Gene Deitch
<p>Gene Deitch was born in Chicago in 1924 to Ruth Delson Deitch and Joseph Deitch, a salesman. The Deitch family moved to California after the stock market crash in 1929 and Gene started school in Hollywood. Gene enjoyed creating classroom and neighborhood newspapers, and the different printing techniques he used over the years speak to his lifelong love of technology. He was also fascinated by the movie industry and especially enjoyed watching cartoon shorts. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1942, Gene joined the war effort and drew aircraft blueprints for North American Aviation. It was there he met his first wife, Marie. They married in 1943 and had three sons together. That same year, Gene was drafted and, although he trained to become a pilot, he fell ill with pneumonia and was honorably discharged in May 1944.</p>
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<p>Gene embarked on a career as a cartoonist and animator. He drew covers and cartoons for the jazz magazine The Record Changer and joined the animation studio UPA (United Productions of America). He later became the creative director of CBS Terrytoons. In 1959, Gene had started his own studio, Gene Deitch Associates, Inc, which was primarily producing commercials. He was asked to travel to Prague by a client who wanted him to direct a film there. As Gene was reluctant, this client promised to fund a project particularly close to Gene’s heart (the pet project was a film called Munro – which later won an Oscar). In October 1959, Gene arrived in Prague, and he recalls his first impression of the city as ‘creepy.’ However, he soon met Zdenka Najmanová, the studio’s production manager, and fell in love with both her and the city. Gene says that as soon as he returned to the States, he was ‘looking for ways to get back’ to Prague. He returned shortly thereafter and married Zdenka in 1964. Gene’s career flourished in Prague; he produced many films, including several installments of the popular series Tom and Jerry.</p>
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<p>Gene says that he was received with some suspicion in communist Czechoslovakia; his reasons for being there – love and work – were too simple for people to believe. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Gene and Zdenka traveled to Vienna to contact his family back in the United States. When they attempted to return, Gene says they were not allowed back in, as the country had closed its borders. The two went to Norway to work on a project while the studio convinced the government that Gene’s work was beneficial to the country and that he should be allowed to return. He says that in the mid-1980s, the two considered moving to the United States, and even went so far as to buy a house in San Francisco; however, the event of the Velvet Revolution led them to stay in Prague. Gene remains an American citizen and over the years he has frequently traveled back to the United States. Today, he lives in Prague with Zdenka.</p>
<p><a id="ucRelatedViewer_dlRelated_ctl00_lnkView" class="lnkRelatedItem" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609114816/http://genedeitch.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gene’s web site</a></p>
<p><a id="ucRelatedViewer_dlRelated_ctl01_lnkView" class="lnkRelatedItem" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609114816/http://genedeitchcredits.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gene’s newest project, an online book about people who have influenced him</a></p>
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Otakara Safertal
<p>Otakara Safertal was born in Kladno, central Bohemia, in 1947. For a number of years, Otakara lived with her grandparents in the village of Velké Přítočno, as both her parents worked in Prague. Her father, Lubomir, was in charge of a bakery, while her mother, Miroslava, managed a small patisserie and also helped at the bakery. Otakara remembers frequent visits from her parents. She attended kindergarten in Velké Přítočno, but upon starting first grade, she joined her parents and sister, Ivana, in Prague. As a young girl, Otakara remembers participating in Sokol and religious classes which were eventually discontinued. She excelled at badminton and as a teenager travelled throughout Czechoslovakia to play. After finishing school, Otakara applied to economics school in Prague; she says she was rejected because she ‘didn’t have a very good background.’ After one year training to be a salesperson in a drugstore, Otakara was accepted to economics school. She graduated in 1967 and began working for Czechoslovak State Airlines (CSA) as a ground hostess. She married her husband, <a href="/web/20170609142506/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/frank-safertal/">Frank Safertal</a>, that same year. Otakara remembers the Prague Spring, saying that the mood of the country changed and that in particular, the ‘youth was very excited about the future of the country.’ At that time, Otakara and her husband were part of a theatre group that performed poetry and plays around the city.</p><p> </p><p>Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.</p>
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Miro Medek
<p>Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.</p><p> </p><p>At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.</p><p> </p><p>Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.</p><p> </p>
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Milena Kalinovska
<p>Milena Kalinovska was born in Prague in 1948. Her maternal grandparents emigrated from the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution due to their anti-communist views, and her grandfather became a librarian who started the Slavonic collection at Charles University. Milena’s father’s family was from Moravia where they had a furniture-making business. Věra, Milena’s mother, worked as an accountant at TESLA, but was fired from that position in the 1950s when her Russian background was discovered; she was sent to work in a factory instead. Milena’s father, Adolf, built camera rails for the film industry and worked for several well-known directors.</p><p> </p><p>Milena grew up with her maternal grandmother in the Prague district of Strašnice. She spoke Russian at home and observed traditional Russian holidays. In addition to participating in sports and the Pioneer youth organization, Milena was also interested in art, having been exposed to museums, film and other culture by her father from a young age. She joined an art club in high school and put on an exhibition at a local movie theatre. As a teenager during the Prague Spring, Milena recalls a ‘great sense of liberalization’ and took advantage of the music and theatre happening in the capital city. Following her graduation from high school, she began studying law at Charles University.</p><p> </p><p>Shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Milena went abroad to work as an au pair in the U.K. She returned to Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1969 and, because of the ‘oppressive’ environment she saw forming the beginning stages of normalization, began making plans to leave the country permanently. With money given to her by her grandmother, Milena secured a three-week trip to the U.K. She did not return with the group and went to London where she was granted asylum. In 1975, she graduated from the University of Essex with a degree in comparative literature and began teaching Russian literature while also working with dissident and exile publications. She then received her master’s degree in Slavonic studies from the University of British Columbia and decided to pursue a career in the arts. Back in London, she found a job at Riverside Studios, a gallery and studio for contemporary and experimental art. In 1986, Milena married her husband, Jan Vanous, a Czech-born American, and moved to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Milena’s art career has flourished in the United States, where, in addition to working as an independent curator, she has held the position of director at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and is currently the head of public programming and education at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Milena’s Czech heritage has played a large role in her professional accomplishments, as she has made it a point to highlight artists from eastern and central Europe, particularly those whose work was suppressed during the communist era. Milena holds British, American and Czech citizenship, and she travels to the Czech Republic annually. Her two children speak fluent Czech and she continues several Czech traditions at home. Today Milena lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.</p>
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Michal Tuavinkl
<p>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from <em>gymnázium</em>, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.</p><p> </p><p>In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.</p>
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Melania Rakytiak
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</p>
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Ludvik Barta
<p><img class="wp-image-2516 size-full alignleft" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ludvik-barta-SQ.png" alt="" width="240" height="240" /></p><p>Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a translator during WWII. Ludvik’s father became a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but changed his views completely in the early 1950s in light of the high-profile political trials taking place at the time. Shortly before his father’s death, when Ludvik was 12, he says his father urged him never to join the Communist Party. Later on in life, Ludvik followed this advice.</p><p> </p><p>When Ludvik was 17, he went to the local technical school to train to be a bricklayer. After two years he put his studies on hold to do his military service. Just before leaving for military training in Turnov, Ludvik married his wife Lenka in June 1964. The couple soon had a daughter, also named Lenka. Upon return from military service, Ludvik became a successful builder, and constructed the family’s own apartment. In August 1968, his wife Lenka finally had a chance to visit her father – who had left Czechoslovakia in 1948 – in his new home in Cleveland. When Lenka returned home, shortly after the Soviet-led invasion, the family decided to move to the United States. However, while arrangements were being made, the Czechoslovak government changed its passport requirements, which nullified the family’s existing travel documents. It subsequently took Ludvik and his wife 11 years to come to the United States. When they did, they had to leave their daughter behind. Two years later, having established residency in the United States, Ludvik and Lenka petitioned the Czechoslovak government to allow their daughter to come to America. The family was reunited in 1981.</p><p> </p><p>Today, the Bartas still live in the Cleveland area and are owners of ‘Hubcap Heaven’ – an emporium of wheel covers for automobiles.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815/http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=117360&catid=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Ludvik’s star appearance on WKYC’s program ‘What Works’</a></p>
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Kveta Eakin
<p>Kveta Eakin was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1956. When she was 18 months old, however, she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents’ home in Brno, Moravia. Her father, Arnošt, was a successful agricultural engineer, who subsequently moved to Cuba to work for the government there. When Kveta was eight, her mother (also called Květa) remarried. Kveta’s stepfather was Dr. Vladimír Šimůnek, an economist who became one of President Alexander Dubcek’s advisors during the Prague Spring in 1968. Dr Šimůnek had been teaching economics in Brno, but shortly after marrying Kveta’s mother gained a fellowship in Prague, and so the pair moved there, while Kveta herself remained with her grandparents. In 1969, Kveta’s mother and stepfather moved to the United States, when the latter was offered a position at Kent State University in Ohio. The pair defected and Kveta was, in her stepfather’s words, ‘kept hostage’ for six-and-a half years in Czechoslovakia. Following the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Kveta was reunified with her mother in Cleveland in February 1976. She says she was the second person released from the country as part of a pledge to reunify families torn apart by the Cold War.</p><p> </p><p>That year, Kveta started her studies at Kent State. She graduated in 1980 with a major in psychology. Ten years later, she returned to university to gain a masters degree in rehabilitation counseling, which is her current area of work. Kveta is now settled in the Cleveland area, where she is active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the local Czech drama group, Včelka. She has one son, Paul.</p>
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Jiří Pehe
<p>Jiří Pehe was born in 1955 in Rokycany, western Bohemia, where his father was stationed as a soldier in the Czechoslovak Army. Shortly thereafter, the Pehe family moved to Příbram, where Jiří started school. The family moved yet again when Jiří’s father was made commander of a military base in Krhanice, and later, Milovice. After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Jiří’s father lost his command position and the family moved to Moravia where Jiří attended high school. Jiří spent his high school summer vacations in Prague, where he enjoyed reading literature published during the Prague Spring that his uncle – also named Jiří Pehe – had collected and saved. With help from the same uncle (the editor-in-chief of a workplace safety periodical), Jiří began studying law at Charles University; he also took philosophy classes at night. He participated in poetry readings and published several of his poems. After graduating in 1978, Jiří spent one year in the army and then studied for a doctorate in international labor law.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1981, Jiří and his wife went on vacation to Yugoslavia. After several unsuccessful attempts to cross the border, they were hidden in the trunk of a car and smuggled into Italy. After a two-month stay in a refugee camp near Rome, Jiří arrived with his wife in New York City. For two years he worked as a night security guard and receptionist in a hotel; he improved his English language skills by reading American literature on the job. Jiří attended Columbia University’s School of International Affairs and graduated with a master’s degree in 1985. He found employment at Freedom House, a non-profit organization promoting civil liberties and human rights, and later became the director of East European studies there. In 1988, Jiří was recruited to work as a Czechoslovak analyst for Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. His first day on the job was August 21, 1988 – the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion. He remained in this post at RFE throughout the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. Later, he was promoted to head of Central European research and analysis.</p><p> </p><p>Radio Free Europe moved its headquarters to Prague in 1994 and Jiří moved back to the Czech Republic. He says that his frequent appearances in the Czech media led to a job offer from Václav Havel’s government; from 1997 to 1999, Jiří was President Havel’s chief political advisor. Jiří has written numerous essays and papers that have appeared in world newspapers and academic publications and has also published several books. Today, Jiří is the director of New York University in Prague, where he lives with his second wife.</p>
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Jerry Barta
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-1706 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906235201im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/jerry-barta-bw.png" alt="jerry-barta-bw" width="226" height="272" /></p><p>Jerry Barta was born in Prague in 1950. He grew up in the Dejvice district of the city with his parents and two brothers. His mother Dagmar worked as an accountant while his father Josef held a number of jobs, including as a cartographer and a teacher. Jerry says his family’s food supply was augmented by produce and meat sent by his grandparents, who lived in the country. After Jerry finished high school, he hoped to study architecture but he says that he did not have the background or connections to be admitted to any programs. He instead trained to become a typographer. Although a serious motorcycle accident interrupted his studies, Jerry finished a program for industrial design and packaging. While studying, he worked nights as a typesetter. After graduating, he began working as a graphic designer and became a teaching assistant at the Václav Hollar Art School. Jerry says that he had been hoping to leave the country since the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. In 1974, after several years of being denied a travel visa, he decided to take a ‘calculated risk’ and forged a letter from the director of the school where he was working stating that he was being sent to Amsterdam as a reward for participating in a state art exhibition. Because of this forged letter, Jerry received a travel visa and money for ten days in Amsterdam, and he left the country in the fall of 1974.</p><p> </p><p>Jerry and his then-fiancé (who was also able to obtain a visa) stayed with friends in Amsterdam for several months before traveling to Germany where they applied for asylum and began the process of moving to the United States. The couple were sent to Zirndorf refugee camp for two months and then lived in an apartment while awaiting their paperwork. They arrived in Los Angeles in September 1975 and stayed with Jerry’s distant relatives. Jerry found a job in a print shop but, several weeks later, decided to move to the San Francisco area after a cousin invited him for a visit. He worked as a typographer for a small printing company and eventually became manager of the firm. In 1985, Jerry opened his own studio called Master Type in San Francisco and today owns the company Pacific Digital Image. He (with his wife and daughter) returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time just a few months before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989; now, Jerry says he visits as often as possible. He lives in Danville, California, with his wife.</p>
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