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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>Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xHovWyTt8Uw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“1924, the year, the people who were born in 1924 were given as a gift to the Third Reich. And everybody had to be shipped to work for whatever they needed. And I had the papers already to Kassel or Essen, and that was bombarded by Americans, so I already had my friend, and he said ‘How about we get married? And that way you don’t have to go to Germany. You can stay in Czechoslovakia (or the Protectorate at that time).’ And so we got married in 1943, the last… no, December 30. And at New Year right away I went to Prague, they shipped me to Letov, and I was working making airplanes for the German Army.”</p><h4>Kobylisy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pDqRnd0y91E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in Prague, there were those parachutists, they killed Heydrich, and it happened in Kobylisy. So actually, I was living through it, and we got German soldiers coming in the apartment at any time, during the night, during the day, with bayonets looking for something, [or whether we had] somebody here hiding. You know, it was kind of hard.”</p><h4>Air Raids</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MIrVmzXWWOQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I don’t even remember what I did there, they were always giving me something to do, I don’t remember exactly what, and we were mostly talking because we were waiting for those airplanes to come and then we had to run out. So that’s about it and, as I said, about two months… the War ended on May 5, or something like May 4-5, 1945, so about two months before the end, I stopped going there to Strakonice, because they were shooting into trains and they were killing people in trains, those airplanes. You know, they dived and…”</p><h4>Bank Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PRlij3WtTCU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I worked in the neighborhood where we lived, so I could walk there, and it was a nice job, you know like from 9 to 3, so I was home in the afternoon when Hana came home from school already, so it was okay. Then we merged with First Federal Savings, which was, I don’t know, 1965 I guess. And they, I was still there for a while. I had five hold-ups in that neighborhood. Well, I survived, as you can see. And then they closed that bank, they closed that little branch and they shipped me [between] two other branches where they needed [me] and then I was working downtown in 1970, we moved downtown from Broadway, in 1973 I think, and I stayed there until I retired.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Milly Voris
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Milly Voris was born in Bělčice, Bohemia, in 1924. Her father, Václav, was an architect and realtor while her mother, Kamila, stayed at home raising Milly and her younger brother, also called Václav. Growing up, Milly says her family played an active role in Sokol and that she remembers them being ‘extremely patriotic.’ Milly attended school first in Bělčice and then in Prague, where she stayed with her aunt (in the city’s Kobylisy district) and studied at the Akademie obchodní Dr. Edvarda Beneše [Benes Business School]. When Milly graduated from high school in 1943, she says that she and her classmates were ‘given as a gift to the Third Reich’ and that she received papers to work in Germany. She managed to remain in Bohemia, however, by marrying her husband, Ladislav. Instead of being sent to Germany, she started work at the Letov airplane factory in Prague. Shortly before the end of the War, Milly moved back to Bělčice and began work at Česká zbrojovka in the nearby town of Strakonice. She says that not a great deal was accomplished as air raids often meant employees had to evacuate the factory.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Following the War, Milly moved to her husband’s family home in Stará Role (in western Bohemia) and commuted to Karlovy Vary, where she was employed in a bank. She returned to Bělčice again in 1947 to give birth to her daughter, <a href="/web/20170612094115/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/hana-voris/">Hana Voris</a>. Throughout this period, Milly’s husband was attending university in Prague. He left Czechoslovakia immediately following the Communist coup in February 1948 and settled in Paris, where he had traveled once before as a student and had made contacts. He procured an exit visa for Milly and Hana, who joined him in France in June 1948. The Voris family came to the United States in 1952, but Milly says that after several months in New York City her husband decided to return to France. She traveled with Hana and Ladislav back to Europe. They stayed in France for another couple of months before deciding finally to settle in America in the autumn of 1953. The Voris family spent just over four years in Jackson Heights, New York, before moving to Cleveland in 1958.</p><p> </p><p>Milly found work in a bank with a large Czech clientele in Cleveland and remained an employee of the organization (which became First Federal Savings & Loan following a merger) for more than 30 years. She and her husband both became active in Sokol in Cleveland, and in the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland [<em>Krajanský výbor</em>]. They taught their daughter Hana to speak fluent Czech. Milly says she is happy to have settled in Cleveland, which she calls both a ‘huge village’ and an ‘amazing city.’ Now widowed, Milly lives with her daughter in South Euclid, Ohio.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigre/refugee
Akademie obchodni Dr. Edvarda Benese
Belcice
Ceska zbrojovka
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Jenickova
Krajansky vybor
Stara Role
Women workers
World War II
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83a4a8e9145c96631af400025ab43305
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>Piano Lessons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/toUgT54m56M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I had to take piano lessons, you know, the parents insisted. And the teacher, the piano teacher, was an old boy scout. That was, of course, that was outlawed. But he had these models of cabins and the little scout things, and so we would spend half the time playing piano, and half the time playing with the scout things. So, my piano is not that good.”</p><h4>Sokol Gymnastics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iBVDviEWprk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a sort of… Sokol was outlawed, but he [my father] was teaching a little gymnastics class that I and about a dozen boys, we would go into the old Sokol Hall and he made arrangements, he would teach us the stuff, you know, gymnastics: parallel bars, high bar, rings, floor exercises, the sort of typical stuff that the Sokols do – for several years. And I think he always believed in exercise and the whole notion of ‘in a healthy body is a healthy spirit.’ So he was doing it a little bit for himself, because he always liked to exercise and stuff, but at the same time, he put up with a dozen other kids too.”</p><h4>Snap Decision</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/atWhbYHm4zk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had this meeting on the steps of our house, I was coming down in the morning and he was coming up, he proposed that we go and try to go to the United States, and it’s going to be challenging, but we should go. And of course, I was a 13 year old, for me it was just a big adventure. So I said yes, let’s go. And so that day he went to the hospital to do his rounds and work, and I packed whatever I deemed important, some clothing and a sleeping bag. It was kind of interesting because I still have the sleeping bag; I still have it in the car in case we get stranded in the snow. But it is amazing how that one item was sort of like the security blanket, like a little boy’s nene blanket, because we didn’t know where we were going to be. We could be sleeping on the floor of a gym some place or some kind of a camp. So we were dragging this sleeping blanket all around across the continent.”</p><h4>Adventure</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hia1HkxzULY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You need to understand that especially as a young boy like that, anything Western, anything forbidden, was idolized. Anything Western was idolized. If somebody gave us chewing gum, because it was from America it was like the hottest thing. So, when we said ‘let’s go to America,’ it was like this great adventure. To me as a young teenager, it was like, why not? Let’s do it – I didn’t have to worry about all those legalities and technicalities and potential… I knew there was danger, I knew that there was danger, that if things don’t work out it could be sort of nasty at least for him [my dad.] I was a child but… So it was sort of a quick decision, sometimes you just have to make those snap decisions.”</p><h4>Road Signs</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YPPV9nbtkKk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Ironically, travel was complicated because the locals changed the signs. And so if you followed the road signs, you would end up in the wrong place. You really had to go by knowledge of the local area or by map. But if you came to an intersection and it said ‘Prague, this way,’ it would probably point you to the wrong place.”</p><h4>Cleveland</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IEeQR7jewA8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well actually, he [Alex] was more active in the Ukrainian or the Rusyn community, so my first years until college, I was really not involved with the Czech community at all or very little. If anything, there was a Carpatho-Rusyn ski club and he was an officer and we did a lot of traveling, a lot of skiing in the wintertime. And so I was more involved in that culture. It was not until I already was married and had children, and I was taking my daughter to a gymnastics class, and there was a fellow reading a paper, a Czech paper, Nový svět. And so I said, ‘Well, he’s got to be Czech or Slovak or something,’ and he was my age, and so when the opportunity came I said hello to him, ‘Dobrý večer’ [Good evening] or something like that. And he turned out to be a local dentist, Stan Pechan, who is Slovak, Czech – he covers both areas, much like me, and we started talking and he introduced me to, he took me to a meeting of what was then the Krajanský výbor, which now is really defunct, but at the time it was the Czech and Slovak committee for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Cultural Garden</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EGVIE_cjwGs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of my colleagues at work, at Cleveland City Hall, approached me one time and said ‘Hey, you are Czech, you know there’s a Czech Cultural Garden and it’s orphaned and you know, somebody should take care of it.’ And I said. ‘What garden?’ I had no clue about the gardens. And he said ‘Come on, I’ll take you there at lunch time.’ So, we did, we took a ride to East Boulevard and MLK and drove through the gardens and saw the Czech garden and I was impressed and said ‘Yeah, well somebody kind of needs to attend to that.’ And before I knew, it kind of became my commitment to the Czech community, taking care of that. And I think we’ve been pretty successful. We’ve got some grants from the Czech Republic, we’ve got some donations from specifically the Ptak family, got some grants from the Holden Parks Trust, which is a trust which takes care of some of the parks, or specifically that park. So, we did a lot of things, restored the statues, planted new shrubs, tuck-pointed the masonry and over the years I think it’s one of the better… [We have] had virtually all of the ambassadors that were stationed in the United States come and visit and walk through the gardens.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Paul Burik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paul Burik was born in the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice in 1954. His father, Nicholas, was a doctor, while his mother, Vlasta, worked as a pharmacist. When Paul was still a toddler, the family moved to Prešov, in eastern Slovakia, which was where Paul’s father (who was ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn) had grown up. After nearly six years, however, the family moved back to Bohemia, first to Prčice and then Sedlčany, where Paul’s father worked as the chief surgeon in the local hospital. When Paul was still a teenager, his mother died of a terminal disease. His father worked long hours so Paul says he grew up fairly independently. In 1967 his father traveled to the United States to visit his brother (Paul’s uncle Alex) who had immigrated to Cleveland shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Paul says his father spoke with a number of American doctors during his visit to the States, but decided to return to Czechoslovakia because, at the time, ‘things were good there.’ Following the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, however, Paul’s father suggested to him that the pair resettle in America. Paul says he looked forward to the ‘adventure’ of emigrating and agreed with his father’s suggestion.</p><p> </p><p>The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.</p><p> </p><p>In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Ceske Budejovice
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Health care professionals
Krajansky vybor
Presov
refugee
Sense of identity
Sports
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
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Transcription
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<h4>Housing Shortage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u87mVjdU4CI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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!”</p><h4>Concerns</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0W56K4l1OLQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Politically Active</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KjiUzESo-GA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Prague 1989</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TT0-vEhUZ6Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Cohesive</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HwhExedlhEA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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…”</p><h4>Communism</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ou_UevT6SJ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p>
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Title
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Stan Pechan
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<p> </p><p>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 <em>gymnázium</em> 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.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Community Life
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Kosice
Krajansky vybor
marriage
Military service
Sports
Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Safarika
Velvet Revolution