Charlotta Kotik
<p>Charlotta Kotik was born in Prague in 1940. Her father Emanuel was an art historian and her mother Herberta was a musician. Charlotta’s maternal great-grandfather was Tomáš G. Masaryk and, as a result, one of her earliest memories is of an SS soldier living in her family’s house during WWII. She also clearly recalls the funeral of Jan Masaryk, her great-uncle. While growing up, Charlotta often spent time in Rybná nad Zdobnicí in eastern Bohemia where her grandmother lived. Following her graduation from high school, Charlotta says that she found it impossible to continue her education due to her background, but was able to get a job as a curatorial assistant at the Jewish Museum in Prague, thanks to a friend of her mother. She was responsible for the photo archives and also worked with children’s drawings from Terezín. After three years, Charlotta began working in the Asian department of the National Gallery. She enrolled at Charles University as an evening student and, in 1968, graduated with a master’s degree in art history. Charlotta also worked for the National Institute for Preservation and Reconstruction of Architectural Landmarks, where she was involved in monument preservation during the building of the Prague subway. In October 1969, Charlotta’s husband Petr left Czechoslovakia to take a job at the University of Buffalo in New York. Although she had reservations about leaving her family and her country, Charlotta and their son Tom (who had been born in May 1969) followed, and they arrived in Buffalo in January 1970.</p><p> </p><p>Charlotta soon found a job at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo where she worked for 13 years. She and Petr had a second son, Jan, in 1972. In 1983, the Kotiks moved to New York City where Charlotta began working at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She retired from there in 2006 as head of the department of contemporary art. Charlotta says that she did not regularly speak Czech to her sons, which helped her master the English language; however, they both spent one year studying in Prague, and Jan eventually settled there, married, and had two children before his death from cancer in 2007. Today, Charlotta is an independent curator. She visits the Czech Republic several times a year where, in addition to visiting her grandchildren, she works with an organization that supports young artists. She is also a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and is on the advisory board of the Czech Center New York. Now divorced, she lives in Brooklyn.</p>
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George Hauner
<p>George Hauner was born in Prague in 1949 and grew up in the Dejvice neighborhood with his parents and younger sister. His father, originally from Prague, studied architecture but worked in the finance department of the science ministry. His mother grew up in southern Bohemia and worked in a personnel department. George has fond memories of traveling to visit his maternal grandparents as a young boy. He says that because his mother’s village, Kasejovice, was liberated by American soldiers during WWII, she was sympathetic to the West and the United States in particular.</p><p> </p><p>George attended high school in the years during the Prague Spring and says that the liberalization of the times made school ‘quite exciting,’ as he and his classmates were exposed to new publications and information. He graduated a few months before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and, although he considered leaving the country in the wake of the invasion, he decided against it as he was to begin university. George studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and graduated in 1975. He served one year in the military and began working at an architecture firm.</p><p> </p><p>On February 7, 1981, George and his then-wife left the country shortly after marrying. They obtained passports and visas for a trip to Austria and eventually made their way to the United States. Although they intended to move to Los Angeles, their plans fell through and they settled in New York City. George, who had visited New York twice before on short trips, describes the city as ‘a theater stage.’ Aided by a friend, he quickly started working at an architecture firm and has worked in the industry ever since. Starting in the late 1980s, George returned to Prague each year to visit family and friends. Although he lived in Wyoming for three years and, for a short time, returned to Prague to work, he considers New York City his home. Today, George works for Grimshaw Architects and lives in Manhattan.</p>
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George Malek
<p>George Malek was born in Tábor in southern Bohemia. His father, Jan, owned a factory that produced auto parts while his mother, Marie, stayed home to raise George and his two brothers. Shortly after the Communist coup in 1948, George’s father’s business was nationalized and he was sent to prison for over one year. In the meantime, George’s mother began working at a co-op making stuffed animals. As a child, George was especially interested in woodworking and mathematics. He attended a technical school in Tábor where he studied building construction and equipment. Although he hoped to study at university, George was not initially admitted and, instead, joined the military. After training for one year as a paratrooper, he was stationed in Aš where he was tasked with manning a radio system and intercepting German military conversations and transmissions. George was then admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied computer engineering. He began to think about leaving the country to improve his job prospects and, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, crossed the border into Austria with his wife and young son, Robert. George’s father had helped them to secure visas under the pretense of visiting an uncle in Vienna.</p><p> </p><p>George and his family stayed in Vienna for just over a month while awaiting immigration paperwork. They arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, and settled in Toronto in 1968. After taking English classes for six weeks, George began working and was admitted to the University of Toronto where he earned his doctorate. It was in 1976 that George first returned to Czechoslovakia to visit his parents. That same year, his company transferred him to California. By 1981, George had switched jobs and was sent to work on a software project in Japan. There, he met his second wife, Yuko. The couple married in 1983, returned to the United States, and had a son, Alan. In 1988, George set up a company in California’s Silicon Valley called Apogee Software Inc; he remains the firm’s president and CEO. Ten years later, he set up Apogee.cz in Prague as an out-sourcing partner of Apogee Software. He and his wife Yuko (the firm’s CFO) often visit Prague, both for business purposes and to enjoy the opera, ballet, and concerts that the Czech capital has to offer. The couple are proud of an apartment they own in a 14th-century historical building in Prague’s Old Town. George and Yuko are planning to ‘retire partially’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. They are in the process of reconstructing an old hunting lodge in Mirovice in southern Bohemia, which was owned by the Schwarzenberg family until 1938. George and Yuko currently live in Los Gatos, California.</p>
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Jan Kocvara
<p>Jan Kocvara was born in 1946 in Trnava, Slovakia. His father (also called Ján) was a tailor who published a book on tailoring and taught at an apprentice school. After the Communist coup, he was forced to stop teaching and writing and began making clothes at a state enterprise. Jan’s mother, Emelia, had been a homemaker, but she began working under the Communist regime. Jan and his siblings were cared for by their grandmother while their parents were working. Although he was a better-than-average student, Jan says he was not allowed to enter high school until he had completed one year as a chef’s apprentice.</p><p> </p><p>Later, Jan attended teacher’s college, where he studied Slovak and English. During the Prague Spring, Jan says he found himself ‘able to travel,’ and participated in a study-abroad program in Wales. His stay there was extended from three to five weeks as a result of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. Upon graduation, Jan says he had no problem finding teaching work because he was one of the first graduates with a qualification for teaching English.</p><p> </p><p>Jan married in 1971 and had two sons, Ondrej and Matej. He says it was a series of events which led him to leave Czechoslovakia with his family in 1979. He and his wife were unhappy with the ideas their children were being taught in school. During the period of Normalization, Jan says that he himself was ‘encouraged to leave’ his teaching position. As a teacher, he was not granted permission to leave the country; however, once he became a waiter he was allowed to travel abroad. At first, Jan was granted permission to travel alone, but after some bartering with a well-connected family acquaintance, his whole family were issued exit visas. They took a train to West Germany and then to London where they lived for five years. Because of his language expertise, Jan got a job with BBC Radio where he was an on-air broadcaster of news and sports. He decided to move to the United States with his family when he began to feel unsafe, amid a number of attacks on radio employees. Jan applied for a job at Voice of America, and after waiting two years for his papers to clear, he and his family moved to the Washington, D.C., area. At Voice of America, Jan translated and broadcast news reports, some of which involved interviewing other Czechoslovak émigrés.</p><p> </p><p>Upon arriving in both London and Washington, he immediately joined the local Sokol and other Slovak émigré groups. Because of the effect his broadcasting work had on other Czechs and Slovaks, and the success of his family, Jan says he ‘did not escape in vain.’ Jan has been back to visit Slovakia twice since he left. Today, he lives in McLean, Virginia, and teaches Slovak language classes at the Foreign Service Institute.</p>
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Jana Fraňková
<p>Jana Fraňková was born in Prague just after WWII in 1946. Her Slovak-Jewish mother had been in hiding in southern Bohemia during the War, and her cousin (who lived with Jana and her mother) had spent two years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Jana says that she did not learn of her Jewish heritage until she went to school, as her mother did not bring up the subject. Jana’s mother, who joined the Communist Party, worked in telecommunications for the government. As a result, Jana says that her home had the first television set in the neighborhood. As a young girl, Jana was active in sports and joined a competitive gymnastics club. She attended <em>gymnázium </em>and became interested in philosophy and politics; she began studying philosophy and English literature at Charles University. Jana says that the time of the Prague Spring was very exciting and that she and her friends ‘all believed in it.’ While working as an au pair in Britain during the summer of 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Her mother convinced her to stay in Britain where she landed an interview at Oxford University and was admitted to Saint Hilda’s College. She received permission from the Czechoslovak government to commence studies there, and graduated with a degree in philosophy and English. Jana returned to Czechoslovakia after three years and finished her degree at Charles University.</p><p> </p><p>Upon graduating, Jana says that she had trouble finding employment and worked a series of temporary jobs. She worked for a construction firm for one year under the auspices of starting a company magazine; however, she says that she did very little actual work as she was given the job by a friend and the company did not actually have money for the project. She then found a job at a publishing house translating Czech language books into English. She quit her position when she was offered promotion with the stipulation that she join the Communist Party. With the help of her uncle, Jana began teaching at a language school. She married Jiří Fraňek, a journalist, and had two children, Jakub and Ruth. Jana says that although many of her friends signed Charter 77, she declined because of the effect she believed it would have on her husband’s job. Instead, she helped the cause by translating various documents relating to the Charter into English, including the Charter itself. Jana says that her dissident activities and refusal to join the Communist Party led to conflict with the headmistress of the language school at which she taught. She was questioned by the secret police, and eventually resigned. She then began working as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was in this position during the Velvet Revolution, when both she and her 15 year old son worked as interpreters for foreign journalists. In more recent years, Jana has accompanied Czech politicians such as Václav Havel and Václav Klaus on foreign visits to English-speaking countries, where she has been their interpreter. She lives in Prague.</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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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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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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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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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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