Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
]]>Thomas Gral was born in Nitra, Slovakia, in 1925. His mother, Helena, was a concert pianist who had studied in Vienna and Brno, while his father, Viliam, was a lawyer who attended Charles University. As Nitra was a large town situated close to Vienna and Budapest, Thomas grew up speaking Slovak, German and Hungarian, and he has early memories of visiting the two cosmopolitan cities. After elementary school, Thomas attended a classical gymnázium in Nitra.
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler and the split of the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the nominally-independent First Slovak State, Thomas’s life changed drastically. Although he and his parents were baptized Christians, they were ethnically Jewish and, therefore, were subject to the discrimination forced upon Jews. In September 1944, Thomas was deported to Auschwitz where he lost almost his entire family. He was liberated from Gleiwitz in February 1945 and he says that his relatively short stint in the camp was what saved him, as he had already lost an extreme amount of weight due to little food and hard labor.
Thomas made his way home to Nitra where he was reunited with his father, who had gone into hiding during the Slovak Uprising and had later been captured and sent to a POW camp. In the fall of 1945, Thomas started studying medicine at Comenius University in Bratislava. After a previerka, Thomas was asked to finish his studies at the Košice campus of Comenius University and so he moved with his wife and infant daughter. When he received his degree in 1951, he worked in internal medicine at the university.
In the aftermath of the Slánský trials, Thomas’s father was arrested due to his politics and friendships with Vladimir Clementis and Eugen Loebl, among others. Thomas himself lost his job at the university and spent two years in the army. Thomas and his family (which now included his son) moved to Bratislava in the early 1960s. In 1964, he was able to secure a one-year fellowship in a research institute at Loyola University Chicago. Although his family had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, Thomas was able to extend his fellowship for several years and he settled in Los Angeles. His wife was visiting during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and upon returning to Europe met their children in Vienna (who had visas thanks to the help of Thomas’s father). By that time Thomas had a green card and was able to bring them to the United States. His wife returned to Czechoslovakia to care for her father and the two eventually divorced.
Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), which he says was relatively active at the time. He received his American citizenship in 1974. Following the fall of communism, Thomas frequently returned to his homeland, teaching during summers. He also started a foundation in Hradec Králové dedicated to fighting intolerance. In his retirement, Thomas moved to the Miami area where he has given lectures at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Today he lives in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
“The biggest problem was that we had to move from our apartment, because we lived on the main street and Jews were not permitted to live on the main street. That was making the city ugly, if you had Jews living on the main street. So we had to find an apartment in a side street, which we did and it was actually pretty good. But then, of course, we couldn’t visit swimming pools, public places. We couldn’t visit parks, we couldn’t go to the movies, we couldn’t travel without a permit, and we had to wear the Star of David. So you had to be marked. And that was not a very pleasant thing, and not necessarily because of the fact that you had to deliver your sporting equipment. You had to give to the state. You had to donate it to the state. Of course all kinds of jewelry. Your bank accounts were frozen. And finally, my father was prohibited from being an attorney, so he had to find another job. It couldn’t be an attorney; it had to be some clerk, which we finally found. He was a clerk in a shoe factory and he did some clerical job there. But that gave him an exemption that we would not go into an concentration camp – at least not initially.”
“We all went to Auschwitz together and except for me, everybody perished. There was tremendous famine there. We had practically no food, so I lost – I was never a big guy – but I lost at least 40 pounds. So when I was liberated I weighed about 80 pounds. So if this would have taken a longer time I certainly wouldn’t have survived, because it was not only the lack food, but also hard labor. We had to work – which I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t stand that Auschwitz. I remember that smoke and the fire and the smell of burning bodies. So I reported myself that I am an expert electrician, which of course I was not. But I was taken as an electrician to a neighboring little camp where they had some electrical work; I never did anything electrical because it turned out that was a different camp – they mixed me up. But it doesn’t matter; it was still a labor camp, where the food wasn’t much better but at least we had to work and we were occupied and tired and came home and went to bed and slept. So I didn’t have too much time to think about things. So that’s why I was able to survive, and don’t forget that Auschwitz, and the neighboring camps, was liberated much earlier than the rest of the camps because the Russian front was so close. So actually, Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. I was liberated a little later because I was in a slightly more Western camp, but still it was the beginning of February.”
So which was the camp you were moved to?
“It was called Gleiwitz – Gliwice in Polish. That was an industrial city, as most of them there, in the same area of Auschwitz, maybe 35-40 miles from Auschwitz. Very close. And that was the sister camp because they didn’t have gas chambers in Gleiwitz, only in Auschwitz. So if somebody was too weak to work, then they sent him back to Auschwitz from Gleiwitz. There was no crematorium and no gas chamber, so there was a big difference.”
“I had a prověrka, previerka in Slovak, and I was given a condition that I can study, but I have to finish in the proper term. The fact that there was a previerka is horrible, but they way they acted toward me I would say is reasonable. They gave me a condition. They gave me another condition, which was given not on the university side but on the civilian side, that they suggested to me to be more in touch with the working people. That I was much of a high-nose, snobbish guy who is an intellectual who is studying medicine; that I should go to the folk, to the people, and I did. I immediately reported to become a factory physician for one month, to be close to the workers, and then I became a company physician later at the university, to become more united with the working class.”
“When I came back from the [concentration] camp, and it was not a communist state yet, I joined the Czechoslovak youth organization, which very many people joined. But that was good only until I was 27; after 27 it automatically became the Communist Party. So that’s how I became a member of the Party, but for three years I didn’t even pay my dues. But when I had my previerka, I was ordered to be more active as a member and after three years I paid my dues backwards and became more active, meaning I attended Party membership conferences and meetings and that’s it. But I was never a functionary or any office holder. So that was Party membership, which may have helped me a little bit in my difficult life as the son of a bourgeois who was in jail – maybe, I’m not sure.”
“It’s an insane system, that communism. That’s why it never worked any place, and it can be maintained only by terror, by secret police and by forbidding this and forbidding that and censoring the mail and censoring the newspaper. That’s why I felt it acutely that I had to go to the evening meeting of the Party, that I had to go on May 1 to manifest for Stalin, which I didn’t want to. So that’s why I was very anxious to get out, and when I did get out, suddenly I had all the possibility for doing research, doing what I wanted to do all my life. I had a laboratory, I had my mice and rats for experiments, I had a professor who took care of me – specifically had several fellows and I was one of them; excellent teacher – and I said ‘For goodness sake, now I’m going back to that Czechoslovakia.”
“Los Angeles is just a chapter, like Miami is a chapter, and we had a very good president who really arranged all kinds of lectures. And at that time we were lucky because, for instance, Milos Forman was there in Los Angeles and he gave a number of lectures. There was another guy who was chair of a filmmaking institute; I forgot his name, but he was a member of SVU. Then we had a painter, quite famous locally; he was a member. So it was interesting company: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professionals, filmmakers. And it was interesting to go to because it was a social club more or less, and it was not only lectures but also parties – beer and wine and some cookies and some good Czech cooking, because we went usually from one house to another – we didn’t have an official meeting place – or we met at the Beseda Sokol. They had one in Los Angeles.”
Stan Pechan was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1951. His father was an engineer who became head of the local road-building department, while his mother stayed at home with Stan and his brother, Marcel. After graduating from the local gymnázium in Michalovce, Stan went to medical school in Košice, studying at the Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika, at first general medicine and then dentistry in particular. A keen handballer, Stan continued to play for his home team Michalovce throughout his studies, as well as making it to the university world cup in the sport in Prague. Upon graduation, Stan was conscripted into the military for one year, which he spent in the Army Medical Corps, mostly at a clinic in Olomouc in southern Moravia. Following discharge in 1975, Stan returned to eastern Slovakia to work as a dentist in Budkovce. He met his future wife, Julie – an American of Slovak extraction – during a trip she made to Czechoslovakia at this time. The couple were married in Slovakia and Stan embarked upon the process of legally moving to the United States. The paperwork took one-and-a-half years, says Stan, who eventually arrived in Cleveland in March 1977.
After a number of years spent learning English and retraining as a dentist in the U.S., Stan became progressively more active in Slovak and Czech societies in the Cleveland area, such as Krajanský výbor, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Zemplin Club. To this day, he is an active member of the Cleveland chapter of SVU. Stan has his own dental practice and counts a large number of Slovaks and Czechs in Cleveland amongst his patients. He has two children, Michael and Nicole. He lives with his wife, Julie, in Avon Lake, Ohio.
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Stan Pechan was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1951. His father was an engineer who became head of the local road-building department, while his mother stayed at home with Stan and his brother, Marcel. After graduating from the local gymnázium in Michalovce, Stan went to medical school in Košice, studying at the Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika, at first general medicine and then dentistry in particular. A keen handballer, Stan continued to play for his home team Michalovce throughout his studies, as well as making it to the university world cup in the sport in Prague. Upon graduation, Stan was conscripted into the military for one year, which he spent in the Army Medical Corps, mostly at a clinic in Olomouc in southern Moravia. Following discharge in 1975, Stan returned to eastern Slovakia to work as a dentist in Budkovce. He met his future wife, Julie – an American of Slovak extraction – during a trip she made to Czechoslovakia at this time. The couple were married in Slovakia and Stan embarked upon the process of legally moving to the United States. The paperwork took one-and-a-half years, says Stan, who eventually arrived in Cleveland in March 1977.
After a number of years spent learning English and retraining as a dentist in the U.S., Stan became progressively more active in Slovak and Czech societies in the Cleveland area, such as Krajanský výbor, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Zemplin Club. To this day, he is an active member of the Cleveland chapter of SVU. Stan has his own dental practice and counts a large number of Slovaks and Czechs in Cleveland amongst his patients. He has two children, Michael and Nicole. He lives with his wife, Julie, in Avon Lake, Ohio.
“My dad – as a little kid, I remember – he actually, the building wasn’t even… there was scaffolding, and he moved, so as to secure, so that nobody could take this apartment. So he lived with no heating, there was nothing, there was not even a façade finished, it was just this brick or whatever, and [he] lived there so that nobody could come and steal this. Because that is how difficult it was to get an apartment!”
“We did fine, as a kid growing up, we did fine. We accepted the food was rationed, the dwellings were rationed, you know, you had only so much money, so yeah, but it was fine. There’s only so much food you need and then… you didn’t go hungry. We had to eat certain foods over and over, you know? Still today, I couldn’t eat cabbage for many, many years! But you adjust, you were able to adjust, and yeah, it was tougher. Occasionally we didn’t have hot water, maybe once a week, and those little conveniences that you have nowadays. So you can’t tell somebody… you got bread every day with lard on top of it and that’s it, that’s what you… nobody worried about nutrition, you worried that you were full, that’s all. So yeah, you can’t tell somebody if they didn’t have the same experience, yeah.”
“It was interesting, it was something and, you know, all of a sudden you think, well, all of a sudden you were more interested in your country than I was living there, you know? Because you tried to think, well, the country should… the country should be better, better off than… When you live there, you accept it. And when you look from the outside, you look at all of those inequities in the country and you think ‘this country should be much better, it’s got so much potential.’ You tried to, sometimes you were able to – not too much later on – but give certain donations to certain organizations to spread the word or help refugees. We always gave at the Krajanský výbor some money towards refugees. And politically, certain people tried to go there and get some information through so, you supported them.”
“That was the time when the Germans were going through, escaping East Germany, going through Hungary. So already things were, something was going on, or there was a big influx of Germans going to West Germany through Hungary, and Hungary allowed them to go. And you talked to different people, and at the time I talked to some, you know, Communism was still… on the surface it looked like nothing would change, to me the country looked the same. But you knew that… you talked to several people and they said that they… they talked to some in Prague and they said that the Communists already have their suitcases packed. They’re just ready to go, they knew that time was over for them.”
“Obviously, when I came, it was more cohesive. And I think the grouping took a lot of knowledge and hoping for change of the system, regime, and so people were coming together just to get some gossip or some information – if somebody traveled, [to ask] if they knew if maybe it’s getting better or worse. So there was some, people were together, and there was still this ethnic… there were a lot of programs. Even in the Zemplin Club, actually, the programs were very nice. At the time we had a, they made me MC a couple of times, of the Zemplin Club, and a little side note; I had to make a speech. And so I wrote the speech, I had to, for this one there was Cardinal Tomko who was, I think, third or fourth in the hierarchy in the Vatican – he was from Zemplin. And there was a General Čatloš, who was a big general, a Slovak general, and so, you know, I introduced it, and I made a little, kind of political, speech. Well, behold, this my speech ended up on Radio Free Europe. And my mum, she listened to Radio Free Europe, and there’s my speech being, at this time… and this was still communism so…”
“We talked about communism, even during communism. You know, in groups you talked, sometimes alcohol was involved, and then you started to talk, you know. People did talk. Sometimes you were unlucky and somebody maybe turned you in, you know? But this did not happen too much, it did not happen too much. Because we exchanged and we knew what was going on, later on, the abuse of power – we talked about it right openly. And the funny thing is afterwards, not being there but, it’s like a closed chapter, it’s over. Communism is done. Maybe some people do talk about it, but it seems like – what I read – that a lot of people just don’t want to talk about it, and I think that that’s historically, a lot of people don’t want to talk about certain things which happen. When there was war, they didn’t want to talk about it.”
Following his graduation, Peter began working as a freelance musician, performing, conducting and composing. He married and had a daughter. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Peter took the opportunity to travel. He says that he applied to seven countries for permanent residency; as he received permission from Canada straightaway, he and his family moved to Toronto in 1992. He visited New York for the first time when the American Ballet Theatre put on a performance of his works; later Peter applied for and received a green card. He moved to New York City in 2007 and, today, lives in close proximity to the house where Antonín Dvořák lived while in New York.
Peter is a prolific and renowned musician. He has conducted nearly every major orchestra, and his arrangements and recordings are especially popular. Peter is currently working on a multimedia program based on his orchestral piece called ‘Slovak Dances, Naughty and Nice’. He is also a writer, authoring a column for a popular Slovak newspaper. Since his childhood, Peter has been an avid soccer player and plays in the city four times a week. Today he lives in Manhattan.
]]>Peter Breiner was born in Humenné, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1957. His parents, Ernest and Edita, were both Holocaust survivors and his father also spent many years in a labor camp. His father managed several restaurants while his mother was a teacher. Peter and his younger brother and parents lived with his paternal grandparents, who attempted to maintain Orthodox Jewish traditions – a task which Peter says was not easy during the communist era. Peter began music lessons at a very young age and, by the time he was nine years old, he was taking the train to Košice once a week to study piano with a professor. Following his eighth grade year, Peter moved to Košice to study piano, composition and conducting at the conservatory. He continued his musical education at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. While at university, Peter worked as a train conductor and as a music producer for Czechoslovak Radio. Because he failed his Marxist-Leninist exam, says Peter, he was required to spend one extra year at university to repeat the class.
Following his graduation, Peter began working as a freelance musician, performing, conducting and composing. He married and had a daughter. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Peter took the opportunity to travel. He says that he applied to seven countries for permanent residency; as he received permission from Canada straightaway, he and his family moved to Toronto in 1992. He visited New York for the first time when the American Ballet Theatre put on a performance of his works; later Peter applied for and received a green card. He moved to New York City in 2007 and, today, lives in close proximity to the house where Antonín Dvořák lived while in New York.
Peter is a prolific and renowned musician. He has conducted nearly every major orchestra, and his arrangements and recordings are especially popular. Peter is currently working on a multimedia program based on his orchestral piece called ‘Slovak Dances, Naughty and Nice’. He is also a writer, authoring a column for a popular Slovak newspaper. Since his childhood, Peter has been an avid soccer player and plays in the city four times a week. Today he lives in Manhattan.
“I remember spending some enjoyable time, at four or five years old, at a music school in Slovakia with a particular teacher who, for some reason, decided that I am worth investing his time into. So I, on occasion – as I have been told – I even ran away from home to go to music school. So when they couldn’t find me they went ‘Oh, he’s probably at the music school again.’ That is a memory other people have; I don’t quite recall it. I just remember that particular teacher, Mr. Fecura, who was a very nice and friendly person and who was one of my first contacts with music-making.”
“For obvious reasons my parents were too scared to be Jewish after what they’d been through. We lived with my paternal grandparents and they were very religious. They were almost Orthodox Jews, to an extent that was possible during communism, because there was no synagogue left in Humenné and not much kosher food available, if any. So they really tried and, on top of that, my parents maintained general Slovak cultural traditions, including [having] a Christmas tree and Easter, so it was quite confusing for me. Even when I went to school there was still religion taught – it was one of the last years – and so, Friday afternoon, a local Catholic priest arrived, looked at the grade one kids and saw me, and said ‘Oh, my son. You can go home.’ I was terribly upset because I wanted to take part in everything all the other kids did, but I wasn’t allowed to, and without any explanation. At home I wasn’t told why I was sent home, so I had no idea. Monday, again when we all got together, it was discussed: ‘Why was I sent home?’ Nobody knew; I didn’t know until one of my classmates came with an explanation and said ‘Oh, I know why it happened. Because his father is a communist.’
“So it was rather confusing and, the same way as I learned about the past of my parents, the same way I picked up information about our religious background, or whatever it was, and it was up to myself to figure out by reading and by putting things together that ‘Hey, it looks like we are Jewish, even with a Christmas tree and Easter eggs and everything. We probably are Jewish.’”
“As a child you have many different interests, so there moments when it was quite difficult and overwhelming to cope with the fact that I had to spend four hours every day practicing piano at the age when all the other kids were running around outside and having fun. But somehow that fascination with music that I had since I can remember – plus the perks, in the form of skipping school once a week and being on my own for an entire day as at ten or eleven years old I was taking the train to Košice and going to the restaurant for lunch on my own – kept me going, because it was quite unusual and had a sense of adventure in it and a sense of being different and doing things other kids didn’t; and I was entering competitions and I was meeting great musicians who were on a very different level and I was competing with people that were much older. So that all played together to the extent that it wasn’t overly difficult to overcome that aversion that naturally developed after awhile when it became clear that there has to be time spent in order to get any further.
“I think my mother was quite ambitious for me and then I adopted that ambition as well, and once I entered the conservatory the fascination with all things musical I was able to do all the time was too strong to even think about a different career or a different direction in my life. It was just very straight and very clear to me that there is nothing else I want to do.”
“Turned out that the best thing out of it was freedom to travel, which I used immediately, and I asked for permanent residency in seven different countries. I didn’t care where I would go, I just wanted where I didn’t want to be. Despite the fact that I was already a fairly prominent figure in Slovak music and had some success, it was so severely limited by people that would make an effort to consciously hurt me or my career, and I thought ‘This is not going to get any better.’ I was aware that at that time I had and exclusive contract with a recording label in Hong Kong [and] I knew that was taken care of for at least two years, financially, so I said to myself and my family ‘Let’s go somewhere. Whether it’s New Zealand or Australia or Holland or England or Germany or Canada or U.S.A…’ I applied to seven different countries, and Canada replied positively and first, so we went to Canada. I didn’t know anyone there; I just decided to go and be there, and it worked.”
“My grandmother’s cousin immigrated to the United States, I think, shortly after the War – or even during the War – I’m not sure, but they lived in Cleveland and, about once a year, she would send a package from America. The famous package from America: chewing gum, jeans, and, of course, being myself, I had special requests, which were scores. I wanted Gershwin’s scores because they were completely unattainable, like any American scores. So I was 14 when, in one of those famous packages, there were jeans made of stars and stripes – the American flag. Of course the first thing I did was wear it on the street. After ten minutes I was stopped by a policeman and sent home to change. I realized I can’t walk on the street, but I took it to school and I changed at school. So after ten minutes I was stopped by the director of the school and sent home too. That was my first American experience, and the other was West Side Story. When the movie arrived in Slovakia I went to see it eight times in one week. I was completed fascinated by it, and so on some unconscious level that was always my final destination, even if consciously I was aware that it’s just impossible.”
In 2002, two of Pavol’s friends who had plans to move to Canada convinced Pavol to join them; Pavol says that he had always thought of Canada as a place of freedom and nature, but that he hadn’t given much prior thought to moving there. He applied for a permanent resident visa which he received less than two months later; he says this was an unusually short waiting period. He and his wife arrived in Toronto where Pavol quickly found a job in a warehouse. After nine months of applying for jobs in his field, he began working for the Bank of Montreal in 2003 and has remained there ever since. Pavol is active in the Slovak community in Toronto, serving on the boards of several organizations including the Slovak House in Toronto and the Canadian Slovak Institute. He is the founder of Canada SK Entertainment, an organization which brings Slovak groups to perform in Canada and the United States. A dual citizen of Canada and Slovakia, Pavol speaks Slovak at home with his wife and keeps Slovak holiday traditions. He lives in Toronto.
]]>Pavol Dzacko was born in 1974 in Bratislava. Before the Velvet Revolution, Pavol’s father, Štefan, worked in an agricultural processing center; following the Revolution, he took a job providing IT services for a bank. Pavol’s mother, Dagmar, was a teacher who, following the Revolution, began teaching French at a small college. Pavol grew up the oldest of five siblings. When he was two, the family moved to Košice for his father’s job. As a boy, Pavol was interested in electronics and heavy metal music; he says his two hobbies intersected when he created homemade amplifiers and other devices for his friends. Pavol says that although his day-to-day life did not immediately change after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he remembers the time to be one of ‘excitement.’ He attended technical high school and studied computer programming at the Technical University of Košice. Upon his graduation in 1997, Pavol moved to Bratislava where he served one year in the military and simultaneously worked as a janitor at the financial and insurance firm AXA. At AXA (which was contracting for CitiBank), Pavol moved into IT development and, later, became a manager.
In 2002, two of Pavol’s friends who had plans to move to Canada convinced Pavol to join them; Pavol says that he had always thought of Canada as a place of freedom and nature, but that he hadn’t given much prior thought to moving there. He applied for a permanent resident visa which he received less than two months later; he says this was an unusually short waiting period. He and his wife arrived in Toronto where Pavol quickly found a job in a warehouse. After nine months of applying for jobs in his field, he began working for the Bank of Montreal in 2003 and has remained there ever since. Pavol is active in the Slovak community in Toronto, serving on the boards of several organizations including the Slovak House in Toronto and the Canadian Slovak Institute. He is the founder of Canada SK Entertainment, an organization which brings Slovak groups to perform in Canada and the United States. A dual citizen of Canada and Slovakia, Pavol speaks Slovak at home with his wife and keeps Slovak holiday traditions. He lives in Toronto.
“I spent most of my time, not in front of the computer because there were no publicly available computers in those days, but my hobby was to create small electronic devices – radios, blinking stuff, anything which would create a weird noise – little gizmos like that. Very interesting devices in those days, and very popular, were amplifiers, because every good musician needs amplifiers and boosters and all these kinds of devices. So I became famous for my electric guitar specialized devices among my friends.”
“I was in class when it happened. Suddenly everybody went out. Everybody spent a couple of days, a couple of nights, on the streets, and we knew it was over. You knew from the beginning it was over. There was a lot of excitement because now we recognize multiple parties, multiple goals and strategies for how to make people happy in politics. Those days there was only one option – them, Communists, or not them. So I guess it was kind of a surprise for everybody when we realized that we are suddenly free, ok, and what next? Nobody thought of ‘what next?’ means. In the moment we ran away from the school and spent the nights on the street.”
“I was with the Ministry of Defense in Bratislava with an intelligence group, screening through all kinds of newspapers, media, TV shows, and my role was basically to capture any single news which was related to the Army. So my work day was starting at 4:00 a.m. and I was done about noon, and I had another eight hours to have a second job – which was out of the Army in a company named AXA. That’s how I started there. It was interesting in the terms that it was something ‘secret,’ so I felt important. Plus, I didn’t have to shovel roads and run in circles for ten hours and funny stuff like that. I was treated as a professional. So I wouldn’t say it was quite easy, but it was definitely easier than 99 percent of other guys serving in the Army.”
“I landed in Toronto, and my first feeling when I was landing was ‘Oh my gosh. What did I do?’ I realized in that very moment ‘Yes, this is a remote country; yes, English is the language here; yes, I’m alone; yes, I don’t have a job; yes, I don’t know anybody.’ That was the feeling – frustrating.”
So what happened next?
“I never became homesick, that’s the first thing. Plus, I’m not a person who would sit home and wait for a miracle, so I got a job after two weeks. I worked in a warehouse picking fruits and vegetables, loading trucks. Of course I was looking for a job in my area, but I had to pay the bills. There was rent, there was everything else, so I had to make sure that I had income. So I spent nine months in that warehouse until I found a job.”
“It is a very easy question with a very easy answer. Our lives are like a moving window of 20, 30, 40 years? Nobody knows, right? When you’re gone, whatever you brought to this life is gone unless somebody saves it. Slovak people in Canada came a long, long time ago; they’re dying, everybody will pass away eventually, so if we don’t save what was valuable to them, what was valuable to the community, those days will be gone. There are plenty of historical documents dying in somebody’s basement being flooded, being lost, being thrown away, and the purpose of what we do is to save it. To save it not just for us, but for the future so we know that Slovaks were here, they were not an insignificant group, they did huge things and all these things will not be lost.”
Do you think sometimes that people who are expatriates or people who are abroad have a different relationship to their own cultural heritage than people who stay in their country?
“Absolutely, because staying in a country, you don’t feel the gravity of the situation. In the country, you still speak the same language, you see all those folk groups – professional ones – performing, and you don’t have a feeling that you’re losing something or that there is something that may be lost or forgotten. Away from home, you feel it. Because if a culture is not preserved, people assimilate with native people – which is normal – and after a couple generations there wouldn’t be any Slovaks here.”
Pavel says that after his Army service, he had to make a decision about pursuing the arts professionally or beginning his business career. He says that although the time period was excellent for getting into business, he enrolled at a small school in Canada to pursue a performing arts degree. After one year there, he transferred to the School for New Dance Development and finished his degree in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, Pavel applied for the U.S. green card lottery. Many months later, while he was completing an internship in Louisiana, Pavel was notified that he had been selected for an interview. As he was not able to return to Europe in time for the interview, he rescheduled the interview and finished his internship. In September 1999, Pavel moved to New York City. After unsuccessful pursuit of performing with established companies he started producing his own work instead. In 2004, Pavel formed his own company, Palissimo, and today continues to be the artistic director there. He lives in Manhattan.
]]>Pavel Zuštiak was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1971. His father, Ján, was a director at a construction company while his mother, Zuzana, was a meteorologist for a TV station who did research and collected data. Pavel is the youngest of three boys and he recalls frequently visiting his grandparents who lived on a farm near the High Tatras. At age nine, Pavel was cast in a musical children’s television show called Zlatá brána [Golden Gate]. He also participated in a modern dance group and played piano. After high school, Pavel applied to JAMU (Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts) in Brno for theatre directing, but was advised to re-apply again since he was only 17 at the time. He instead began studying business at the University of Economics in Košice and, shortly after classes started, the Velvet Revolution occurred. Pavel says that he realized he was ‘witnessing a major moment in history.’ While studying business, Pavel took one year off to study at a performing arts school in Canada. He then returned to Slovakia, graduated university, and did one year of alternative Army service where he translated books from English to Slovak.
Pavel says that after his Army service, he had to make a decision about pursuing the arts professionally or beginning his business career. He says that although the time period was excellent for getting into business, he enrolled at a small school in Canada to pursue a performing arts degree. After one year there, he transferred to the School for New Dance Development and finished his degree in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, Pavel applied for the U.S. green card lottery. Many months later, while he was completing an internship in Louisiana, Pavel was notified that he had been selected for an interview. As he was not able to return to Europe in time for the interview, he rescheduled the interview and finished his internship. In September 1999, Pavel moved to New York City. After unsuccessful pursuit of performing with established companies he started producing his own work instead. In 2004, Pavel formed his own company, Palissimo, and today continues to be the artistic director there. He lives in Manhattan.
“My father saw an ad in the paper for an audition for the TV show, for the Golden Gate show.”
How old were you?
“I was nine. And it was a show that was broadcast in the whole Eastern European bloc and it was broadcast once a month and then there was one New Year’s Eve special edition. We would learn the songs, we would prepare for the show for about a month and then it ended with five days in the studio. I say coincidence because it was kind of surprising that it was my father who instigated me pursuing that. But then it was my mom who actually took me to the audition, and I remember my audition number was very high, so we were there most of the day and I think there was a point where my mom was trying to convince me just to leave because it was probably 10:00 in the evening and there was still a long line before us. But eventually we stayed and I remember I got a telegram at the time to come to the first rehearsal and I was very excited.”
“A schoolmate of mine wanted to go and audition for a folk dance company. It was very popular at the time and this was also the time when Flashdance came out, and so dancing was a big thing. This friend of mine wanted to go to an audition, but he didn’t want to go alone so he asked me if I’d go with him. I said ‘Sure,’ and once we got there we realized that he messed up the dates of the audition, and the day when we came it was actually a modern dance company audition. So we stayed and both of us got in, and he quit after a month and, for me, this whole new world was introduced and presented to me.”
“I remember activists who came from Prague right after the revolution, right after the demonstration in Prague, with video documentation. It was both at school and I know that through any underground Christian groups, they would be very present there. So all of us would watch the footage from the demonstration and at that point I really felt like there’s no way that this could turn backwards. And I don’t know how much that was just my naïveté at the time, but the power of that wave that was coming felt… And also understanding the opposition and what is going to play against it, at that point I felt like there is no way it would reverse. There were too many things leaning towards that system collapsing, I think.”
“I ended up graduating and getting my masters within a year after I got back; at the same time, I started to run my own dance company in Slovakia. Once I graduated, I actually did an alternative Army service. I was translating books from English to Slovak. After I finished that, I was at the point where I had to look for work. My desire to work in the arts and pursue arts was still very strong and, on the other hand, it was a very good time to find work with my business education. Many Western companies were opening affiliations in Eastern Europe, and I knew that if I take that route that it will be impossible for me to continue doing dance and arts on the side, because it’s pretty much an all-consuming career. So I decided at that point to go and get a degree in the arts and, at that point, kind of deciding and making decisions about the future.”
“My works are multidisciplinary in nature. Movement and dance is at the core of the work, but I am always bringing to every project a group of artists and designers. Even performers and dancers that I work with, I treat them as collaborators. Eventually each element of the show, from lighting, through set, through music, I see those elements as equal voices or equal elements in creating a work, creating an environment, creating a narrative. It usually starts with a theme or questions around a theme that we are discussing together and often I see myself an editor. All of us generate material that I start to sort through and edit through, and eventually create a world of images. Often I create a sequence of images that don’t connect in a linear way, but create a world, create an environment.
“Thematically, within the last several years, I was drawn a lot to themes and ideas that are themes of the narrative of my own life and questions of my own life: issues of identity; ideas of belonging; trying to find your place within a community; ideas of otherness or being the other, not fitting; how does the environment we are in define who we are. So these themes are kind of directly and indirectly flowing throughout my work.”
“The rest of the group is very diverse: Irish dancer, Italian dancer, Czech dancer, another Czech dancer; I’ve worked with Israeli dancers. So really this is truly a melting pot. But the nationality is not necessarily as important for me when I’m selecting people. It’s more their story and their personality and who they are as humans in their life, because that reflects to who they are on stage.”
In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.
Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.
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Monica Rokus was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in January 1950. Her father, Jan, worked as an architect for the firm Stavoprojekt and then for the city of Košice, as the assistant to the municipal architect. Monica’s mother, Eudoxia, meanwhile stayed at home raising her and her older brother, Paul. At home the family spoke Hungarian and Slovak. Monica attended the Slovak-language Kováčska Street gymnázium and, as a keen gymnast, competed with the club Lokomotiva Košice in her spare time. Upon graduation in 1968, she had plans to study in Bratislava at Comenius University’s Sports Faculty.
In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.
Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.
“We were speaking Slovak and Hungarian equally. My mum spoke Hungarian to us and my father spoke Slovak to us, and my grandmother spoke German to us, so it seemed like chaos for outsiders, because not everybody had that, but a lot of families in Košice spoke Hungarian and Slovak because that was… So when I was asked ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ I would say ‘Oh, my mother tongue is Hungarian and my father tongue is Slovak and my grandmother tongue is German. It was actually Schwaebisch, so she taught us how to write in that. I forgot all my German as I learned English though.”
“See, my uncle was in Siberia, my mother’s youngest brother was in Siberia for eight years, and I remember when he came home in 1954. And that was, I mean, that was horrendous and I listened to him for hours and hours on end of how they were treated in Siberia. He left as a 17 year old, they took him from the street as a 17 year old, and he came back in 1954, I remember him, I’ll never forget, and he looked like an old man. He had grey hair as a twenty-some year old. So, it was a very painful thing in the family to discuss because you couldn’t discuss it, you couldn’t discuss it, because he was so scared, having lived through it. Not until we were older, when I went back [in 1978] did I talk to him and he was telling us stories that were… just pretty awful.
“He was a 17 year old what was called Levente. They were training with – this is the story I was told – they were training with wooden guns, and the Russians took them, took these, it was an organization of young boys that were not army trained yet, because they were too young. And he was in the archipelago, in Siberia for eight years in captivity. And they let a few of them go and said ‘Here, go,’ and just his trip from Siberia with no means, with one long coat and a bag, you know, getting on trains illegally, and being thrown out of trains… because they were free to go, but they had no means of getting there.”
“It had to have been like ’58 or… ’58-ish. And my father and my mother went for a walk to the park and didn’t come back, like, for hours. And because our aunt lived with us, we weren’t left alone, but we were waiting and waiting and saying ‘Where are they?’ And then my aunt came in and my grandfather came in and you know, they were kind of calming us down and said ‘Well mummy and dad are not coming home’. Well, they were arrested in the park in Košice, my father was taking pictures of my mother. It was a nice spring day – spring or fall day – I know it was. And he had a camera from Germany, a little, tiny, 36mm, you which… we had the big Flexaret 6 x 9. And this was this little new camera which his friend Laco, who was then the head architect, brought from Germany, from East Germany, I’m pretty sure. And it had the kinofilm, the 35mm.
“So he obviously used it, tried to take pictures of my mother whom he obviously loved and thought she was hot. So they arrested them for taking pictures, and later on we found out what happened, but they were not home for like three days. And I mean, within this time, there were these police officers, they were in civil clothing, and raided our apartment. And they took every camera we had, which was this big Flexaret and another 8mm movie camera, because my father loved doing that. They took all of that, all the film, all the negatives, everything that was in the cabinet, they took everything. Because they were spying? I don’t know…
“Well it turned out that they arrested them until they cleared all the films and all the, you know, camera equipment that they weren’t spies and all the pictures on it obviously got destroyed, because they didn’t get them back. So the film from that little camera, however, they pulled that out, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Oh, it was color film too, imagine that, in the ’50s. And they brought out to my dad a 6 x 9 film and said ‘What are these –xs here?’ And he said ‘That is not from my camera! What are you, crazy? This is from a big one, right, it won’t even fit in that!’ Boom! So they got beaten. And my father had bruises and my mother had, you know… they were not allowed to talk. They were sitting together and they were not allowed to talk. And they were jailed for three days, to find out that they were spies, they had nothing on them, obviously. But here was the thing; he was taking pictures in an area that was secret. He said ‘What is secret about this?’ Because there were no signs saying ‘you may not’, you know how you have signs saying ‘No photography’ or something. Nothing was marked. It was unmarked but he should have known that down that park, at the end of the park, in the middle of the park, was the police station. And that was the secret. I don’t think they ever found out what was secret.”
“When I was graduating gymnázium, that was 1968 – June 4, 1968 – the day that Bobby Kennedy got shot, I remember hearing that on the news when I was walking in for my exam. And what had happened in 1968, In January of ’68, you know, The Prague Spring, Russian became non-mandatory to take as an exam in maturita [the school leaver’s certificate].
“So we had Slovak, Russian, history… oh, and Latin, and then a selective, so I took German as a selective. Well, then Russian became non-mandatory and I said ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to graduate? That’s all I know!’ So, I took it as a selective. And I thought, well, there’ll be a bunch of us. No one. No one in the whole gymnázium graduated in Russian as an elective. I was so embarrassed, because there was so much animosity towards Russian. But I did not carry the animosity to the language, because I loved the language, you know, Pushkin and Dostoevsky and all that, I used to read it in Russian. So I loved it, I loved the language. And I loved Hungarian, so the animosities that were, such as they were – I was not affected by them, if you will. A lot of people tried to forget the language, intentionally, they worked on it. And it worked – after a few years, they did forget.”
“She also told me not to tell anyone, just one close friend, and so all my closest 30 friends came to say goodbye to the train station. But, what I may add, everybody was so loose about this, everybody was so bitter about what had happened, everybody was just so upset that even on the borders people knew we were not coming back but they were like ‘Good luck, have a good life.’ That was what they said. But my worst memories were prior to leaving when I knew we were leaving. You know, we were in towns and there were all these tanks and shootings, because we had a curfew, like at 6:00 or 7:00, I’m not sure what it was. But there were all these tanks, and in Kosice with all these tanks the cobblestones, I mean they were all ripped up from the tanks, horrible, horrible, horrible. Rude, the soldiers were pretty rude to us, because we were talking, saying ‘What are you doing here?’ Some of them didn’t even know they were not in their own country, some had children in the tanks. Yeah – because the Russians were taken from wherever they were, they were called in to ‘save Slovakia, or Czechoslovakia, from capitalism’. So they came to save us. It was horrible, it was horrible.”
“I was the women’s, I was the náčelníčka [leader] of the women’s group. We created a Czechoslovak school with a couple of friends and we were teaching, a couple of women were teaching Slovak and Czech to our American children, and I was teaching gymnastics. And I think it was once a week, we dragged our kids there to learn Slovak. But I mean all my kids speak Slovak, but it’s spoken, so they learned to write and read and they hated going there because who wants to go to school after school? But they learned some, and we had these events where they were dancing. There was a very active lady by the name of Lucia Maruska Levandis, very talented, she was making kroje, so we made those for the kids. I mean I helped her, she made most of it. The events that were organized for children, they were like Mikulášska and they were Sokol and SVU and all the organizations so… We were pretty active in all of those.”
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
]]>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s chata [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.
In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.
“I was young. I was probably ten or even less, and times sometimes were really tough. And I remember there were days, for example, there was a real shortage of milk and then when milk arrived, the kids would run in front of the block and they would yell ‘Mom, milk arrived!’ and everybody kind of looked and then everybody just grabbed the reusable shopping bag and all went down and stood in line for milk. It was the same thing for oil, like cooking oil, or butter, I remember, or there was the winter season before Christmas and it was any tropical fruit like bananas and oranges or, my goodness, if there was a pineapple, it was like ‘Wow!’ So as a child, I pretty much used to stand in line for food, which I really dislike. If there’s anything going on, like a picnic, and there’s food involved, I really refuse to stand in line for food.”
“Yes, we did have a chata, or summer home, or záhrada [garden] and we pretty much spend almost the entire summer there. There was always something to do. My dad was very much an avid gardener and we grew everything. I didn’t know such a thing as to go to a store and purchase potatoes or carrots or even things like jam or ketchup or anything. My mom pretty much made everything from scratch at home and in our apartment building, downstairs, there was a place where everybody had a teeny storage space. We called it a pivničný priestor or pivnica, and everybody just had this little nook with a door and you open it and it looked like a pantry. It was a pantry of everything like a large bag of potatoes, sauerkraut that was made in this huge barrel, jams, and syrups, and preserved fruit. I mean, it was just like living goodness down there. I very much clearly remember Sundays mom would make traditionally rezne, or schnitzels, with potatoes and then would say ‘Oh we are out of pickled cucumbers,’ or she said ‘What do you want? Do you want cucumbers or peaches in syrup?’ And when we were out of it at home, we had to take the elevator all the way downstairs. Sometimes we were really lazy and we’d just say ‘I’ll just stick with pickles,’ because I was just too lazy to go down and get it.”
“My dad was the person who had a lot of friends. He was very outgoing and he knew a lot of people. I remember one day he came home with this huge suitcase and it was quite late in the evening and he said ‘Ok, are you up for it?’ and I said ‘Dad, what are you talking about?’ and he opened this suitcase and it was filled with these LPs of all these Western artists. So I remember holding the Madonna LP in my hand, Material Girl. I would read it and I had no idea what it meant, but I was just so excited. I said ‘Dad, where did you get this?’ He said ‘Don’t ask any questions. We have until morning to go through all these LPs and to record them on cassettes. So whatever you want, just go for it, girl.’ I was up with my dad listening to all these LPs and I remember Falco; I remember Nana, Bananarama, Rick Astley, Aha – all these bands from the ‘80s. Later on I learned that dad had to schmooze up this local DJ to be able to bring these LPs home, and it was literally just for several hours we had them and then he had to return it.”
“I remember my very first trip when I was ten. My sister and my grandmother, we traveled to Bulgaria. We were very excited because we were finally going to see the Black Sea. So traveling, it was quite a journey. It took us pretty much two and a half days on the bus, and I remember clearly crossing the borders. It was terrifying. It was standing in a long line, being afraid that they might send you back for whatever reason. There were policemen or soldiers with guns. There were dogs. There was nowhere to go; there were no restrooms at all, so you had to really hold or just go out there wherever. It was usually just a field, like open fields. Yeah, it was kind of terrifying for us as kids. We didn’t know what’s going to happen, and we could just see all the adults, the way they reacted to it, and that was terrifying because, as a child, you depend on the adult being able to help you.
“The Romanian border was probably the worst. There were a lot of small Gypsy children that would come and be knocking on the bus and they would be asking for anything, money or candy. There were so many of them and they would be looking so poor. Sometimes they were not even dressed; dirty little kids. So that was kind of hard to see. But then when we arrived in Bulgaria, we were like ‘Wow!’ It was just like a different world, being able to see the Black Sea and eating different foods and people speaking different languages. That was really nice.”
“I was looking forward to seeing something different and pretty much when they were saying that we are opening borders, all I could think of was ‘Wow, we can actually just go somewhere else than Bulgaria?’ So that was my first thought in my head: travel. Travel and see the world. I don’t know if the seed of coming to America was planted back then, but it might have. I really just wanted to know where the beautiful napkin with Strawberry Shortcake came from. It was something that I think a lot of people my age wanted to do. They wanted to go out West – not necessarily to the United States – but just experience and learn.”
“There were definitely a lot of things happening in Košice. For example, the Východoslovenské železiarne [Eastern Slovakia Iron Works], where my mom worked for many years, all of the sudden they have a new owner. U.S. Steel, from Pennsylvania is coming and taking over. So that was huge. This is a company that has years of history in the metallurgical industry. The import/export business has always been there – and heavy. We’re talking, this company employed thousands and thousands of people, so that was the very, very strong talk.
“My mom stayed in her current job but then changed positions, and with the U.S. Steel coming as part of the new wave, there were a lot of changes that even for my mom were hard to digest. Because people lived this life day by day for so many years and not everybody is very good with change, and this was very strong. This was very strong. I remember my mom, so many times she would come home really exhausted and she was like ‘You know what these Americans have come up with again?!’ I can’t remember quite exactly what, but she was in charge of – U.S. Steel had internal dry cleaning/laundry because there were a lot of workers who had uniforms and those were the people that the service was for, but then my mom also had clients like local hotels or motels and accommodations for the workers, and so there were a lot of changes in the technology of how the business was run. [It was] much more strict. Not too many coffee breaks; not too much smoking cigarettes and a lot of people didn’t like that. So the capitalism was definitely, slowly but surely, getting in, and a lot of people lost jobs because they were not flexible enough, I would say.”
“This social group was created purely out of my own curiosity and maybe a little homesickness. I kind of wanted to create a sense of community of Slovaks in this area, to learn who is out there, who may be interested to get together and talk about our upbringing and culture, eat the food and just have a simply good time. And slowly but surely, since 2006 when I started this group, the meet-up has over 230 members. Not everybody is active, which is fine with me, but we do a lot of different things and I have met so many wonderful, wonderful friends through this meet-up. Great friendships; we help each other if we can. So it is almost like my own little family that I have here in D.C.”
After high school, Lubos studied economics at Comenius University in Bratislava. In the newly-formed College of Management, Lubos says that much of the curriculum was not only American-based, but also taught in English. In 1994, Lubos traveled to Kansas for a study-abroad program at Wichita State University. He decided to finish his undergraduate education there and, one year later, began a doctoral program in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving his doctorate, Lubos accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where today he is a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.
In 1996, Lubos’s future wife, Sonia, arrived in the United States. The pair had met at university in Bratislava. They married and, today, have three children. Lubos says that the family speaks Slovak at home, and they return to Slovakia each summer to visit family. Today, Lubos lives in Chicago with his family.
]]>Lubos Pastor was born in Košice, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1974. His parents, Marie and František, were both math teachers – his mother taught at the high school while his father also taught computer science at the local university. As a student, Lubos’s hobbies included computers, chess, math, and athletics. He competed in chess tournaments and participated in math competitions and camps. He also often joined his parents and younger sister for hikes and gardening. Lubos attended a math-oriented gymnázium for high school. He was in his second year there when the Velvet Revolution occurred. Lubos recalls crowds and protests in Košice and says that the fall of communism changed his life as he saw that ‘anything was possible.’
After high school, Lubos studied economics at Comenius University in Bratislava. In the newly-formed College of Management, Lubos says that much of the curriculum was not only American-based, but also taught in English. In 1994, Lubos traveled to Kansas for a study-abroad program at Wichita State University. He decided to finish his undergraduate education there and, one year later, began a doctoral program in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving his doctorate, Lubos accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where today he is a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.
In 1996, Lubos’s future wife, Sonia, arrived in the United States. The pair had met at university in Bratislava. They married and, today, have three children. Lubos says that the family speaks Slovak at home, and they return to Slovakia each summer to visit family. Today, Lubos lives in Chicago with his family.
“We had a little Sinclair computer at home when I was growing up. Back then I was probably 12 or so when he bought a little Sinclair for me. It was just a few kilobytes of memory, but I was able to do a little coding in Basic. I even programmed my own little game – this little ghost moving around and collecting some goodies. Similar to one of the games at the time. But computing was certainly in its diapers. It’s come a long ways since then.”
“They would call them seminars. So what would happen is that high school kids would get a set of math problems, say eight problems, once a month, and they were not easy problems – some of the were, but not too easy – and you were supposed to solve them, write them up, [and] send them in. Once a month you would do that and then, every three months or so, the top thirty kids would be selected and invited to a weeklong camp, which was a combination of math lectures and a lot of fun in the afternoon and evening. So I did at least a dozen of those, both in Košice and in Bratislava and even outside Slovakia, maybe a couple in the Czech Republic. I got a lot of math, and especially a lot of friends, that way.
“Some other extracurricular activities… Well, I used to play a lot of chess as a kid. Starting maybe in fourth grade I played in a lot of tournaments. My father taught me how to play chess and then I had a coach, who was actually Czech but lived in Košice – Václav Bednář. He gave me a lot. He was a great guy – still is, I think – I hope. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. There are some really good chess players back there in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Many of the kids I used to play with and battle with are now Grand Masters. Mostly in the Czech in Republic; some in Slovakia. So I did math and chess. I did some athletics as well. Only locally, so I would run distances like the 800 meters and 1500 meters. Those were my favorites.”
“I was just a bit too young to appreciate what was going on, I think. I didn’t feel at age 14 or 15 that I was being oppressed. I did things that I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed doing things like sports and math and chess and I liked school; you could do all of those things without any restrictions so, at the time, I didn’t really understand the big picture. When I was 14 and 15 I did not really understand how oppressive that system was to adults. I think maybe two or three years later it would have started oppressing me. So I got really lucky.”
“The big thing that I think was stamped on me for the rest of my life was that I saw as a kid… At ages 15, 16, 17, you build your views about how the society works, whether you would like your society to look like this or that, and at that time what my generation saw was that the whole society can be changed. So when you see that, when you see that the whole political system in which you lived can be replaced, anything becomes possible. Anything becomes possible. And many of my peers from my cohort, plus or minus one year, have become very successful later on. And I wonder whether this mentality was acquired back then. That they saw that anything was possible and that sort of made their lives more open, and that perhaps pushed them to work harder and in pursuit of their dreams. That was the main thing. That’s still with me.”
“So we speak mostly Slovak at home. They grew up here, they go to school here, which means that English is their first language and I don’t think we can change that. But we do speak mostly Slovak at home. They understand Slovak; they can speak it. You can tell they are not native, but they can speak it. In addition to speaking it at home, we take them to Slovakia every summer where they get to meet their grandparents and their numerous cousins. So they always pick up a lot of Slovak there. At the end of each summer their Slovak is a lot better than at the beginning of each summer.”
In 1999, Jozef enrolled in a molecular biology doctoral program at Charles University in Prague and his research focused on childhood leukemia. During this time he attended several conferences in the United States; his first trip was in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Through contacts he made at conferences, Jozef applied for and was given a research position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One year later, he transferred to his current position at the University of Chicago. Jozef says that he has two homes, one in Chicago and one in Slovakia, but that he finds it easy imagining his future in the United States.
]]>Jozef Madzo was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in 1976. He says that he had a ‘really nice childhood’ and enjoyed spending weekends with his family at their cabin in Slanec, a small town outside of Košice. Jozef was active in a karate club and computer programming club, and showed an affinity for science from a young age. He was in eighth grade at the time of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which he says resulted in numerous name changes for the schools he attended. After graduating fromgymnázium, Jozef studied biology at Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika [Pavol Jozef Šafárik University] in Košice. Summers he spent working in construction. He recalls one particularly fun summer during which he worked in the Czech Republic picking hops.
In 1999, Jozef enrolled in a molecular biology doctoral program at Charles University in Prague and his research focused on childhood leukemia. During this time he attended several conferences in the United States; his first trip was in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Through contacts he made at conferences, Jozef applied for and was given a research position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One year later, he transferred to his current position at the University of Chicago. Jozef says that he has two homes, one in Chicago and one in Slovakia, but that he finds it easy imagining his future in the United States.
“I was 14, so at that age you start forming ideas about the world, and we felt that there is something wrong with all the things they are telling us, and communism fell and it was like ‘Oh yeah, so this is what that is.’ We had been told that the communist system is the best system ever, but you can see that people emigrated from communism to Western Europe, but it never happened the other way. So we were like ‘There’s something wrong. Why all these people from Germany don’t come here and all people from Slovakia are trying to escape to Austria and Germany?’ We were like ‘Ok, maybe that’s not all true that this is the best system ever.”
“It was fun to learn new stuff. I was interested in biology, so I enjoyed it. It was a really good social life with your colleagues and classmates because you studied a lot together and after that, when passed the exam, you had fun together, and after that you study again. Because I studied biology, we used to have a lot of field trips and field classes, so it was kind of nice to get out of the city and still be in school, but be in the field.”
“There was no need to learn the Czech language. Of course, growing up in Czechoslovakia, there is mutual understanding, so I could understand everything. I just kept speaking Slovak because I would rather speak normal Slovak than broken Czech if they can understand me, and there was no problem. My thesis, I wrote in Slovak because I could have written it in broken Czech or decent Slovak, so I chose decent Slovak. There were some official documents that had to be written in Czech; of course I was using Czech in these official grand reports or emails, but for day to day work I used Slovak.”
“It was really interesting. The first time I visited the U.S. it was in late fall/early winter of 2001, so it was right after the attack on the World Trade Center. It was really chaotic because they had really chaotic security, and it was during the anthrax attack so everybody was freaking out about anthrax. They made us walk through sponges soaked with a lot of chemicals. They almost took all our clothes off. They went through all of our luggage. It took us forever. We almost missed connections; everything was late. So it was really chaotic. But when I was in the U.S. again, it was really interesting, because at the time, people were really patriotic everywhere with the American flag and ‘God Bless the U.S.’ So I thought that this was the U.S., but no, it was just a response to the terrorist attack.
“I remember really enjoying my time there in the U.S. because it was Florida, and coming from Prague (it was December) there was already snow, and I came to Florida and it was really nice weather. So I enjoyed that and thought ‘Oh, this is a perfect country to live.”
Upon graduation shortly after the War, George began his studies in Bratislava at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University, where he remained for six years. He has written a book about the atmosphere he remembers at the medical school in the early 1950s, entitled The Silent Conspiracy (published in both Slovak and English). Following university, George returned to Košice to work at the city’s children’s hospital. This job was followed by stints at the children’s hospital in Sliač and then back in Bratislava. In 1960, George married his wife, Judith; the couple had both a civil ceremony and a church wedding in secret in Budapest, he says. At the time of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, George was on holiday in Yugoslavia with his wife and two children. In light of the invasion, the family decided not to go home.
A leading cardiologist, George accepted an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship in Tübingen, where he and his family subsequently stayed for ten months. In 1969, the Meskos came to Boston, when George was offered a position at Harvard Medical School. Twenty years later, George set up the Heart to Heart Foundation with other members of the Slovak-American Cultural Center – an institution based in New York City. The fund sponsored, among other things, study visits for Slovak healthcare professionals abroad. George retired in 1996. He now lives in McLean, Virginia, and devotes much of his time to writing, primarily about 20th-century Slovak history.
]]>George Mesko was born in Košice in March 1928. His father worked as a senior official on the Košice-Bohumín Railway, while his mother stayed at home and looked after George and his older sisters. With the signing of the First Vienna Arbitration in 1938, the Mesko family found itself living in Hungary as Košice was handed over to Regent Miklós Horthy. The family made plans to move to Vrútky, Slovakia, where they had relatives, but George’s father had a stroke and so the family remained in Košice for the duration of the War. In 1944, George and the other 16-year-old males in Košice were summoned to Germany to man the country’s understaffed factories. George did not end up going as he suffered a serious allergic reaction shortly before being dispatched, which his mother then used as a reason to send him to Slovakia to convalesce with relatives (and therefore avoid enlistment).
Upon graduation shortly after the War, George began his studies in Bratislava at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University, where he remained for six years. He has written a book about the atmosphere he remembers at the medical school in the early 1950s, entitled The Silent Conspiracy (published in both Slovak and English). Following university, George returned to Košice to work at the city’s children’s hospital. This job was followed by stints at the children’s hospital in Sliač and then back in Bratislava. In 1960, George married his wife, Judith; the couple had both a civil ceremony and a church wedding in secret in Budapest, he says. At the time of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, George was on holiday in Yugoslavia with his wife and two children. In light of the invasion, the family decided not to go home.
A leading cardiologist, George accepted an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship in Tübingen, where he and his family subsequently stayed for ten months. In 1969, the Meskos came to Boston, when George was offered a position at Harvard Medical School. Twenty years later, George set up the Heart to Heart Foundation with other members of the Slovak-American Cultural Center – an institution based in New York City. The fund sponsored, among other things, study visits for Slovak healthcare professionals abroad. George retired in 1996. He now lives in McLean, Virginia, and devotes much of his time to writing, primarily about 20th-century Slovak history.
“Then came the Viennese Arbitrage, you know, and then Košice on November 11, I think, fell to Hungary – and we were packing to go to Slovakia, you know, as [we were] of Slovakian origin. But my father had a stroke, you know. And he was paralyzed for one and a half years. So we went nowhere. We had to switch allegiance or whatever, and we stayed in Hungary until 1945 – that means in Košice, you know. Because this is not the only… many towns changed state; it was Austro-Hungary before, then it was Czechoslovakia, then it was Hungary and then again back Czechoslovakia. And the citizens stayed there, because that was there home.”
“I don’t know, you know we were, at that time when the screws were kind of tightened up with food… and like many of my professors at school were taken to the army. Then the two high schools were connected because there were not enough professors, you know. So the fourth year and the fifth year of the high school – especially the fifth year – was kind of shaky. And then 1944 – then it was tough, you know. Then it was tough.”
“I had a very good position at the children’s hospital in Bratislava and so… but then we went for vacation, to Yugoslavia, you know. And after we finished vacation we came to Belgrade on August 19, 1968 with two small children – daughter two, son five. And the 20th or 21st, we were ready to go home. And we were living with a friend and he went to the market to buy some fruit for the kids, and suddenly all the microphones in the city of Belgrade were sounding ‘Invasion, invasion, invasion, blah, blah, blah’ and we did not know what is going on! Well, my friend told me ‘Well, you go nowhere – the Soviet Army, the Warsaw-Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. My God! We didn’t have any money! Just for gasoline! But, when I was in Bratislava, I was teaching cardiology to Yugoslav doctors from Belgrade… Náhoda [coincidence]… And so I went after them and they told me, you know, ‘Listen, we need you.’ The Party and the union had a meeting. ‘We’ll give you a monthly payment ahead and you will start to work with machines.’ And I really did. I did diagnostics and whatever.
“But, you know, there were tremendous demonstrations in Belgrade. The Yugoslavs were fantastic. There were a couple of thousand, I don’t know, 50,000 Slovaks and Czechs in that area because people were coming up from the sea, you know, going home. This was the end of August, the end of vacation. They gave gasoline to people, food, lodging, you know, everything – hat down! They were extremely helpful. And, the funny thing is, I went to a demonstration with my wife and there was half of the Czechoslovak government! Šik was there, Hájek was there – I don’t know who else, you know, all on a balcony all, and we were all chanting, you know!”
“That was the so-called kádrovanie, you know the sort of political… x-ray, you know, who you really are. But the funny thing is, they didn’t find out who you really are. I was lucky that my father was dead. If my father was not dead, I am out of medical school. You know, that’s what your origins are – you know, your belief, your religion – this is what counts. If you were not on their side, on the left side then, that’s it.”
“Well I was married… we just celebrated, with my wife, our 50th anniversary. I was married in Banská Bystrica and they knew in Sliač that I was a Catholic, so they were snooping [to find out] when I am going to go to church. And so in November we went, with my wife, to a congress in Budapest, you know, and I had there an aunt of second, third degree, and she arranged that we were married in church, in secret, in Budapest, where the altar boys were our witnesses. And our son was baptized in secret in Banská Štiavnica, you know, in a small town in Southern Slovakia – a beautiful little town – and our daughter was baptized in Modrý kostolík in Bratislava, it was kind of not a big deal. But they were all baptized.
“You just go to some kind of remote town where nobody knows. And we went to the church, we knocked on the priest’s door, and I told him that we have a two month-old son and that we would like to baptize him. And the priest had his sister there as a housekeeper, and so she was the godmother, and he baptized him, so that’s how. And I think he wrote a certificate or something like that, you know.”
“It started with a bouquet of flowers. You know, I go here to my cardiologist. He is paid, but on Christmas, he got a bottle of Bordeaux. But I am not corrupting him, I just express my gratitude. But this kind of gratitude which was in
Košice a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of wine… when a babka [old woman] came from, I don’t know, Palárikovo or whatever, so she gave you a chicken. But this was not there to corrupt you, but to be thankful to the doc. But it degenerated. That’s where the problem is, you know? And when in Bratislava somebody needs a bypass, before the euro, I have a Canadian friend and he paid 30,000 koruny, you know, extra. But this started under Communists – you know – I should correct [that]… it degenerated under the Communists. That’s how I would look at it.”