveled quite a bit with his work, so he was eating out a lot. He was away from home a lot, so when he came home, he wanted to be home so we never ate at restaurants. And if we went to the country or something, we packed food… Never went to restaurants.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zxqFPy-7I1s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And I felt, I think, for the first time… I mean I use the analogy that, and I think it’s pretty corny, that I was a flower ripped up by its roots with dirt still hanging on to it. And it really is, it’s not a unique thing to me… But at six months, I was ripped out of this culture, of this country, in very unpleasant, tension-ridden circumstances. But I still had this dirt attached. But my roots were just kind of dangling, you know, somewhere, and they would dry out, and then I’d be plopped in here, and then pulled out again, and then plopped down here. So I was always being shoved somewhere and then pulled out. And so you don’t really know where you belong. But what was interesting to me was going into the subway, the train, for example, or on a bus or a tram, and I’d sit there and everybody was speaking Czech in close quarters. And that’s all that I was hearing. And there was a kind of a bit of a comfort level – this total immersion. And I don’t know if it is genetic memory, you know, because being so young when I left. But it’s there – it was definitely there. And for years and years when I started to go back in the 1980s, I always had this kind of nervous energy before I went – this very nervous energy and then once I got there, there was like this calmness. Although now, having been there so many times, and being much more secure in who I am, and understanding more who I am, and being 62, having gone through a thing or two, I don’t have the desperate need to go back. I don’t have the desperate need to identify myself as Czech. Because before it was always ‘já jsem češka, já jsem Zbíral, já jsem češka.’ You know, and I don’t have that need anymore.”</p><h4>Rich?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JnJ7U5Oap6Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Especially when we first came to Canada, not as much Norway, but when we first came to Canada, this was 1954, and Czechoslovakia was in a bad state. A bad, bad, bad, state. And the Czechs back home had an image of us in Canada, and I can say Canada and U.S. too, because I’m sure it was the same here, that we’re wealthy, that we have an easy life, that we have a big car, that we have big houses, that we have, you know, fur coats and all this stuff. A couple of interesting things – and you’ll find this with almost any ethnic group – one of the photos that they send back… my father’s boss had a Cadillac, which my father was allowed to take home on weekends every now and then, because he would also tinker around in it and fix little things here and there. So, what did my mother do? She borrowed a fur coat and we all got nicely dressed up, and we stood in front of the Cadillac and took a family picture of us in front of the Cadillac and sent it back. You know, and you’ll find every ethnic group doing that. But even before we did that, as soon as we got to Canada, we started to get letters – ‘Oh, send me this, send me that, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme!’”</p>
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Title
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Jerri Zbiral
Description
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<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Child emigre
Concentration camp
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Czech-German relations
Discrimination
Forced labor
Heydrich assassination
Judaism
Lidice Massacre
Nazis
Refugee camp
Sense of identity
World War II
Zbiralova
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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>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
Description
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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
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
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