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82461508b419a53e449654112ee151d1
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>Growing Up</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2eiBM4GdVg4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Because it’s not far away from the German border, there was a huge Czech Army station and Sušice was just the first city outside of what used to be the Sudetenland. So historically, Sušice was a diverse place. There was always a Czech, German and Jewish community. But it wasn’t in the German zone, so it was considered a Czech town and it was not affected by a Sudeten history, but there was the Army base. So when I grew up, there was always a strong sense of the communist regime’s presence, in the sense that the people who were army people were always coming and going and privileged. They had a lot more money that the rest of the people and, especially through my mother’s profession, I was very aware of that because any time there would be a new army family coming, wives would always be privileged by getting jobs very easily in schools or anywhere, and the children were privileged. My mother as a schoolteacher was always tense when children from these families were evaluated badly in school.</p><p>“So there was a strong sense of awareness of that and I grew up in a family that was always very clearly on the other side, meaning that if Havel, for example, talks about a certain schizophrenia in a society, which I write about in my book, I was strongly aware of this as a child, where when you talk about it at home, history is one way, and different history is told in school, and different things you can’t say or act in school. The city was liberated by the American Army and my grandfather, who was a photographer and also a musician, was friendly with American soldiers, so we always had in our family albums pictures of my father and American soldiers in my grandfather’s studio. So I grew up knowing that the city was liberated by the American Army while other kids who didn’t have this connection through visuals were living in the world of imagining that we were liberated by the Soviet Army only.”</p><h4>Education</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v8IYyGh2GjY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think it was more well-rounded and cohesive. We had a lot of gym, we had art and I also think we had wiggle-room for people with different gifts. I remember I was good in visual arts and it was seen as a plus. It was seen as a talent that’s good to groom and it is okay if you do well in arts or music and you maybe don’t do so well in other subjects. I felt that art education, music, creativity was overall more valued. Math was good; I think science, not so. Given the ideological [constraints] I think history was good, but I think overall there was more stress on trying to find your skills or your niche or talent and pursuing that and supporting you on that.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CxmWWHSeSbY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think that in Czech[oslovakia] there were situations where people sometimes were able to hide in certain places, like I know that the school where she taught had a president who was sympathetic and a nice person and an interesting personality who was somehow able to survive, and he would hide some people and I think that happened to my mother. By the time the 1980s came, when I could see that there were strict divisions between teachers who were in the Party and who were not, it was almost like an agreement. People sort of lived next to each other with this agreement: ‘We’re not crossing these boundaries; we’ll just take you for what you are, communist, and we’re here.’ And they co-existed with certain parameters, like you don’t cross over certain lines. You had to go to certain meetings. They had an organization for teachers that was, of course, a communist-affiliated organization. It wasn’t the Party, but it was a union, the teacher’s union, which, in a socialist state, was a socialist organization. So my mother was in that, but it was just like a union.”</p><h4>High School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYDZADM9yHI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got very involved in the Catholic religion at that time. There was a huge revival; the people in my generation were very interested in spirituality as a form of looking for a place of truth, looking for different, alternative environment. It was very ecumenic. Ecumenic in a sense that Catholic and Protestant was very mixed, there were no boundaries, and it was more about being a teenager and looking for the meaning of life and a place where you can trust people. There was a sense that you could trust religion after it was suppressed. There was a lot of this happening underground and there were a lot of things that, because my parents were secular, I had no idea about, so it was also newness to it. So I got very involved in a Catholic, not so much a church, but various underground activities that united people. You met a lot of intellectual people through the Catholic underground, so I was very involved in that.”</p><p><em>So how did you get involved in that and what sort of activities were you doing?</em></p><p>“There were certain parishes in Prague that would be popular to go to for young people, meaning that there would be certain priests who would have Mass and homily for young people. They would be more provocative, more modern – within its limits – but then also certain groups organized after church groups where people would get together and talk, sing, become a community, sometimes read from the Bible and had theological readings. I wouldn’t call that Catholicism; it was more spiritual and theological interest in reading the Bible. So that was one thing. The other, being in Prague, young people would often travel outside [the city] on weekends and summers, so there would be parishes around the country where you would go for weekend retreats, where you go and spend time together. You may sing; you may pray. It was social, but with a religious program.</p><p>“Now this is so different from here. I would want this to be really clearly distinct from here because that kind of activity was spiritual. It was not important that it was the Catholic Church, in other words. It happened to be for me, but it could have been Protestant. I had friends in my classroom from both Catholic and Protestant [churches] and we would often, as a gesture of solidarity, go back and forth to churches. There was no animosity or competition between churches.”</p><h4>Kicked Out</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mue4cahwgsc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was, through my friend, recommended to a woman named Miloslava Holubová who lived in Malá Strana in a beautiful apartment overlooking Malostranské náměstí and she was a Czech intellectual who signed [Charter 77]. She was a writer intellectual who was connected and, in fact, her apartment was often a place for meetings of various groups, like theological groups, and when books were brought to Czech[oslovakia] secretly from Britain or Germany they were often delivered to her place then sent around. Literary people, underground Charter people often met in her apartment and so the fact that I was expelled for my religious activity and found this room in this woman’s apartment changed my life again in a major way because I became close friends with her, but also she was sort of my mentor and my aunt and my grandmother and my everything. We had an amazing couple of years together. From her, not only was I exposed to all these underground, literary circles and religious circles and literature that I normally wouldn’t have access to, because she was my mentor, we would spend a lot of time together and she would often talk about her life before WWII, during and after, and so I would learn through her about Czech history and the history of experience.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxbzZ0d1CWk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in FAMU, my last two years or year, I witnessed a number of people coming back home from the West after the Revolution. A number of immigrants who decided they would like to come back and try, and I saw how Czech people in their professions were not supportive; were jealous and actually quite evil and nasty to them, and anything that they came with. There were mutual tensions between people who came from outside and wanted to contribute their knowledge from outside; there was real hatred, sort of this insecurity – ‘Don’t come back and tell us now’ – and the real serious sort of animosity. It was very sad for me for me to see that because I felt that, as a young person, I wanted to see other… what was coming from elsewhere, other ideas. I was open and to see that these older guys in charge are frightened by that and afraid to let go, and not accepting people who were Czech people coming back. It was depressing. Of course, now I made myself to be in the position where if I ever want to go back, I know I would never be accepted, for the very same reasons. But, that was really the reason I left. I was in love with my husband and wanted to be with him, but he would have probably stayed. If I said ‘I’m not going, stay here, make it happen’ he would probably stay; I wanted to go, and I would have gone anywhere in the West. I really wanted to study more.”</p><h4>Research</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zVeoOdTcGAk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I noticed a group of older men sitting at a table, Sunday morning at 9:00 or 9:30 and they were having coffee or a little glass of wine and, as a photographer, I was intrigued and sort of curious. What was bringing them to this café that was mostly a younger crowd or foreigners? So I walked up to them and introduced myself as a photographer and asked them if I could photograph them or talk to them, and they sort of looked at each other and said ‘Sure.’ So it turned out that they were men who were political prisoners from the ‘50s and they were a group that would gather every Sunday. So I met them, and we talked, and I asked if I could photograph them, so I set up my tripod and my camera and I did an interview about their lives. I interviewed six or seven people and after that I came back the next summer and decided to meet more of them and I also decided to find women and see if women had different experiences or not.</p><p>“In 1995, I began this project where I would interview former political prisoners, people who were arrested in 1948 and spent many years, ten or more years in what were Czech labor camps, equivalent to what Solzhenitsyn writes about in <em>The Gulag Archipelago</em>. I first started with life histories and these portraits and then, as I was progressing towards my dissertation, I started to ask questions, not so much about their individual lives, but more about their life as a community. I discovered that they have this community that has political aspirations, that has social aspirations. So I started to hang out with them more. Not with all, but some of them I met with individually, some of them through the community and some of them I stayed friends with and visited, like this man for example. We were very close friends. So really, until 2004, I was going every summer regularly, meeting, if not interviewing, individuals or their spouses or children. I would participate in their annual gatherings and celebrations. They would often return to these places or camps and I would join them and photograph them, and I wrote a journal and records and that all became my data for my doctoral dissertation.”</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
Jana Kopelentova-Rehak
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jana Kopelentova-Rehak was born in Sušice in southern Bohemia in 1968. Her mother Jana was a teacher while her father Jaroslav was a photographer for the city. Jana’s paternal grandparents had owned a photography studio in Sušice which was nationalized after the Communist coup in 1948; her father has since reclaimed the property and works with some original family equipment. Jana says that her parents both held anti-communist views and that she was aware of history that wasn’t taught in schools; for example, the liberation of Plzeň and Sušice by the American Army. Exposed to photography from an early age, Jana was accepted to the art school Střední průmyslová škola grafická in Prague. While living in a dormitory, Jana became interested in religion and attended retreats with fellow classmates. When a Bible was found in her room, Jana says that she was expelled from school housing and had to find her own accommodations in the city. She finished high school living with Miloslava Holubová, a writer and signatory of Charter 77 whom Jana says was a big influence. After graduating from high school, Jana worked for three years as a photographer for an art restoration company. In 1990, she began studying fine art photography at FAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). While at FAMU, Jana studied abroad in Norway and Glasgow and says that she learned English thanks to the international makeup of the FAMU students.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1994, eager to continue her studies in the West and with plans to marry Frank Rehak, an American who was in Prague on a Fulbright scholarship, Jana moved to the United States. She settled in Baltimore, Maryland, and married Frank a few months later. To adjust to the move, Jana says that she spent some time taking photographs of Baltimore neighborhoods. She completed her MFA in photography from the University of Delaware in 1997 and was accepted to a doctoral program in anthropology at American University. Jana’s research focused on 1950s political prisoners in Prague. For several summers, Jana and Frank returned to the Czech Republic and taught a summer photography school for international students. Jana is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola University in Baltimore and Towson University in Towson, Maryland. She also teaches Czech language classes for the local Sokol group. A dual citizen, Jana received her American citizenship two years ago, which she says was an ‘emotional decision.’ She lives with her husband and two daughters in Baltimore.</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
Arts
Education
Holubova
Plzen
Post-1989 emigrant
Religion
school
Stredni prumyslova skola graficka
Susice
Teachers
-
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eea38b593326172abf8b75d7b4e7eb63
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>Dancing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JZORKzRZFaU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Hitler ordered [everyone] who was born in 1925 has to immediately stop all schooling and go work, and you have to have an <em>Arbeitsbuch</em>, (a working book). So, my gosh, I didn’t know what to do, because that year, everybody was sent to Dresden to work. So, my gosh, my father was in Plzeň, my mother in Jičín, and I didn’t know what to do. So where we lived for school, in the <em>pensionat</em>, downstairs was a theatre. And I decided to go down and ask for a job, and explain to them otherwise if I don’t have an <em>Arbeitsbuch</em> I’m going to be sent. So they said ‘What education do you have? What do you do?’ I said that I do ballet since I was 16 with Madame Nikolská. So they said, ‘Go to her and she will write everything, and go to the <em>Arbeit</em> office and they will give you a book. I ran to Madame Nikolská’s house, woke her up at 6:00, and she signed everything she had to do, and I went with it to the office and they gave me an <em>Arbeitsbuch</em>. And they gave me an engagement in the theatre. So I went to school – I kept on with German – and had school, and in the night I would go dance in the operetta, it was an operetta theatre.”</p><h4>Plzen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0wliLq8WWMA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When he wasn’t there, we had fun with the Americans. They were throwing cigarettes at us. Plzeň, the only place where the Americans came, and I would practice the little bit of English that I knew, and we would look out from the window; we smoked so much with my mother.”</p><h4>Secret Police</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A29hJmHkIrs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father went at 6:00 to the Ministerium, and we didn’t see him for a year. We called the office, ‘Where is he? He didn’t come home.’ ‘Oh, just look in all the hospitals.’ That was their answer; there were already Communists there. And Jake [her husband] calls and says ‘Get out of there. Get on the plane and get back.’ The next day, for us came two Czech communists. They interrogated us in our home.</p><p>“So anyhow, finally he got sent to military prison, and we could not visit, we could do nothing, and for us, come two gentlemen. So they locked my mother in the kitchen and they locked me in the living room. So one interrogates my mother, another one hits me over my mouth. Horrible, horrible. And from then on, they watched us. They stayed in front of our door downstairs. And we would go listen on the balcony, with my mother and they would say ‘It’s 10:00, they’re not going to go anywhere. Let’s go.’ Can you imagine, to put two communists to watch us two? What were we going to do?”</p><h4>American Embassy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jqLyFXNbNN4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One day, the bell rings about 8:00. And I said ‘Mommy, don’t open, don’t open. It’s those idiots from downstairs.’ Mom says ‘They’re not there anymore. Let’s look who it is.’ So we looked, and we see a man; I never saw him in my life. It was the consul from the American Embassy to come check on me and to ask ‘Please come work for us. We need you.’ Boy, I got a job like you don’t dream. And the money! I could take my mother for dinner, and pay everything. So I was there at the American Embassy for two years.</p><p><em>Did you come under extra scrutiny for working at the Embassy? Did they watch you more closely? The secret police?</em></p><p>“No, they watched the Embassy. One time, they locked us all there, but they had to give up. It was a beautiful job. Of course, my mother was scared all the time that something would happen, but I felt good. I felt that the Embassy would know about me if something would happen.</p><p>“We were the permit office. We decided if [the applicant] was a little bit communist, and we would say ‘Oh, we don’t have a visa [to the free zone] for you yet.’ I knew, so we would hold them. ‘Oh, I want to go to Germany’ and so on. ‘Yeah, come next week. Come in two months.’ In the meantime, they would check him. Always, I was right.”</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
Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Kveta Gregor-Schlosberg was born in Jičín, northeastern Bohemia, in 1925. Her mother’s family owned the chateau, Čeřov Jicin, in which she was born, and Kveta describes her childhood there as a ‘fairy tale.’ Kveta began ballet lessons in Jičín when she was six years old, and says she made her debut at the National Theatre in Prague at the age of seven. When Kveta was ten, she moved to Prague with her family, as her father Josef, a military officer, was transferred from his regiment to the Ministry of Defense. In Prague, Kveta attended a language school where she studied English, French, and German, and continued dancing.</p><p> </p><p>When Nazi forces occupied Prague, Kveta and her family were separated. Her father lost his job in the Ministry of Defense and moved to Plzeň for work. Kveta’s mother returned to Jičín, and Kveta remained in Prague. She says that she only saw her father a few times during WWII; later, she was told that her father had been active in underground resistance and did not want to jeopardize his family. Kveta recalls other changes the Nazi occupation brought to her life. Hitler mandated that all people born in 1925 would be sent to Germany to work unless they could prove they had employment. Kveta says that she immediately found an appointment as a dancer for a theatre company housed in the basement of her apartment. She says she was able to continue studying, but only German, as her other studies were banned.</p><p> </p><p>Immediately following liberation, Kveta and her mother traveled to Plzeň to find her father; however, he was traveling to Prague to meet up with them. Kveta says that the few days she and her mother spent in Plzeň while waiting for things to get straightened out were fun, as they were able to celebrate liberation with the American soldiers. Once back in Prague, Kveta began working at another theatre and dating an American soldier her father knew. They married in September 1945 and for one year traveled around Germany to various military stations; Kveta says they spent time in Nuremberg during the war criminal trials. Kveta and her husband then moved to San Antonio, Texas, but in December 1947, she returned to Czechoslovakia to visit her parents. The Communist coup occurred while she was visiting in February 1948, and Kveta found herself unable to return to the United States, as her father was arrested and made to stand trial. She was offered a job processing visas at the American Embassy. In 1949, her father’s trial ended and Kveta’s boss arranged for her to receive a visa back to the United States. Divorced from her husband, Kveta settled in Washington, D.C. where she found employment as a receptionist in an apartment building. She later married her second husband, Bruce Schlosberg and had three children. Today, Kveta lives in Washington, D.C. with her former classmate from Jičín, <a href="/web/20170609054922/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/lubomir-hromadka/">Lubomir Hromadka</a>.</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
Arrest
Arts
Cerov Jicin
emigrant
Jicin
marriage
Plzen
refugee
World War II
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17f3c8652ee46e3c64f21f810a8a3dae
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Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Going to Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OCo6UzNiJ-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It became clearer and clearer that the Communists would take over, and we were very fortunate that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – was living already in Israel, and her best friend was the mother of the person who was Israel’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. This lady told my grandmother that if she wants her children to get out of Czechoslovakia, she needs to get there and bring them, because the phones and the mail and everything was censored already. So she did do that exactly, she took a plane and came. Within a very short time my parents put together what they called a lift, which was filled with whatever belongings they could put in. And by the way, my mother had taken courses in photography, so one of the things they put in there was a camera because they thought that maybe she would be able to make a living in Israel as a photographer, and a few other very valuable things because we were well off in Czechoslovakia.</p><p>But when the lift came to Israel, instead of all these wonderful possible resources, there were rags. So on the way or wherever, these things were stolen or taken.</p><p>“So anyway, this is what we did to prepare to go, and because of this terrible experience of flying from England after the War, I developed a very high fever and they had to postpone the trip to the last plane that left Czechoslovakia for Israel. The plane that we were supposed to go on was one that was shot at, and it fell over, I think, Bulgaria. So that forever was kind of a shock to us that we could have been on that plane.”</p><h4>United States</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dS8t85wQOYs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father had had an uncle who lived in the United States when he was a little boy, and this uncle – as uncles from the United States often did – would come to Czechoslovakia and bring for him and his brothers gifts, he always bore gifts for them. He was one of the co-owners of a large shipping company, so he was able to bring them goodies. And from that time on, my father had this dream to come to the United States. My mother and he had papers to leave, but when the War broke out of course there was no way to leave, and as I said, he joined the Army and so forth and so that fell through.</p><p>“So as soon as they came to Israel he started thinking about going to the United States, but it took about seven years until the papers were arranged and we left for Rochester because there was a family friend living there, which is an incredible story.</p><p>A man whose roots were Czech but he studied medicine and lived in Vienna. Evidently, he took care of my mother who was a tennis player and had some problems with her knee, and he took care of her and fell in love with her and wanted her to marry him, but by that time my mother knew my father already. I don’t know exactly what the story was, but he sent his wife to Israel and she came and saw how we lived and she said ‘Oh, we’re going to send you an affidavit, we will bring you to the United States, we will take care of you.’”</p><h4>Living in Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/55JMcJfy4pY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First of all, it was my formative years, but it also was the beginning of the state of Israel. That was a very exciting period and everybody was very nationalistic and so forth. I think that in those years, I just did not feel so much of the connection to Czechoslovakia as much as I did later on because my parents were so busy making a basic living, and everyone was trying to assimilate. There were people who came to Israel from all over, and everybody wanted to find a common denominator, so the language was an important factor, and the songs, and the dances and so on.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dw9rEIVKa0E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, I never think that you have to choose, especially here because our loyalties to the United States, to Israel, to Czech Republic, they’re not conflicting. We all have very basic, democratic values, so it’s not like if I had to choose between Russia. So I don’t see them conflicting. I also think that religion is one thing, but as I said, I don’t think there’s any conflict between being an American and a Jew, and in the same sense, I don’t see any of it as conflicting. Fortunately, I never had to make big choices between ‘I believe this, or I don’t believe that.’ So I think in a way I look at it as very very enriching, rather than otherwise.”</p><h4>Hardships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zi8tbGPCqwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The wronging, if you will, when you think about it from the economic point of view, yes I know that if it hadn’t happened for it, I’d be living a totally different life because my parents on both sides came from very well-to-do families and I would not have had to struggle with my education, et cetera. But that is not so important. The fact that I never got to meet my grandparents and other relatives; it’s a very painful thing. It’s one thing if a person is taken because they’re ill, but to know that they died such horrible deaths, and with my uncle and aunt and cousin, I really don’t know exactly what happened, because they – the uncle and aunt were young people – they could have been used for forced labor, they might have lived for three, four years, who knows, and who knows what awful life they might have had.</p><p>“It’s a pain that does not go away and it’s a pain that all of humanity has to carry, not just for the Holocaust, but for other genocides, for other wrongdoings that just don’t make sense, not fathomable, not understandable.”</p>
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Title
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Michlean Amir
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2336 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609111851im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Michlean-Amir-SQ.png" alt="" width="260" height="260" /></p><p>Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.</p><p> </p><p>Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948
Child emigre
emigrant
Family life
Holocaust
Jews
Plzen
refugees
Sense of identity
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bcba8548571cd04e87a86c4ef5ba36f4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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>Liberated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/56wIMqRlnnM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were actually lucky that Plzeň was liberated by the American Army. General Patton was there, and General Harmon actually lived in the little village that my parents had a country villa. That’s where his headquarters were, near Plzeň. It was about 40 kilometers from Plzeň. We as children – I was barely two years old and my brother was six years old – we were welcoming the American Army there in our national costumes. I have a picture with one of the soldiers, one of the black soldiers because it was something very unusual for us. We’d never seen a black man before, so this was really something unusual. I have a picture which was printed in <em>Americkè Listy</em> later on. It was a big celebration. All the people were really happy and we were hoping that the American Army would be allowed to go all the way to Prague and liberate Prague, and if they had been able to liberate Prague, the whole Czech Republic would have been liberated. But, of course, according to the treaty and Stalin’s orders in those years, they were ordered to stop right before [Prague sic.]. So our destiny would have been very different if the American Army would have been allowed to go all the way to Prague.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qY1fiKlLENc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, as a doctor, wanted one of us, me or my brother, to follow in his footsteps and study in a medical school, but we wouldn’t have been accepted in a medical school because we were not children of working-class parents. We were so-called ‘bourgeois’ because our parents were intelligentsia. My father was a doctor and my mother was a lawyer, so it was not desirable by the Communist Party for us to have a higher education. The only way for me to get a university degree was to study in the physical education field because they wanted to have well-qualified professionals in the sports. To the communists, sports were actually a means of showing to the world that they are a strong system. They wanted to show the world ‘We have the best athletes in this and that field, so we are the best system…’ That was part of their plan. So actually, I was only allowed to study sports to be a qualified professional in that field later on. So that was my only possibility to go on to higher education.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8zT0xYkN50E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After four years, I interrupted studying and joined the Vienna Ice Show (a professional skating show) which was the only way to be able to travel throughout Europe, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to leave the country. So I traveled with the Vienna Ice Show in many European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, so it was really valuable experience for me. After the two years’ contract, I went back to graduate, to do my last fifth year and graduate. But after the two years, it was the summer of 1968 and there was the Russian invasion on August 21, and that left me actually stranded in northern Germany and I was thinking if I should return to the country or shouldn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen because it was totally unexpected and none of us knew what to do, so I waited almost until the end of September to figure out if I should go back to finish my fifth year and graduate or stay in the West. I really didn’t want to back to the dark ages of the communist regime of the 1950s and that’s actually what happened later on.</p><p>“I did return; I finished my fifth year; I graduated. But during that fifth year, from September of 1968 until June of 1969, it was clear to me that the country was returning to the so-called normalization process which was returning to the bad time of the dark ages of communism. So I said ‘If I ever marry and have children, I don’t want them to grow up in this regime.’ I said ‘I have to get out of the country. If I marry and have children, I want them to live in a free country.’ So after I graduated, I first looked for a job in Czechoslovakia. I wanted to teach skating in one of the larger cities that had skating rinks, but of course the jobs in the larger cities went to the kids of communist parents, so everybody from those families got a better job. And to us, to the remaining people, we would have to take a job somewhere, maybe in the border villages or something like that. So I decided to join the Vienna Ice Revue again, to sign another contract and went with them on a tour of Belgium and Holland, and afterward there was a tour of American and Canada, and at that point I decided that I’m going to stay in the United States and I asked for political asylum.”</p><h4>Ice Show</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqCwhTGFaD4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in the Vienna Ice Show and he [Milada’s brother Jaroslav] joined the Skala Ice Revue, we joined these professional ice shows officially. We got a contract through an organization which was called Pragosport, and there was also Pragokoncert. Those were two organizations that negotiated contracts with Western companies. But for that, we had to pay the government a pretty large amount of our salary in Western currency. That was the only way we were able to travel to the Western countries.”</p><p><em>How did they justify that?</em></p><p>“Because nobody else was allowed to travel outside, so for the privilege of negotiating contracts with Western companies, we had to pay them quite a large amount of our salary, quite a large percentage of our salary.”</p><h4>First Job in America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oei0F0a3QTg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first place I lived in was LeFrak City in Queens, which is near the Long Island Expressway, and the nearest rink to it was the World’s Fair skating rink, which doesn’t exist anymore, but in those days was the closest rink to the apartment where we lived. I used to travel to that rink on a bicycle before I had a car. They knew about my international skating background, my competitive background, so they gave me a job right away. I started teaching there; I had some nice kids there. Actually, in those first days I didn’t know much of the skating terminology and I was just learning from the students I was teaching. So I was showing them a move, a jump or spin and I said ‘What do you call this? What do you call that?’ That’s how I learned the terminology, so that was interesting.”</p><h4>New York Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kXVp6iR3xUE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think it was almost immediately, because I had some friends who brought me to the Bohemian Hall and [Beer] Garden in Astoria, and I went to the celebration of Czech and Slovak Day which was usually during Memorial Day weekend. At first it was Sunday and Monday and now we are celebrating it every Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. I met a lot more friends there. I started to get involved in Czech theatre in Queens, which was led by Mrs. Božena Snížková. The theatre’s name was the Theatre of Jan Snížek who was her husband who died just before I met her. She was continuing his work and brought to the Czech and Slovak community a lot of beautiful performances, and I even acted in some of those performances. She talked me into it and it was a great time. My kids were little at the time and they started attending Czech school in Winfield, which is also in Queens, and their teacher was Mrs. Marie Miladova who was a wonderful lady. She always put on a show of the Winfield school at Czech and Slovak Day, so my children were reciting Czech poetry at that time, they were singing Czech songs and they were dancing Beseda, and I even danced Beseda with them once when one of the girls was missing. So it was really a happy time. And that’s how I developed my relationship to BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria) and, this past March, I even became a president of that society.”</p>
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Title
A name given to the resource
Milada Kubikova-Stastny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Milada Kubikova-Stastny was born in Plzeň in 1943. Her father, Jaroslav, was a doctor and her mother, also named Milada, was a lawyer. When Plzeň was liberated by American troops at the end of WWII, Milada (then two years old) and her brother were dressed in Czech folk costumes to welcome the soldiers. Milada began ice skating at the age of seven and for several years skated pairs with her older brother Jaroslav. Along with her later pairs partner, Jaroslav Votruba, Milada became a national champion, competed in the European and World Championships, and placed tenth at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck.</p><p> </p><p>Milada moved to Prague to study physical education and Russian at Charles University. One year before graduating, however, she joined the Vienna Ice Revue and toured for two years throughout Western Europe. She was in West Germany at the time of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and although she considered not returning to Czechoslovakia, Milada did return and finished her degree. Upon graduating, Milada again joined the Vienna Ice Revue which was undertaking a tour of North America. In the fall of 1969, as the ice show was ending in New York City, Milada decided to stay in the United States and claimed asylum. She settled in the borough of Queens where she had two children with her first husband and worked as a skating instructor. Milada says that she became involved in the Czech community ‘almost immediately,’ where she became a member of the BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria), participated in Czech theatre and enrolled her children in Czech school. Milada married her second husband, Bretislav Stastny, who was a jeweler in Manhattan, and moved to Long Island. The pair had a son in 1976. Milada continued to teach skating and became the director of a large skate school in Great Neck, New York.</p><p> </p><p>In 2001, Milada, along with her pairs partner Votruba, was honored as one of ten ‘Sports Stars of the Twentieth Century’ in Plzeň for her international success. She travels to the Czech Republic yearly, in part to visit her brother Jaroslav who also left the country as part of a touring ice show. He returned to Plzeň in 1991 and now runs three skating rinks in the city. Today, Milada is active in the Czech community in the United States. She is a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, and in March 2012 she was named president of the BCBSA. Milada lives in Roslyn, New York.</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 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Education
Plzen
Snizek
Sports
World War II
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22c9104e6f61ad2781173632e87cb41e
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
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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
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<h4>War Restrictions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/avgmEr7S_CI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I think I was mostly inconvenienced, being a teenager, by the restrictions on our lives – social lives – and curfews at night. I tried to go to ballet school and I couldn’t go because you had to be home before dark. Everything was all closed up without lights, because they worried about the Allied planes going over and bombing.”</p><h4>Illegal Groceries</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EtzNW_TpOJA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It sort of goes with you, I think all these people that you might talk to and who spent their childhood and young adulthood through those time, those difficult times… I can’t throw any food away and I always am looking for something to save, and how would I do if I can’t go to the store? Because we would go out in the country and buy illegally on the black market food so that we could survive. But then, when you went through the train station, we would carry, let’s say, five pounds of pork, or something somebody in the country would sell us. And the Germans had German shepherds, and I remember one instance – and I think after that I didn’t do it, I didn’t want to go anymore – they caught the people before us. They were involved with whoever it was, I don’t remember, and they just sort of descended on them and we just sneaked by, it was another friend of mine.”</p><h4>Translator</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DB-e8b-sp5g?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember being on the town square, the beautiful town square, where there was a big parade for General Eisenhower and Bradley, Omar Bradley, and I was there with my cousin. We went down to see the parade. And I was trying to peek over the tops of the people in front of us and I couldn’t quite see. And an American soldier brought me a chair from somebody’s house, and I said ‘Well, thank you very much!’ And he said ‘Oh! There is a fräulein who speaks English!’ Well, I right away got involved in that and I was working as a translator for… that was the Third Army that went through Plzeň. And then they had to leave Plzeň, pull back, and they stopped in a town which is a beautiful resort town called Mariánské Lázně, Marienbad. And they offered me a job. I was, I think, 17 years old.”</p><p><em>So you became a translator for the American Third Army when they were in Plzeň, and when they withdrew to Marienbad you went too?</em></p><p>“Right. I had a lovely apartment in a hotel and every morning a Jeep would come and pick me up, and then at noon I would have one lunch in the enlisted men’s mess hall, and then I would be asked by somebody to have a lunch with some upper officers. Pineapple, bacon or coffee, it was just fantastic. So, I was for I guess six or seven months in Marienbad and I love that town.”</p><h4>Benes Decrees</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/isAZ4UQHuOA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In this town Marienbad where we were – our headquarters – there were people, older Germans, who lived there for x number of years and all of a sudden they were told ‘Pack your suitcase and go.’ And some of them, when they were elderly or ill, they would commit suicide. So, I was involved in finding out what was happening and then the American Army was working with the Czech police, so, some of it was not very pleasant. And I think I was doing it for only five or six months, and then they got some men to take over.”</p>
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Title
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Paula Moss
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<p> </p><p>Paula Moss was born in Prague in 1925. Her father, Josef Hubka, served as a senator for the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party for three terms until Parliament was dissolved before the outbreak of WWII. Her mother, Anna, was a housewife. Paula attended Jan Masaryk Elementary School in the Prague district of Vinohrady and then the Akademie obchodní Dr. Edvarda Beneše [Beneš Business School], where she specialized in languages. Paula says her father wanted her to focus on studying French, but her first choice of foreign language was English, which she learned, she says, to improve her comprehension of Walt Disney films. Paula remembers food shortages in Prague during the War and says she would travel to the countryside to buy items such as pork illegally, until she came too close to being exposed, and so abandoned such activities.</p><p> </p><p>Upon liberation in 1945, Paula traveled to Plzeň to visit one of her cousins, where her English-language skills were discovered by a member of General George Patton’s American Third Army during a victory parade. She was immediately taken on as a translator for the troops and followed the Third Army to the spa town of Mariánské Lázně when they withdrew to western Bohemia shortly after the end of the War. Paula says part of her work in Mariánské Lázně was with local authorities implementing the Beneš Decrees, which displaced thousands of ethnic Germans from the Czechoslovak border regions.</p><p> </p><p>Paula moved to Germany with the troops about six months later and remained in Heidelberg when they left, working for the Seventh Army (which replaced them) instead. It was then that Paula met her husband, Captain Richard Moss. The pair were married in Prague in June 1947 and moved to his native Chicago upon his discharge the following year. They first lived with Paula’s in-laws on Lakewood Avenue before moving to the Rogers Park district of the city. The couple had three children. Richard worked in a number of roles for NBC Chicago for 35 years, while Paula worked as a librarian and in real estate. She became a U.S. citizen in 1956. Now widowed, Paula lives in Highland Park, Illinois. A long-term member of the Czechoslovak National Council of America, Paula has donated several historic garments originally belonging to her grandmother to the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Akademie obchodni Dr. Edvarda Benese
American citizenship
Community Life
Czech-German relations
Education
English language
Marianske Lazne
marriage
Plzen
Translator/interpreter
Women workers
World War II