Duke and his family arrived in Chicago in July 1949. They had been sponsored by some of Duke’s mother’s relatives, who had settled in the United States before WWI and owned a Czech bakery in Berwyn. Duke says that the family stayed in Berwyn for less than a month, with his mother and father quickly deciding to take jobs as a maid and a gardener in one household in Winnetka, just north of Chicago. There Duke began his schooling at Hubbard Woods School. He gained his degree at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and was in the middle of studying at DePaul Law School when a friend told him about the work he was doing in the investment banking sector. Duke was impressed and applied for a job at Hornblower & Weeks, which he got. He has worked in the industry since and is now partner at William Blair & Company, which is based in downtown Chicago. Duke says he is ‘incredibly proud’ of his Czech background. Today, he is active as chairman of the Chicago Prague Sister Cities Committee. He is also on the Czech-North American Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
]]>Edward (Duke) Dellin was born in Prague in 1940. His father, Eduard, had studied agricultural engineering and, after a time spent at the helm of the Sugar Beet Growers’ Association, became involved in politics as the Secretary of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party. Duke lived with his parents and older sister Jane in Prague’s Nové Město (New Town) until he was eight years old, attending a French-language school run by nuns in the center of the city. Following the Communist coup in 1948, a warrant was issued for Duke’s father’s arrest, leading Eduard Dellin to flee Czechoslovakia for Paris, where he joined a number of other former Czechoslovak politicians. Duke says that his mother, Marie, was not sure at first what she should do and, in a bid to curb mounting pressure placed on the family by the authorities, took the first steps towards divorcing Duke’s father. After a short while, however, she was approached by a number of Western agents, says Duke, who gave her instructions on how to get out of Czechoslovakia with her two children. In July 1948, Duke arrived in Regensburg, West Germany with his mother and sister. They remained there for one week before being transferred to Ludwigsburg refugee camp. There, Duke’s father joined the family and the Dellins applied to come to the United States.
Duke and his family arrived in Chicago in July 1949. They had been sponsored by some of Duke’s mother’s relatives, who had settled in the United States before WWI and owned a Czech bakery in Berwyn. Duke says that the family stayed in Berwyn for less than a month, with his mother and father quickly deciding to take jobs as a maid and a gardener in one household in Winnetka, just north of Chicago. There Duke began his schooling at Hubbard Woods School. He gained his degree at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and was in the middle of studying at DePaul Law School when a friend told him about the work he was doing in the investment banking sector. Duke was impressed and applied for a job at Hornblower & Weeks, which he got. He has worked in the industry since and is now partner at William Blair & Company, which is based in downtown Chicago. Duke says he is ‘incredibly proud’ of his Czech background. Today, he is active as chairman of the Chicago Prague Sister Cities Committee. He is also on the Czech-North American Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
“We lived, we lived in one room. And I believe, off and on, there were either two or three families sharing one room. It was a relatively large room. The bath was actually down the hall, so that was shared by several other families. It was an old army barracks, it was an old kásarna that had been bombed during the War. And so it was not in the greatest shape. There was a lot of rubble all around it. So it was not a very pleasant place for children to play. I remember parts of it were bombed out and they were just sort of leveled, almost to the ground, except the basements. And playing in those little warrens underground almost – that was awful. I mean it had to be, I guess, tremendously dangerous, you know there could have been bombs down there that hadn’t exploded or something. I mean, I do remember that whole experience and I just found it to be fairly difficult. Sharing the room with other families, I remember… trying to go to sleep, let’s say at 8:00 or whenever a child goes to sleep, but of course the parents and the other families would be up ‘til 10:00, 11:00 or midnight, smoking, probably, I remember my mother smoked quite a bit. And so I remember the smell of smoke, conversation and so on, well, the children are trying to sleep in a little cot in the corner somewhere so, I remember that as being a fairly difficult time.”
“I remember very much looking forward to receiving packages from America at that time, and it would be a CARE package. There was an organization called CARE and I think it’s still, I think it’s still… because I have given CARE some money in the past and getting these packages, it was truly like Christmas. It was a very exciting time. I remember getting a package that had some peanut butter in it. And I had never tasted peanut butter and it was so good, I remember my father would keep this jar of peanut butter way up on a high dresser somewhere and only if we were good, if we did something that was very good, we would get one spoonful of peanut butter. And that was a reward, and I don’t know how long that jar of peanut butter lasted, because I wasn’t that good – so it was up there a long time probably but… Anyway, so the food I think was absolutely terrible at the time, because I do recall getting these Care packages and what a great treat they really were.”
“Well actually I think, I think it was primarily for the children. I think they saw the fact that maybe living in the Czech part… well, I think they wanted sort of more opportunity for us, I mean I, I didn’t know that at the time, I was told that later. That’s why, that’s why they did it, because I had questioned them also, you know, about this years later, and they stated simply that they had been introduced to someone who worked as a domestic servant in the town of Winnetka, which is just north of Chicago. And she had heard that another family was looking for someone who would work as a maid and as a gardener and so I think they thought that this was probably a good opportunity, and I think they did it just because they realized that this would be a good opportunity for us, for the children.”
“I was deposited in the back of the room and I simply sat there. I was introduced of course, ‘Okay class, here we have with us little Eddie Dellin’, and there he is, this weird looking little kid who had some funny clothes on and so… and anyway, so I just kind of sat there and class went on, and people were raising their hands, and the teacher was writing on the blackboard and the kids went up to the blackboard to write things down and I just kind of sat there. Anyway, but sooner or later, I started to realize that I’m kind of catching on, and I remember fairly distinctly the teacher asking a question and she was asking, I guess they were studying history, and she asked the question of who had been the prime minister of England during the War. And… ‘Yes Eddie?’ ‘Veenston Churchill,’ ‘Yes! Ok!’ I remember getting a round of applause the first time that I raised my hand to be able to answer a question. And from there it was relatively simple.”
“I certainly felt this great desire to go back and it was… the feeling was absolutely incredible. I flew to Frankfurt and rented a car and drove it and as soon as I got to the border I almost started to weep. Oh, I know, I was able to catch a Czech station on the radio and somehow I found this station that was playing some of these songs that I had learned and that I knew and I mean, I got terribly emotional, I started driving and crying and stuff, just as I was driving across the border. Anyway, it was very emotional and very nice.”
“When I was growing up, I was sort of ashamed of it, I mean, the Czechs were just like any other Eastern European behind the Curtain, behind the Iron Curtain countries, and there was not much to distinguish them – at least from what I could see over here – and in fact they would have… there was a television show here called Saturday Night Live which is still on and they had this skit, with John Belushi or Dan Ackroyd, and it was a comedy, and they had one skit about the two wild and crazy guys from Czechoslovakia. And they were sort of painted to be the buffoons who said silly things and so on. So that was the image of the, of the… and so I never made a point of the fact that I was Czech. It was not until a little bit later that I realized how stupid I was for denying this heritage and then I really started to embrace it entirely, and now I’m just incredibly proud to be a Czech. Because you know, so many people have been to Prague once and I think almost everyone says ‘my goodness, what a wonderful city, and what wonderful people’ and they can’t believe this incredible history that they see. And so, of course, I have become extremely, extremely proud and so I have gotten involved in, you know, quite a few things Czech.”
The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.
]]>John Palka is the grandson of Milan Hodža, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1938. He was born in exile in Paris in 1939, without his father present. His father, Ján Pálka, joined the family some months later, after playing an active role in the anti-Nazi resistance back home. The family spent most of WWII in Chicago, with John attending kindergarten and elementary school there. In 1946, the Palka family returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Liptovský Mikuláš (today found in northern Slovakia), which had for generations been the home of the Palkas. Following the Communist takeover in 1948, John Palka’s father spent four months in jail, and the family eventually fled in 1949, when it was suggested that he may again face arrest. John was nine when the family escaped.
The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.
“He managed to find this place in FNB Manufacturing – it’s a company which still exists, though now they do different things. He would actually bring me home components which had been rejected to play with. And so I had switches and transformers and things of this sort which I could take apart and unwind and string the wire all over the place. It was actually a bit of a hazard in the apartment.”
“It was a school that my grandfather had helped to build. He came to the opening of the school in 1938, it was named in his honor. So I went to my grandfather’s school, so to speak, for the second half of first grade. That was a very bad experience, because the students there were way ahead of anything we had done in the Chicago public schools. And most particularly, they were all writing in cursive, and they were using quill pens that you had to dip into the ink, and I only knew how to write in pencil, and I only knew how to print – I didn’t know how to write cursive. And I had never gone to school in Slovak, and it was a much more formal attitude and when I walked in I had no idea that you were supposed to stand when the teacher came into the room and all those kinds of traditional ways of being in the classroom – that was all new to me. So I was not very happy in that school.”
“The idea was to move when there was no light in our sector and then drop to the ground as the light started to come closer. And of course it had a fairly regular rotation and so you could be sort of out of reach of the light. I remember very distinctly that this was a heavily ploughed field and so there were big, big chunks of earth and it was not easy walking, especially for little feet. We were held together by a rope, a light string, that we all held onto. And so the leader would go, he had made the crossing a number of times, and he would go when it was safe, he would drop when it wasn’t safe, and the rest of us did the same. And then we came to the barbed wire fence and, in my memory, the wires were either spread, or one was lifted, anyhow – a crawling space was made for me at any rate. And we crossed over to the other side, which was just as dangerous, because it was still ploughed, and it was still within reach of the searchlights, and it was the Russian zone of Austria. So this was not a complete escape by any means. But we did make it across safely and we did end up in another safe house.”
“My mother tried her best to assimilate. My father I don’t think ever really tried to assimilate. He tried to make a living, but that’s different than really assimilating. He didn’t do that, but it wasn’t because he was resentful or because he thought it wasn’t appropriate, he just… I think the energy had gone out of him. By the time of one escape, and then another escape and being jailed in between, and having sort of come from very elevated circumstances and having had to do this really menial work during the war, and trying to run a business and that failing – it was just a tremendous amount of discouragement. And how much the imprisonment had to do with it, I don’t know. We certainly never talked about it, but my cousin in Bratislava… my closest cousin says that he remembers his mother saying that when she saw my father after he’d been released from prison, her first reaction was ‘this is a beaten man.’”
“You just had to be really careful and basically stay out of trouble and find ways of not yielding to the system completely. That was particularly difficult with children, because children went to school, and at school they might repeat anything that was said at home. And so parents were faced with this horrible dilemma of either not saying anything and having their children brainwashed, or saying what they saw was the truth and then risking that everybody would be severely penalized if this ever came out into the open – and this easily could through the children. It was… Not only was it dangerous, but it confronted everybody with the problem of how to live within the regime and not sell out to it completely.”
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.
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.
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.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
]]>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 Radek 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.
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.
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.
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.
Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape
“Our mother, she was jailed twice, and she spent a long time in German jails, and during that time our maid was still with our family and also our grandmother, who came also from a family which was German speaking, so she was looking out for us and actually, it was our grandmother and our maid who saved us when our mother was taken prisoner, when she was in the jail. So, she saved us from going to be reeducated and re-assimilated into the German folks. Our grandmother went to the authorities and she said, when they wanted to take us away, she said ‘look, I am going to look after them, I am German and so I am going to bring them up in the proper frame of mind so don’t worry’ and this is how we were kind of saved.”
“The Russians were very, very friendly, very nice. We just loved them, everybody threw flowers at them, because we were all allies, we just did not recognize… they were our brothers. And as a matter of fact, the first troops which came to Poděbrady, who stayed there, we were so friendly with them. In the evening, they used to dance kozáček and they used to sing and they used to play harmonicas and us kids, we just loved it. And they had the troops… they had women soldiers also and officers were women also and sometimes they even had kids – not their own kids, but somewhere in Ukraine or Poland they were abandoned, orphans, these kids – so they took them with them and they were moving with them. So for us it was all new and they would share their food with us because there was no food, it was a pretty bad situation. So, initially it was all very friendly, it turned 180 degrees later on.”
“When the Germans were emptying some of the concentration camps, they were moving these Jews in open railroad cars during the winter time. And when these people, when they froze, their co-prisoners, they just threw them out of the railroad cars. And these guys, there were two guys, who simulated being dead. They were thrown out and they came through this Colonel Vaněk, they came also to the place where our POW, the Russian guy, came to [a hiding place made by the brothers inside one of the walls of their home].
“And as a matter of fact, before then, I don’t know if you have any experience of this, but kids when they are in their teens, 12, 14, everybody was playing clubs – so we had a club and our club, we dug a hole. Near our village, there was a little patch of woods and a sandpit, and in the sandpit there was a bunch of rabbits and these rabbits, they dig holes, and we enlarged one of the holes and made a kind of cave underneath, and it was our clubhouse. And as a matter of fact, in our clubhouse (because we did not have any place to keep our POWs) after we moved him out of our house, we moved him and these two Jewish ex-German prisoners; they were moved for a certain period to our clubhouse. So we kept them there. We were getting food to them also, because as kids we were not very obvious, we could carry the food and deliver it to them.
“And we have also, at that time through Poděbrady near the place we used to live, German military supply trains used to move and for example, they were moving fighter planes on these supply trains, on flatbed cars. So we went on these flatbed cars with hammers and so on, and we were damaging these fighter planes so that they could not be used elsewhere. But it was not that simple, because when they were moving these military freight supply trains, there was always anti-aircraft… there was the last car and the car right after the steam engine, they had cars with anti-aircraft guns and military guards. But these guys sometimes… either they were drunk or towards the end of the War, the discipline was not what it should have been, so they have not noticed or something and so we were able to do those things. And for these activities after the War we got this medal from Beneš.”
“It was raining, it was freezing, it was snowing. We were wet, our navigation was pretty bad because things in East Germany were not what we thought they would be. We decided… especially Zbyňa [Zbyněk Janata] was nudging us to move quickly, and so we decided to carjack, do carjacking, get a car and move to Berlin on four wheels.
“On that occasion, Radek let his gun… because Zbyněk wanted to have a gun there so just, he let him have the gun and he, for no reason, just to scare people, he fired the gun. And other people traveling on the road, which was the road by Freiburg going up north towards Berlin, other people started stopping, having heard the shotgun. Other cars started to stop and we had to abandon the effort. Because the fellow who was driving the car – it was a Volkswagen, an amphibious Volkswagen, and there was not enough place even in that vehicle for all of us, but when we pulled him out and Radek gave him chloroform, so before then, he pulled the key out of the ignition, and we had no way to start the car. We started to look for the keys, Zbyněk fired the gun and so there were about five, six people all of a sudden, several cars… before then, no cars stopped, but at that time all the cars started to stop and there and they started to chase us through the woods and Zbyněk sprained his ankle real bad.”
“Why we don’t go there? Because it’s not the country we fought for. In the army, in the U.S. Army, we had Slovaks, good Slovaks, there was a fellow; his name was Pokorný – he used to be a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army and he was in Special Forces, there were a couple of other Slovaks. We fought, we wanted to fight for something for Czechoslovakia, united Czechoslovakia, democracy and everything. None of this happened.”
“Democracy is not to drive a Mercedes, svoboda [freedom] is not to go to Cuba on vacation, or to the Caribbean or Mallorca, you know? It takes a little bit more; it’s a frame of mind.”
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.
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.
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 Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.
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.
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.
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 Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.
“Being minister of the interior, he was in charge of police issues. And the commissioner of police for Prague was, I don’t remember his title, but it was Doležal. And Doležal came to my father and said that they had a report that there was going to be an attempt to assassinate the president, Masaryk, but that they had no real solid information about it, it was just hearsay. But what should they do? Masaryk was supposed to speak at the Obecní dům in Prague…
“The bottom line was that they decided to flood the place with secret police, or tajní, as they used to call them – mufti – in civilian clothes. And the way they identified where they were was to put potted palms in this meeting hall so, beside every potted palm was a policeman out of uniform. And the guy who came to assassinate Masaryk must have sensed this police presence and decided he wasn’t going to try it, it was too much of a chance… So the president was saved and so this guy, whose name was Gorguloff, a Russian terrorist – today, you would call him a terrorist – decided who was to blame and he said ‘Slávik’s to blame, because he is the head of the police system!’ So he came after my father in Schnirchova – that was the name of the street in Prague.
“And he came to our apartment in Schnirchova on the pretext of presenting a book to my father. And so my father – in those days you didn’t think about these things or security – so he agreed that he would meet. It was easier to meet at the apartment than at the office. So, this man Gorguloff came to the apartment. It was fairly recently after my birth. My mother didn’t know that he had a guest. In the deposition that came out later, he said that he had this book for my father to initial or sign, and under the book he had the pistol. And he was going to wait until my father looked down into the book to sign, and he was going to shoot him. And at that point my mother happened to, not knowing that there was a guest, open the sliding doors, somehow she had me in her arms. The guy took one look at her and ran out. Later he said that he had seen the Madonna – so that became a family joke, because they said ‘Who do you think you are?’ And I said ‘I don’t know!’ The bottom line was that later he settled in France and shot the French president, Paul Doumer.”
“The instructions came from the minister of foreign affairs, Chvalkovský, to the embassy – to the mission, because it was not an embassy, it was the mission, the legation, or whatever its titles were – to turn over the legation to the Germans, since they were now the new Protectorate and they had the right… With the exception, probably, of one individual, the embassy staff said no. It was decided that it would not be turned over. The Poles by this time were beginning to be a little worried. They said, you know, it’s an extra-territorial problem, we really can’t get involved in the middle of this. My father at one point had a phone call, which he says was a muffled voice, which he thought he recognized as being Ambassador von Moltke, who was the German ambassador, who was a good friend.
“The warning was that the German Gestapo had gained keys to the Czechoslovak legation and were coming to take over. Do something about the locks… so they put sand and paper and junk into the locks and so the German keys did not work and the Poles had insisted that the takeover be without violence. So the German Gestapo departed the scene, you know, and left without the embassy. And it was used as a focal point for all the Czechoslovaks who were escaping across the border from Czechoslovakia and Slovakia into Poland and where perhaps the nucleus of this potential legion, which took a while to get approved, and so by the time they were approved, it was too late.”
“Tony Mach packed up some papers of my father’s and took them back to his father’s farm in Volhynia, including a suitcase full of my father’s dressier things like the smoking, the dinner jacket, the white tie, tails, you know – the formal dresses, his decorations, his sashes – you know, ambassadors used to wear these formal decorations. And he took them all to his father and mother’s farm in Volhynia, where he spent the war working in a German factory, going back to his parents on weekends, taking out the clothes, brushing them to get rid of the moths, cleaning them up, and keeping them safe, including the papers. Had the Germans found the papers on that farm, it would have been the death of all of them, I mean, it was just that kind of situation.
“Many years later, my father has just learned that he is going to be ambassador to the United States, and about a day or so later, there was this movement of the Volhynian Czechs – they had been brought back into the German Sudeten areas. And the people in Volhynia were told ‘You can opt, you can stay here and become a citizen of the Soviet Union,’ which was expanding into Poland, ‘or you can go back to Czechoslovakia which is no longer subject to counter-reformation practices.’ So, they opted to go back to Czechoslovakia after 300-odd years of emigration.
“And so Tony… they put everything onto horse carts and ox carts and whatever, and the doorkeeper at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Černín Palace, comes up to my father’s office and says ‘Mr. Minister, umm, there’s a man here with a horse cart, and he says he knows you, he’s got some things of yours.’ And so my father says ‘Oh my God!’ So he goes downstairs and there’s Tony Mach, our butler, with all these things of my father’s! And he had brought them on his way from Poland to wherever they were going in the Sudeten area. And so, of course, the irony of it was that my father’s shape had changed over time. Most of the things didn’t fit anymore. But the papers… so half the papers were saved this way – that’s why my father was able to write his memoirs!”
“Rosslyn House had a phenomenal view of London. So of course we watched the Battle of Britain from our windows, when we were not in the air-raid shelter. Although I tended to sneak out and try and watch, because I could see the fires and the German bombers, you know, illuminated in the searchlights. That was real heady stuff, you know! Later, or actually not later – earlier – there was one day that I remember I was in the garden, and there was this roar, and I looked up and a German Heinkel was coming and I could see the pilot with his goggles and his head, looking out, and he was obviously trying to get his bearings, because I thought he was going to hit the hill, I mean, it was just round… And about 30, no it couldn’t have been 30, about 10 or 15 seconds later, two Spitfires were barreling exactly on the same path! That was all the noise! And of course they started, I could hear them shooting, and eventually there was a plume of smoke, so you know they got him. So this would go on, you know, and it was watching the dog fights during the day, because you were wondering, was it one of ours or one of theirs? You know, they’d come plummeting down with smoke trailing and stuff like that. And that was, as I say, very heady stuff.
“And then going to school was fascinating, because there was a lot of shrapnel on the road, and it was suggested that it would be helpful to collect the shrapnel, so we had bags or buckets or whatever, putting the pieces of shells in to collect so that they could melt it and shoot it back. And the prize collection was always the fuse – the shell fuse, which was the settings for the explosion at a certain altitude – so that was, those were real collector’s items, those you could trade, and so it was great fun collecting. Of course it also meant, because the air-raids would come in the morning, we always hoped it would be in time to slow us down on going to school! Because then we could do the collecting of the shells, the ammunition, the spent shells, the shrapnel and be late at school, so that was a benefit – and do a good deed by turning it in, and then in the evening, we’d spend the night in the shelters, because they would do some bombing at night.”
“There were some cases that were pretty horrendous. I don’t think it’s a classified one – one border guard shot the other border guard who was patrolling with him, they were covering the border security, you know the mined area and stuff like that, the barbed-wire fences and the machine gun sectors and stuff like that. And this guy was on the border, was on a patrol with his buddy, and he shot him in the back, killed him, and then escaped. He said the reason he shot him was it was the only way he could feel secure to effect his own escape; the Czech authorities said he was a murderer and had escaped in order to escape punishment for his crime. Two different stories – one the government’s, one this ordinary border, pohraniční stráž guy’s – we were hard put, because obviously, if it was murder and escape from the penalties of murder, he should be returned. If he had in effect gotten out because he had killed a guy in order to effectuate a successful escape, that was another question. The question of course immediately comes to mind ‘Why didn’t he just knock him in the head and pass him out, and then make his way out?’ The question there was ‘How long would it have taken him to get out?’ He had no way of knowing how long it would take to effect his escape, whether the guy would recover and call the alarm before he could… you know, so there was a real judgment… I had to take him to Frankfurt for a lie-detector test that we did, and the lie-detector operator said ‘I believe his story checks out, his escape rationale, however, I would not like to be his mother and tell him no about having a cookie!’ So, we sort of knew how amoral this individual was.”
“At one point he says he was visited by a couple of secrets, tajní, you know, and they said ‘Would you write a letter to your father to tell him it’s okay to come back to this country?’ You know, ‘Everything will be forgiven’, and Dušan said ‘What do you mean, forgiven?’ And they sort of negotiated this. And he said ‘Look, I can’t see my wife, I can’t see my child, I don’t have anything to read, I can’t write, everything is forbidden. Forget it!’ And they said, ‘Well, if we were to give you some of these benefits, would you consider writing a letter?’ And he said ‘Consider? Of course! Sure!’ And so of course then he did write a letter, and he obviously put in little references which they didn’t like. So they never sent the letter, but they did give him the freedom, and they asked him what did he want to read? And he said ‘I want to read Karl Marx, Das Kapital.’ They said, ‘Why do you want to read that?’ And he says ‘To learn how you think so I know how to fight you!’ So, he said ‘I figured I was in for a beating’, but he said they only tried to do it once. He was big, much bigger than I am, heftier, and he said the interrogator came at him, and he said he took the chair he was sitting on and pinned the guy against the wall and he said ‘You try and do that again and I’ll kill you, I have nothing to lose!’ And they never beat him after that.”
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.
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.
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.
Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including Madame Secretary: A Memoir and, most recently, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
]]>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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including Madame Secretary: A Memoir and, most recently, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
“My father – the thing that was interesting about him, many things, but he was very young. He was Czechoslovakia’s youngest ambassador. And a lot of the émigrés were older people who stayed around the East Coast to some extent and, if I could say, lived more in the past. And they would… I remember this going to the Library of Congress, for instance, when I was in college still – there were a lot of little old Czechs there who kept calling each other ‘Your Excellency’ as they were arranging the card catalogue. And they would say ‘As I said to Beneš…’ And the other one would say ‘Well, as I said to Beneš…’ My father never did that. I mean, they moved to Denver and a lot of people would say ‘Well, if this had worked out, you would have been foreign minister.’ And he said ‘I don’t live that way.’ And he said – and there’s a lot in his papers now in terms of that – nothing made him happier than to be a professor in a free country. And he was so grateful to be in the United States. And really quite stunning in that particular way and so, I think they didn’t think about going back.”
“Our citizenship papers all took a little bit longer because it was during the McCarthy era, and also because technically my father had worked for a communist government for that period from 1948 until he defected, and trying to explain what that all meant… And, by the way, what is interesting is when I went to the UN, they gave me all the papers so that I could see how he begged Dean Acheson for asylum. There were letters from the British Foreign Office saying that he was really a good man and all that. The other part is, as I have been doing research for my last book, they gave me my father’s secret police records. And he keeps being accused of being a pro-Western democrat. But we were getting our citizenship during this difficult time.
“When I got to Wellesley, I didn’t realize this but – I mean, I’d gone to high school in Denver, my English teacher and my Latin teacher had gone to Wellesley – all of a sudden, freshman year, two weeks in, we all wore Bermuda shorts and Shetland sweaters and things like that… Anyway, at Wellesley what happens is that someone would come to visit you and they would announce it over the loudspeaker, so all of a sudden somebody came and said ‘Madeleine, there are some ladies here who want to take you into Boston to show you what the American girl wears.’ So I came down in my Bermuda shorts and Shetland sweater and anyway, it turns out that I was seen as a foreign student at Wellesley. And when I went to find out how… It was different days when they didn’t tell you what your SAT scores were, and I went to find out and they said ‘Amazing! Absolutely amazing!’ And I think it is because they thought I was a foreign student.”
“All we ever talked about was foreign policy and history and politics. I mean, other people might have other discussions, but that’s all we ever talked about. And my father was amazing in terms of explaining history and in terms of telling stories that went along with it. And then what happened was that he… I kid about this, Alexis has heard me on the subject – I am old, he is dead, and I am still the perfect daughter; all I ever wanted to do was to be the perfect daughter. And so whatever my father was doing I did. So, he got interested in India and Pakistan, so I wrote a paper on Mahatma Gandhi (by the way, I have now found everything, it is in a box here). And so I learned about all of this, and I wanted to know, as my father wrote books, I always wanted to know what he was doing.”
So I had a copy of my father’s book, and Havel knew that he was going to meet with some American delegation and I’m handing him my father’s book and he says ‘I know who you are. You’re Mrs. Fulbright.’ And I said ‘No, I’m Mrs. Albright.’ And that is how our friendship began.
“We were in the Castle, and I told him what NDI could do, and that we could help. And he said ‘It would really help me… I need a new electoral law.’ And in two or three days I managed to get experts that weren’t American (because we had a different system), that came to help on the electoral law. The other thing that happened, he said – we were sitting there with Žantovský and various people and he said – ‘Why don’t you talk to my advisors and, because we are setting up the presidential office, whatever ideas you have…’ So we actually went to Vikárka [restaurant], which is up by the cathedral, and we started talking about – because I had been in the Carter administration – what a presidential office would look like.
“So I explained to them and then, I’ll never forget this: it was January; it was snowing, and I was staying at the Jalta Hotel up by Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square], but I walked down the stairs and then crossed Charles Bridge in the snow and I thought ‘I’ve never left here.’ And then I thought ‘Well, that’s not possible!’ Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to speak English and wouldn’t have understood how a presidential office really works.”
“Well, I have always believed in the goodness of American power. And the theme in my life has been that America was not present at Munich and terrible things happened. Americans then come into WWII and everything changes. Then, as a result of agreements made during WWII – even though Patton marched 45 kilometers into Czechoslovakia – as a result of the agreements, Soviets ‘liberated’ Czechoslovakia. So, when the U.S. isn’t there, bad things happen. When the U.S. is involved, good things happen.
“So, I have always thought that we, and I believe in… I grew up with this whole concept of what it’s like to live in a free country, the fragility of democracy, the importance of American values, a beacon, sailing past the Statue of Liberty, the whole works in that regard.
So, I have believed in the importance of America’s role internationally. That was very much the theme of when I taught and then specifically when I actually had something to do with it at the UN and when I was secretary. And so I have believed in the fact that we need to be internationalist. President Clinton said it first, but I said it so often – that we were ‘the indispensible nation’ – that it got identified with me. And there was nothing about the word indispensible that means alone – it just means that we have to be engaged.
“And what had happened after… I had worked in the Carter administration for Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is not dissimilar from me in terms of background, and what was the role of the United States? And President Carter with the human rights policy and all that fit into… And then we had Reagan, Bush, who – I thought – did the exact opposite. And what had happened after the Gulf War, when there had been all of a sudden Democrats coming back into office, and there had been sort of a lack of attention to domestic programs – I was afraid that we were just going to look inward. And so that’s why at the UN I thought we needed to be engaged and operate with partnerships and use the United Nations.
“So then, because life is so peculiar, the fact that I should be at the UN with my background was one thing, then the fact that the major thing we dealt with was the Balkans when my father had been ambassador there and I could actually understand it when the Serbs and the Croats came and they spoke to each other. You know, life is weird.”
“Democracy is more complicated than it looks. And I think that there were certain issues that weren’t completely resolved at the beginning. I have said this publicly before, and I said it to Václav Havel personally – he made a mistake in not creating a political party. Because you need… Movements can’t run countries. I believe in political parties. Political parties are the channel whereby people talk to their leaders and vice versa. But because of his experience, with ‘party’ being the Communist Party, there was kind of an allergy to the whole thing.
“Democracy is harder than it looks, and it is not an event; it is a process. And even we – the United States is the world’s oldest democracy – and at the moment we’re screwed up. I mean, I just came in listening to the radio and we can’t decide how to pass a farm bill that is both good for the farmers and the poor people.
You know, everything is an argument; there has been a terrible discussion now between the majority and the minority leader in the Senate over nominations… I mean, democracy is not simple.
“In the Czech Republic, what has basically happened is that there is – from what I read, there is a lot of corruption. Corruption is the cancer of democracy. And I think that one of the things that people forget is that – and this is a term only applicable in Europe – the ‘intelligentsia’ has a very good time during periods of freedom, ordinary people need to have… Democracy needs to deliver. People want to vote and eat. And so reading about, in this very week, reading about what is going on in the Czech Republic should be embarrassing to the Czechs. Because they had an amazing Velvet Revolution with probably one of the most amazing leaders in modern history, who made mistakes – everybody makes mistakes. But he really is the most modern, moral leader that any country could have and the Czechs should be proud that they had him as president. But what is going on now is very troubling.”
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 Svědectví [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.
]]>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.
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 Svědectví [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.
“They wanted to give me more chances in life. People were really… on the one hand, people living in a communist country – or at least in communist Czechoslovakia – were on one hand isolated, they didn’t have access to information and they were definitely not making a lot of money, that’s why they couldn’t travel etc. etc. But on the other hand, education and languages were important, even if they were not very important practically, because you couldn’t travel. It was something that was actually quite wise of my parents to open this gate for me – that was good.”
“I tried to get to Charles University and that was a typical communist-era anecdote. You know, the whole thing was that I was not accepted, although I had all the best scores with the exception of Russian, where I had a slightly… I had a dvojka z ruštiny [a B for Russian]. But still, you couldn’t get into these quotas. And so, funnily enough, I didn’t even… send an appeal – as far as I remember, I didn’t even do this. And that’s actually when I realized that I want to leave the country; if I cannot study, I will leave. But strangely, my stepfather, he met as it happens – there was this school maybe gymnázium, (secondary school), gathering of people. You know, from time to time, they have this anniversary gathering – and there was this guy who must have been a big-shot whatever in the Ministry of the Interior or wherever – something like this – and he said ‘If you want some help just call me.’ So my dad did, and suddenly I received an answer to an appeal that I never posted, that yes, I am accepted to university, which was rather surrealistic; people had already started university, I came a week later. And that’s how I started psychology, but in my head, in a way, this was the breaking experience, I felt like ‘No, I don’t need this, I want to see the other side.’”
“Maybe a year before leaving the country – so when I was 20, 21 – I got baptized at home, at my friend’s home, where we were meeting regularly, reading evangelical, but, you know, very modern guys, like Bonhoeffer and these freedom evangelists – you know, people who were rather avant-garde in terms of their theological thinking.”
Why did you decide to get baptized at that age?
“That was something that, at the time, was very meaningful to me. It was a very rich (and enlightening to me) alternative to the philosophy that was being served to us politically – Marxism, and those things. And as all religion, it was also obviously because there was a community of people who were very interesting and very strong. You know, people with whom I am friends until today.”
“It was tolerated, now of course, when you were… you know, the fact that I got baptized in an apartment – that would be already a big problem for the friend of mine who made the ceremony, and who actually later on became a professor of theology at the Prague faculty etc. That was really forbidden, but for the rest, it was tolerated. Obviously, a lot of people in these circles were people who were also politically active in their position, but it was not necessarily the same thing. Some people were very far… were clearly opponents to the regime, other people, like my father, were actually, you know, in the Party, as many people were, and still going to church, and somehow he could manage…
“You know, small towns were always worse, in Prague you could hide somehow, there was so much going on. In a small town like this of 20,000 people, it was actually a little bit more dangerous or you needed more courage, because everybody knew you and you were going to church. But people were going to church, some people were going to Catholic church, it was not exactly like in Poland, where church was really strong and the regime… These churches – the communists did not like them, but it was okay, at least they knew who they were – these people. And as long as you didn’t cross a certain limit, a certain red line, which was basically to be publishing and spreading information of not just religious, but even religious, it was not encouraged… but that was the line.”
“People were queuing in a queue, as I did, for three days, you know, making shifts – there was this self-organization of the people. You know, you came for two hours, and then you left, and then the day after, you came for another two hours and people were helping themselves in the line like this, because – they knew why – because on the day, D-Day, when the sale was open, even though I was eleventh in the line, after these three days, five minutes before the opening of the store, some people from the store came, opened the door and suddenly, even when you were eleventh in the line, there was not enough seats for me on the trip to, what was it? France or Western Europe, which was supposed to have a number of 14 or something. So clearly, things were going on. So I ended up in the trip to Greece – a wonderful country – and I spent my two weeks there. And what happened was that I sold my record collections, my parents gave me some money; it cost 20,000 crowns, which was a lot of money at the time! A lot of money! So, there were not many 20 year olds, young people, taking this trip. And this didn’t escape the people traveling. You know, on this day I came to the meeting point and they would say ‘Oh yes, there were young people like you last year – they didn’t return!’ And I was like ‘Oh no! That’s not my case!’ And you know, I have my sleeping bag with me – a sleeping bag for a trip in a hotel! You know, there were things…
“And then I was selling these albums, so obviously I had to tell these people, because otherwise they wouldn’t understand why I was selling these albums. So I think I was very lucky, there must have been at least maybe 40-50 people who knew I was emigrating. Nothing ever happened to me; nobody ever denounced me, because there were cases when this happened. People were all ready with their luggage, and two hours – that’s the way they were doing it – they were coming to the house two hours before you were leaving, and they just took your passport and you go nowhere.”
“It just happened that at the time, this was the time that computers were becoming more important, especially, among other things, in the printing business and the publishing business, and they just needed someone in the rédaction to take care, not of IT (I would not be the right person), but someone who could use it – that was the breakthrough, to be able to use it. And it happened to be me – so I started like this: I was actually basically just typing one of Mr Tigrid’s books on the computer – you had people for this at the time – and then from this it moved on and suddenly I was among the inner circle of Svědectví, which was a very small, family owned kind of operation. And this was quite exciting, I was a little bit afraid that it might really affect negatively my family back in Czechoslovakia, but suddenly it happened. And so, after a few years where I was working at the Centre Pompidou, you know, to make my living during my studies, I was offered a job at Svědectví and I took it, and I think I was what you call the deputy editor, or in France they call it secrétaire de rédaction – you know, the guy who is taking care of collecting the manuscripts, keeping to the deadlines and getting the issue together. And I stayed there from 1986, I think, until 1990.”
“Every emigrant, with the time you are [away]… your idea and your image of your homeland – where you are coming from – gets frozen in what you left. Just this very idea that life and changes could continue after you… that there even could be changes, is an abstract thing for you. In your deeper way of thinking, you believe it’s like it was. I mean this was a rather short time, I only left in 1983, we were in 1989, so it was six years, but still, I was not exactly following and realizing that things that were not possible before were [now] possible. But on the other hand, I was actually following Gorbachev and I think I was the only one in the whole editorial committee who probably naively believed that Gorbachev is maybe bringing something… I was not wrong on this, that it was actually opening new opportunities, so it is not that I was totally pessimistic or disconnected, but I was very skeptical specifically about Czechoslovakia.”
“I thought that I would never, ever return to the country unless things changed, and I didn’t believe that they were going to change. It was really like a tabula rasa, which was important, I think. Again, it is something I would recommend to everybody if you jump like this – if you want to really emigrate – I think that’s the mentality. I always believed this; I was not looking specifically to… well, I did have Czech friends, and I worked, actually, with Czechs, which was something, but I was really not looking for it. It was an accident. And this whole time, basically these eight years that I spent in Paris, I was doing my best to become French. I mean, as ridiculous as it might sound or look, that was the philosophy. The philosophy is: you cannot do this halfway. And there is a wisdom in this, the challenge of living a new life wherever in the world is quite huge, and if you stay halfway, I… I always pitied these people who were living in Paris, and actually I had friends like this, and they are friends until today, some of them returned, and I understand them, it’s their point, but in a way I pitied them…
“I don’t like this ambiguity, you know, I think at some point in life you can overcome this and you, you have [your] identity built enough, and it can be a double identity, and then no problem. But, when you struggle for life, and you start a new life, I think it is definitely more conducive to success and to even some kind of logic, to focus on the world where you live and that was my philosophy – I mean, you can do it both ways, all kinds of ways, there is not one way.”
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.
]]>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.
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.
“In 1948, when the communists finally took over in Czechoslovakia, people were not accepting it very well, they didn’t want it. Because first of all, people were losing their own property, they didn’t own anything. And my father thought everything belongs to everybody – you couldn’t be having more than I do, or I shouldn’t be having more than you do – we all should have the same. And his own sisters, who lived in a different village, Dubovany, by Piešťany, his own sisters didn’t want to accept that people have to leave their property or something and let Communists run it. And he went over there to talk to his sisters to sign, they had some farmland. My aunt had a small amount of farmland, and my other aunt, and he didn’t feel that they should own that – they should all own it and all together work. So he was very, very strict about it, he would talk and say ‘No, you have to agree, it’s going to be a better life for you, I guarantee you’.
“He had really good ideas, and those ideas which I heard, which he told me, I liked them, because I felt yeah, everybody should… there shouldn’t be hungry people, there shouldn’t be poor people, everybody should have a little piece of something, everybody should have free school, free health program. And that’s what communists promised. So that’s how he believed it.
“Until, I believe, after we left, in the late seventies – he died in 1976. After 1968, it was that Prague Spring and everything, and things were changing. And he went outside, in the city, in Bratislava, and he sees these big shots, these communist leaders talking and being rich, suddenly they were rich, loaded with money and he would say – later on I found out, he never said anything to me, because we were over here – ‘Now something is wrong! Because this is not how I wanted. I wanted to have everything equal, this is not equal.’”
“It was a small village, farmland, there were about 300 population, that’s it. And that teacher who was working with me – her name was Rosie, Ružena, Rosie – she got me involved with the people. We had a drama club, we had the kids involved in pionieri, that was kids… I was a Pioneer when I was in sixth or fifth grade or something! And sväzáci, that was a teenagers’ club, they wore blue shirts, so we were involved with them. With the drama club we put on some play, that was a teacher’s job in the farmland or villages, the teacher has to do that. And because of that, somebody came up with the idea of ‘Why don’t you become a Communist?’ So that woman, that Rosie said ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want to be!’ She was single, 36 years old, she didn’t want to be. I wanted to be because, I think it was something I wanted to prove to my father, or I wanted him to be proud of me or whatever. I thought that he would be proud.
“And when I told him I was asked to be a Communist Party member, first you are on a waiting list for about a year, and then you are promoted, a full-blown… He looked at me and he says to me ‘Wait a minute! Do you want to go because you believe it, or do you just want to go because you think it’s not time to do it?’ I said ‘No, I want to believe it.’ He said ‘Alright then, you have to live by that!’
“So, I lived by that except one thing: I never claimed that I don’t believe in God. That was my private thing. When somebody asked me the question ‘How are you doing with your view on God and religion?’ I said ‘I’m still working on it.’ That was my answer. That was the only thing that I kept with me, I always believed in God. Because I thought, that has nothing to do with it, communism and God. God is taking care of even communist people.”
“I know my husband one time brought some radio, it was about midnight, we were listening to something, but we called it propaganda. I didn’t believe that. I said ‘Yeah, they tell you anything they want to.’ We say in Slovak ‘keď vtáčka lapajú, pekne mu spievajú’ – did you ever hear that? ‘If you want to catch the bird then sing to him.’ So I thought, this is a nice, nice, speech, but that’s not my idea… When my husband brought up the idea of leaving Czechoslovakia, I said to him ‘You know what, why don’t you go, because I know some people, older people, men went to the United States and made money and then supported their wives, sent for their wives. Why don’t you go?’ And he says ‘Well, I think I have some place a marriage license, and on the marriage license you’re in my name. So, that makes no sense, me going without you. We all go, or nobody goes.’”
“My father, because he had contact with everything, he knew what was going on. He said to my husband, ‘You know what, probably you are going to be called to service, because Cuba is happening, and a lot of soldiers are being called and sent to protect the country. Probably you are going to be called too.’ And my husband says ‘Dad, why me? I already did my… I am not like a regular soldier!’ And my father says ‘Well, it can happen.’ We got home and about 10:00 in the evening somebody knocked on the door, a man, in a uniform, and he says to my husband ‘You have to report at the airport tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning.’ And that’s when reality hit me. I had a two year-old daughter, and he left in the morning, he went to the airport, and then, at the end of the day I didn’t hear from him, and it wasn’t like here where everybody has phones. We didn’t have a phone, I was living with my mother in law, she didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a phone. So, the following day, I went to a phone booth, and I called the army reserve or somebody, and I asked about my husband, and they said to me ‘Oh, you know what, súdružka, you don’t have to worry about it, but we can’t tell you where he is, it’s a secret.’ And I didn’t know anything. So, a week went by, I didn’t know anything, and then about maybe ten days later, he called me and he said that he is in Trenčín – I don’t know how many miles it is from Bratislava – he’s in Trenčín, he’s with the army, he is safe, and he is working as a driver. He was driving some big surgeon or big shot in the army, driving him from one place to another. That’s about it. And I said ‘Are you coming to visit or something?’ And he said ‘No, I can’t even talk to you for long, I have ten minutes only.’”
“It was a beautiful day and I took my kids to play outside. We had an apartment building with a little kind of playground; there was a sandbox, trees and a line for hanging your laundry. And I used to, in those days, I used to wash diapers by hand, we didn’t have disposable ones, it wasn’t that good a time like now. So I took those diapers and I hung them on a line and my youngest one was in a stroller sleeping, his afternoon nap. And a helicopter was flying. I was in the building already, and then I heard people, I went on the balcony and I saw people on the other balcony screaming ‘Take the children in! Take the children in!’ So, the helicopter was shooting, I don’t know at whom. So I ran downstairs, a couple of people helped me get the kids inside, and then we find in a couple of diapers holes. I wish I saved those diapers those days!
“I’m sure they were not shooting at the children, probably because it was the center of the city, probably some commotion was going on on one of those streets and one little bullet got lost or something. So I had another reason, I’m not going stay here, I’m moving out of here, I’m going to live with grandma. Because I thought in a village, it’s nice and quiet, what is the city offering you? Nothing!
“Then, later on that afternoon, my husband – I sent him to get the bread, he came home without bread – he says ‘The stores are empty, no bread!’ I said ‘I need milk for my youngest one.’ Over there for babies, you need a prescription for baby milk, you can’t buy it just like that. And it’s also only in drugstores or pharmacies, they were equipped with the milk for babies. So I said, ‘I’m going to get milk for Lubo,’ so I went down the street, I lined up in front of the pharmacy, I’m standing in line, and they say to me ‘We need a birth certificate, we are not giving you this milk, because anybody can come with a prescription. And we have a shortage, look at the shelves, they are empty.’ So I went back home, walked about ten minutes, meantime helicopters were flying and shooting, we were hiding in one house, in a building, we ran. The whole street, everybody ran into the building. They were shooting, nobody got hurt. I got home, I got the birth certificate, I went back to the pharmacy. No more milk.”
“In 1969, when we left Slovakia, it was secret, nobody knew about it, not even my father, because my father would call the police and lock us up. He wouldn’t allow it – he said it later on. He said if he knew we wanted to leave, he would have taken precautions so that we won’t leave, even if we went to jail. Yes, he was very upset. Because he was a devoted communist, and he thought he had raised me the same way, and how can I leave my country?
“And he wrote us letters, kind of mean letters, and in those letters he said ‘I don’t think you have an idea what is waiting for you, life out of your country is very hard. I remember my life, it wasn’t easy, and it’s not going to be easy for you, especially because you have four children.’ And ‘Why did you do that? Did I raise you the wrong way, or did I make a mistake raising you? You left this country, you left your family! You shouldn’t do that.’ And he was very upset, and my husband wrote him a letter and apologized to him for me, saying he shouldn’t be mad at me, because it was not me who was doing that, it was my husband who wanted to leave, and I just followed him because I was his wife. So I don’t think my father ever made peace with me leaving.”
“The language was really tough, my husband went to Berlitz, so he picked up quick, he was talking all day. The kids, they didn’t have problems at all. My daughter, she was a fourth grader when we left Czechoslovakia, when we got over here they put her in second grade, because they said that’s where she should pick up English. About three months later, she went to the principal, that was a nun, and she said to her ‘I think I speak good enough English, I want to go to fourth grade.’ And they transferred her to fourth grade. So she picked up really good, she didn’t have problems, my boys didn’t have problems. My problem was I didn’t want to talk to anybody, when we were living in that town house, I would go outside, my kids were playing and the next door neighbor would talk to me, I turned I went inside because I didn’t understand her. So, I watched TV, there were soaps, and I would watch them and I said ‘Every day it’s the same people!’ I didn’t understand what was said, I didn’t understand when is the story and when is the advertising, the commercials! I didn’t know, I couldn’t.
“Then my kids were watching a lot of kids’ shows and I would watch with them. And you know what show? Sesame Street! Sesame Street helped me… I watched Big Bird ‘one, two…’ and that’s how I learned English from the TV.”
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.
]]>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 gymnázium, 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 Oddělení pro vědeckou politiku [The Section for the Scientific Study of Politics].
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.
“When you are 16 or 15, you don’t know or feel that you are a participant in a great enterprise, but when you are hit, or when that enterprise is hit, as it was by the Munich crisis and what this implied for the future – because this was one event and, my generation, we were aware enough to see and to know what to anticipate… We were finishing at the gymnázium, the country became occupied by the Germans, we lost our building, we had to share a building with other schools which were not occupied. My gymnázium, which was a very modern building – opened, I think, in 1928 or 1929 – was immediately occupied by the German state security.
“But at the same time, you know, we were at that time when we were going to take dancing lessons, which meant for the first time to be with girls. It was a very important moment in a 17-year-old’s life, and then you didn’t know what was going to happen after that. You graduated, and after my graduation, the Germans began to recruit – to simply conscript, rather – young people to work in armaments factories.”
“Our neighbor was a decommissioned officer who had been in the Czechoslovak Army, who had two boys, roughly my age and my cousin from that same villa’s age. When we were kids we would play in the street, soccer and that, we had scooters and we would borrow and lend them and all that. The next neighbor was the principal of a German school in Czechoslovakia, his two daughters were teachers there. Come the crisis, the daughters turned out to be Nazis and very unpleasant. In my memory, the symbol of this was that they began to wear white stockings. The two boys appeared in the uniform of the SA [German Sturmabteilung], were immediately mobilized; that decommissioned officer was taken into the German Army. We never saw the boys again because, we learned, they were killed on the Russian front. So that’s a different kind of relationship, you didn’t hate them but they became alien, and I think that it was this alienation which was probably the worst part.”
“The pilots were very young boys, 21, 22 years old, you know, and cheerful kids. And they simply took a bedroom and slept in the bedroom until when they were going to leave. And you know you welcomed them, you were glad that they came. We had two of them, and one day the two of them came and left in the morning and locked their bedroom. My mother [normally] sort of made their beds and cleaned up after them and when they came back, mother said ‘Well, why did you lock the room?’ They said ‘Don’t worry about that, grandma, we will do it;’ she said ‘No! Leave it open! I want to clean the room.’ Well, the next day, again, it was locked. So she said ‘No, no, no – you leave the room open! I’m coming in,’ and she wedged her foot or something in the doorway. And then she smelt an unpleasant smell. And they sort of gave in. So she went to the armoire and they had two rabbits in it.
“So she said ‘Where did you get those rabbits?’ ‘Oh!’ they said, ‘we were given the rabbits.’ ‘Who gave you the rabbits? Nobody gives people rabbits!’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we found them in another house.’ ‘So you take them back!’ They were, you know, kids and she was a woman of 50. So she sent them to give the rabbits back, but then they left her a very touching thank you note written on a piece of paper, giving us the address to visit them at in Moscow.”
“I had complete confidence in those people, we were working together. And so I was told ‘You be on this particular evening at the streetcar station, there will be a car and two people and they will take you to the border, and so I did go. So, I went there, there were two young men, one of them was in the [Beneš Party] youth movement, and we drove to the border. There was a border guard, who stopped us, got in the car and took us all the way practically to the border. We saw the barriers on the road and he said ‘Well, we’ll have to stop here. You get out, and walk about a quarter of a mile/half a kilometer along that road here, and then you will see on the other side the lights of the German village. You cross the fields, and in the German village report to the German police.’ The border guard wished me good luck and said ‘come back and don’t forget us.’
“Now, after the Communist regime fell, it came out that the escape was arranged by a branch of [Communist] state security, who wanted to get me out in order to eventually become their agent or something.”
“My mother was afraid about me going to Chicago with all those gangsters and worried whether I would survive. Well, you know, at midnight after the last lesson and the last coffee we would walk to Jackson Park and the lake, and come back safe to start the morning fresh. And I had to study also, one of my fields was American diplomacy and diplomatic history and for that I had to look into the larger picture of American history. And I found it rather inspiring and encouraging, especially in the situation in which we found ourselves. Somehow I learned to understand America and its shortcomings and the way that it gets out of them, because the country, the people, the nation has a cushion, which is several layers. One is the cushion of values and ideals. One is the cushion of resources, and especially in those days, you know, 60 years ago, who would have questioned America not having the resources? And of the institutions, however imperfect they were, they somehow worked. So [my wife] Joy keeps saying ‘You’re more American than a native American.’ And I say ‘Well, it’s a compliment!’”
“Hundreds and thousands of us left thinking that we are going to be back in five years time. People lived in this kind of provisional state for years and years. Now, as I said, I was young enough, I was lucky enough, I could study, I could establish myself. So the hope that fed you in the beginning of the homeland to which I’m going to return began to play a secondary role in your planning of your life, in your orientation. I think the trick is, under those conditions, to transcend from the provisorium. It is no longer, however limited it may be, a provisional phase of your life, but you do the best with your life that you can. The trick was then to combine it with a certain amount of living devotion to the cause for which you left. And you know, maybe if you lived in the provisional, maybe you would be more tenacious and more active and more this, but that’s not how life sort of works. And you know, I found a wife who was very supportive, we agreed when we met in 1955 that if I go back to Czechoslovakia, she will come to Czechoslovakia. But if you asked her 10-15 years later, when those little kids were all around running about here, then I don’t know.”
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
“We were in the woods gathering firewood and a stranger approached us, and he was an escaped Russian major – NKVD political officer – and he wanted to get out to the West. And my father hid him until the war was over, gave him one of his suits and everything, because he was really taken in by the man, and then in May ’45 he delivered him across Czechoslovakia to the American lines and, somehow, he wanted to get to the OSS section and that’s where he ended up, and that’s how my father got the OSS connection with Donovan. And as soon as the Iron Curtain fell he automatically worked for the Americans.”
“For Czechs right after the war, to go live in the former Sudeten area was like moving to the Wild West.”
Why do you say it was like the Wild West?
“Well, because the inland was more peaceful. Over there, with kids, we go out hiking or something, we find an anti-aircraft machine gun, we find piles of ammunition and rifles. I remember we found an abandoned Tiger tank and about 15 of us started carrying ammunition and just dumping it in the open hatch – this was deep in the woods – and then we emptied out big shell casings and made a long path of gunpowder that went about half mile away, and lit it. What a bang. That was the entertainment for after the war for kids.”
“When the Iron Curtain fell in ’48, I got to be real good friends with them because I was the only Czech in town that spoke Yugo, and they knew my political views too, because a lot of them were not Communist. Three of them asked me how to get across the border to Germany. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll take you.’ And I did, and one of them had a change of heart, came back, and turned me in. I was 15 then, and I’m going to school and a couple of my friends said ‘The state secret police is waiting for you. You better not go to school.’ I did go back home. There was nobody at home. I left a note that I’m leaving, that I have to leave. I didn’t have time to go into detail because I was really, really shook up. I had a gold coin collection. I taped it to the soles of my feet with some kind of tape. I took all the money that I had saved up with me, and I took my little briefcase with school books and everything, just in case I got stopped by the border patrol – ‘I’m visiting my friend that lives down over there…’
“So they shanghaied me on a ship. Two days later we’re going through the Suez Canal to Hai Phong. Well, that was French Indochina then. And from Hai Phong we were put on a train to Hanoi to pick up French wounded. I was assigned to one wounded guy that I had to take care of. Back on a train, back to the harbor, back to the ship, and all the way to Marseille, and then I just walked away from it. So my stint, it was a good adventure, because, just stop and think, not 18, I’d seen Africa, North Africa, I’d seen Indochina.”
“And they were poor. I thought I lived much better in Czechoslovakia then he did in America, and once I got there, I knew I did. First thing he says, ‘We got electricity six months ago.’ Outside toilet, phone on the wall with a crank. My uncle, they looked at going to the movies as the devil’s work. They wouldn’t let me listen to popular music, I had to listen to gospel, or…They were fanatical religious.”
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.
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.
Vladimir’s biography in Slovak (without diactrics)
PDF Vladimir’s interview clips in Slovak (without diacritics)
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.
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.
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.
Vladimir’s biography in Slovak (without diactrics)
PDF Vladimir’s interview clips in Slovak (without diacritics)
“They were very much against that, they didn’t want for me to be a pilot although I started flying in 1946 right after the War. I joined the soaring club, the air club in Bratislava and I accomplished, I got the C exam, which is pretty high, and also the Silver C, which qualified me for Air Force duty. Also we started jumping with parachutes and I had six jumps before I went to the Air Force, so actually I was pretty well qualified there.”
“Well, we actually started, what was available at that time was, like three years after the War ended, we had the surplus German aircraft, and that’s what we were using. Way back then in parachute jumping, there were old German parachutes sometimes infested with mice. And they had holes in them, we had to patch them in order to be serviceable so we could jump out of DC3s. And that was another thing that we got – we were so grateful to the UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], which was the help after the War. And we got those planes there, actually they were still with the military colors, and that’s what we were using. And also the German planes of course, they were all surplus material. And we had some problems, we had some people getting killed because of the old structure. But overall we did good training and we went through all the curriculum they had in Britain. At that time, 1948, we still had members of the Royal Air Force, our Slovaks and Czechs that were fighting on the Allied side, and they were our instructors.”
“This was in 1952 when I was getting pretty well persecuted because of my political inactivity. We got together with my cousin and a friend from the aero club – we got together and decided there is no way, no future for us. Because pretty soon my flying career ended; they stopped me from flying, and my two friends were mechanics whereas they joined the Air Force for the purpose of flying so that they would get flight training. And so actually when they demanded that after so many years of being mechanics they get flight training they were told no, so they wrote to the minister of defense, and the result was that they put them in jail as they went over the official procedure. They just couldn’t get anywhere, and they wanted to fly so badly and so we decided that it’s time to go.”
“We had an alternative airport which was Graz in Austria. And we were still not 100% sure if it is in the British zone, if it is safe to land there. But there was from Bratislava another 45 minutes of flight. We wanted to go as far West as Frankfurt or Munich, but we didn’t have enough fuel. And of course then there was a Soviet airbase in Vienna, which, when we were flying over Bratislava they were getting our flight path and then they took off and went after us. But the thing we devised was that we would change direction from Bratislava to Vienna, descend down to tree level almost; it was still night, pitch dark, and then change course towards the British zone, which was, I would say, almost another 90 degrees to the left. And sure enough, in about five minutes, there were MIG 15s that were flying looking for us. We could see their exhausts, the flames from their exhausts, just about, I would say, a couple of miles away. But we were already sneaking out the other way and they were going the direction we were in before. But they didn’t find us, because like I said, we were already heading the other way and disappearing fast.”
“It was such that we landed, but we were still not sure whether it was a British airport or not because of the runways. They were marked – actually they were not runways, there was a grass area which was marked with evergreen twigs, which didn’t look like a civilized airport really. After landing when we were passing by hangars, it did say ‘N’ ‘O’ underlined, like ‘No. 1’, ‘No. 2’, ‘No. 3’ and we couldn’t decipher it, whether it was the way the Russians marked their hangars or not. We were coming towards the quarters and there was a bunch of soldiers that were coming towards us with their rifles, and then ‘Heck, what are we going to do?’ But what happened when we were circling the airport, I noticed barracks where there were soldiers with white belts and white things over their boots, their shoes, which I remember from movies, American movies, that this is actually the MP, the military police. I remember that, and I couldn’t even tell my guys in the back that this is what I saw. So I was pretty well sure that we are in British hands, but I wasn’t sure about the guards, which later came true, that they were Austrians.”
“In London, they gave us new passports and also they wanted us to change the names we had for safety purposes because communists were kidnapping people even from England, they managed to kidnap someone and brought him back to Czechoslovakia and executed him, really. So they said, now, this is for your safety, do that, and we agreed.”
What was the name you chose?
“The name that I chose I am still using is Frederick Tornil. Tornil was a name of a racing-horse that won the Irish sweepstakes that particular weekend when we arrived there. So it was kind of funny because it took us a long time to pick up names, and so Tornil was the one, and they used to call me Freddie alias potápka in Bratislava, and so I adopted the name Frederick.”