Frank Schwelb
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-4027 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808051429im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler94.jpg" alt="Frank in 1988" width="228" height="320" /></p><p>Frank Schwelb was born in Prague in 1932. He and his parents, Caroline and Egon, lived in the center of Prague, and Frank remembers the Nazi troops marching through the city. Caroline was a language teacher and translator, and Egon worked as an attorney. In March 1939, shortly after the German occupation, Egon was arrested and sent to Pankrác prison. Frank says that his father’s clients included German anti-Nazi refugees living in Prague and believes that this, along with his Jewish background, led to his arrest. He was released after two months. Following his release, they were able to secure exit visas, and, in August 1939, took a train through Germany and the Netherlands where they boarded a ship to England. Frank says that most of his family who were unable to leave the country, including his mother’s sister, died in concentration camps.</p><p> </p><p>Frank’s family settled in London where he attended several different schools, including the Czechoslovak State School of Great Britain in Wales; he maintains contact with many of his classmates from there. His father became a member of the legal counsel of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and served in that capacity from 1940 to 1945. Frank says that his parents initially hoped to return to Czechoslovakia following WWII; however, because of his job, his father understood that the country would likely fall under communist rule and decided not to go back. In 1947, Egon was offered the position of the Deputy Director of the UN Human Rights Division; the family moved to New York City to join him several months after he accepted the post. Frank attended Yale University where he played soccer and joined the NAACP. He began Harvard Law School in 1954, but volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in 1955 to gain military naturalization. He served for two years before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1958. Eager to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” Frank began working as a lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in October 1962; his work with voter registration discrimination exposed him to the segregated South. He was named to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was later appointed (by President Reagan) to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where he served as a Senior Judge.</p><p> </p><p>Frank enjoyed speaking Czech whenever he got the chance, rooted for Slavia Praha (a Czech soccer team) and returned to the Czech Republic many times. He was involved in the Czech and Slovak legal community, meeting with visiting lawyers, judges, and students, and he presented the inaugural Rosa Parks Memorial Lecture (in Czech) at Charles University in Prague. Frank lived with his wife, Taffy, in Washington, D.C., until his death in 2014.</p>
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George Malek
<p>George Malek was born in Tábor in southern Bohemia. His father, Jan, owned a factory that produced auto parts while his mother, Marie, stayed home to raise George and his two brothers. Shortly after the Communist coup in 1948, George’s father’s business was nationalized and he was sent to prison for over one year. In the meantime, George’s mother began working at a co-op making stuffed animals. As a child, George was especially interested in woodworking and mathematics. He attended a technical school in Tábor where he studied building construction and equipment. Although he hoped to study at university, George was not initially admitted and, instead, joined the military. After training for one year as a paratrooper, he was stationed in Aš where he was tasked with manning a radio system and intercepting German military conversations and transmissions. George was then admitted to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied computer engineering. He began to think about leaving the country to improve his job prospects and, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, crossed the border into Austria with his wife and young son, Robert. George’s father had helped them to secure visas under the pretense of visiting an uncle in Vienna.</p><p> </p><p>George and his family stayed in Vienna for just over a month while awaiting immigration paperwork. They arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, and settled in Toronto in 1968. After taking English classes for six weeks, George began working and was admitted to the University of Toronto where he earned his doctorate. It was in 1976 that George first returned to Czechoslovakia to visit his parents. That same year, his company transferred him to California. By 1981, George had switched jobs and was sent to work on a software project in Japan. There, he met his second wife, Yuko. The couple married in 1983, returned to the United States, and had a son, Alan. In 1988, George set up a company in California’s Silicon Valley called Apogee Software Inc; he remains the firm’s president and CEO. Ten years later, he set up Apogee.cz in Prague as an out-sourcing partner of Apogee Software. He and his wife Yuko (the firm’s CFO) often visit Prague, both for business purposes and to enjoy the opera, ballet, and concerts that the Czech capital has to offer. The couple are proud of an apartment they own in a 14th-century historical building in Prague’s Old Town. George and Yuko are planning to ‘retire partially’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. They are in the process of reconstructing an old hunting lodge in Mirovice in southern Bohemia, which was owned by the Schwarzenberg family until 1938. George and Yuko currently live in Los Gatos, California.</p>
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John Palka
<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>
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Joseph Masin
<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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Juraj Slavik
<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>
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Ludvik Barta
<p><img class="wp-image-2516 size-full alignleft" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ludvik-barta-SQ.png" alt="" width="240" height="240" /></p><p>Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a translator during WWII. Ludvik’s father became a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but changed his views completely in the early 1950s in light of the high-profile political trials taking place at the time. Shortly before his father’s death, when Ludvik was 12, he says his father urged him never to join the Communist Party. Later on in life, Ludvik followed this advice.</p><p> </p><p>When Ludvik was 17, he went to the local technical school to train to be a bricklayer. After two years he put his studies on hold to do his military service. Just before leaving for military training in Turnov, Ludvik married his wife Lenka in June 1964. The couple soon had a daughter, also named Lenka. Upon return from military service, Ludvik became a successful builder, and constructed the family’s own apartment. In August 1968, his wife Lenka finally had a chance to visit her father – who had left Czechoslovakia in 1948 – in his new home in Cleveland. When Lenka returned home, shortly after the Soviet-led invasion, the family decided to move to the United States. However, while arrangements were being made, the Czechoslovak government changed its passport requirements, which nullified the family’s existing travel documents. It subsequently took Ludvik and his wife 11 years to come to the United States. When they did, they had to leave their daughter behind. Two years later, having established residency in the United States, Ludvik and Lenka petitioned the Czechoslovak government to allow their daughter to come to America. The family was reunited in 1981.</p><p> </p><p>Today, the Bartas still live in the Cleveland area and are owners of ‘Hubcap Heaven’ – an emporium of wheel covers for automobiles.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815/http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=117360&catid=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Ludvik’s star appearance on WKYC’s program ‘What Works’</a></p>
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Peter Palecek
<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>
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Susan Mikula
<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>
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Tony Jandacek
<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>
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Vera Plesek
<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>
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