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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
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>Ban On Dancing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x6sflmN1ivU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“No dancing. It wasn’t allowed. I know that we had at one family’s house, they knew somebody who was before a dance instructor, so he would come there occasionally and we gathered and we danced, but that was… if we were caught, we would be in trouble. So that was one of those things, and a lot of things were… you know, we were young girls; we would like to have nylon stockings, we couldn’t get them, you know. With a lot of things you had to be very inventive – to make things interesting and fashionable. You know, from old to new.</p><p>“But I think otherwise we were happy. Maybe we were even happier young people than they are nowadays. You know, we didn’t have any expectations. We were taught that we have to work, either physically or mentally, to accomplish things – that nothing comes free in life, and that you should deserve it and be proud of anything, whatever you do. It doesn’t matter how important or unimportant the job is, but you should be always proud of the things you are doing and do it at your best.”</p><h4>Tradition</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bp9quwp5zi8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, more or less, I think it was a tradition. You know, nobody talked about it, nobody was so aware of what you are or not. You were a neighbor, you were a friend, you were an ‘Oh, terrible! I wouldn’t talk to him or to her!’ And the kids, we didn’t have any way to get in trouble if we went to Sokol, you know, we didn’t get in any trouble. We got [rid of] our energy, you know, that way.”</p><h4>Life After WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OIJ6KIN9pe4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Oh, everything was more open and free. There were more goods to buy and you could plan. You know, I think you do not know what freedom means unless you lose it. You know, we are talking about freedom, but nobody knows what it is, really, until you lose it. You don’t have it, you cannot decide things for yourself, you know. There are so many things which you don’t think about if you live in a free world. And so we were enjoying all those things, and I think we were happy, but it didn’t last too long and then the Communists took over.”</p><h4>Prison</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oudr5OeHy20?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“That was a horrible thing, because you were in a tiny little cell and even when I went to the bathroom I had to leave the doors open. I don’t know what they thought that I will do. It was terrible. Then they interrogated me there, of course, and in Čtyrka too. And I think at Čtyrka they were very rude, very rude. Actually, that was when I learned how to smoke. They brought me from the interrogation and I was completely out, and the girls in the cell gave me a cigarette so, that’s how… Then I had to undo that habit.”</p><h4>Toilet As Telephone</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPNGQmKJlKQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a good time in the bad times too. We used the toilet as a telephone, because we found out that if we empty it, then we can talk to the people downstairs. And we were sending letters through the windows on a thread. So we had all kinds of excitement. But you know every day somebody had to go through the interrogation, and that was tough. So you had to make it nice.”</p><h4>Perspective</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ESyFco5YGSA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Once you take that step, you are in the middle, because you miss certain things from the country you came from, and if you are there, you miss the things from where you are: you have comparison. If you live and stay in the same country, you don’t have any comparison. You know, you can see it on TV or whatever, but you have to live it. It’s like if you go for vacation some place, it’s not to live there. It’s different.”</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
Zdenka Novak
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Zdenka Novak was born in Prague in July, 1931. She lived there until the outbreak of WWII when her parents (who owned a delicatessen in the capital) decided to return to their native Kokšín in western Bohemia. In Kokšín, Zdenka’s father Václav set up a feather processing business with a Jewish partner, Emil Goldscheider. Zdenka says her family came under scrutiny because of this partnership and that she remembers the day the Goldscheiders were taken away (none of them returned from the concentration camps they were sent to). During the War, Zdenka remembers attending secret dancing lessons, as dancing was outlawed in the Protectorate in 1941. She says young people had to be ‘inventive’ due to shortages in goods, but that on the other hand they had ‘less expectations.’ At the end of the War, Zdenka’s family moved to Tašovice, near the West Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, where Zdenka started attending ceramic school. She says one of her proudest moments was being selected to paint a vase for President Edvard Beneš on an official visit to the academy. She studied there until one year after the Communist coup in 1949, when she was arrested on charges of helping smuggle secret documents across the border to the CIC in West Germany. She was interrogated and found guilty without a trial. Zdenka spent 18 months in Prague prisons such as Pankrác and Čtyrka (the StB headquarters on Bartolomějská Street). She escaped through a bathroom window en route from one prison to another in 1951 and went on the run – making her way to territory she was familiar with near Karlovy Vary by train and then walking across the border into Bavaria through the woods.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Zdenka reported at a police station in Mehring, Germany, and was sent to Valka Lager refugee camp. She says she was not there long before she was approached by the American government with a job offer. She moved to Oberursel near Frankfurt to work and it was there, in 1953, that she married her husband Frank (a Czech émigré whom she had met at Valka Lager). At the end of 1953, the couple moved to the United States. They settled in New York City. Zdenka first worked as an office hand at an import/export company but soon became a clerk at an insurance firm. She says that she had many Czech friends in the city and that she enjoyed socializing at Sokol New York in particular. In 1956, she moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, when her husband gained a job as a mechanical designer at Beloit Corporation – a factory producing papermaking machines. There, Zdenka and Frank started raising their two children before moving to neighboring Rockton, Illinois. While her children were growing up, Zdenka ran a landscaping business. Today, she continues to live in Rockton. She has traveled to the Czech Republic with her children and grandchildren and says she tries to impress the value of her Czech heritage upon them.</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
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Benes
Community Life
Ctyrka prison
German
Jews
Koksin
Nazis
Occupation
Pankrac
Political prisoner
Prison
Refugee camp
Smrcinova
Tasovice
Underground
Women workers
World War II
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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
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>Massacre Survivor</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hyqD8HBFXQU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”</p><h4>Opinions Hurt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tlzpSg6Eixc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”</p><h4>Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A3Na8BQnvdE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fou0milWM60?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.</p><p>“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QkstvhUWd2A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”</p><h4>Mistake</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x71Xtz_qLIQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?</p><p>“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”</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
Vera Plesek
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.</p><p> </p><p>When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper <em>Hlasatel</em> for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.</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
American citizenship
Concentration camp
Discrimination
Divorce
Family life
Healthcare professionals
Kosinova.
Prison
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
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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
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/bKda885FPwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is <em>srazka</em>, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”</p><h4>Cleared</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HFlNKVM3Dm4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p class="wp-caption-text">Tony’s father Antonin in 1946</p><p>“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”</p><h4>The War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Gw6EEIWZBU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”</p><h4>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTltUpQjLKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”</p><h4>Escape into Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHWxyBuqBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”</p><h4>Refugee Camps</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_s8N3S9mQ8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.</p><p>“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”</p><h4>American Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1BbEXNzJ24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”</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
Tony Jandacek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.</p><p> </p><p>Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </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
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czech language
Education
German
Journalism
Mushrooms
Nazis
Occupation
Prison
Refugee camp
school
Smichov
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
World War II
Zelezna Ruda
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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
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/FyrKcQPwvU8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father, who by that time had been working with the U.S. Army quite a while, had set up an underground, once the communists took over after ’48, they set up an underground, an organization called the Biela légia – the White Legion, whose purpose was anti-communist activities. They were going to try to broadcast into the Czech and Slovak territories, they were going to try to get people out, they were thinking about writing pamphlets and anti-communist literature to be distributed. So they had this active underground and once the communists took over, the underground kind of kicked in.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/25Yk2CcSqpo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Communists then arrested her in the summer of 1949. They took her into prison, they kept her in prison. They didn’t torture her, but they threatened torture. They kept her awake for three nights and three days, they would use sleep deprivation, they would use threats against her children, they would touch her skin with razor blades and say ‘You have to tell us this information.’ They were asking her to actually name some people, and, in her confused state, after a few days – after three days and three nights of this – she did name one man, who then, when they told her stand there and then to turn around, she heard a wheelchair coming in and this man was beaten so badly, but he still looked at my mother and denied that he knew her. But, of course she had identified him and that was enough. Even though she didn’t know politics, it wasn’t political in her mind, nevertheless, the association with us was enough.”</p><h4>Adjusting to America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/99jVSfXl-x0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I teach at a university, and my students believe kind of ‘the American ideal’ that you can come to America and you can make it – anybody can make it. And I use my story to kind of say yes, and no. Yes, because we came with two suitcases, nothing. My father worked in a factory for a while but then got a job in a company, and eventually – we moved to Detroit two years after we came to Milwaukee – and my dad joined Massey Ferguson, an international corporation and he was Chief Financial Officer at the end for Massey Ferguson in the United States, a branch of it. So yes, the adjustment was difficult, but not impossible. On the other hand, when I tell my students that and they think this validates the American myth, I say, “But you might think a couple things.” We didn’t come as poor refugees. We came as educated people. My father was fluent in English, he had a doctor of law degree. So it’s easier to make it, especially if you know the English.</p><p>“It was much harder for my mother. When she came to America, she literally did not know how to cook – she had had cooks. She literally did not know how to clean, and she went to become a cleaning lady in a department store. And she owned only two dresses when she came, one of which was hand sewn for her, navy blue with white lace, and she went to clean in that dress because that’s all she had. So it was very hard for her. I’m very proud of my mother that she learned to cook, that she learned to do all these things because she was forced to.”</p><h4>Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JuCdmwmdaWY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I didn’t get a chance to go back until 1965 and for a very short trip, and everyone was really scared. They had me stay in a hotel; nobody wanted me to stay in their house. My older cousin had married an army doctor; he left town so that he wasn’t even anywhere near the fact that this American escapee was in Bratislava, so that his status in the Army wouldn’t be contaminated by being with me.”</p><h4>Bratislava</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S-O6ldV9Sc8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had a grant from the university to research my dissertation and I arrived in May of 1969, spent five months there. So I experienced not the Prague Spring, but the undoing of the Spring by the following year. I arrived in May, there were still signs of some freedom. On every building in Bratislava was <em>štyri-dve</em>, 4-2, because that was the score that the Czechoslovak team beat the Russians in the World Hockey tournament [1968 Olympics/World Hockey Championships]. And every wall in Bratislava had 4-2, you know, the kind of subtle protest that people were doing. They couldn’t protest anymore, the army was still there, the Soviet tanks were still there, but 4-2 on every wall.</p><p>“Over the summer you could see it slowly progressing towards more and more control. I worked in the archives, and we would sit and talk politics in May and June, and by July, as you’re getting closer to the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, every one of the archivists would come up to me and say, ‘It’s ok to talk politics with me, but maybe we better not in a group.’ And the tragedy was that everyone said that. So none of them was a police spy, but they couldn’t be sure. That system totally undermined any sense of trust you had between people. And so you could see that. And as the anniversary approached, two, three days before, you of course had flowers everywhere – a couple of the people had been killed in Bratislava and then some in Prague. And then on the day of the anniversary of the invasion, a huge silent crowd gathered in the main square in Bratislava, and the soldiers were there with guns and tanks. And I was standing to the side and my cousin Igor came up and he grabbed me and he pulled me out of there, and he said ‘They’re broadcasting on Slovak radio that all these demonstrations are the work of foreign students. You’ve got a foreign student passport here, get the hell out of here.’ So he pulled me out of there, because that’s what they were blaming the people’s protests on – foreign students.”</p><h4>Changes in Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qZD4BK3z4ug?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“McDonald’s. Come on, I knew communism ended when there was a McDonald’s in both Praha [Prague] and Bratislava. This had really changed. What particularly impressed me, last summer when I was there, I did an experiment. So sometimes I would pretend I didn’t know Slovak and just try English. Every young person speaks English. There was virtually no place that I went in Prague or in Bratislava where, if I pretended I didn’t know any Slovak, I couldn’t get help in English. If not the actual person who was serving me, then somebody would call over. And so, the presence of a much more international culture, the young people feeling free to go everywhere. The children of my cousins who are in their twenties and thirties, they’ll hop to Barcelona for the weekend. For my cousin’s generation who grew up under communism and couldn’t get to Vienna, the idea of hopping to Barcelona…the young people don’t know that at all. It’s a very cosmopolitan, to me, very European culture now. Very much part of Europe.”</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
Susan Mikula
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Susan Mikula was born in Bratislava in 1943. Her father, Jozef, was very involved in the Tiso government in the First Slovak Republic and, Susan says, left Czechoslovakia following WWII. She moved with her mother, Edita, and sister, Katherine, to her mother’s native Ružomberok at this time. Abroad, Susan’s father worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), gathering information on communist activity in Czechoslovakia. Jozef was also a leading figure in the Slovak resistance, heading the underground group Biela légia [White Legion]. As a result of his activities, in 1949, Susan’s mother was arrested and held in prison for three days. After her release, Susan’s mother decided to escape with her daughters. Aided by the Biela légia, Susan and her family crossed the Morava River into Austria in November 1949. They were reunited with Susan’s father in Vienna. This was the first time that Susan had seen her father in close to five years. They stayed in Salzburg for three months, and then spent one month in a refugee camp at Bremerhaven. Sponsored by the CIC, Susan’s family arrived in Milwaukee in the spring of 1950 where they were warmly welcomed by the Slovak community.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After two years in Milwaukee, her family moved to Detroit. Susan says she had a very Slovak upbringing and remembers speaking Slovak at school and church. She attended the University of Detroit for her undergraduate degree, and then Syracuse University for her doctorate in East European history. Susan traveled to Bratislava in 1969 while writing her dissertation on <a href="/web/20170808010124/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/john-palka/">Milan Hodža</a>, and remembers the tense atmosphere following the Warsaw Pact invasion. Now, Susan lives in Chicago and is a professor of history at Benedictine University. One of her specialties is Slovak politics. Susan regularly returns to Slovakia and has kept in close contact with her family there. She says she still strongly identifies with her Slovak heritage and has considered retiring in Bratislava.</p><p> </p><p> </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
1948 emigrant/refugee
Anti-communist
Arrest
Community Life
Education
Mikulova
Milan Hodza
Prison
Resistance
Ruzomberok
Sense of identity
Slovak Language
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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
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>Divorce</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xW3k77OfBg0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”</p><h4>Bombing of Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Cq9f43kjWE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”</p><h4>Prison Visit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mY-k8GtjGEw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”</p><h4>Barely Graduated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cXz1EFXTab4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”</p><h4>Business Principles</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F2DMGMCo6A4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”</p><h4>Student Trade Union</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Rr0WO4C8cc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of 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
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Peter Palecek
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2531" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler1.jpg" alt="Peter Palecek 2012" width="250" height="417" /></p><p>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437/http://recordingvoices.blogspot.com/2012/06/peter-palecek-on-his-father-general.html">Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.</a></p><p> </p><p>As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-2530" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906231437im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-16.jpg" alt="Handler-1" width="350" height="584" />Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.</p><p> </p><p>Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, 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
American citizenship
Anti-communist
Arrest
Catholics
CKD
CVUT
Divorce
Education
German
gymnazium
Occupation
Political prisoner
Prison
Svatoborice
Terezin
Vertel
VSE
Warsaw Pact invasion
World War II
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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
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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>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
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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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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>Assassination Attempt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JjuhoGyGDHI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Being minister of the interior, he was in charge of police issues. And the commissioner of police for Prague was, I don’t remember his title, but it was Doležal. And Doležal came to my father and said that they had a report that there was going to be an attempt to assassinate the president, Masaryk, but that they had no real solid information about it, it was just hearsay. But what should they do? Masaryk was supposed to speak at the Obecní dům in Prague…</p><p>“The bottom line was that they decided to flood the place with secret police, or tajní, as they used to call them – mufti – in civilian clothes. And the way they identified where they were was to put potted palms in this meeting hall so, beside every potted palm was a policeman out of uniform. And the guy who came to assassinate Masaryk must have sensed this police presence and decided he wasn’t going to try it, it was too much of a chance… So the president was saved and so this guy, whose name was Gorguloff, a Russian terrorist – today, you would call him a terrorist – decided who was to blame and he said ‘Slávik’s to blame, because he is the head of the police system!’ So he came after my father in Schnirchova – that was the name of the street in Prague.</p><p>“And he came to our apartment in Schnirchova on the pretext of presenting a book to my father. And so my father – in those days you didn’t think about these things or security – so he agreed that he would meet. It was easier to meet at the apartment than at the office. So, this man Gorguloff came to the apartment. It was fairly recently after my birth. My mother didn’t know that he had a guest. In the deposition that came out later, he said that he had this book for my father to initial or sign, and under the book he had the pistol. And he was going to wait until my father looked down into the book to sign, and he was going to shoot him. And at that point my mother happened to, not knowing that there was a guest, open the sliding doors, somehow she had me in her arms. The guy took one look at her and ran out. Later he said that he had seen the Madonna – so that became a family joke, because they said ‘Who do you think you are?’ And I said ‘I don’t know!’ The bottom line was that later he settled in France and shot the French president, Paul Doumer.”</p><h4>Refusal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K6gixZZVKwY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The instructions came from the minister of foreign affairs, Chvalkovský, to the embassy – to the mission, because it was not an embassy, it was the mission, the legation, or whatever its titles were – to turn over the legation to the Germans, since they were now the new Protectorate and they had the right… With the exception, probably, of one individual, the embassy staff said no. It was decided that it would not be turned over. The Poles by this time were beginning to be a little worried. They said, you know, it’s an extra-territorial problem, we really can’t get involved in the middle of this. My father at one point had a phone call, which he says was a muffled voice, which he thought he recognized as being Ambassador von Moltke, who was the German ambassador, who was a good friend.</p><p>“The warning was that the German Gestapo had gained keys to the Czechoslovak legation and were coming to take over. Do something about the locks… so they put sand and paper and junk into the locks and so the German keys did not work and the Poles had insisted that the takeover be without violence. So the German Gestapo departed the scene, you know, and left without the embassy. And it was used as a focal point for all the Czechoslovaks who were escaping across the border from Czechoslovakia and Slovakia into Poland and where perhaps the nucleus of this potential legion, which took a while to get approved, and so by the time they were approved, it was too late.”</p><h4>Precious Documents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qF3IOdJy8vk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Tony Mach packed up some papers of my father’s and took them back to his father’s farm in Volhynia, including a suitcase full of my father’s dressier things like the smoking, the dinner jacket, the white tie, tails, you know – the formal dresses, his decorations, his sashes – you know, ambassadors used to wear these formal decorations. And he took them all to his father and mother’s farm in Volhynia, where he spent the war working in a German factory, going back to his parents on weekends, taking out the clothes, brushing them to get rid of the moths, cleaning them up, and keeping them safe, including the papers. Had the Germans found the papers on that farm, it would have been the death of all of them, I mean, it was just that kind of situation.</p><p>“Many years later, my father has just learned that he is going to be ambassador to the United States, and about a day or so later, there was this movement of the Volhynian Czechs – they had been brought back into the German Sudeten areas. And the people in Volhynia were told ‘You can opt, you can stay here and become a citizen of the Soviet Union,’ which was expanding into Poland, ‘or you can go back to Czechoslovakia which is no longer subject to counter-reformation practices.’ So, they opted to go back to Czechoslovakia after 300-odd years of emigration.</p><p>“And so Tony… they put everything onto horse carts and ox carts and whatever, and the doorkeeper at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Černín Palace, comes up to my father’s office and says ‘Mr. Minister, umm, there’s a man here with a horse cart, and he says he knows you, he’s got some things of yours.’ And so my father says ‘Oh my God!’ So he goes downstairs and there’s Tony Mach, our butler, with all these things of my father’s! And he had brought them on his way from Poland to wherever they were going in the Sudeten area. And so, of course, the irony of it was that my father’s shape had changed over time. Most of the things didn’t fit anymore. But the papers… so half the papers were saved this way – that’s why my father was able to write his memoirs!”</p><h4>Great Britain</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MnteynbuDkw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Rosslyn House had a phenomenal view of London. So of course we watched the Battle of Britain from our windows, when we were not in the air-raid shelter. Although I tended to sneak out and try and watch, because I could see the fires and the German bombers, you know, illuminated in the searchlights. That was real heady stuff, you know! Later, or actually not later – earlier – there was one day that I remember I was in the garden, and there was this roar, and I looked up and a German Heinkel was coming and I could see the pilot with his goggles and his head, looking out, and he was obviously trying to get his bearings, because I thought he was going to hit the hill, I mean, it was just round… And about 30, no it couldn’t have been 30, about 10 or 15 seconds later, two Spitfires were barreling exactly on the same path! That was all the noise! And of course they started, I could hear them shooting, and eventually there was a plume of smoke, so you know they got him. So this would go on, you know, and it was watching the dog fights during the day, because you were wondering, was it one of ours or one of theirs? You know, they’d come plummeting down with smoke trailing and stuff like that. And that was, as I say, very heady stuff.</p><p>“And then going to school was fascinating, because there was a lot of shrapnel on the road, and it was suggested that it would be helpful to collect the shrapnel, so we had bags or buckets or whatever, putting the pieces of shells in to collect so that they could melt it and shoot it back. And the prize collection was always the fuse – the shell fuse, which was the settings for the explosion at a certain altitude – so that was, those were real collector’s items, those you could trade, and so it was great fun collecting. Of course it also meant, because the air-raids would come in the morning, we always hoped it would be in time to slow us down on going to school! Because then we could do the collecting of the shells, the ammunition, the spent shells, the shrapnel and be late at school, so that was a benefit – and do a good deed by turning it in, and then in the evening, we’d spend the night in the shelters, because they would do some bombing at night.”</p><h4>Debriefing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a7NFhJb7u6o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were some cases that were pretty horrendous. I don’t think it’s a classified one – one border guard shot the other border guard who was patrolling with him, they were covering the border security, you know the mined area and stuff like that, the barbed-wire fences and the machine gun sectors and stuff like that. And this guy was on the border, was on a patrol with his buddy, and he shot him in the back, killed him, and then escaped. He said the reason he shot him was it was the only way he could feel secure to effect his own escape; the Czech authorities said he was a murderer and had escaped in order to escape punishment for his crime. Two different stories – one the government’s, one this ordinary border, pohraniční stráž guy’s – we were hard put, because obviously, if it was murder and escape from the penalties of murder, he should be returned. If he had in effect gotten out because he had killed a guy in order to effectuate a successful escape, that was another question. The question of course immediately comes to mind ‘Why didn’t he just knock him in the head and pass him out, and then make his way out?’ The question there was ‘How long would it have taken him to get out?’ He had no way of knowing how long it would take to effect his escape, whether the guy would recover and call the alarm before he could… you know, so there was a real judgment… I had to take him to Frankfurt for a lie-detector test that we did, and the lie-detector operator said ‘I believe his story checks out, his escape rationale, however, I would not like to be his mother and tell him no about having a cookie!’ So, we sort of knew how amoral this individual was.”</p><h4>Jail Time</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lDotS9JCC2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At one point he says he was visited by a couple of secrets, tajní, you know, and they said ‘Would you write a letter to your father to tell him it’s okay to come back to this country?’ You know, ‘Everything will be forgiven’, and Dušan said ‘What do you mean, forgiven?’ And they sort of negotiated this. And he said ‘Look, I can’t see my wife, I can’t see my child, I don’t have anything to read, I can’t write, everything is forbidden. Forget it!’ And they said, ‘Well, if we were to give you some of these benefits, would you consider writing a letter?’ And he said ‘Consider? Of course! Sure!’ And so of course then he did write a letter, and he obviously put in little references which they didn’t like. So they never sent the letter, but they did give him the freedom, and they asked him what did he want to read? And he said ‘I want to read Karl Marx, Das Kapital.’ They said, ‘Why do you want to read that?’ And he says ‘To learn how you think so I know how to fight you!’ So, he said ‘I figured I was in for a beating’, but he said they only tried to do it once. He was big, much bigger than I am, heftier, and he said the interrogator came at him, and he said he took the chair he was sitting on and pinned the guy against the wall and he said ‘You try and do that again and I’ll kill you, I have nothing to lose!’ And they never beat him after that.”</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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Juraj Slavik
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Juraj Slavik was born in Prague in October 1929, son of the then-minister of the interior, Juraj Slávik. In 1936, Juraj’s father was sent to head the Czechoslovak diplomatic mission in Poland, with whom relations were strained because of both countries’ claims to parts of Upper Silesia. Juraj attended the Lycée Français de Varsovie [the French School in Warsaw] but, in light of heightening tensions, was sent to school in Switzerland just before the outbreak of WWII. After a brief spell in Belgium, Juraj spent the War in Britain, first with his parents in London (where his father was a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) and then as a boarder at Magdalen College School in Oxford and the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj returned with his parents to Czechoslovakia in 1945. One year later, however, Juraj’s father was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States and so the family left for America. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Juraj’s father resigned from his post and the family decided to stay in the United States. Juraj’s siblings Dušan and Taňa remained in Czechoslovakia, where Dušan was subsequently arrested and spent 11 years in jail.</p><p> </p><p>Juraj studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and then volunteered for the draft, serving in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1956 as a translator debriefing Czech and Slovak refugees after they crossed the border into West Germany. In 1960, Juraj married his wife, Julie Bres Slavik. The couple have two children. After a successful career working for the U.S. government’s cultural exchange Program, Juraj, now retired, devotes much of his time to Slovak and Czech organizations, including Friends of Slovakia and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1990, Juraj returned his father’s ashes to his native Slovakia. He has worked with Slovak and Czech historians to have his father’s letters published. In 2006, a book about Juraj’s father, titled <em>Juraj Slávik Neresnický: od politiky cez diplomaciu po exil 1890-1969</em>, was published in Bratislava by Slovak historian Slavomír Michálek.<br /></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Battle of Britain
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czechoslovak resistance during WW II
Diplomatic service
Education
Family life
German
Michalek
national
Nazis
Occupation
Political prisoner
Politics
Prison
school
Translator/interpreter
World War II
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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
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>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/83w-f2SmRwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Our mother, she was jailed twice, and she spent a long time in German jails, and during that time our maid was still with our family and also our grandmother, who came also from a family which was German speaking, so she was looking out for us and actually, it was our grandmother and our maid who saved us when our mother was taken prisoner, when she was in the jail. So, she saved us from going to be reeducated and re-assimilated into the German folks. Our grandmother went to the authorities and she said, when they wanted to take us away, she said ‘look, I am going to look after them, I am German and so I am going to bring them up in the proper frame of mind so don’t worry’ and this is how we were kind of saved.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5PkzIynDqbg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Russians were very, very friendly, very nice. We just loved them, everybody threw flowers at them, because we were all allies, we just did not recognize… they were our brothers. And as a matter of fact, the first troops which came to Poděbrady, who stayed there, we were so friendly with them. In the evening, they used to dance kozáček and they used to sing and they used to play harmonicas and us kids, we just loved it. And they had the troops… they had women soldiers also and officers were women also and sometimes they even had kids – not their own kids, but somewhere in Ukraine or Poland they were abandoned, orphans, these kids – so they took them with them and they were moving with them. So for us it was all new and they would share their food with us because there was no food, it was a pretty bad situation. So, initially it was all very friendly, it turned 180 degrees later on.”</p><h4>Bravery</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ch3Zc7hKSEY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When the Germans were emptying some of the concentration camps, they were moving these Jews in open railroad cars during the winter time. And when these people, when they froze, their co-prisoners, they just threw them out of the railroad cars. And these guys, there were two guys, who simulated being dead. They were thrown out and they came through this Colonel Vaněk, they came also to the place where our POW, the Russian guy, came to [a hiding place made by the brothers inside one of the walls of their home].</p><p>“And as a matter of fact, before then, I don’t know if you have any experience of this, but kids when they are in their teens, 12, 14, everybody was playing clubs – so we had a club and our club, we dug a hole. Near our village, there was a little patch of woods and a sandpit, and in the sandpit there was a bunch of rabbits and these rabbits, they dig holes, and we enlarged one of the holes and made a kind of cave underneath, and it was our clubhouse. And as a matter of fact, in our clubhouse (because we did not have any place to keep our POWs) after we moved him out of our house, we moved him and these two Jewish ex-German prisoners; they were moved for a certain period to our clubhouse. So we kept them there. We were getting food to them also, because as kids we were not very obvious, we could carry the food and deliver it to them.</p><p>“And we have also, at that time through Poděbrady near the place we used to live, German military supply trains used to move and for example, they were moving fighter planes on these supply trains, on flatbed cars. So we went on these flatbed cars with hammers and so on, and we were damaging these fighter planes so that they could not be used elsewhere. But it was not that simple, because when they were moving these military freight supply trains, there was always anti-aircraft… there was the last car and the car right after the steam engine, they had cars with anti-aircraft guns and military guards. But these guys sometimes… either they were drunk or towards the end of the War, the discipline was not what it should have been, so they have not noticed or something and so we were able to do those things. And for these activities after the War we got this medal from Beneš.”</p><h4>Escape Plan</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1SFXmsfVkU0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was raining, it was freezing, it was snowing. We were wet, our navigation was pretty bad because things in East Germany were not what we thought they would be. We decided… especially Zbyňa [Zbyněk Janata] was nudging us to move quickly, and so we decided to carjack, do carjacking, get a car and move to Berlin on four wheels.</p><p>“On that occasion, Radek let his gun… because Zbyněk wanted to have a gun there so just, he let him have the gun and he, for no reason, just to scare people, he fired the gun. And other people traveling on the road, which was the road by Freiburg going up north towards Berlin, other people started stopping, having heard the shotgun. Other cars started to stop and we had to abandon the effort. Because the fellow who was driving the car – it was a Volkswagen, an amphibious Volkswagen, and there was not enough place even in that vehicle for all of us, but when we pulled him out and Radek gave him chloroform, so before then, he pulled the key out of the ignition, and we had no way to start the car. We started to look for the keys, Zbyněk fired the gun and so there were about five, six people all of a sudden, several cars… before then, no cars stopped, but at that time all the cars started to stop and there and they started to chase us through the woods and Zbyněk sprained his ankle real bad.”</p><h4>No Visits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/73esh6VbLYY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Why we don’t go there? Because it’s not the country we fought for. In the army, in the U.S. Army, we had Slovaks, good Slovaks, there was a fellow; his name was Pokorný – he used to be a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army and he was in Special Forces, there were a couple of other Slovaks. We fought, we wanted to fight for something for Czechoslovakia, united Czechoslovakia, democracy and everything. None of this happened.”</p><h4>Dangerous Democracy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zXW--Clv3z0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Democracy is not to drive a Mercedes, svoboda [freedom] is not to go to Cuba on vacation, or to the Caribbean or Mallorca, you know? It takes a little bit more; it’s a frame of mind.”</p>
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Title
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Joseph Masin
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Joseph Masin was born in Prague in 1932 and was raised nearby in the Czechoslovak military barracks at Ruzyně, where his father Josef was an army commandant. With the outbreak of WWII, Joseph’s father became a leading figure in an anti-Nazi resistance group called the Tří králové [The Three Kings]; he was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Gestapo one year later. Joseph’s mother, Zdenka, meanwhile, was interned in Terezín concentration camp. Joseph and his brother <a href="/web/20170609145800/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/radek-masin/">Radek</a> spent most of the War in the spa town of Poděbrady where, says Joseph, the pair carried out a number of anti-Nazi actions, for which they were decorated by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3662" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-141.jpg" alt="Joseph Masin" width="240" height="350" /></p><p>Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800/http://www.gauntletinfo.com/homepage.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape</a></p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Anti-communist
Arrest
Benes
Collaborator
Concentration camp
Family life
Military service
national
Podebrady
Politics
Prison
Resistance
Russians
Ruzyne
Terezin
Tri králové
World War II
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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>WWII Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pzDvWdU_79Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He managed to find this place in FNB Manufacturing – it’s a company which still exists, though now they do different things. He would actually bring me home components which had been rejected to play with. And so I had switches and transformers and things of this sort which I could take apart and unwind and string the wire all over the place. It was actually a bit of a hazard in the apartment.”</p><h4>Elementary</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZRxO2smO0DQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was a school that my grandfather had helped to build. He came to the opening of the school in 1938, it was named in his honor. So I went to my grandfather’s school, so to speak, for the second half of first grade. That was a very bad experience, because the students there were way ahead of anything we had done in the Chicago public schools. And most particularly, they were all writing in cursive, and they were using quill pens that you had to dip into the ink, and I only knew how to write in pencil, and I only knew how to print – I didn’t know how to write cursive. And I had never gone to school in Slovak, and it was a much more formal attitude and when I walked in I had no idea that you were supposed to stand when the teacher came into the room and all those kinds of traditional ways of being in the classroom – that was all new to me. So I was not very happy in that school.”</p><h4>Escape 1949</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lTpwqCNo2Vs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The idea was to move when there was no light in our sector and then drop to the ground as the light started to come closer. And of course it had a fairly regular rotation and so you could be sort of out of reach of the light. I remember very distinctly that this was a heavily ploughed field and so there were big, big chunks of earth and it was not easy walking, especially for little feet. We were held together by a rope, a light string, that we all held onto. And so the leader would go, he had made the crossing a number of times, and he would go when it was safe, he would drop when it wasn’t safe, and the rest of us did the same. And then we came to the barbed wire fence and, in my memory, the wires were either spread, or one was lifted, anyhow – a crawling space was made for me at any rate. And we crossed over to the other side, which was just as dangerous, because it was still ploughed, and it was still within reach of the searchlights, and it was the Russian zone of Austria. So this was not a complete escape by any means. But we did make it across safely and we did end up in another safe house.”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ed0kXN8NmHs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother tried her best to assimilate. My father I don’t think ever really tried to assimilate. He tried to make a living, but that’s different than really assimilating. He didn’t do that, but it wasn’t because he was resentful or because he thought it wasn’t appropriate, he just… I think the energy had gone out of him. By the time of one escape, and then another escape and being jailed in between, and having sort of come from very elevated circumstances and having had to do this really menial work during the war, and trying to run a business and that failing – it was just a tremendous amount of discouragement. And how much the imprisonment had to do with it, I don’t know. We certainly never talked about it, but my cousin in Bratislava… my closest cousin says that he remembers his mother saying that when she saw my father after he’d been released from prison, her first reaction was ‘this is a beaten man.’”</p><h4>Revisit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aR8WZGyH9o4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You just had to be really careful and basically stay out of trouble and find ways of not yielding to the system completely. That was particularly difficult with children, because children went to school, and at school they might repeat anything that was said at home. And so parents were faced with this horrible dilemma of either not saying anything and having their children brainwashed, or saying what they saw was the truth and then risking that everybody would be severely penalized if this ever came out into the open – and this easily could through the children. It was… Not only was it dangerous, but it confronted everybody with the problem of how to live within the regime and not sell out to it completely.”</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
A name given to the resource
John Palka
Description
An account of the resource
<p>John Palka is the grandson of Milan Hodža, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1938. He was born in exile in Paris in 1939, without his father present. His father, Ján Pálka, joined the family some months later, after playing an active role in the anti-Nazi resistance back home. The family spent most of WWII in Chicago, with John attending kindergarten and elementary school there. In 1946, the Palka family returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in Liptovský Mikuláš (today found in northern Slovakia), which had for generations been the home of the Palkas. Following the Communist takeover in 1948, John Palka’s father spent four months in jail, and the family eventually fled in 1949, when it was suggested that he may again face arrest. John was nine when the family escaped.</p><p> </p><p>The Palkas crossed the border into Austria at Petržalka, which under communism became one of the most heavily guarded borders in the country. After nine months spent in Innsbruck, Austria, the family obtained American visas and moved to New York City. John’s mother, Irene Palka, worked as a translator at Radio Free Europe, while his father tried to set up an import/export business, which eventually failed. John excelled at his studies and landed a scholarship at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he met his wife, Yvonne. They have two children. Until recently, John taught biology at University of Washington. He has written a book about his experiences which was recently published in Slovak by Kalligram in 2010.</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
1948 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Border patrol
Communist coup
Czechoslovak resistance during WW II
Education
Hodza
Lutherans
national
Politics
Prison
school
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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
A name given to the resource
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