Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
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Tomas Pavlicek was born in Kroměříž, southern Moravia, in 1957. His father, Oldřich, was an electrical engineer while his mother, Jindra, worked as an accountant. Due to his father’s position as the head of a hiking club, Tomas spent many weekends traveling around Czechoslovakia. He was active in sports and particularly excelled at skiing and orienteering. Tomas says he first got a taste of Western society when he competed at the orienteering world championships in Finland as part of the Czechoslovak national team. He attended a technical high school in Olomouc, and then studied technical cybernetics at Brno University of Technology. In his first job as an ultrasound technician, Tomas occasionally traveled to the Netherlands, where he worked for Toshiba Medical Systems of Europe. He says that after several of his of trips there, he was offered to join the Communist Party which he refused. Tomas decided to leave the country when a friend told him that his name had come up at a Party meeting.
In May 1987, Tomas booked tickets on a bus tour across Europe for himself and his six-year-old daughter. Upon arriving in Munich (the group’s destination), Tomas and his daughter left the tour and made their way to the house of an acquaintance. It was there that they were reunited with Tomas’s wife, who had left Czechoslovakia separately to avoid raising suspicion. The family stayed in Munich for five months before arriving in the United States in October 1987. The Pavliceks first settled in New Hampshire where Tomas took an ESL course at the University of New Hampshire while applying for jobs. He first found employment at a hospital as a biomedical engineer, but soon joined a fledgling company that provided software training to businesses. After the fall of communism, Tomas began investigating possible business opportunities in Czechoslovakia. He has since started a successful company importing and selling unique Czech glassware. Tomas is still an avid skier and, for the past several years, has ranked amongst the winners at the annual Bača Cup race held at Blue Knob Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. Tomas’s children both speak fluent Czech and he enjoys cooking traditional Czech meals. He frequently returns to the Czech Republic to visit family and friends and, when he retires, hopes to split his time between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Mexico where he owns a villa. Today, Tomas lives in Vienna, Virginia.
“He had a lot of friends still in the town who knew who he was and what he did. So they came to him from time to time and said ‘Hey Tomas’ – his name was Tomas too by coincidence – ‘Can you fix my watch?’ or ‘My ring broke, can you fix it for my wife?’ And he did. And mostly only as an exchange for favors. The other person says ‘Oh I have hens; here is a dozen eggs’ or something like that. Money in many cases didn’t even exchange hands. However, and this is the bad part of Czechs, somebody turned him into the secret police. So during one of his night shifts in the wood factory, they came. They took him inside the hall, they turned on the circular saw, and they cut his fingers. He brought those home in the bloody napkin – the ends of the fingers from his right hand – and from that time, I could never ever become a member of the Communist Party, and that’s why I have a lot of resentment against the regime and everything there. Because it was to me something so brutal, so inhuman. I don’t know a lot of circumstances around it because I was a little boy, but I never will erase from my memory for the rest of my life, the totally bloody napkin, soaked with the blood and there were the three ends of his fingers. He tried to I guess take them to the hospital if they could sew it back, but they couldn’t because I guess it was too much delay. And this piece of the memory, it is too strong to forget about.”
“My father was the leader of a tourist club [turistický klub], I believe for 50 years, consistently, and along with that, I have a lot of great memories of traveling around the country. This club had been very active. They had built a relationship with a big factory in the town which provides electrical parts for automobiles, and they had a bus which was used a lot of the time during the week to take the people to different meetings or so forth, but on the weekends quite often the bus was available and the tourists somehow made the arrangements for some kind of fee to have the bus, and traveled to different parts of the country. So that’s why I spent easily every other weekend somewhere in the mountains, a lot of hiking, climbing, this kind of stuff.”
“Thankfully to my work and also to my sports – from childhood I was very heavily involved in a variety of sports, including skiing, cross-country running, and various other sports – so I had an opportunity to see a different part of the world, the lifestyle, life experiences and different ways how people lived their life. I wasn’t dependent only on the relatively small point of view living in a small town in southern Moravia.”
“I started working for a big computing center which was working with the data from a variety of different factories and organizations and returning them back. I was working as a hardware engineer so my duties were to be on standby, ready, when any part of the computer fell down. So I have to pick up there, find out what’s wrong, fix it, then the people who operate the computer continuously could process the data. But as I mentioned, this type of work didn’t really [appeal to] me very much. I am more of an action person, and those waiting periods, when I had to literally sit in the office and wait ‘til something goes bad was not, in my mind, very productive.”
“After my first trip to Holland, when I returned back, the people from the Communist Party approached me in the company, and they offered me a membership in the Communist Party, which I kindly refused. I tried to be diplomatic back then, so I said ‘It’s a big honor for me, but a big responsibility. I have to think about it,’ and so on and so forth. So I tried to procrastinate; however, it didn’t work very well. Another trip to Holland came quickly, and another, and they approached me again and I turned it down. I sort of refused. I said ‘I love to be and perform as an electrical engineer, I love the technical science, but I would prefer to stay aside from any kind of political activity.’ So for that reason I didn’t join it. So then a friend of mine who had been a member of the Communist Party – he mentioned to me that during the meeting, which they have on their own time, was mentioned that my next trip may not be west, but east. As little I knew at the time, I thought this was kind of a fair warning, and anywhere in the world I would be much better off than perhaps in the Gulag islands or anything like that. I don’t know if the situation would go that far eventually, but who knows today. It could, because there had been many people who disappeared. So I started to plan my escape or runaway from Czechoslovakia. On my very last trip to Holland, I had been able to carry with me my university diploma and a few other documentations, birth certificates and stuff, and I sent that to the friend of a friend in Germany with a note that I will pick it up sometime later.”
“I was not sure what responsibilities the tour guide had from the bus. If he perhaps will try to hold me, maybe even under gunpoint, I had no idea. So when the people got out of the bus and were picking up luggage, I used that as an opportunity when it was kind of chaos created, and it was late at night, so when I ran behind the corner during the darkness I thought perhaps I wouldn’t be followed or I wouldn’t be noticed. So I separated myself with my daughter from the group rather quickly, literally running away. Then I found that I was not followed by anyone, so the rest of the night I was just walking. But that short moment to getting from the place where we were getting out of the bus at some hotel, I literally ran away.”
“I found a home here. I am very thankful that even through some struggles I had a very warm welcome and help from Americans. So I find my home here, and I have to say sometimes I do have kind of mixed feelings because whenever I go there, of course I still have tons of friends there. It is very nice; I have to say, every time I am there for two or three weeks, I become a little bit homesick and I gladly return back here where I feel I am home.”
Milos began working for Vodní stavby, the largest building company in Prague. He started as a draftsman and later worked his way up to engineer and manager. Milos says that because he was not a member of the Communist Party he was denied higher-level management jobs. He is particularly proud of working on the Prague Metro system during his years at Vodní stavby.
With his wife under some pressure from the secret police and his daughter being denied entrance to a high school she hoped to attend, the Zivnys began to think about leaving the country. In 1984 they received permission to travel to Yugoslavia for vacation and, the first day there, Milos, Zelmira and their son and daughter crossed the border into Austria. Milos says that his first thought was to go to Australia, but instead they were helped by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. In February 1984, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California. Milos found a job working for a cabinet shop – thanks, in part, to his knowledge of the metric system. After a few years he opened his own cabinet-making company with a partner and ran it for close to 20 years. After retiring, Milos and Zelmira became heavily involved in the local Sokol organization and enjoyed other opportunities with the Bay Area Czech community. Today, Milos and Zelmira live in the house they bought shortly after moving to Oakland.
]]>Milos Zivny was born in Kroměříž, a city in Moravia, in 1935. His father worked as an accountant for a state health insurance company while his mother stayed home to raise Milos and his two younger sisters. Following the Communist coup, Milos’s mother worked as a nurse and his father was kicked out of his job and worked in a factory in Brno. As a boy, Milos was a member of the svaz mládeže youth organization and also enjoyed playing sports, particularly basketball and volleyball. Prior to attending a technical high school in Vsetín, Milos was sent to Zlín to work in the Bat’a factory for one year. After four years of high school, Milos studied engineering at Vysoká škola železničná, a technical university in Prague. It was there he met his wife, Zelmira. The couple married in 1955, before graduating from university.
Milos began working for Vodní stavby, the largest building company in Prague. He started as a draftsman and later worked his way up to engineer and manager. Milos says that because he was not a member of the Communist Party he was denied higher-level management jobs. He is particularly proud of working on the Prague Metro system during his years at Vodní stavby.
With his wife under some pressure from the secret police and his daughter being denied entrance to a high school she hoped to attend, the Zivnys began to think about leaving the country. In 1984 they received permission to travel to Yugoslavia for vacation and, the first day there, Milos, Zelmira and their son and daughter crossed the border into Austria. Milos says that his first thought was to go to Australia, but instead they were helped by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. In February 1984, the Zivnys moved to the United States and settled in Oakland, California. Milos found a job working for a cabinet shop – thanks, in part, to his knowledge of the metric system. After a few years he opened his own cabinet-making company with a partner and ran it for close to 20 years. After retiring, Milos and Zelmira became heavily involved in the local Sokol organization and enjoyed other opportunities with the Bay Area Czech community. Today, Milos and Zelmira live in the house they bought shortly after moving to Oakland.
“I don’t remember too much the beginning of the War but I remember especially the end of the War. The situation of Kroměříž, in central Czechoslovakia – or this time, Böhmen und Mähren – was on the way for American pilots going from Italy bombarding Germany, going over Czech Republic. And every day we heard this humming and saw thousands and thousands of B-17s and B-24s flying over, and the sirens of course. The Germans had flights all around but they were not shooting because the plans were really high. But it was something that I never forgot because all over you see the [hum of the planes], and they were floating down these small strips against radar. And this I remember very well.”
“There was some special rule at this time. Communists will tell you when you graduated from high school or university, they tell you ‘You will be working in this town at this post.’ They gave you a special paper called umístěnka and they shipped you there. But we got married the last year of university because we knew when we got married they would send us to one place, not husband to Slovakia and wife to west Czechoslovakia or something like this. We were married in the beginning of the last year, and she started working in Prague in Czech rozhlas [radio] and after we graduated we had some special meeting with the people from university and they were actually sorting out where we were going. I claimed that my wife is already working in Prague; she has a place in Czech rozhlas and I would like to get my special paper for working in Prague. And they accepted it. It was actually good. The special paper meant that I started working for a company in Prague, and the company was Vodní stavby. It was the biggest building company in Prague. They had around 10,000 people working there; it was a huge company.”
“My first year in university. Because I was playing very good volleyball and basketball and our school team had some friendship with DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) with a school in Dresden and I was on this team. We went there for one week, playing volleyball and basketball, and some travel. This was the first time I was able to go to a foreign country. I was already in university – 1955.”
Was there a marked difference between East Germany and Czechoslovakia at that time or were they quite similar?
“They were very similar, but the DDR was not strict about… Everything in Czechoslovakia was government owned. In East Germany, there were still some private, small shops at this time. You could go to a small bakery and buy something; there was absolutely nothing like this in Czechoslovakia. But the system of produce was very similar. They had maybe some more stuff – for example, I remember raisins. They had more raisins; we could buy raisins in Dresden, but not very often in Prague. But we had more lemons; they had almost no lemons. Some things were really strange. They had restrictions in foreign trade in all communist countries, but each communist country had some slight difference. But there was no big difference.”
“There is two parts of the Czech community. There is one Czech community which is old. They are immigrants or daughters and sons of immigrants which are getting very old. This is Sokol itself. We are mostly around 60, 70 or 80, and this part is unfortunately going down. There is no way to get young people. We are trying, because there is a new Czech community in Silicon Valley. There are really a lot of young people who came here for work or girls who came to au pair and got married here. A couple of years ago they asked for a contribution to a Christmas party, making vánočka (Želka baked I think eight vánočka). We went there and there were 200 kids! Czech origin, Czech parents or half Czech. This is the young community we are trying now to bring to Sokol, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work too well. Because Sokol, even in the Czech Republic, it’s not… The younger generation has a completely different point of view.”
Milos was urged by a former professor to apply for a fellowship in Montreal. He was awarded the position in 1968 and says that he almost did not accept it because the stipend was so low; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year changed his mind. He left for Montreal in September 1968. Two months later, his wife and young daughter joined him. After completing the two-year fellowship, Milos started his internship at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. He was also in constant correspondence with his parents back in Czechoslovakia, and they often sent him LPs of classical Czech music. He says that although music was always an integral part of his life, these records inspired his love for classical music. Milos began attending Czech concerts and theatre in Toronto which brought him contact with the Czech community there. As a member of the board of directors of a chamber music group, he was instrumental in bringing Czech groups to the city. Recently, Milos has started a series of classical music concerts called ‘Nocturnes in the City,’ which aim to bring Czech music and musicians to a Toronto audience.
Milos currently holds dual citizenship and travels to the Czech Republic twice a year. He has made a habit of reading Czech-language newspapers and stays on top of Czech current events. His son and daughter are both fluent in Czech and he says that his son is especially enamored with his Czech heritage. Today, in addition to his work as an allergist, Milos is the president of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra.
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Milos Krajny was born in Kroměříž, eastern Moravia in 1941. His father, a doctor who practiced internal medicine, changed the family name from the German-sounding Kreuziger to Krajny following WWII. His mother, who had studied philosophy and spent one year at the Sorbonne, stayed home to raise him and his two younger brothers, and later taught music lessons. Milos has early memories of WWII, including the burning of the town’s castle at the close of the War. In 1953, Milos’s father’s practice was nationalized, and he was placed in a factory as the company doctor, caring for thousands of employees. Milos enjoyed school and extracurricular activities; he especially looked forward to a cycling trip that he made each summer to a school in Slovakia. Although he was an excellent student, Milos says that his ‘bourgeois upbringing’ hindered his acceptance to medical school. He was accepted to Palacký University in Olomouc four days before the start of the term after a patient of his father’s intervened on his behalf. After graduating in 1964, Milos practiced internal medicine in Přerov, and then, the next year, he returned to Olomouc where he began training as an allergist.
Milos was urged by a former professor to apply for a fellowship in Montreal. He was awarded the position in 1968 and says that he almost did not accept it because the stipend was so low; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year changed his mind. He left for Montreal in September 1968. Two months later, his wife and young daughter joined him. After completing the two-year fellowship, Milos started his internship at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. He was also in constant correspondence with his parents back in Czechoslovakia, and they often sent him LPs of classical Czech music. He says that although music was always an integral part of his life, these records inspired his love for classical music. Milos began attending Czech concerts and theatre in Toronto which brought him contact with the Czech community there. As a member of the board of directors of a chamber music group, he was instrumental in bringing Czech groups to the city. Recently, Milos has started a series of classical music concerts called ‘Nocturnes in the City,’ which aim to bring Czech music and musicians to a Toronto audience.
Milos currently holds dual citizenship and travels to the Czech Republic twice a year. He has made a habit of reading Czech-language newspapers and stays on top of Czech current events. His son and daughter are both fluent in Czech and he says that his son is especially enamored with his Czech heritage. Today, in addition to his work as an allergist, Milos is the president of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra.
“We were living in our house in the cellar, or basement, which had metal plates on the windows, and because there was a sign of ‘Doctor’ in front of the house, soldiers would be bringing their wounded colleagues to the house, and as a little boy I would be mingling around and I would see the blood dripping from the stretchers and stuff like that. My father had to attend to them, even though it might have been dangerous. It might have been German soldiers; it might have been Russians and Bulgarians later toward the end of the War. I vividly remember when, before the end of the War, Germans put gas on the Kroměříž castle – it was a big tower – and they set it on fire, and my parents woke me up around 3:00 in the morning and they said ‘This is the end of the War, but look what they did to us.’”
“Our school had a friendly relationship with one high school in Slovakia and people who were interested in bicycles and tourism, they would ride on bicycles every summer to this university and stay with Slovak students for three weeks in the summer, and then the Slovak students would come back to Moravia. So I was part of that activity; I was actually carrying the first-aid box and if somebody had a scratch on their knee I would attend to them. And my brother, the second one, was the official reporter. He was making a movie about the trip. It was really enjoyable and we learned to speak Slovak, and that was the highlight of the year, always.”
Whereabouts was the school in Slovakia?
“The school was in Liptovský Mikuláš, which I think is Fatra, Malá Fatra. It would take two or three days to get there, so you would have to sleep overnight in some kind of barn on the hay or on the straw, among cows sometime, and we would have to look for some food. It was very exciting. If the weather was nice, it was great. If it was raining it wasn’t so fine, because we had to dry off somewhere, but I have good memories of those trips.”
“I was top of the class and basically, I passed the admitting exam, but I was hanging in the air. Somehow, luckily, that was the only way you could do certain things at the time, my father had a patient who had some connection to the Secretariat of the Communist Party, and I’m sure there was some money involved, that the guy actually issued that I was accepted on a special permit. It was only four days before the university started, so it was quite a nervous summer. But by the same token, because there was already a way established how to get to university, my brother, who was two years younger, by this way also got to technical school in Brno.”
“Interestingly enough, some of the teachers – especially in Olomouc because they didn’t have enough teachers educated in Marxism ideology and who would be good – there were some teachers who were not members of the Party and who were actually on the blacklist, and they were very good. It was the brother of Jan Zrzavý, the painter; there was a professor in anatomy, and we as students, we knew that, so their lectures were really attended 100%.
“The first two years we had Russian, even at the university level and then of course, first year, we had political economy I believe, and then second year we had Marxism-Leninism. You basically had this nonsense and you had to sort of say ‘Yes, yes’ and you had to study something for exams. I just barely passed this Marxism-Leninism because the teachers knew your background and they really wanted to let you fail, so that was very unpleasant. But Czechs are Švejks and we made fun from it too, even if it was almost impossible. But you had to do it. But we were not forced to join the Party or anything like that. We were students; we still had fun.”
“I think in Czechoslovakia – like in all Europe – that the thing was prestige and, because doctors had such low salaries, they would be getting some presents from the patients; it was a normal thing. Because actually, the workers and miners had a salary three or four times higher, and I think the doctors were even below teachers’ salaries. But then three years after I graduated, they started suddenly paying you for night calls which were free before. So with the night calls, if you would do two, three a week, you could make some extra money, so there had been some improvement, and every year you would get two percent more or something.
“Medicine in Czechoslovakia was actually on a very high level. Maybe technologically not so much – that was before the time of computers – so certain technical things were not there, but Czechs were very good diagnosticians just with simple things and techniques, and I read some foreign literature so I could compare; I know we had very good medicine.”
“My parents were told, when they wanted to visit, they were told they would never be allowed to visit. And then after Helsinki [Accords] was signed, my father completely refused to go back for permission, but my mother asked the city hall and they told her that one of the conditions would be that she would talk us into returning. She said ‘Well, you know, I can tell them, I can try.’ So they allowed my mother for the first time in 1979. Quite late. She came for a few weeks and when she was going back, my brother in Germany had a son born about six months before, and I said ‘Why don’t you stop in Germany?’ She didn’t have a visa, so I asked for a visa for her at the German Consulate and they wanted to put it in her passport and I argued. I said ‘You can’t put it in her passport because when the poor woman goes back to Czechoslovakia she will be punished!’ So after long interviews, they gave her special papers, and she stopped at my brother’s place for about four days, saw her grandson, and came home. And only after 1989, when we looked at our dossiers, we figured out that she was followed. They knew everything about her.”
“I started to visit the Czech theatre and, of course, concerts. If there were some Czech musicians, we would be involved. Then later on I joined a chamber music organization and was on the board of directors for many years downtown, and always tried to bring Czech musicians.”
Did you do this even before 1989 and was that a fairly straightforward process? How did that work?
“Well, before 1989 there were still some Czech groups that were allowed abroad because they were bringing money back. So if you knew who was coming, you could get them to Toronto. Because we were in contact with agents in New York, and I had my brother involved with music back in Prague, we could bring people here. Of course, it was in limited numbers; it wasn’t so free like now. But it was a little different. Everything was cheaper, so that was one way, but then, it wasn’t so free.”