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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>SS Soldier</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hnZmsadNf2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Because we were closely watched, that’s why. Because Masaryk, as you probably know, was suspect by not only communists, but by fascists. Any kind of dictatorial regime hated President Masaryk and because he was the grandfather of my mother and my aunt and father-in-law of my grandmother, obviously my family was basically in a bad situation, whether it was communism or fascism.”</p><p><em>What was that like, living with an SS man? </em></p><p>“It was not funny obviously, but you have to find ways to survive.”</p><p><em>And what ways did you find?</em></p><p>“We were out in the country a lot where he didn’t accompany us all the time, and you have to find a modus vivendi under any circumstances.”</p><h4>Grandmother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nRTNSMOhMjc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1948, when Jan Masaryk died and we went to the funeral, my grandmother was very upset because she was listening to Klement Gottwald talking about Jan, saying ‘Our friend, Jan’ and all that stuff, and she stood up, because we were in the front row, and she said ‘And now you will just shut up’ – in Czech obviously – ‘because you know that you killed him. And you will not be saying things like this because it’s not true.’ And we all sort of died because we thought ‘Oh my god, this woman is going to be arrested immediately.’ Again, she got away with it, because she always stood up, and she was very tall and very skinny and very monumental in her own way, and she could just tell anybody anything. She was absolutely fearless. Absolutely fearless. And I guess if you are fearless you can do things, because you have the inner power and inner conviction which sort of gets you away from the trouble.”</p><h4>Lineage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NsFMWkv_hac?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was applying for school, for stipends, for travel, for anything, on all the bureaucratic paperwork was always one sentence: ‘Mother of Charlotta Poche (and later Kotík) is Herberta Masaryková!’ and that said it all. So I was not allowed to do anything. I couldn’t find a job, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t join any groups, I was persona non grata, simply. It was as if I had some major disease, if I were a leper. I was totally blacklisted on everything. It was not only the regime or the officials of society; it was people who sometimes were afraid to be friends because they associated me with all these troubles which could spill over on them. So it has been a very difficult situation. It was simply ‘No’ to everything. Every little thing had to be fought for.”</p><h4>Prague Spring</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D2q9M7XE7zI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We wanted to improve the system because there were a lot of good things in the system. The free education, the free medical care. There were a lot of good things and if you could have political freedom and travel and exchange, then I think the system would have been very good. I didn’t understand why anybody would say no to it, because we didn’t want to declare war on Russia or some stupid thing like that. It was just making decent living conditions, so I didn’t understand. But older people, like my mother, they were saying ‘Oh no, this is not going to work. They will come and crush it.’ I said ‘Mom, you are crazy. Why would they do that? We don’t want to do anything against them. We just want to improve what we already have. But I was wrong, because I am slightly naïve. But I really felt it was a great experiment and people were so nice to each other at the time. It was like the society blossomed. People were just so different. They were so hopeful. They were so nice. It was just amazing.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MqxMg5T3N9E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was very difficult for me to make the decision of leaving because I was leaving my mother and my father and my aunt there and I felt I was deserting them, and also I felt that I was deserting a country that was in a really difficult situation. It was a little bit like leaving a sick person, and I felt that’s not the right thing to do, but ultimately I joined my husband. I was also thinking about the future of Tom [her son] – at the time it was only Tom, not Jan – because I had so many difficulties, really. It was very difficult and I didn’t want them to have to go through – Tom at the time, and I was hoping to have another child later – so I didn’t want to prepare for them the same life I had. I felt that it’s not right. Since I had a chance to leave, I ultimately decided to do it.”</p><h4>Mother</h4>
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Title
A name given to the resource
Charlotta Kotik
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arts
Community Life
Education
English language
Nazis
Prague Spring
Rybna nad Zdobnici
Secret police
Terezin
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eb2ad8da64f32bbfed842dff862e354b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Parents Political Ideology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dWsSb_8H6eY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My mom, being born and growing up in this village I named [Kasejovice, in southern Bohemia], was liberated by the American army, so she was more oriented towards Americans, freedom, and I think that she quite early realized what the other side of the token will be one day. With my father it was a little bit opposite because he came up from a quite poor family and, I guess after the War, he believed in the new world, the new system, which was brought from the East, so he joined the Party until 1980. So it was a little bit of a contrast of opinions in our family.”</p><h4>High School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r6WmKbCgKKA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In high school, I think it was quite quality and, again, a combination of the ideology and then the real subjects. We were lucky because our last year of high school was ’68, so it was very liberal and many changes took place, even in our education and the information provided. Like reading <em>Literární noviny</em> was mandatory, and it was quite exciting. Then we graduated and enjoyed this happy time for a few more days and it was over.”</p><h4>Career</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HUcJQ1YMBJ4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I would say not at the beginning, because at the beginning I could care less about architecture; I was more into sports in high school, at the end of high school when we had to make a decision where to go, what to study. But later, certainly it was a big influence and a great feeling living in Prague, and then I had the opportunity to travel abroad and visit a few other places around Europe. I was always saying ‘It’s a very, very nice place we live in, compared with other places.’”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fR0f2feufg8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Like a theater stage. Some quite exciting, interesting theater stage. And lately, I’ve just realized that there is not such a place anywhere in the world. It’s so special and one has to think really hard to describe why it’s so different. I like the compactness; it’s a very prominent place in the world, being in New York City, going back or from New York City, working opportunities, quality of the offices here. And everything else: culture, people, restaurants. Just name it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
George Hauner
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
CVUT
Education
Prague Spring
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338034847b0bab6c28dd7a540bc9a342
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>CVUT</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dc8QEqHQXAA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I first did computers, those were Russian computers with vacuum tubes. So the full room of vacuum tubes was about as powerful as my little laptop, or even less powerful. Then professor [Antonín] Svoboda – who I knew personally – he left the country and he essentially designed the first family of IBM computers. So, judging from that, we were not that much behind, if a professor of computers from Czech Republic could come here and start a century of revolution in modern computers. Then of course, silicon came, integrated circuits came, and it just kept rolling.”</p><p><em>Were you able to read journals being written in America and Britain? Was that possible at that time?</em></p><p>“If it was strictly technical information, I could get my hands on it. It wasn’t easy, and it was censored.”</p><p><em>So how could you do this? Through the university library?</em></p><p>“Mostly through the university library. And between guys, sometimes, we would distribute things that we’d obtain in a somewhat questionable way and we would distribute it among ourselves.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6qdDWD1vsyE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We saw it as just the beginning. We thought that Dubček is just a temporary figure that will help us get to where we want to get, but then he would have to go because he was still a communist after all.”</p><p><em>So what did you do on August 21?</em></p><p>“We went to the streets, we talked to them [the soldiers], and it essentially was pretty much hopeless. There were some guys who would throw the Molotov cocktails at the tanks, but it was pretty much useless. You cannot fight the tanks and an armed army with bare hands and with stones. And if you do, they will shoot you. So then I went home.”</p><p><em>Was it scary? How scary was it?</em></p><p>“It was scary, but it was extremely frustrating. Extremely frustrating that a big country like them can come and do this and there is zilch you can do. You just shut up and pretend it didn’t happen. That was the worst part of it.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ZJNeAgJ2o4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, he had a lot of connections, so he found a so-called uncle in Vienna that sent me an invitation. You had to have an invitation, so I got an invitation from the imaginary uncle in Vienna to visit Vienna for five days. So we could take with us only what was for five days. At the time, my son was four years old. I had my university papers and everything and I put it in his teddy bear. I sewed it inside and he was holding it. Then we stopped on the border and the Czech army people with Russian soldiers were going through the train and checking your papers. So I showed him my papers and he knows that I am escaping. He talked to the Russian guy and then the Czech guy said to my son ‘Hey, where are you going?’ He said ‘No, I won’t tell you,’ and holding his teddy. And then I looked at the Czech guy and I said ‘Please, let us go’ and he looked at the Russian guy and said ‘Oh, they’re ok. Let them go.’ People in the next compartment, they took them out, they lined them up in the railway station, and they took them to prison, so it was this close.”</p><h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qdK7G65YKOw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, there were two reasons. One reason was, I wanted to do something for the Czech Republic. I wanted to set up a company there; I wanted to get Czech people and pay them good salaries and help the country in some way, and this is a good way to help. The second reason was, quite frankly, Czech programmers are extremely good, but still pretty reasonable. I studied at university; I have a lot of contacts there; I knew people. The guy who is leading my company in the Czech Republic, he is one of the leading figures at university, so he could find me people who were the best of the best. I treated them well; they come to the U.S. for one year or so for a visit and for training, and I did something for country this way.”</p><h4>World Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ZTHtkMgaQk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I like Czech food. I cook it whenever I can. We like Czech music. We like music in general. We like Czech composers. Smetana is one of my favorite composers; Dvořák, of course. But so is Bach, so is Vivaldi. I don’t really see myself as being a citizen of some specific country. I see myself as a world citizen. Wherever I am, I am happy as long as they treat me well and I return the favor.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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George Malek
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
As
CVUT
Dubcek
Dvorak
Education
Engineers
Military service
Prague Spring
Prison
Sense of identity
Tabor
Warsaw Pact invasion
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c6eb17227dcecee46ac3287a5d3034b5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/thXvyrXVUzU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Before the Communist [coup] he published a book about tailoring and was teaching at the school in the city. But, you know, when the communists came to power he was not deemed ideologically fit to educate the new generation. So he was told that it would be better if he left and, you know, he had to return to his own – of course, not to his own business because he could not have his own business – but he worked for the city or state companies that were allowed to.”</p><h4>Father's Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hd8cDxh733w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father was working, I would say, 16 hours a day, because after coming from work he still had some former customers and he had the equipment at home so he would work in one of the rooms until ten in the evening. And the next day go to work at six because, you know we – my mother and grandmother – had been used to a much higher standard of living than he could provide from the salary he was given. So he tried to supplement it any way he could.”</p><p><em>Did you know if that was illegal or not, to do that kind of outside work?</em></p><p>“Well, I knew it was illegal, but people did not like what those state enterprises were doing so even some people who were fairly in favor with the regime begged my father to do it for them because they just, they wanted to look good. They said ‘Ok all we can do is go to this guy because we’re never going to get it in the state enterprises.’”</p><h4>Emigrating</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fC_stn3qNrQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My son was in kindergarten, no actually, he was in nursery school and we went along the street for a walk and there was a big poster of Lenin and my [son] said ‘Look mommy, Comrade Lenin!’ And she said ‘This is enough. I don’t want this anymore. I had enough. They put it into the children. We have to go. We have to leave.’ So from that day on, we were trying to find some avenue how to get out.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fbkdEFXQsbo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She knew some lady who came to her and heard ‘You know, I know you have a daughter in the West and my husband…’ Some member of her family was seriously ill and the doctor told her ‘This person needs this medicine but we don’t have it. Only the western companies have it.’ So she asked if my mom could write to my sister to send it. And my mom said ‘Yes, I can do it, but I know that you have somebody very highly in the Communist hierarchy. In exchange, I want my son to be allowed to leave with the whole of his family for vacation.’ Because my sister was godmother to my sons and she was expecting her first son. She said ‘She wants him and his wife to be godparents to her son.’ So they said that could be arranged and that’s why we were able to leave, the whole family.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KY2OIbTw0Dg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In spring of 1982 I was run down by a car. I got almost killed. I had two operations on my eyes, both eyes, and I was in a coma for two or three days and eventually I recovered. But after I came home, my wife and I started to talk. Prior to [me] becoming an employee of BBC, one of the Bulgarian broadcasters was killed by the Bulgarian secret service. He was poisoned – I don’t know if you heard about this – an umbrella with a poison stick, and [there was] another attempt to kill another Bulgarian but he survived that because he got medical attention soon enough. And about a year after I started for BBC there was an explosion in Radio Free Europe in Munich – in the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe. So I was starting to think that maybe this [car accident] might have been something to do with it. And my wife said ‘Well we better not expect something or wait here doing nothing. Why don’t you apply for a job in Voice of America? Maybe in America it would be safer.’”</p><h4>Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4vg78Fze0m4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were given a certain amount of time to fill it with area focused material like, I said, these people who were American citizens but were active in the resistance during the war, or after the war. For example, one of my colleagues got a very nice interview with Waldemar Matuška when he emigrated to the United States. He did a series of interviews with him, so the people who were outcast in Czechoslovakia was very, very interesting material, we knew, for people over there because they were dying to hear about these people, how they did in America, what they did in America.”</p><p><em>Did you ever hear from people in Czechoslovakia, that they were listening to you?</em></p><p>“Yes we got letters, not very many. Mostly what people did was when they traveled out of the country they sent us letters. And we had many, many encouraging letters. We even had one or two visitors who were lucky to visit America, so they took the trouble to visit us and gave us some feedback, what’s interesting for them and what people want to hear and everything. Yeah, we had some feedback.”</p><p>“One old man [who visited his friend], he said that in Bratislava, every morning they would meet around ten in one of these old <em>kaviarne</em> they called it, coffeehouses. And they would have a task – ‘You listen to Voice of America, you listen to BBC, you listen to Radio Free Europe, and you listen to Deutsche Welle.’ And then they reported what they said, whether there was anything those reported that the other stations did not report. So they would compare notes, if you want. They never wrote anything down but they had vivid memories of what they heard and they shared their information.”</p><h4>Cold War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9tpil-wek2A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was leaving the country, my primary goal was to provide a better future for my family. And I feel very, very fortunate that I was able to participate in the Cold War as a… I call myself an ideological mercenary. Because I worked for BBC, for some time I worked here as a Washington correspondent for Radio Free Europe and I worked for Voice of America. So I feel that I was very fortunate to participate in this struggle that basically may have changed history.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jan Kocvara
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Community Life
Education
English language
Journalism
Prague Spring
Teachers
Western/Pop culture
-
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678ea61ff63e4b532047b4d6d7feeddf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x7lNhapHgKY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She was telling me that she lived there. They didn’t tell me we were Jews for a long time, because Jewish parents just didn’t usually tell their children because they were afraid; they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But she was telling me about the people and, actually, I knew them because we used to go to their place during the summer holidays, so they became like a part of our family – family that we didn’t have anymore because very, very few members of the family survived, and most of those who survived left not only this country, but Europe. They just wanted to be away from Europe, so they went to Canada, to Israel, to Australia. But I knew these people and I thought my mom had a beautiful time because she was telling me only about lovely things.</p><p>“My cousin was actually telling me about the concentration camp and only much, much later I found out that I was probably the only person she told, and I suppose she told only me because she thought I didn’t understand – I was little. I knew the word ‘camp’ for summer camps, because bigger children spoke about summer camps, so I thought she went to one of these. And when she was telling me about things that happened, I thought they were games. It was only later, when I went to school and I started hearing about Jews and about concentration camps, I realized what happened, and I realized we were Jews. Even though I didn’t know what it meant, I knew it meant something strange, but that was about all.”</p><h4>Prague Spring</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a6li3oyjfoE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Imagine something that you really believe in is happening. You are 21. You feel that you, just by going into the street and signing various petitions, can change something. Can you imagine something more exciting? It was fabulous. And we all believed in it. Even though, I remember my mother and her friends talking and sort of worrying that it wouldn’t work which, in the end, it didn’t. But for us it was incredibly exciting. And it was very difficult then to stay in England, especially at the beginning, to stay in England, when you felt that you ought to come and help the country – we didn’t know at that time we actually couldn’t help the country.”</p><h4>Return to Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kxotEKBWugw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the end, I got stuck here. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t know what it would feel like, getting suddenly stuck. So I finished school, then I couldn’t find a job whatsoever for three years. And at that time there was a law that anyone who was not in school anymore and who was not a married woman had to work. It was an obligation, and if you didn’t work and they found you out, they would charge you with ‘leading a parasitical way of life.’ I don’t know who I would be a parasite to but… So I had to take various odd jobs on temporary contracts.</p><p>“Then, a nice good Commie, who was a friend of my mom, was a director of a big firm that built roads, gave me a job. It was the most terrible year of my life because I didn’t have anything to do there. I had to come there every day, spend eight and a half hours there, and there was no job. So I used to help people in other departments. They had to think that I was preparing something like the company magazine, which he told me ‘Look, we really don’t have money for that magazine; we’re not going to produce it, but you are here to get it going.’ So I had to pretend.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KAqRTuomWfw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Charter 77 came. At the time of Charter 77, I was on maternity leave with my daughter, and lots of my friends were involved and they said ‘Come and sign it.’ I said ‘Look, if it were only my own decision, I would immediately. But my husband – and the father of my children – is a journalist. He would lose his job. I can’t do it. We are in it together.’ So in the end, we agreed that I would do the work for the Charter, but would not be a signatory. So I did lots of translations. I translated the Charter; I translated various texts that went abroad.”</p><h4>Translator</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/M1DapF91eyQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This IOJ had a lovely house which they used for these purposes. So I come there and the students asked me ‘What’s happening?’ And I said ‘Well, history is happening here. The regime is obviously getting dismantled.’ They said ‘Tell us, what’s going on?’ So I told them about hundreds of thousands of people in Prague and they said ‘What should we do?’ I said ‘I can’t tell you what to do, but if I were a journalist and I was at a place where history is in the making, for God’s sake, I wouldn’t sit in a classroom being lectured by the representatives of the regime that is going down the drain!’ They said ‘Do you think so?’ I said ‘Look, so many journalists are trying to get to Prague, trying to gather pictures, trying to gather news. You are here.’ Most of them already worked; they were active journalists – young ones. Okay, the next day I come there, because I had to come there and they said ‘You know, something’s happened. The students just didn’t come to class.’ I said ‘Oh dear. What could have happened to them? I hope they didn’t run into problems.’ ‘Well, we don’t know, but fortunately it’s the end [of the seminar]. Do you think we should report them?’ I said ‘Let it be. They’re probably curious.’ In the evening they rang me up and said ‘The IOJ is going, of course, to pay for the interpreters as agreed in the contract, but we’re afraid we won’t need you anymore.’ So I was paid for going to the demonstrations by the IOJ, and the students all followed my advice. So I thought it was good that I actually managed my last-moment revenge.”</p><h4>Communist Era</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lMzDD2uzxr4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was always very difficult to explain – let’s say in the ‘70s or even the ‘60s – to explain to Western Europeans what it is to live in a ‘socialist’ country. Because on one hand, they expected entering almost a prison when they came here, and then they were shocked that people lived normal lives, because they didn’t see underneath. The power the regime exerted on the people was much more subtle. It was through allowing you to go to school, or to study at university or not, to get this or that job, to travel somewhere or not, and that’s not what the visitors see. They can’t see this. And this was difficult to understand for Western Europeans, not to speak about Americans. It must be very difficult to understand for the Americans. It was just life that was seemingly normal, but only seemingly.”</p>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Jana Fraňková
Description
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<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Charter 77
Concentration camp
Education
English language
Frankova
Jews
Prague Spring
Sports
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
Vanatova
Velvet Revolution
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389b5ea98980feb69253e1a98e093da2
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>History Lessons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LcTnKiNtHQk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>My grandpa basically taught me about civilization or taught me history lessons because my parents wouldn’t dare to tell me anything.</p><p> </p><p></p><h4>Design School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bRsq_AD5ulo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One interesting point when I was studying design and I worked as a night-shift monotype operator, I had to sign paperwork that [said] whatever I type, I wouldn’t share that information with anybody else. So I was a fairly sarcastic young guy, 20 years old; what do I care? So I signed the paperwork and I was just chuckling like ‘What is this all about?’ And I’ll never forget, and I’m always telling my clientele now, how silly it was and what a joy it is to live in a free society. For instance, in September, because the production of all magazines took a long time – six weeks, eight weeks –</p><p>It had to be done that way, ‘Mr. so-and-so, <em>Soudruh </em>[Comrade] Novák, won 98 or 99.2 percent of the vote, blah blah blah,’ and it was all bull because it couldn’t possibly happen, and that’s the only way production was done. Magazines were printed and everybody was happy. And it was all fake. It was all a big joke.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oKPojc9vQoU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I first forged a letter to the Socialist Youth. The letter was from the director of the school on behalf of Jiří Barta, because I was such a good boy and I participated in some exhibition on behalf of the Communist Party, and as a reward I was rewarded to go to Amsterdam for a field trip and to go to museums and gather information for the school. Signed by the director. I had the stamp; I had a perfect letterhead; everything was just the way the school was communicating.</p><p>I gave it to a guy from the Socialist Youth. He didn’t understand how I had gotten this permit from the director but, hey this is signed. He didn’t question it, and then it was like a snowball. Nobody checked anything and from the Socialist Youth, they said okay. It went here, they said okay. It went to the army, they said okay. From there, it went to the Communist Party and they said okay. And I was waiting and waiting and it was already like three months and I was thinking ‘Well, either I’m going to get a passport and so-called <em>devizový příslib</em> [permit to withdraw foreign currency] from the bank or police will show up by my door.’ Well, I was called and I don’t remember exactly what office it was, but they gave me a passport and they gave me a <em>doložka</em> for ten days in Amsterdam.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rp2Sz19ittU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went through several shocks. In 1968, it started so well.</p><p>when all of the sudden everyone was carrying flags and people were all together and ‘We are in it together.’ That was the feeling I had in spring 1968. There was even a movement of collecting gold to come up with a treasury for the Czech Republic. People were donating money, because we felt that something really nice is going to happen and we will have democracy and this nonsense will end. Well, it ended on August 21. So that was kind of shocking to me, and I definitely</p><p>made up my mind that I’m leaving the country. At home we had maps and we had globes, and I’d look at the globe and here’s Europe and I looked at Czechoslovakia and I said ‘Okay, what’s on the other side’ and I turned it around and [said] ‘Oh, not bad. California.’ And I said ‘That’s exactly where I want to end up. As far away from this nonsense.’ And another reason was that I wanted to change cultures. I didn’t want to be a neighbor. I didn’t want to be in the neighborhood of Czechoslovakia. I wanted to completely forget, like it didn’t exist, because when I was leaving, I believed that I’ll never ever be able to go back, because I always told people, ‘Hey, those guys? They don’t have a chance. Unless something happens in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia is finished for generations.’ Well I was wrong. Anyway, that would explain why I’m living in California.”</p><h4>Proud to be Czech</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dwjOCe2Qnfs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>If anything, it makes you richer. It makes you a little different. Even now, and I am always taking advantage of it because I have an accent, people like it. People like that there is something different. Sometimes I’ll tell them ‘Hey, I was born in L.A.; it’s all fake.’ There is something about heritage that people should keep it. Again, you have nothing to lose. You are only adding to your culture.”</p><h4>Visiting Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UH3lZS1oKtk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We try to go to the Czech Republic several times a year and it’s great. What they did in Prague is a miracle. I remember Prague – again, it’s nostalgic – it’s a town that at any given time was black and white. There was no color; it was all doom and gloom; it was Franz Kafka.</p><p>Now you go there and I take pictures even of their sidewalks because their sidewalks are a mosaic of white marble. I want to do a book of their sidewalks and compare it San Francisco because, boy, this town could get a lesson. It’s pretty amazing what they did in the Czech Republic. I’m very happy.”</p>
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Title
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Jerry Barta
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arts
Cultural Traditions
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Sense of identity
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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ea09d9b2c444e2593d76ce867d4e0e9a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Prague Spring</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v5TREWH5p6k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“What was of course more important, because I was only 13, was that as a result of 1968 and this whole period called the Prague Spring, which actually, I wouldn’t put just in 1968, but even in the years before as it was sort of building up, a lot of interesting magazines and books were published. There was a plethora of interesting magazines, Tvář, Host do domu, Plameny and so on, Sešity. My uncle subscribed to all of them and he had them bound. The legacy of 1968 for me was interesting in a sense because I would travel, as of the age of 15, I would travel every summer to Prague. I would stay with him during the summer or part of the summer and, although we would occasionally go to the swimming pool in Podolí and so on, I mostly just read. Especially when he was at work, I would stay in his apartment and I would read all of these magazines with a few years delay. And that was 1968 for me, but at the age of 16, 17, 18.”</p><h4>Samizdat</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_yo8Txb3clU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I lived in the dormitories in Prague and, after a certain period when you established whom you could trust, you knew that there were samizdat books and so on, which sort of passed hands and people were lending them to each other. In some cases, if you wanted to keep it for a longer period of time, you would have to agree to retype the whole thing which I did a few times, but it was really not easy for me because I am a bad typist. So that was one way. Then another way was I was getting a lot of books through my uncle who had access. His friends were in the field of culture and journalism. A lot of friends who were in 1968 banned or thrown out, and he would give them the possibility to publish under pen names in his magazine to allow them to make some money, which was quite common in a lot of magazines at that time. So there was this underground trade with these samizdat publications, so if my uncle had something, I don’t know, a book by Bohumil Hrabal for example, in samizdat, he would have it for two days, he would read it during one night, and then I would read it the next night, and then he would have to return it. So that was the way it was done.”</p><h4>Army</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uur4excvN2I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was in Týn nad Vltavou, a small town close to the border with Germany in South Bohemia, and I was originally – because all students who studied at law school were trained to become commanders of tank units, which I did become. I didn’t like it so I successfully simulated, I went to a hospital and pretended to be not taking it very well and, actually, after about one month of torturing me in the military hospital in České Budějovice, they gave me some kind of classification which took me from the tanks and put me in charge of the fuel depot. So I spent about ten months or nine months as the manager of the fuel depot. And that was certainly something I, in a way, enjoyed almost, because at the time I could just read there. So I would be waiting for a tank or a truck to come get gas, and in the meantime, I could just sit there in the office and read.</p><p>“One funny thing was that in these military institutions such as libraries, there were quite often books which everywhere else were already taken out, but I guess these libraries were managed in such a way by people who didn’t really know who Škvorecký was or whatever. You could find books which, in the military library or in the library in the hospital where I was, I could read books which you could not find anywhere else in Prague and that was quite amazing to me. So I actually remember my one year in the army as very educational. I spent a lot of time just reading, and I managed to survive that.”</p><h4>Vacation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zAtLsrFPvBw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So they actually put us in the trunk of their car and we drove to the border in Koper, the same border crossing we started at a week before. They put us in the trunk of their car, put our luggage and their luggage on the backseat. We had this idea that if the border guards stopped them and wanted to go into the car, they would say ‘We don’t have a key for the trunk and we have all of our stuff on the backseat, so should we take everything out?’ which was sort of naïve, because that would be almost incitement for the border guards to go in the trunk. But that’s how they decided to do this, so we actually managed to get into this trunk, but two adults in this trunk was a bit too much. The border crossing, they chose a bad time. It was in the afternoon; it took like 45 minutes and we were losing our… no blood circulation, no breathing. My wife whispered to me, but she was on the verge of screaming that she cannot take it anymore and that she needs to get out. So we spent about 45 minutes there. Another unpleasant thing was that the fumes, as the car was stopping and going, were getting in, so we were partly poisoned too.</p><p>“And then finally we got across the border and we heard the car going, and then the car stopped. They went from the main road to a corn field. It was this dusty road in a cornfield. They opened the trunk and we just fell out. We couldn’t stand; we had no blood circulation. I remember, my first sight of the west was lying in dust on this dusty road.”</p><h4>Refugee</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u5Yk1RIfIhA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We actually first applied for Canada, but after about two days of hard thinking, I persuaded my wife that I don’t want to go to Canada. It seemed to me, quite frankly, the program they were offering seemed to me to be too socialist. Six months of paid language classes, then they would place you somewhere, and I thought I don’t want to go through anything that has to do with the government again and government sort of being in charge of my life, so we actually changed it to the United States.”</p><h4>English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/80iy3ldQJrg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“What is funny is that my first job ended up at the Algonquin because – although the job was found for me by the International Rescue Committee, I had to go for an interview – and when I got there I was interviewed by the manager of the hotel, Mr. Ansbach, who was an avid reader and man of literature. He said ‘Looking at your CV, you are overqualified for this job and, at the same time, we have to worry about your English, so what are you doing for your English?’ And I said ‘Well, the past few weeks I’ve been reading John Updike and any word I don’t know I jot down and I memorize it,’ and he said ‘Oh, John Updike; you are really courageous. His English is pretty difficult. Did you learn anything? Can you try any words on me?’ He was playing sort of a game with me. I said ‘What about turbid?’ and he said ‘Turbid? What’s turbid?’ I said ‘Turbid is like muddy water. It’s a very literary term for muddy water.’ He was very impressed and said ‘Ok, we’ll give you a chance,’ and actually, he was coming almost every evening – because I worked from 6 p.m. until 3 a.m. – so after midnight, I was reading basically. Obviously, I liked these jobs where I can read a lot. So I was reading, and he would come and he would always look over my shoulder and say ‘What are you reading?’ and we would discuss the books. So actually literature and English played a role in my first job.</p><p>“There was a slight problem because I was learning English from all the books I read, which is the kind of English you cannot very often use in regular contact, and spoken English I was learning from the guys from Puerto Rico and occasionally Mr. Ansbach. So I think that I really started learning English properly, spoken English, when I landed at Columbia.”</p><h4>Advisor</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DrGWtxXq_6E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I have to say that it was a very gratifying experience because he certainly was not the kind of boss who would micromanage anything. He was intelligent, funny, a figure of mythical proportions at the same time. Certainly we never had any conflicts. It was a fortunate collusion of very similar views on things. During those two years it was very harmonic and, for me, very inspiring, because you don’t work very often in your life with someone whom you consider to be, in a certain area of human activity, a genius of sorts – which is certainly what I thought about Havel.”</p><h4>NYU Director</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0oGrhkj4_Fw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Czech students, when I encountered them for the first time [in 1995], were quite different from the students I deal with today. It was still the old system. Students were brought up in the educational system where they had to memorize, when they were not asked to be active. They didn’t know foreign languages. So my first experience was when I arrived in the classroom and all the students were sitting in the back rows; they were afraid to come forward, they were afraid to discuss anything. I told them ‘Look, I am teaching a subject where there is no Czech literature. Can I give you literature in English?’ No, they didn’t speak any languages. And I have to say that 2011, [it is] the same class and totally different students. Totally Westernized students who travel freely; students who if you ask them what they did last weekend, ‘Oh, I had friends from Germany, Austria [visiting]. By the way, next semester I am going to study in Great Britain so I won’t be around.’ A different kind of people. And that’s my, despite my very critical view of the overall state of democracy here, this transformation of the young generation is the most hopeful sign I can see here.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jiří Pehe
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Education
English language
Jiri
Military service
Prague Spring
-
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1ccb060ec443e0cd5fb2180c313bd71d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Kveta's Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LB5uRklpRq4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He was always bothered by inequality in wealth between people. He had trouble accepting that there’s a class of people that’s very wealthy and a class of people that’s very poor. But I don’t think he actually actively did anything in that direction. But he supported equality or fair treatment: that was his objective. But I think what happened with him was that he was so extremely intelligent and knowledgeable that his frame of reference was horribly skewed, because I don’t think he understood that not everybody was as smart as him. So, he could easily… he didn’t care, he could easily give up what he had today, because tomorrow he would have double. Do you understand? He could easily earn money quickly. So, he didn’t understand the struggles of most people because he was definitely above an average person – he spoke four languages fluently, he was, you know, extremely good at what he did, at college his picture was on the wall way after he graduated as one of the best students they ever had, you know. But they did send him to Cuba and he was drinking with Castro. Yes, so, when he left for Cuba, he was already involved with someone else who would be my stepmother and my brother was born in Cuba.”</p><h4>House Troubles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9hWgIofG760?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They did want to take the whole house, and they would come every so often, I remember, when I was a little kid, people would come to our house and they would measure the whole house, because they had some rule, if your property exceeded some whatever square feet, or meters in our case, they had a right to take it. And they wanted to convert our house into a department store, but we were right on the money. Like, by just a centimeter – one more centimeter and it would be over, but they just couldn’t find that one centimeter! That’s what happened.”</p><h4>Immigration to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OmdkiRoEg1A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The idea was that I would come and visit them for summer vacation, and I got a passport, and I was pretty much set to go, but then my grandmother got an idea that I should not be traveling alone and she wanted to come too. And at that point… so she went to apply for a passport, and that triggered my stepfather’s sister saying she wanted to come too. And then everybody was applying for a passport, which delayed the whole thing. I was 16 years old. And by the time it was processed or anything could be done, they actually called me to the passport station and took my passport away. So, nobody went.”</p><h4>Reunited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wyXPV3z1EC8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I heard later, and I don’t even remember at what point that was, that when they finally released us, I was the second one to go and that the first child released was a child who was terminally ill. I don’t know for sure, the story goes that she got hit by a car crossing a street and so somehow, whether that triggered something, or whether she had an infection anyway, she had only six months to live, so they let her go, to die with her parents. And I guess she was only ten years old. Whether that is true or not, I really don’t have anything to substantiate that. And I was told I was the second one. But again, whether that’s the truth, I don’t know. And supposedly it was 35 of us they let go, from the whole country. So you have to imagine, it’s, you know, even though it’s not a big country, but still, that’s hard to find somebody else like, in your situation.”</p><h4>Politics or Family?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cAp-2S9EjrM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Of course, the sad part is that it’s bad enough to deal with family issues – you should not have to have politics interfere in your family life, because then, it’s almost like you have no place to go. And that’s what happened to me at that one point, you know, when I graduated from high school. I was completely stuck. I didn’t know if I could go to school, I did not know if I could leave the country, I just did not know. There was nothing. And I was, you know, becoming an adult. I did not know how to survive. I was really scared to death. I did not have any skills, any, any skills worth mentioning as far as who would hire me, you know… to do what?”</p><h4>News Conference</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bMYi3GcZXg4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We landed around 7:00 on February 10, in the middle of the winter. And of course, unknown to us, there were reporters waiting. So, when we were getting off the plane, the stewardess came and told us we had to wait, to be the last, because they already knew. You know, and at that time I’m already thinking ‘That doesn’t sound good!’ And sure enough, we get off the plane, and you know, there is my mother, my stepfather and a bunch of photographers and then they drag us into a room and I had a press conference, right off the bat. Yeah. I could answer questions, but I didn’t understand what they were asking so my stepfather had to translate for me.”</p>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Kveta Eakin
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Divorce
Education
emigrant
Helsinki Accords
Kankova
marriage
Prague Spring
refugee
Simunkova
Vcelka
Women workers
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4f230680b0a0a61d01ec4737afc94dbd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Work & Success</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jD5XL5R9FQo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You have to check the blueprint for them, talk with them, you have to order materials all the time – order windows, doors, ceilings, and everything – and in advance you have to order trucks and cranes. And everything was too much pressure. Communist members didn’t like this kind of job because of all this responsibility. But they checked my job all the time because you know you cannot be against the government. And when I went one step up and had the 41 guys, this was really too much of a headache for them, because you have to have the knowledge and bricklayers – they can fool you, they can do something on purpose and you can be in trouble. And this knowledge I had from the base, because I was a bricklayer, then a foreman, then a supervisor. They don’t like this kind of stuff, they like easy jobs. But I still had to be careful, I could not be over the line and say something that was bad against the government, because you can stop in the office one day and have no chair and have no desk. They can say you have to go back and be a brick layer. But I was not afraid, because I finished up at my desk at 3:00 and then I always worked a second job as a bricklayer because I needed extra money.”</p><h4>Jail & Mother-in-Laws</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hp8FpGMoQbk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She was living at this time 20 miles from Liberec and one day she received a paper saying ‘can we talk to you?’ And what happened was she told a neighbor ‘can you watch my children?’ My wife, she was four years old and her brother was six. ‘Can you watch them?’ she said, ‘I’m leaving the city at eight o’clock and I’ll be back on the bus at four o’clock’. And she was back four years later. What happened was they charged her with talking with someone who crossed the border, the judge said ‘you are a traitor. I’ll give you 25 years’. She was in Rakovník, the city of Rakovník. They made tiles, which was a very rough time, they did everything – the ceramic tiles, they even made them in the factory at this time, which was the 1950s, and they even put them on the train. With her in jail were a lot of famous ladies, like movie stars who did something against the government, but, who she said were really the best in there with them were the prostitutes. They were living with them, of course, because they put everyone in the one room. But she had respect for them because if the political prisoners messed up something, the prostitutes – they took the blame, because they knew somebody else could be more punished. So a lot of those ladies said ‘I did it!’ because they knew the prisoners in there against the government would be treated worse and that’s why they took this stuff on and said ‘I did it’, and they were not punished.”<br /></p><h4>Liberation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CUADGKGZ_SU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had some history books in the school always, and on the front of the history books was a tank, a Russian tank, with a flower and it said ‘we liberated you’. And I found out in 1968, which was the Prague Spring, I bought every week a Slovakian magazine called Expres, and they started to put a lot of stuff in, and I found out the southwest of our country was liberated by General Patton! For 23 years I never knew it because, why? My father told me just this stuff about the Communists, but my mum, she was so scared she never… she knew it, but she was so scared I could talk and she would be punished! That’s why I had to find out when I was 23 years old, in 1968 I found out our country was liberated by General Patton! That’s why when I came to the United States I saw the General Patton movie about five times!”<br /></p><h4>Liverec Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_45gA55tY1Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I saw the blood and everything, I had a motorcycle, I drove home and I visited my mother in law and said ‘What do we do now? The situation is bad.’ She said, ‘You know what, go buy the main things’ – like milk, bread and this stuff, we had to support ourselves because nobody knew what would happen. So I went to the grocery store for this stuff and when I stood in the line I heard a gunshot and a lot of noise. And after I went back to the city (I brought the groceries home and said ‘Can you stay with my daughter?’), and I came back to the downtown, and what had happened was that they were still going the wrong way. Streetcars have steel tracks on the ground, and a tank had slipped on these and there was an underpass, where you walk under a building. There was a pillar and the tank had hit this pillar and the whole section fell down. And a lot of guys standing under this were killed. But we saw how people can really use their hands, they started pulling the bricks out and pulling people out. And the tank started moving out, the idiot who was leader of the tank said ‘Move out!’ And people said ‘Stay! Stay!’ because behind were the emergency ambulances. They said ‘Stop!’ and they almost killed a nurse and people there were mad. And they guy used a gun and shot in the air and said ‘Move, move, move!’ He was so scared too, and he started moving the tank finally out and there was big damage. And at this place there was another nine people killed. We had, they said, about 16-18 people killed and a lot of people injured.”<br /></p><h4>Child Left Behind</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Wu6m_XKAk0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At this time she was 14 and a half, and I even told her… I said ‘Honey, I’ll tell you one thing very serious – we are going to the United States, if the situation there is a little bit better, we’ll stay over there. But don’t listen to the people around – we haven’t forgotten you. You won’t be forgotten. We care about you. Stay here, we’ll do everything that we can to move you over there.’ She says ‘Okay Dad, okay, I trust you.’ And two years later, when I received a green card, I visited the Czech Embassy in Washington and it was Mr. Safka or whatever, he smelt of alcohol. But we visited him, we showed him the green card. They said ‘Write down everything about your daughter’. And we wrote where she went to kindergarten, when she was six and a half what kind of school she went to. They checked our papers and Mr. Safka said, because we asked him how long she can be over there, what kind of chance we have to see her, and he said ‘We signed the Helsinki Agreement, and when we talk about putting families together, we have to stick with that.’ We were really pretty surprised because really six months later we saw our daughter.</p><p>“Those two years were very tough. Mostly for my wife because she said ‘Did we do wrong, did we do right?’ And I said ‘No, no! It’s the United States and I think this is good we have to just be tough. But we have to look to the future, we have to look to the future!’ It was a tough two years, but, you know, everything is a risk and we are here.”</p><h4>Cleveland Spy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dz04muEvgeM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When [Joe] was in 1987 at the police station, they told him, ‘We’ll treat you very nicely and fairly, but tell us where you go – two days there, three days here, and everything – but we’ll give you some advice, we don’t want any problems.’ He says, ‘I won’t give you any problems’, and the guy who was in charge, some major or someone in some pretty nice position, says ‘Mr. Joe Kocab, we know about you very well, more than you think!’ He says ‘What? I haven’t said anything!’ The major says ‘You know what? You want to hear something? Come on over here.’ He says ‘Come on, follow me into this room’. He went to another room and he pushed the button and his speech was on the tape! This was 1987, the speech was made two years before. The major said ‘Whose voice is this?’ Joe said ‘That’s my voice; I had a speech ’85 or ’86 in the Czech Hall.’ And the major told him ‘Your speech is not for the Communist government, it is against us. Watch yourself, we don’t need problems, that’s why we know about you more than you think.’</p><p>“When Joe Kocab told us, our people here, what’s going on, we told the ambassador and Martin [Palouš] ‘Can you do us a favor, can you find out – somebody from our Czech environs has to be a black sheep who taped this stuff! Somebody amongst us had to have taped it, because it was all Czech people here at the speech. Somebody had to make the tape and donate the tape to the Czech Republic, to the Communists! Can you find out who is the guy, because he can’t be with us any more! Because we cannot do this to the United States government, especially with this Reagan stuff, you know, we owe them, with the FBI, the CIA, we can’t play this sort of trick.’ And they told us; ‘Oh, we have a problem, they are destroying all of the documentation that they can.’ This was a big shock for us, because we thought, finally, they cannot punish somebody, but we can punish somebody who worked with them. Because we thought this would be our duty to punish somebody who worked with them, because this was terrible, what they did. But we still don’t know, who was the guy!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Ludvik Barta
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
emigrant
Family life
Forced labor
Military service
Prague Spring
Prison
refugee
Sudeten Germans
Warsaw Pact invasion
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11030a7125069375e5b4c5b0ba8e5580
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Devoted</h4>
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<p>“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’.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.’”</p>
<h4>Communist</h4>
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<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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!’</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Radio Free</h4>
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<p>“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.’”</p>
<h4>Army</h4>
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<p>“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.’”</p>
<h4>1968 Invasion</h4>
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<p>“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!</p>
<p>“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!</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Departure</h4>
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<p>“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?</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>English</h4>
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<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Melania Rakytiak
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Catholicism
Catholics
Cierna Voda
Communist coup
Communist Party members
Divorce
Education
Family life
local
Lutherans
marriage
Marxism
Politics
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Strecanska
Stredna pedagogicka skola
Surovce
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
World War II