Vojtech Mastny
<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
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Vladimir Mlynek
<p>Vladimir Mlynek was born in the small village of Hamry, in northwestern Slovakia, in 1926. His parents, although both Slovak, had met in Cleveland, where they were married and had already raised two children, Vladimir’s brother and sister, Steve and Irene. Just before the Great Depression, the whole family returned to Slovakia. They bought a mill, from which Vladimir’s father, Štefan, operated a cabinet-making business. When they were old enough, just before WWII began, Vladimir’s brother and sister returned to the United States. When the family cabinet business failed towards the end of WWII, Vladimir moved with his parents to the more industrial town of Považská Bystrica. There he trained to become an electrician and started working for the local arms factory, later known as Československá zbrojovka.</p><p> </p><p>After the War, Vladimir’s parents returned to the United States and, in 1947, Vladimir himself followed. He settled in Cleveland, working first as an assistant to his father, who was making cabinets for televisions at the city’s DuMont plant. In 1952, after a number of deferments, Vladimir was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was supposed to be sent to Korea, but in fact spent most of the Korean War stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In 1955, Vladimir married his wife, Clara, an American of Polish extraction. The couple have two children, Gerald and Jeanette. A life-long radio enthusiast, Vladimir has been involved in Slovak-language broadcasting in Cleveland for over half a century. He has hosted the Slovak Radio Hour on Cleveland’s WCPN with his son Gerald every Sunday since 1985.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808010411/http://www.wcpn.org/WCPN/about/personality_bios" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A biography of Vladimir on WCPN’s website</a></p>
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Vladimir Krman
<p>Vladimir Krman was born in Bratislava in June 1929. He attended business academy in the city as his parents wanted him to become a bank clerk, but dropped out so that he could train to become a pilot in the Czechoslovak Air Force in 1946. He started learning how to fly at the Aero Club in Vajnory, a suburb of Bratislava, and once he gained certification to became a flight instructor, his first posting was at Piešt’any airfield in Western Slovakia. Vladimir was a sergeant in the Czechoslovak Air Force until 1948 when, he says, Soviet rules were adopted and he was elevated to the rank of second lieutenant. Vladimir worked as a military flight instructor until leaving Czechoslovakia in early 1953, though he says he latterly came under increasing scrutiny due to his ‘political inactivity.’ He was also a member of an aerobatic flight team. Vladimir says he was about to be stripped of his right to teach, and indeed fly, which was why he decided to leave the country.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir devised the plan to leave Czechoslovakia with his cousin Jozef Fleischhacker and his friend, Gustav Molnar (both company sergeant majors in the Air Force), in 1952. It is said the escape was organized at Reduta dance hall in Bratislava while the American tune ‘Domino’ was playing, and so the men later referred to their escape as ‘Operation Domino.’ It was decided that when Gustav found himself on guard duty, Vladimir and Jozef would sneak into a hangar, prepare a plane for takeoff and then, in the early hours of the morning, set off for Graz in the British-controlled zone of Austria, where the three would ask for asylum. The opportunity presented itself on Friday, March 13, 1953 in Piešt’any. Vladimir says that while the plan went perfectly, once in the air, the trio found themselves pursued by Soviet MIG 15s. He says, however, that he managed to shake them off by flying low and changing course.</p><p> </p><p>The three made it to Graz, where they were debriefed and were presented to journalists at a press conference. Around 10 days later they were transported to London, where they were advised by British officials to adopt false names for security purposes. Vladimir took the name Frederick Tornil, which he still uses to this day. After one year in Britain, Vladimir moved to Canada, where he started working as a flight instructor at Toronto Island Airport and, at the same time, for General Motors. In 1958, he moved to the Chicago area. After stints working at Rockwell-Standard and Zenith Electronics, Vladimir again went to work for General Motors in La Grange, Illinois, where he stayed for more than 30 years. He gained a commercial pilot’s license and flew from DuPage County airport as a hobby, he says. In 1967, he married his sweetheart from the Bratislava Aero Club, Ružena. She came to live with Vladimir in La Grange alongside her son Roman (who later joined the U.S. Air Force). Vladimir and Ružena had two more sons; Daniel and Martin. Vladimir says he used to enjoy playing soccer and attending dances at the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. Today, he enjoys DIY and fixing scooters and motorbikes.</p><p><a href="/web/20170609161808/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Krman_bio_Slovak_translation.pdf">Vladimir’s biography in Slovak (without diactrics)</a><br /><a href="/web/20170609161808/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/e-Krman_interview_clips.pdf">PDF Vladimir’s interview clips in Slovak (without diacritics)</a></p>
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Savoy Horvath
<p>Savoy Horvath was born in 1933 in Brno, Moravia. Six years later, his family moved to Hradec Králové where his father worked at a German airport as an interpreter and accountant for the Nazis. Savoy’s father was also the leader of a Czech resistance group called 777. Immediately following the War, Savoy’s father was given management of an ESKA bicycle factory in Cheb, a city in the Sudeten region close to the German border. Savoy remembers being active in politics as a young teenager and, as a supporter of the Czech National Socialist (or Beneš) Party, clashing with his peers who held communist views. Savoy went to trade school and began an apprenticeship at his father’s factory, where he became friends with a number of Yugoslav workers. In 1948, he helped a couple of them across the border illegally and, after one escapee changed his mind, Savoy says he was in danger of arrest. Convinced that he must leave the country immediately, Savoy crossed the border into Germany in April 1948.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3499" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609044934im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-211.jpg" alt="Savoy Horvath" width="300" height="333" /></p><p>After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Mojmir Povolny
<p>Mojmir Povolny was born in Měnín, a small village near Brno, in 1921. His father owned a local liquor store and his mother stayed at home, raising him and his younger brother, Bořivoj. When Mojmir was old enough to go to <em>gymnázium</em>, he was sent to Brno to study, where he lived with his aunt and uncle. Mojmir’s studies were interrupted by WWII. He was sent to work in the Minerva munitions factory in Boskovice for the duration of the War. In 1945, he enrolled as a law student at Masaryk University in Brno. As an undergraduate he became involved with the Czechoslovak National Socialist or Beneš Party and, within that, an influential group of students and professors called <em>Oddělení pro vědeckou politiku</em> [The Section for the Scientific Study of Politics].</p><p> </p><p>After his studies, Mojmir was invited to work for the Beneš Party at its headquarters in Prague. He worked there until just after the Communist coup d’état in February 1948. He left Czechoslovakia two months later; he says he found out afterwards that the Communist secret police had helped him escape. Mojmir was sponsored by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees to come and study at the University of Chicago in 1950. He became an American citizen in 1956. From 1974 to 1989 he was chairman of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia. Following a career in academia, Mojmir retired and lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife Joy. He died on August 21, 2012. He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Joy, and their two children.</p>
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Melania Rakytiak
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</p>
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Marek Skolil
<p>Marek Skolil was born in Slaný, central Bohemia, in March 1962. His mother, Jaroslava, was a nurse who later worked for the national chain of record stores Supraphon, while his father, Pavel (whom he did not see very often following his parents’ divorce), served in the Czechoslovak Army. Marek started primary school in Slaný before being sent to nearby Kládno to attend a special language school where he learned German, Russian and French. After attending the local secondary school in Slaný, he decided to spend his last year of schooling as a boarder at a school in Žd’ar nad Sazavou, which prepared students to go to university in Moscow. Marek says he had no intention of studying in the USSR, but that this year away from his family did subsequently help him live abroad. In 1980, after being rejected and then accepted in a series of events he refers to as ‘surreal’, Marek began a degree in psychology at Charles University in Prague. He left the country before finishing his studies in June 1983.</p><p> </p><p>Marek settled in Paris, where he began by working as an au pair. He resumed his psychology studies at Paris X – Nanterre and, in 1986, started working at the legendary Czech exile publication <em>Svědectví </em>[Testimony], run by Pavel Tigrid. He worked at the quarterly as the deputy editor until after the Velvet Revolution. After a couple of years working as a journalist and lecturer in Paris, Marek was invited to join the new Czech Foreign Ministry (following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992). He did and started his diplomatic career on the French desk in Prague. He was subsequently sent to Paris as the deputy chief of mission, and then to Vietnam and Lebanon as ambassador. It was on a posting to the latter that he met his Slovak wife, Lydia, with whom he has two children. Marek was the first ever consul general of the Czech Republic in Chicago between 2005 and 2010.</p>
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Madeleine Albright
<p>Madeleine Albright was born in the Prague district of Smíchov in 1937. Shortly after her birth, she traveled to Belgrade with her mother, Anna, to join her father, Josef, who worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in the Yugoslav capital. With the outbreak of WWII, the Körbel family traveled to Britain, where they settled first with relatives in Berkhamsted before moving to the London district of Notting Hill Gate. It was here that Madeleine experienced the Blitz. Madeleine’s father began work for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, serving as both the private secretary to Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and the head of the Czechoslovak service of the BBC.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine remembers her schooling in the United Kingdom during WWII, as well as a starring role she played in a Red Cross film about refugee children (in return for a stuffed rabbit). She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in 1945 and spent several months living in Prague on Hradčanské náměstí before her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. Over the two years that followed, Madeleine says she led a “pretty constrained life” at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade, as her father did not want her to attend school with communists and so she was taught at home by a governess. In 1948, Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland in order to learn French.</p><p> </p><p>Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Madeleine’s father was appointed to a UN commission on Kashmir. As a result of this appointment, the family traveled to the United States to live. In 1949, following the coup, the family sought asylum in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where Madeleine’s father took a teaching position at the University of Denver. Madeleine attended Kent Denver School and then Wellesley College for her undergraduate degree. She subsequently attended Columbia University in New York City, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of the media in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine became involved in politics as a campaigner for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, and then as a member of his staff. She worked for the Carter administration under Zbigniew Brzezinski and then as the head of the National Democratic Institute. In 1993, she became the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1997, she was appointed Secretary of State, making her the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. government until then.</p><p> </p><p>Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including <em>Madame Secretary: A Memoir</em> and, most recently, <em>Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War</em>, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.</p>
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Juraj Slavik
<p> </p><p>Juraj Slavik was born in Prague in October 1929, son of the then-minister of the interior, Juraj Slávik. In 1936, Juraj’s father was sent to head the Czechoslovak diplomatic mission in Poland, with whom relations were strained because of both countries’ claims to parts of Upper Silesia. Juraj attended the Lycée Français de Varsovie [the French School in Warsaw] but, in light of heightening tensions, was sent to school in Switzerland just before the outbreak of WWII. After a brief spell in Belgium, Juraj spent the War in Britain, first with his parents in London (where his father was a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) and then as a boarder at Magdalen College School in Oxford and the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj returned with his parents to Czechoslovakia in 1945. One year later, however, Juraj’s father was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States and so the family left for America. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Juraj’s father resigned from his post and the family decided to stay in the United States. Juraj’s siblings Dušan and Taňa remained in Czechoslovakia, where Dušan was subsequently arrested and spent 11 years in jail.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and then volunteered for the draft, serving in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1956 as a translator debriefing Czech and Slovak refugees after they crossed the border into West Germany. In 1960, Juraj married his wife, Julie Bres Slavik. The couple have two children. After a successful career working for the U.S. government’s cultural exchange Program, Juraj, now retired, devotes much of his time to Slovak and Czech organizations, including Friends of Slovakia and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1990, Juraj returned his father’s ashes to his native Slovakia. He has worked with Slovak and Czech historians to have his father’s letters published. In 2006, a book about Juraj’s father, titled <em>Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969</em>, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.<br /></p>
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Joseph Masin
<p>Joseph Masin was born in Prague in 1932 and was raised nearby in the Czechoslovak military barracks at Ruzyně, where his father Josef was an army commandant. With the outbreak of WWII, Joseph’s father became a leading figure in an anti-Nazi resistance group called the Tří králové [The Three Kings]; he was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Gestapo one year later. Joseph’s mother, Zdenka, meanwhile, was interned in Terezín concentration camp. Joseph and his brother <a href="/web/20170609145800/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/radek-masin/">Radek</a> spent most of the War in the spa town of Poděbrady where, says Joseph, the pair carried out a number of anti-Nazi actions, for which they were decorated by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3662" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-141.jpg" alt="Joseph Masin" width="240" height="350" /></p><p>Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800/http://www.gauntletinfo.com/homepage.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape</a></p>
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