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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
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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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>Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X1H4l_DECtk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I took German but before you… when I went [to school] in the ‘60s… before you could take an elective language you had to do well in Russian. And if you wanted to be a cool kid, you would have As and Bs but you’d have a D in Russian because that was a sign of a little bit of a protest, you know. But if you had a D in Russian, then you couldn’t get in to the other languages. So I ended up having a C or something and just squeezing by, so they let me take some German and some English – I took English for five years. But that didn’t help much when we came to the States – that’s another story. Because, you know, you learned the British English and that was kind of harsh, you know.”</p><h4>The Explosive Group</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ucbaJpMvOs4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In eighth grade we started a rock and roll band, of which I was the lead singer and guitarist. And of course we played The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was seen like not only blasphemy but an anti-communist gesture, you know. So… we always had a lot of troubles, because of the long hair and everything else… But somehow it all sort of worked out, we squeezed by, you know. We had good grades, sort of. But my mother was frequently summoned to school by the principal and told ‘Have your son have a haircut!’ And of course I would fight it, and so they would cut a little bit, you know – the usual trials and tribulations of growing up. But for me, being in the music band changed everything because… this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with girls. Because, you know, older girls were interested in me, which is a big thing to a young boy pre-puberty or just when puberty comes in. And we left the country when I was 16, almost 17, so my formative years – I still have the accent, when we came to the States was maybe just a little bit, a year, too late, where it never went away – but, in the school, my self confidence, being surrounded by these fans, was great! And all the politics at those moments went aside, yeah.</p><p>“Everybody listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe was only… they had signals so that you couldn’t listen to the news, but they would let it go for the music. So like from two to four everyday you could listen to music on Radio Free Europe. So we would record the music on reel to reel tape recorders, so then we could then learn the music by phonetics. But it was not that difficult, you could buy records, people had collections, it was available for those who were interested, you know. And the quality wasn’t very good, because it was recorded over recordings, you know, there was a lot of hisses and scratches, but you could still listen to The Rolling Stones. So you could do that, yeah.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EhH-vI2K_w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Now, my dad was over six feet tall, he used to play soccer for Sparta, he was an athlete. Up until his late 70s when he passed away he had black hair, he never had grey hair. He was a good looking, good looking guy. And he walked upright, as opposed to… the people in our building signed a petition against his walking. They said ‘He’s walking too arrogant. He’s not saying hello to the neighbors.’ There was like a meeting of all these people who lived in this building, because every building had a caretaker… The caretaker was a member of the Party, they usually lived on the bottom floor. They were snooping around, they were the ones who knew… And this was the woman who made this official complaint that my dad comes home from work and… My dad worked 18 hour shifts, I mean, he worked like a slave to make money. So when he came home, it’s possible he didn’t say hello. But not because he didn’t like her, because he was dead beat tired. But he walked upright, so she thought that he was walking with his nose up. My dad was not. But that’s the kind of environment that we lived in. My dad, of course, when he had to come up and explain himself in front of these morons, you know. So he would never join that group on any level, let alone the Communist Party.”</p><h4>First Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tc23tc_Lr9E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They said to my mom ‘Go and apply for a job at Western Electric – a company that makes telephones – on Cicero and Cermak Road, in Cicero basically. They’re hiring.’ They told me ‘Since you’re a guy, go to a steel company called Seaco, and the chances are you’ll get a job there, they’re hiring.’ So my mom took one bus, I had to take like four or five buses to get to this location. So my mom got in, got hired. I walk into this place. I knock on the door, there’s a man who says, again, ‘How have you been?’ If he said ‘How are you?’ I would have said ‘Fine.’ But that phrase ‘How’ve you been’ I’d never heard. So again, there is this exchange, I’m a total idiot, I can’t… He says ‘I have no work for you. Go away.’ Just then, somebody comes in and says ‘I need one guy for my department.’ And the guy says ‘I’ve got no one.’ He says ‘Well, what about this kid here?’ He says, ‘He’s an idiot.’ So he says to me ‘Hey kid, you speak English?’ And I say ‘Yes!’ And he said ‘Well, if he speaks English… So, what’s your name?’ And so, somehow it came out that I am Czech and he says ‘Well, I’m Czech. My name is Ferjencik!’ He never spoke Czech, you know, but he was very proud of his… He said ‘I’ll hire this kid.’ So I got the job.</p><p>“So, to this day I don’t know what I was doing, I was in charge of some… some… something, I don’t know. But the footnote to this story is that people would always say ‘Where do you work?’ And I’d say ‘Well, a company called CECO. A sheet metal company.’ Every Friday we would get checks, and outside would come a Brinks truck and you would cash the check and you would come home with cash. One Friday we missed this truck and so I brought the check home. And on the check it said Sears. I went to the wrong place, I took the wrong bus. I thought I was working at CECO, I was working at… So, a true moron you know, but I was hired, I was working for Sears. Then I went to school. I realized that manual labor was not for me.”</p><h4>Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iLDWRo28B0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We wanted to appeal to the younger crowd, the people like us. And we were very much influenced by Dadaism and Jára da Cimrman, and we poked serious fun at the establishment. We poked fun at how badly they spoke Czech. How they mixed the English language into the Czech language. And we were ruthless. And little by little the advertisers started to check out. We finally decided to temporarily go off the air. But while it lasted we had a great time. I composed a song called ‘Emigrant’s Cry’… It was introduced by Jan Novak who said ‘<em>Vážení krajané</em>’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”</p><h4>Emigrants Cry</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7sMPEC9XxSM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’</p><h4>Student</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3PPYiFC-DMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My teachers at the Art Institute… the teachers were pretty much always far left, understandably perhaps and all that stuff. But it bothered me that they would not… that they saw communism as something so distant, something on another planet. A thing that really doesn’t affect us, you know. And there was this residue of McCarthyism – ‘We know what… let’s not stir up another round, you know, look where that got us, you know, just paranoia.’ So, it was troublesome, because my views were pretty much to the right of center when I came. Because I wanted to go to Vietnam and fight the communists. I actually was eligible to be drafted that one year, there was a lottery and they filled the quota two numbers before mine came up. So I came very close, but my mom would not survive it. She would do something not to let me go but it never had to come to that. So, having my American friends being completely oblivious to anything that was happening in Europe was and is still troubling.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQdSy03pG3s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1992, my wife and I and our two daughters go back to Prague, and I’m telling them how I grew up, I’m telling them all the stories, you know. So we go, and we visit the place where I grew up – the apartment building. We walk inside, and in all of these buildings there’ll be like a little plaque on the wall with the names of all the people who live there. Our name was still there. Nobody, this is after communism, and nobody cared to change it. Other people came and went, but ours was never removed or replaced. So that was a freaky thing seeing our name. So then as we go up, I knock on the door and nobody opened so… But I tell my girls the story of when I was little, and I would go down into the cellar to fetch the coal or whatever, right? As you open the door, you walk in the cellar, but you would never see the back of the door, because it was of course this way, right?</p><p>“But as a little kid, for some reason, I looked on the back of this door. And there was a poster from the Nazis. It had, you know, the big swastika, and it said in the left column Czech and the right column German, something about not stealing property from this cellar. And finally it said ‘This offense is punishable by death!’ So, I’m telling them this story and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’ So, I take them into the cellar, we open the door and… it was still there! Semi-decayed, you know, barely clinging on, because any time anybody would open the door would go… there was no reason to ever… So that was a kind of interesting experience, you know, how little had changed in all these 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
Vladimir Maule
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.</p><p> </p><p>When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.</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
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Alternative culture
Arrest
Branik
Child emigre
Education
Forced labor
Informants
Jiri Kolar
Refugee camp
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
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899099a649f5d1a4f8df77f843584966
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>Opportunities</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LAuVtJ37uVY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was a straight-A student, and at that time I was 14 and I was firmly decided that I wanted to go and study medicine, I wanted to go to medical school. Then it suddenly became a problem that my father and mother were not members of the Communist Party. Actually, my father hated the regime back then and he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, so all of that was already part of my secret profile, that I was coming from a family that were not loyal communists. That meant the schools of my choice were closed to me, same like to my husband. In Czechoslovakia there was no tendency at the time just to be pretty and marry some guy who has a good profession, [and] he’ll take care of you. Over there, both needed to have an income and career, even women. So it was necessary that I would have any education possible, doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. So the opportunity arose that medical school was closed for me. I would not be accepted even though I had good grades.</p><p>“We had to select a school where I would have a chance to get in to, and at that time there was a tendency in technical schools to want more girls. There was this construction school, architectural school which had two parts – architectural part and plumbing part, like piping in the buildings, heating systems, water supply, sewage and all that. So my parents convince me. They said ‘You have no other choice, you need to go to this school,’ and I didn’t like it. My father played on that I liked to design and said ‘Well, you’ll be designing lobbies, interiors of buildings,’ and that sounded nice to me, so I said ok. So I did tests, I was accepted, I passed the tests. I wanted to be in the architectural class; of course I ended up in the plumbing class. There were two plumbing classes and one architectural. Again, the architectural class was for special people, people which had green at the time. So I got these mechanics and physics, all these technical books, brought it home, realized what I was up to and I cried. And my father said ‘Well, you have to have a maturita exam, you have to have any possible education because you have to have some profession, and you have to fight. You are a good student.’ So I did.”</p><h4>Happy Life</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QLsbXldfH-I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We would do lots of trips, short trips, because in Czechoslovakia at the time, normal people didn’t have a car. Gasoline was very expensive and it simply didn’t fit your budget to have a car. You had to live within a smaller scale, with biking distance. So the boys had small bikes, we had bikes, we used to do bike trips. We used to go to the woods and do bonfires and fry the sausages, so as far as that, the childhood the boys had was very nice. Also, when they were older, they would go out and for a half day I wouldn’t know where they were. They would just come for dinner, and I would have a peaceful time to make dinner for them. In a way, we lived through very simple and happy socialistic years. We didn’t have all these luxuries young people and everybody has here, but you really don’t need them for a normal, happy life. You can do with less and still be happy.”</p><h4>Clothes</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hzqoFAo32HQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You could buy material cheaper at the time, and if you made stuff yourself, you could do something modern, something upgraded, very nice, special, nobody else had it. So that’s how I used to dress because I had a knitting machine and a sewing machine, and I was dressing up myself and my family, too. It was funny, my husband would bring me from the factory these pieces of cloth, like squarish cloth in pieces. A couple of them were the same color, so I sewed a shirt for my boys, and I decorated it a little bit and they had a free shirt. It was free material, right. It was stolen in socialism in the factory. Also, I could go to a secondhand shop and bought fabric which couldn’t be cheaper, or pieces of fabric, but you could put them together and do nice designs and I used to sew jackets. Actually, I have a few things here just for memory, just for nostalgia.”</p><p><em>If you were making things that were different than anybody else, that was important to you.</em></p><p>“It was because I was a woman who took after my mother, I liked to dress nicely. If I had something done myself and I wore it and somebody said ‘Oh this is nice, where did you get it?’ I could say ‘Well, I did it myself.’ It was something extra, it had more value, I was more proud of it.”</p><h4>Child Care</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eefMdpyMQT4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The problem was still that we both had to work and we couldn’t get kindergarten. So we had to change the shifts. And one of us would be with the kids in the morning, then would bring the kids to the factory entry, waiting when the other one was coming out, he would grab the kids, the other one would go to work. And that’s how we lived for two years. We were still trying hard to get kindergarten. I think after two years or two and a half years we finally got it, but that was a very, very difficult life.”</p><h4>Leaving Plans</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Cp4eqAgS1I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Me, as a young girl, I went to visit my uncle in West Germany with my father. So I was aware about how it looked outside. I was not fooled by socialistic propaganda, that things in the west are bad, because that was not true. They lived much happier and easier lives than we were. So I knew I would love to go out, but I didn’t realize when Bob was studying English that maybe he was already planning something like that, because I thought he was studying English because he loved all these folk songs, you know, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and he was always in contact with the western side through music. So when he told me that we got tickets to Yugoslavia, and then we will not go back, I instantly agreed.”</p><h4>Refugees</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JIVIAT9vxH8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We went to that office without the kids and they always asked us ‘Do you have money?’ We said ‘Yes;’ they said ‘Come tomorrow.’ We came tomorrow, and the same thing. Then I realized it led nowhere and meanwhile, some other people were accepted. So I said to my husband, ‘Hey, we’ll take the boys, baggage, everything what we have, we’ll stay in that waiting room, we won’t leave until they take us.’ So that’s what we did, and they threatened us. They said ‘We will call the Czech embassy,’ and I started to cry. I run into the office and I was crying, and Bob ran after me and he was saying that we were persecuted, so then finally they gave us the interview. Both of us had to write reasons [why we should be accepted as refugees]. We didn’t write some horrific reasons, we wrote reasons why we escaped – all those reasons that I told you – these little ones, one after another one, but in a row, and added up, your life becomes impossible there. And you realized, ok we suffered because of our parents, because our parents were not politically correct, they were not communists. But I don’t want my sons, my bright kids to work for communists. They would not go to school like we could not. So, we were accepted.”</p><h4>Czech Hobby</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Krf6zglKA3o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Until we left, everywhere I went on the bike, in a skirt, no hardhats, never fell, never had an accident, all these years, all the time on a bike, my kids, my husband. Here when I see those bikers, I just have to laugh. All these helmets, all these special clothing for hundreds of dollars, and then in order to bike, you have to put your bike on the car, drive somewhere that you do biking just for the sake of biking. For me, biking was a way of life. I went to the market with my bike, I went with my boys on my bike when they were little, later on they had their bikes. So, that’s the one thing which I miss here, the biking.”</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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Vilma Rychlik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vilma Rychlik was born in Zubří, Moravia in 1952. She grew up in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm with her father, Vilém, an electrician, her mother, Zdeňka, and her brother, Tomáš. When she was six years old, Vilma’s father was sent by his employer to China for one year. The rest of the family joined him for six months; however, Vilma says she did not get to enjoy China because she was hospitalized for most of the trip. She remembers her childhood as very free and simple. Vilma says that once a week, she would help her grandmother in Zubří, from whom she learned to bake, sew, and knit. At school, she was a good student and enjoyed most subjects, but she was especially fond of chemistry, as she loved her teacher. When it was time for Vilma to go to high school, she hoped to attend medical school, but realized she would not be accepted. Instead, her parents convinced her to attend a technical school focused on construction. Although she wanted to be in the architecture program, she was placed in the plumbing and piping program and eventually graduated with honors.</p><p> </p><p>Upon graduating, Vilma had difficulty finding a job in her field and settled for working at TESLA as an elementary draftsman. Also at this time, Vilma married her husband, <a href="/web/20170710094927/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/bohuslav-rychlik/">Bob Rychlik</a>. They had two sons, Mark in 1972 and Bobby in 1974. Vilma recalls that the first few years with their sons were difficult, as they both were working and did not have child care. Vilma was also unhappy with her job, as it was very easy and she was not working in the field she had studied. She tried many times to secure a better position, but says that she was not successful because of her undesirable political background. Vilma was finally given a position as a materials accountant in the construction department of TESLA and was able to work her way up as a utility pipe designer, eventually becoming a specialist on reverse osmosis systems. Although she was frustrated with the obstacles in her professional life, Vilma recalls day-to-day life being very pleasant in Czechoslovakia. Her sons took music and art lessons and the family regularly went on camping and biking trips. Vilma says that she had to be resourceful and learn to make the best out of what was available.</p><p> </p><p>In August 1983, Bob was able to secure travel visas to Yugoslavia for the whole family. Once there, the Rychliks made their way to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Belgrade. After an interview and a six-week wait, Vilma and her family were given papers allowing them to leave Yugoslavia and enter Austria. They spent about seven months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Ramsau; in Ramsau they lived in a guesthouse (with a number of other refugee families) and both Vilma and Bob found jobs. Although Bob received asylum status and they could have stayed in Austria, they decided to go to the United States. The family arrived in Baltimore on May 17, 1984, and Vilma found a job shortly after as a sprinkler system designer. Even though she took English classes at a community college, she says that it was difficult for her to learn English, as the family spoke Czech at home so that the boys would not forget the language. Vilma says that she was very proud when they received American citizenship in 1990 and does not regret their decision to leave. Today, she lives with Bob in Mount Airy, Maryland.</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
Bauerova
Education
English language
Family life
Fashion
marriage
Refugee camp
Roznov pod Radhostem
Women workers
Zubri
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3afcc34846efcc61964bf5f58b7cfdd0
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>School Evacuated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vN6GK-K67C0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Actually, I had two aunts, so one was working and the other was supposed to take care of me. But she was partially deaf, so when there was an air raid announced, all children were sent home, and parents came – we were in the first grade, so all the parents came to pick them up – but because my aunt couldn’t hear, nobody picked me up. So I went home by myself. But it was only like two blocks, so it wasn’t so bad. And there was another boy on my street, in my school, and also nobody came for him. So we walked together and, you know, it was an eerie feeling because there was nobody, nothing. Only those airplanes overhead. And I remember it until today. And that bad feeling came in ’68 when Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, and I was home again alone because my daughter was born, and again nothing – nobody around, quiet and just those airplanes. And then I forgot about it, and then September 11 here, when they started to guard those cities – airplanes over Chicago – it came again!”</p><h4>Soup and Soap</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kbnnKDieqDo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember we got, when I was living with my aunts, they bought some beef bones, and we had soup on Sunday, and on Monday they mixed it with some chemicals or whatever and they made soap, because there was a shortage of soap. And it did not smell too good. It was like brown little bricks. We didn’t have to use it for baths but for washing clothes and stuff like that.”<br /><strong><br />
That was an example of making the most of everything you had?</strong></p><p>“Yeah, we ate lots of potatoes and plums. We made plum jam, it was <em>povidla</em> in Czech. And stuff like that. Actually I was malnourished; I had those bumps behind my ears. But it was mainly because I didn’t want to eat.”</p><h4>Happy Times</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qie37YiM-hw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Sixty-eight – I said it was the last time I was quite happy. Because I got my promotion, I was pregnant finally after ten years, between the two of us, we made enough money so that we could get furniture for our apartment. We even had enough money to buy a car. It was exactly ’68 – I remember it because you could not go like here to some place and buy the car, you had to put up the money first, and then wait, and wait and wait. And after years, they ask you if you want your car beige or green. But, another option was to get a used car. And I still remember we went to look at a used white Simca somewhere. And we sent Eva to summer camp, she was ten years old, we went to look at that car and where my parents live, behind them, there are beautiful gardens. Have you ever been in Prague? So they live under Petřín hill, close to that funicular. And we were walking through those gardens, and it was actually really nice, relaxing, beautiful, and I felt so good. And my parents were sitting in the park, so we were talking to them. And it was a Sunday or Saturday, and a few days later, Russians came.”</p><h4>Shortage of Food</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_4BJKz1vgjw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember standing in the line, because suddenly there was… everybody tried to get some supplies, some food, and they sent the Russian Army without any provisions. They told them ‘There is a contra-revolution’, and that they will find food and everything when they went to the town. And there was no food for Russians, nobody wanted to give them anything. And I was standing in the line with my mother to get some potatoes again, and they were in the street, all those tanks going, and I was crying and my brave mum said ‘Don’t cry! Don’t show it to them!’ Then again the next day I was sitting on a bench in the park looking at the bakery, waiting for bread. Because by that time the Russians got smart and they actually ambushed the delivery guys. So it was very important to get there first.”</p><h4>Impressions of America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2OhzkwhM-3w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We came from Vienna, from Europe, where everything was like nice and clean and everybody was dressed-up, civilized. And we ended up at JFK at some time of reconstruction and hippies. And there were hippies all over the floor, all over. And somehow I was still in my mind on vacation, until I saw what was around me. So I started to cry, what did I do?”</p><p><strong>Did you start to have second thoughts about the United States when you saw that?</strong></p><p>“Definitely! I definitely did. Those friends like that [engineer] Hana, they found us an apartment – besides a job for him they found us an apartment in Cicero. And they even found some second hand furniture and everything. They were waiting for us at the airport at O’Hare. So, it was really nice, but when I saw it, it wasn’t the America we knew from movies and books. Those houses and everything in Cicero – it was like, I was deeply, deeply disappointed. To me, America was behind.”</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 Dobrovolny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vera Dobrovolny was born in Prague in 1938. Her father Jan worked as a quality controller for Škoda during WWII and then as a technician at Správa spojů (the state-owned telecommunications company). Her mother Aloisie, meanwhile, worked as a supervisor at a dorm for student nurses in the capital. Vera spent a part of WWII being raised by her aunts, as her mother was hospitalized following the birth of her younger brother. He was named Vladimír, which was (like Věra) deliberately Russian-sounding, as both of her parents were, she says, ardent Pan-Slavists. Towards the end of WWII, Vera’s family moved out of Prague to live in their summer house near Mokropsy, where she remembers attending school in the corner of a local pub, as the village schoolhouse was occupied by German troops.</p><p> </p><p>Vera attended commercial academy in Prague and then worked for Ferromet, a steel export company. In 1955, she met her husband, <a href="/web/20170609083217/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/pierre-dobrovolny/">Pierre Dobrovolny</a>, at a dance. The pair were married in 1958 and have two children, Eva and Lucie. Vera had been raised by parents who strongly believed in building socialism, but says her relationship with Pierre ‘spoiled her’ ideologically. She was repeatedly denied promotion in her job, which she says was most likely due to her relationship with Pierre. In 1968, Vera was finally promoted and says her family enjoyed a degree of financial stability. She refers to this time as one of the happiest in her life.</p><p> </p><p>Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion, in 1969, Vera and Pierre decided to leave Czechoslovakia. They traveled to Vienna in the summer, where they applied for visas to the United States and registered at the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest child Lucie, however, fell extremely ill after a couple of days, and so the family decided to return to Prague and seek medical assistance. After a couple of months, on August 21, 1969, Vera and Pierre again left Czechoslovakia. They traveled with their children to Yugoslavia from which they crossed into Austria without the correct paperwork; Pierre says the border guards did not care. The family spent about one month in Traiskirchen refugee camp near Vienna before being sent to stay in Bad Kreuzen. They arrived in America in December 1969. Vera says her first impressions of the United States were less than flattering and did not live up to the expectations she had formed from films and books. The family first lived in a rented apartment in Cicero before settling in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois. Vera worked as an accountant for CSA Fraternal Life before taking a job at Bosch, where she remained for 26 years. She has played active roles in the Czechoslovak National Council of America (CNCA) and the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in Chicago. She makes frequent trips to the Czech Republic and has taken her grandchildren to Prague to show them where she was raised.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Community Life
emigrant
Family life
German occupation
marriage
refugee
Refugee camp
Skoda
Sprava spoju
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>Elementary </h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6JC_kreNgis?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was two years in the elementary school and my recollections of that time are not happy ones. I was being punished by my teacher constantly for being able to read when I came to first grade.”</p><p>So that was out of line for the times?</p><p>“Today that would be something a teacher would welcome probably. I was reading already Greek mythology and all sorts of things and I was bored with the primitive things that you learn if you are learning to read. I already was reading quite well.”</p><p>And how had you learned to read? Did anyone teach you, or did you just pick it up yourself?</p><p>“Well, I had an uncle who was a teacher – a first grade teacher – and he said, ‘Don’t let her learn to read because she will have problems.’ So I asked the maid to teach me. And I learned to read from tabloids.”</p><h4>American School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9nSsuNTQwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This school was just really outstanding. It was a Presbyterian missionary school, and it was such an outstanding [school]. We learned things that, well, we learned about democracy. We learned about getting together and having relationships – good relationships – with people of other nationalities or religions. In that school, when I was graduating, we had 200 students, 20 different nationalities, and eight different religions. Tolerance was one of the things we learned, above all. And the principal [Commodore Fisher] was the best man I ever knew.”</p><h4>Vet Dreams</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iyC0DKFrgKc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My favorite uncle was a veterinarian. Since I was a little kid, he would take me around when he was making his rounds all over the country, and I wanted so badly to be a veterinarian like him. There weren’t many veterinary school and they really didn’t want women either, and I said ‘I want to go to that university in Brno that you went to.’ And he said ‘What do you think you are? Look at yourself, you’re too [small].’ I was littler then. And he said, ‘You don’t have the strength to be a veterinarian. Come with me.’ And he took me out and he showed me how he was pulling out a calf, how he was pulling out a colt. And he said ‘Can you do that? That’s what a veterinarian has to do. No, you go to the philosophical school in Prague and do something else.’ So I went and I did English studies and then later I was lured into Oriental studies because of my living in Iran and knowing something about Persian literature.”</p><h4>How We Met</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7IZyJIjUJpA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then one day he [my boss, František Slabý] said, ‘Věruška, I have to find you a nice husband. I have just the man in mind. He’s in Ludwigsburg [refugee camp], and I will call him and he can be our accountant here.’ And guess who arrived? Sasha Borkovec. When he arrived I thought ‘Good looking enough, but he seems so aloof and so stand-offish.’ I wasn’t particularly interested. But then, František, my boss, invited us to a party and I went there with my sister, and Sasha was playing the guitar and singing beautiful songs. That was it. And then at that party, I think that’s what sort of started things going, he asked me if I would teach him English. And I said yes, and we would take walks and I would teach him English, spoken English, and I guess that brought us together.”</p><h4>Immigrating</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nB7bbzruyuw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We thought we would stay in Bolivia. It was a beautiful country. I was working for Braniff Airways and Sasha was working for a pharmaceutical company; we were quite comfortable and everything. But then they had another revolution. We lived through three different revolutions during the year and a half that we lived in Bolivia, but the last one was socialist. They were going to nationalize everything, and so again we said, ‘This is not for us.’ Because I was working for Braniff Airways, I could get Sasha a ticket for five dollars to go to Brazil to find out what Brazil looked like, and to Uruguay. And he went on this expedition to find out where we could move to. And then he came back very happy from Brazil. He had been to Uruguay as well and to Paraguay. But he came back from Brazil and said, in front of a gathering of Czechs, ‘So we are moving to Brazil. Brazil is a fine place and we can find work.’ And I said ‘No we’re not. We’re not going to Brazil, we’re going to the United States because we received immigration visas to the USA.’”</p><h4>PhD</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/66bT-_lNEgg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1968 when we were in Prague, my relatives and friends would say ‘You poor thing, how can you teach that awful language, that awful Russian literature?’ And I would say ‘The Russian language is a beautiful language and Russian literature is really world-class literature. I don’t teach socialist realism. I teach the classics, which have nothing to do with communism.’”</p><h4>Czech Playwright</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BZUGIuSLZdg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Recently, two or three years ago, I published a book on Josef Topol and his various plays. But I wanted to meet the man, and I knew people here at the embassy who knew him and they said ‘Oh, you will not have a chance to meet him because he’s very shy and he doesn’t want to meet other people.’ So I asked people in Prague and everybody said the same thing, that you just can’t get close to this guy, that he doesn’t want to meet anybody. And then finally, the former cultural counselor came very happy to me and he said ‘I have found a way and Mr. Topol is willing to accept you. He’s inviting you to his home.’</p><p>“And he took me inside, brought the dog inside, he put me on the sofa and asked if I wanted coffee. I said ‘Yes, please, thank you.’ And so he went to the kitchen to make some coffee and the dog and I were sitting there together. And you know I told you that I wanted to be a veterinarian and how much I love animals and dogs especially. I called Zorinka – her name was Zorinka – I called her over and she came, sniffed me, and then she sat in my lap. And the playwright comes out of the kitchen with the coffee, he nearly dropped it and he said ‘My god! She’s sitting in your lap. Zorinka sat in your lap!’ And I said ‘Well she knows, she knows I like dogs.’ Well that did it. He started talking, he was telling me his whole life story, his love stories, whom he was going to marry, whom he married, how he worked with [Václav] Havel. He didn’t want to let me go home. And we have seen each other ever since. Every year when I go to Prague we see each other, in Café Slavia usually.”</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 Borkovec
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vera Borkovec was born in Brno in 1926. She grew up in Prague with her parents and younger sister until 1934, when her father became the director of Škoda Works in Tehran, Iran. Vera remembers Tehran as a progressive city, and the schooling she received there was an important influence on her. After graduating from the American Community School, she began teaching sixth and seventh grades there, and the principal encouraged her to continue with her education. Vera moved to Beirut where she attended a French school for one year. After WWII, Vera and her family returned to Czechoslovakia; she says they were very happy to be back. Vera majored in English and Oriental studies at Charles University and received her degree in 1949. That same year, she left the country with her family. Through an uncle (who had been involved in the resistance during WWII) Vera’s family was introduced to a guide who helped them across the border into West Germany on July 4, 1949.</p><p> </p><p>Vera stayed in refugee camps in Germany for one year and a half. She and her sister were able to get secretarial jobs at the International Refugee Organization in Munich, where she met her husband, Alexej (Sasha) Bořkovec. Through an acquaintance of her father’s, Vera’s family received permission to immigrate to Bolivia in the spring of 1951. While there, Vera and Sasha married, and Vera worked for Braniff Airlines. Vera and Sasha obtained U.S. visas in the spring of 1952 and they moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, where Sasha was able to accept a fellowship at Virginia Tech that he had been offered five years earlier. Vera worked as secretary for the head of the university’s Department of Dairy Science and also became involved in the theater on campus. She says they became good friends with the faculty and even the president of the university. After short stays in Texas (where they became U.S. citizens) and Roanoke, Virginia (where Vera obtained an M.A. in French at Hollins College), the couple moved to the Washington, D.C. area when Sasha got a job at the Department of Agriculture. In D.C., Vera gained a second masters degree, in Russian, from American University and received her doctorate in Russian literature from Georgetown University. She became a professor at American University, and taught in the Language and Foreign Studies Department for more than 30 years.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vera and Sasha were instrumental in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU) at both a local and international level. Vera became a member in 1965 and sat on several committees before being elected Secretary General of the organization in 1977. She was Chairman of the Washington, D.C. chapter, and also started a student essay contest to promote interest in SVU and Czech and Slovak culture among younger generations. In her retirement, Vera has worked as a translator and published several books. In 2003, she received the Artis Bohemiae Amicis award from the Czech Ministry of Culture for her translations. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.</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
Community leader
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Ethnic diversity
interpreter
marriage
refugee
Refugee camp
Russian studies
school
Skoda
speaker
Teachers
Translator
Vera Zandova
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be1b6950b42bfa247a9021ae90fac0a0
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>Last of WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ISjHw8Q0KXs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“For us, it was rather peaceful; we didn’t have too much going on. Some parts of Slovakia had more of a ‘war’ going on, but we didn’t. Actually for us kids, it was a great time. We were running around, our parents were worried, ‘What is going to happen?’ you know, how to feed us, and clothe us, and so on. Us kids, we had a great time.</p><p>“My dad was actually in the army during the War. Slovakia at the time was also a republic, by itself. When the army was disbanded, and was caught by the Germans, he was sent to Germany to work on the farms as forced labor. They needed it; all the German men were in the army, so there was a shortage. So he did work in Germany until the end of the war. Then he came home.”</p><p><em>What sort of years was he away in Germany? One year at the end of the war, or a couple?</em></p><p>“I think it was the last year of the war. I remember him coming home; he got a hold of a bicycle somewhere and peddled home.”</p><h4>Father's Land</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cUe5v59GwaY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1950, they came to our village, or town. They wanted to start collective farms. My father was one of the bigger landowners. So they were pressing on him to become a member of the collective farm. He refused, so he ended up being in jail for six months. And then after six months, they sentenced him to a forced labor in a coal mine. It [the farm] was supporting us very nicely. We had no problem, and we also employed people during harvest. That was one of the things that they threw at us. You were an exploiter of the working class.</p><p>Well, I guess it started little by little. Then I guess the early ‘50s were the most brutal. The regime really took hold and completely dominated. You went with them or else and faced the consequences.”</p><h4>Border Crossing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PE5KeTulxsk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We didn’t take the roads; we went through the fields, and the forest. We walked all night until we came to the border. We knew the border very well because we lived close by. So my dad and my uncle were watching the border guards for a few days to exactly where and when they crossed. And we came to the point where we saw them, they were crossing. And it was on the one at that time they didn’t have the mines yet. They mined the fields, and the one we escaped in had a wire with flares. And we also knew where the flares were so we came to those wires. And they slowly lowered them to the ground. And we walked between them one here and the other there. And my brother, who was only ten at the time, was dragging his feet and he kicked it and the flares went off. And then, night became like day. We were just a couple yards from the border. So we hit the ground and then took off for the border. We came to the border, and the border is divided by a river. We jumped in and crossed into Austria.”</p><p><em>What happened when the flares went off? Did the guards not react?</em></p><p>“We didn’t know. We just hit the ground and we didn’t know. Somebody thought they heard a dog. But later on, somebody else escaped from our hometown. And the captain of the border guard was living in their house. And they told the border guard and they said they saw them, they saw big groups but they didn’t want to engage.”</p><h4>Newspaper</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tLJSI5xnK3E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had about 18 or 20 suburban newspapers. It was a nice job; actually, it was there where I met… Maybe the name Mr. Murdoch means something to you? [We were his] first acquisition, he was from South Australia, then he came to Sydney, and he bought our string of newspapers. He came to the shop, he talked to us, and I shook his hand. Then a few days later, he bought The Daily Mirror in Sydney. And then, of course, you know where he went from there…”</p><p><em>So, was he a good boss?</em></p><p>“We never saw him, except that one day when he came to introduce himself, so then he was gone!”</p><h4>Return to Slovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b8nlgjZhHLY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first time I went back was after 15 years, because it was very difficult to go. You know, since we left illegally, you had to apply for a visa and you had to pay and exchange so much money and everybody was watching you. But yeah, we went back quite a few times.”</p><p><em>So the first time was 1967?</em></p><p>“Yes… It was quite an eye-opening experience. I remember growing up as a young boy. In my home town I would get out of the house and I would look the end of the village and I thought that was so far away. And when I came back, Oh my god! That’s like looking at the end of this block! I guess when you are young, and little, everything seems to be a big deal. Especially once you start traveling, and you are exposed to so much in the world, you don’t even realize.”</p><p><em>Had it changed? Or had it remarkably not changed?</em></p><p>“When we were back the first time, it didn’t change that much. It was not a very pleasant experience. It was still under communism, and people were afraid to talk, they would close the doors and put the radio on, and would talk to you so no one would hear you. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But it’s different now of course.”</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
Valentin Turansky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Valentin Turansky was born in Stupava, Slovakia, in 1938. His father, Matuš, worked as a farmer, while his mother, Maria, stayed at home and raised Valentin and his seven siblings, of whom he was the oldest. In 1951, his father was arrested after refusing to incorporate his smallholding into the local co-operative farm. He spent six months in prison, and was then sentenced to a further six months of forced labor, which he spent working in a coal mine. Upon his release in 1952, the Turansky family decided to leave the country. They crossed the Slovak border – as part of a group of 15 people – into Austria. Valentin says the group hit a trip wire on their journey across the border, which detonated a large number of flares but, he says, there was no response from the border guards on duty, which he attributes to the large size of the group.</p><p> </p><p>In Austria, the Turansky family stayed in a refugee camp in Wels for 18 months. Around the time his family immigrated to Australia in 1953, Valentin went to Belgium, where he attended college and gained a qualification in printmaking. A keen soccer player, Valentin played for an amateur team in Brussels upon finishing school and moving to the Belgian capital. He joined his family in Australia at the beginning of 1958 and became an Australian citizen in 1959. There, he started work at the Dunlop shoe factory. He subsequently returned to his trade and worked as a printer for the Cumberland Newspaper Group in Sydney. In 1963, Valentin traveled to America and settled in Chicago. He found a job in a print shop in the city’s Printers Row district. In 1965, he married his wife, Margaret.</p><p> </p><p>Valentin became a U.S. citizen in 1968. He continued to play soccer for the city’s Slovak A.A. (Athletic Association) Soccer Club, which he says enjoyed a good deal of success at that time. Today, Valentin lives with his wife, Margaret, in Prospect Heights, Illinois.</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
Arrest
Border patrol
Community Life
Forced labor
Refugee camp
Rural life
Sports
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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>Russian Refugee</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_4ebUPypCHI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were in the woods gathering firewood and a stranger approached us, and he was an escaped Russian major – NKVD political officer – and he wanted to get out to the West. And my father hid him until the war was over, gave him one of his suits and everything, because he was really taken in by the man, and then in May ’45 he delivered him across Czechoslovakia to the American lines and, somehow, he wanted to get to the OSS section and that’s where he ended up, and that’s how my father got the OSS connection with Donovan. And as soon as the Iron Curtain fell he automatically worked for the Americans.”</p><h4>Cheb</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jqvc0C0YwO8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For Czechs right after the war, to go live in the former Sudeten area was like moving to the Wild West.”</p><p><em>Why do you say it was like the Wild West?</em></p><p>“Well, because the inland was more peaceful. Over there, with kids, we go out hiking or something, we find an anti-aircraft machine gun, we find piles of ammunition and rifles. I remember we found an abandoned Tiger tank and about 15 of us started carrying ammunition and just dumping it in the open hatch – this was deep in the woods – and then we emptied out big shell casings and made a long path of gunpowder that went about half mile away, and lit it. What a bang. That was the entertainment for after the war for kids.”</p><h4>Crossing the Boarder</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9XxI3uXsyo0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When the Iron Curtain fell in ’48, I got to be real good friends with them because I was the only Czech in town that spoke Yugo, and they knew my political views too, because a lot of them were not Communist. Three of them asked me how to get across the border to Germany. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll take you.’ And I did, and one of them had a change of heart, came back, and turned me in. I was 15 then, and I’m going to school and a couple of my friends said ‘The state secret police is waiting for you. You better not go to school.’ I did go back home. There was nobody at home. I left a note that I’m leaving, that I have to leave. I didn’t have time to go into detail because I was really, really shook up. I had a gold coin collection. I taped it to the soles of my feet with some kind of tape. I took all the money that I had saved up with me, and I took my little briefcase with school books and everything, just in case I got stopped by the border patrol – ‘I’m visiting my friend that lives down over there…’</p><h4>French Foreign Legion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0KoYyyCP2cs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“So they shanghaied me on a ship. Two days later we’re going through the Suez Canal to Hai Phong. Well, that was French Indochina then. And from Hai Phong we were put on a train to Hanoi to pick up French wounded. I was assigned to one wounded guy that I had to take care of. Back on a train, back to the harbor, back to the ship, and all the way to Marseille, and then I just walked away from it. So my stint, it was a good adventure, because, just stop and think, not 18, I’d seen Africa, North Africa, I’d seen Indochina.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aVXdlg-yOp4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“And they were poor. I thought I lived much better in Czechoslovakia then he did in America, and once I got there, I knew I did. First thing he says, ‘We got electricity six months ago.’ Outside toilet, phone on the wall with a crank. My uncle, they looked at going to the movies as the devil’s work. They wouldn’t let me listen to popular music, I had to listen to gospel, or…They were fanatical religious.”</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
Savoy Horvath
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Savoy Horvath was born in 1933 in Brno, Moravia. Six years later, his family moved to Hradec Králové where his father worked at a German airport as an interpreter and accountant for the Nazis. Savoy’s father was also the leader of a Czech resistance group called 777. Immediately following the War, Savoy’s father was given management of an ESKA bicycle factory in Cheb, a city in the Sudeten region close to the German border. Savoy remembers being active in politics as a young teenager and, as a supporter of the Czech National Socialist (or Beneš) Party, clashing with his peers who held communist views. Savoy went to trade school and began an apprenticeship at his father’s factory, where he became friends with a number of Yugoslav workers. In 1948, he helped a couple of them across the border illegally and, after one escapee changed his mind, Savoy says he was in danger of arrest. Convinced that he must leave the country immediately, Savoy crossed the border into Germany in April 1948.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3499" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609044934im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-211.jpg" alt="Savoy Horvath" width="300" height="333" /></p><p>After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.</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
Anti-communist
emigrant
Hradec Kralove
local
marriage
Military service
Politics
refugee
Refugee camp
Rural life
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89d28da603dc9df945c84db63ba35b34
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>Factory Housing</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ENxaxYGGFao?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Life on the <em>kolonie</em> was absolutely wonderful. Everybody lived very sparsely, as most Europeans. We had an entry area and a little storage room. We had a kitchen which was a kitchen, dining, and living area, and a bedroom area, and that was it. Outhouses on the outside. They were attached on one side, and the storage unit on the other side, of this four-plex. There were little gardens in the back and everybody could have a vegetable garden. This whole thing consisted of maybe 80 apartments that were there and in the middle was the common area which contained a social hall and laundry. Although, the washing of clothing was done in what was called the White River next door. That’s where the washing occurred and the rinsing occurred. The water came right out of the mountains, thus it was pure. Then everything was hung to dry and then after that they had a big thing like a mangle [ringer], and that was like a huge trough with stones in it, and they rolled this over the sheets to straighten them out a little bit, iron them, basically. That’s how people existed. We had close friends next door to where we lived. My mother was a weaver. And all this happened because my grandfather, my mother’s father, was a foreman in that factory.”</p><h4>Slovak Uprising</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EwRw8h1j-U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They were informed that the next day all the hunters and everybody should come to the military barracks on the east side of town – we had two military establishments, an Air Force and a military – and bring their weapons so they could train to resist the Russian advance, and they would be told what to do and how to do it. So my dad and uncle, of course they went there, and by noon of that day I thought ‘Well, I’ll just go and check and see what’s happening,’ so I took a bicycle and rode out to that camp and I saw them, behind the camp fence, and they were just milling about and doing nothing, and it was boring, so I got back on my bike and biked back home.</p><p>“Well, as I was biking home – we lived on the street called Liptauerstrasse, Liptovská ulica – what happened is, I looked up and, about a quarter mile or so, maybe more, away, I saw trucks with all kinds of red flags on top, and I rushed home, right inside the door and I told my mom ‘There’s something not right.’ So then we went into a room that faced the street and we watched and then suddenly these people were all walking by with machine guns drawn, and the front guy had a whistle in his mouth, and red banners. Well, these were the partisans who were taking over the town. They had made an arrangement with the military to peacefully take over the town. All the men with guns were in the camp, so they didn’t have anybody to fight, and that’s how it was. That’s how all the peaceful times then ended. Because what happened then is, the next day, the partisans then tried to take over my hometown [Kežmarok]. These people had heard what had happened in Poprad. In Kežmarok, they had gotten ready, taken over the military, and, with the military’s help, had prepared for the partisans and actually fended them off.</p><p>“One of my experiences as a young kid: We had, besides repairing trucks, cars and vulcanizing tires – that’s what my father’s responsibility was – we also had gas pumps outside for regular gas. The second day, after the attacked Kežmarok, one of those tanks came back to the pump station to fill up with gas again, and there was part of a body still on the tank. Somebody had been hit. They didn’t even remove and clean; they pulled it just like that with that on it, so… horrific sights for a kid to be seeing.”</p><h4>Father Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQMQ91T9-qg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We got to Poprad and then we stayed with our neighbors, the Lubajs, and the Lubajs took us in. Of course, people knew my dad as we walked from the train station to our home and, then next day, it was very in common in Europe to have to go to the city hall and to sign papers saying ‘I’m now a resident back here.’ So my dad, having been seen, he went there and was immediately put into detention camp. The Germanic people and Hungarians were all put in detention camps. At night, my neighbors knew this was happening and they arranged for us, overnight, to go to Kežmarok on foot – which was like nine miles – to my grandparents’. So we got to my grandparents’ house and we stayed from June until the end of September inside, so nobody would know where we are hiding.”</p><h4>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6X9PXk2yqVI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In the end of July, 1946, on a Sunday morning, the state police came and arrested my mother and my grandparents and took them to the initial camp, a castle in Kežmarok, and that’s where we were, in a castle. My mother had a nervous breakdown there. But things were so badly managed and there was so much disorganization. We were arrested in the morning and there were maybe 100 people or so in this initial detention area. I noticed that by afternoon some of the friends, Slovaks, would come to the gates and try to communicate – this was so sudden and such a horrible thing – and some guards would allow them to come between the two gate doors. They couldn’t arrest my grandmother because she was ill. She was in bed, so they left her there and took my grandfather. So I took my grandfather to the doors and when there was a little lapse of observation, I took him in between and ultimately I said to the guard ‘He’s just visiting.’ So they said ‘Ok’ and let my grandfather out. He got back home and was never re-arrested again, and so that’s how it was. My mother and I were then put on trucks and shipped to that military camp in Poprad, where my dad and uncle went with their guns and all that, and that was a big detention camp then for Germanic and Hungarian people. And from there, then we were shipped out to Germany, in September of 1946.”</p><h4>Deported</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X3o-3QHjnUk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We weren’t really welcome. We were intruders. These people suddenly were asked to take in people that they had never seen before. It’s like you having to take people into your home that you didn’t know, didn’t relate to at all. You were forced to do it. So that wasn’t all that pleasant. And not that they were so unpleasant. They tried to help, but they themselves were… Think about it, 1946 wasn’t all that pleasant. People were on rationing cards. We had milk that you could see through and bread was rationed, margarine was rationed. Everything was rationed. The nutritional conditions were very poor. In 1946 in the winter, I would go to adjacent villages, to the farmers, and ask for a little flour. They’d take a soup spoon of flour and put it in your bag and then you’d go to the next one and he’d put in a soup spoon of flour, and that was it. It was very, very bad. You had to beg for food. That next fall, in 1947, you’d volunteer to work for farmers for food. We would pick potatoes, for instance, and it was all manual, and then you could have a little potatoes afterwards. So things weren’t all that pleasant.”</p><h4>Money</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oJHoadO4FOM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I also worked on a golf course caddying for American soldiers. They were allowed to play golf, and I got paid ten cigarettes for carrying the bag for nine holes or a package for eighteen holes, or five candy bars for nine holes and ten for eighteen holes. On the way home, every time we left the golf course, we’d stop at a little restaurant and there were people that would buy these things from us for the black market. I made more money than my dad did working by selling these American goodies to the black marketers.”</p><h4>Excited</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WSMiIa382lg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“To be American was really important, because America had done so much. After we left Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, and crossed the border, there was security and safety. The American zone offered you that kind of lifestyle. You felt safe and comfortable. You may not have had food enough because there was very little food available but, nevertheless, the food wasn’t as important as the freedom. You were secure. There was no uncertainty about your existence, having to worry about who would come and get you the next day or would you be in prison the next day. All that was gone. And then when you saw the luxury – the cigarettes they’d throw away, half candies eaten sometime – then you’d realize ‘Hey these people are really something. They’re wealthy. They’re what everybody’s trying to achieve.’ You kind of became proud to be an American. After losing all of that… Think about that. You lost your previous identity in a way, national identities. It’s important to be an American. My father was absolutely delighted to be an American, and my mother. So too my brother. We really became Americans. Not nationalists. We didn’t think America was always the best, the finest, the strongest. We didn’t need to be the most powerful. But we were good. And that’s important.”</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
Roman Scholtz
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignright wp-image-4055" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170808051245im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-180.jpg" alt="Handler-1" width="300" height="418" />Roman Scholtz was born in Kežmarok in northern Slovakia in 1934. His father, Ludwig, studied the craft of cabinet-making and was a manager of a cabinet shop. His mother, Adele, worked as a weaver in a factory, and the family lived in factory housing. Roman had one older brother, Ewald. When Roman was eight years old, his family moved to Poprad where Roman’s father opened an auto repair shop with relatives. Roman says that the first years of WWII passed fairly peacefully for his family, until the Slovak Uprising began in August 1944. The partisans quietly took over Poprad and were fought back in Kežmarok, and Roman has memories of seeing the effects of the fighting. His brother, a member of the Slovak Army, was conscripted into the German Army, and it would be several years before Roman saw his brother again. Roman himself spent a few months with relatives near the Moravian border. In January 1945, his family’s equipment and machinery was appropriated for the German war effort. Told they could stay with their possessions, Roman and his family traveled to Jablonec nad Nisou and Jičín in Bohemia before returning home to Poprad at the end of the War. Immediately after returning, Roman’s father was sent to a detention camp for ethnic Germans while Roman and his mother secretly traveled to Kežmarok and stayed with his grandparents. Roman returned to school for one year and then, in July 1946, he and his mother were arrested and sent to a detention center. They reunited with his father and were deported to Germany in September 1946.</p><p> </p><p>For a short time, Roman and his family lived in a refugee camp. They were then sent to live with a German family. Roman attended school and worked at a golf course where he caddied for American soldiers. His father worked in construction. In 1950, they sailed to New York and took a train to Cleveland where several of Roman’s family members had settled decades earlier. Roman’s father worked as a carpenter and his mother found a job as a cleaning lady. They bought a house in Cleveland six months after arriving. Roman graduated from high school in 1952 and attended Ohio University where he studied engineering. He also received a degree in architecture from Case Western Reserve University. In 1971, Roman opened his own architecture firm. Although he visits Slovakia often and raised his children to be aware of their heritage, he says that he and his family ‘took roots’ in the United States and were very proud to become American citizens. Today he lives in Davenport, Iowa, with his wife Mary.</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
American citizenship
Jicin
Kezmarok
Refugee camp
Slovak-German relations
WWII
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2ec8fa4a22fc601b82a3fce19ae77871
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>Earliest Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nX2nYy5Cz_k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We grew up in Africa, and Tunisia was blue sky, beautiful weather; we lived in a beautiful town called Monastir. It was right by the water. So my memories are of the beach and sun and all that, and my father was building a textile company, so he was in charge of a lot and meeting with the president of Tunisia and he had a pretty high position, and from there he did a lot of traveling back to Western Europe to buy the machinery from the Belgians, French, English, so he was all over Europe. My memories of childhood are what I can remember from there and any memory of Czechoslovakia was that we would basically we would go vacation there once a year, and I hated every minute of it, because it was gray, rainy, cold. As a kid, I would cry and say ‘I want to go home to the nice place,’ and it just kind of stayed with me so I never liked the place from day one, to be honest. Never liked it, and as soon as one comes to a certain age where you start thinking a little bit outside of the kid’s mind, I basically said ‘I’m leaving the second I can.’”</p><h4>Moving Reasons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lCwH6zbZjck?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The United States has the most friends of the countries which are supposedly the enemies, so the communist world was supposedly the enemy of the U.S.; therefore the people loved everything about the U.S., because we obviously hated the Russians and anything with it. So then you kind of glamorize the other side and you believe every single word of it and you start paying attention and it was this huge attraction. Then you buy books and you read about it and we would listen to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. I never had any idea or tendency to go Germany or Austria; it just wasn’t tempting whatsoever, but the U.S. was like this different planet – it kind of is.”</p><h4>Refugee Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KgHzaE3VHr0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was a mess. For my brother, it was harder because he was the older one so he felt responsibility. For me, it was this great adventure so you don’t much care about anything. But there was a lot of pretty nasty people there. [It was] very corrupt, so all the money, which was – later on you learn was donated by the U.S. government for these camps, most of it was stolen. You get a mattress on the floor and the bathroom isn’t a bathroom. There is a hole in the wall and water is spraying out of it, and that’s what it is. They feed you, but the living conditions are absolutely atrocious. We and the two brothers wanted to be in one room, so you get four mattresses and you stay there, and you make your own weapons and you block your doors at night because it gets very dangerous. Very dangerous. Back then they were saying – I don’t know if it was true – Romanians would empty their prisons and just bus them to the border and send them to Italy. And these types of people would end up in these camps. It was not pleasant. It was a lot of tough people.”</p><p><em>Did you ever need to use your homemade weapons?</em></p><p>“We never had to use it, but a lot of people would get stabbed and shot, even, at night. You couldn’t walk around the camp alone at night; you were crazy if you did that. You had to go with a lot of people together. I guess that’s what happens in these situations, very separated by nationality.”</p><p><em>Were you able to go freely to and from the camp?</em></p><p>“Absolutely. You could do anything you wanted. There were public busses, so you would always looks for work. Stand on the corner of the road, and there are fields and agriculture and people take you, so you make a little money; it’s illegal work basically, but that’s how it was so you would make a little money occasionally. You don’t need to buy clothing. You have food in the camp, so you just go out, take a bus and go to the beach. The public bus was cheap. So you could anything. We would actually take little trips around old, small towns in the mountains and hills there. It’s actually pretty beautiful there.”</p><h4>Immigrate</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P2FxhHJBcQw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They have a process there and you actually go to the consulate in Rome and they talk to you and ask you questions. It’s supposed to be a long process of questions of why and what. I was a 20 year old and had long hair and we thought it was very modern and American, except here they look at you like you are a lazy hippie – which we didn’t know – so they asked you ‘Which would you prefer, long hair or work?’ which I thought was the strangest question because, again, I didn’t know that’s how it was, so I said ‘Obviously work,’ because that’s all you want to do. Then the next question was ‘If there’s a war with the Russians, would you go and fight them?’ and I said ‘Sure, gladly,’ and they said ‘Welcome to the United States.’ It took three minutes.”</p><h4>American Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l7LpcB39w1U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Never read a Czech newspaper; never read one more book. I had no interest whatsoever, because right from day one you want to improve your language and everything about it. You want to understand everything, so from day one I started buying a newspaper. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it’s just that looking into it, that habit, turning on the TV. You just immerse yourself in the country and the culture and the language and that’s what helps you, and you get to the point where, like I said, I get a headache; I can’t read a page of a Czech newspaper because you lose interest, it doesn’t go anywhere; it becomes hard.”</p><h4>Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PwCRZJEoZjs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“As a kid growing up in a place where they tell you that you can’t travel, you kind of always want to see the world, and this enabled us to see the world, and a nice part of the world as well, because the travel is paid for by the company and you stay in player hotels, which are usually four- or five-star hotels, and you go to phenomenal tennis places. So if you like tennis and you go to Wimbledon and Roland Garros and Aussie Open and on and on, it’s pretty amazing. Then traveling with the U.S. Davis Cup team, you stay in nice places; you go to the U.S. consulate and you are chauffeured around in Mercedes. It’s just a great experience. Phenomenal experience. You see the world. I’ve been to probably 65 countries, many of them 20 times or 100 times.”</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
Roman Prokes
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Roman Prokes was born in Svitavy, a city in central Czechoslovakia, in 1960. Roman’s mother and father met after they both moved to the city following WWII, when it had been annexed by Nazi Germany as part of the Sudetenland. At the age of three, Roman moved to Monastir, Tunisia, with his parents and older brother, as his father, the director of a textile company, was tasked with opening a factory there. Roman’s earliest memories are of the Mediterranean setting and his reluctance to travel back to Czechoslovakia. After four years in Tunisia, Roman’s family returned to Svitavy and Roman started school. He recalls his father being quite outspoken against the communist government, especially following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, and subsequently losing his job. Roman says that because of his father’s standing, ‘going to high school was very difficult’ and he and his brother were not able to attend university. Roman’s high school education focused on food service and, as part of his studies, he worked in a grocery store and trained to be a manager.</p><p> </p><p>Following high school, Roman and his brother decided to leave the country. They took a bus tour to Yugoslavia and, on the island of Korčula, left the group and hitchhiked to the Italian border. After crossing the border into Trieste on foot, they were sent to Latina, a refugee camp near Rome. Roman says that although he saw the experience as a ‘great adventure,’ the camp was rather dangerous. After two months in Latina, Roman and his brother were given permission to immigrate to the United States. They arrived in New York in September 1981 and settled in Astoria, Queens. Roman’s first impressions of the city? ‘I loved New York from the first minute we landed.’ While Roman’s brother quickly found work in a hotel restaurant, it took Roman longer to find a job. He worked in a church thrift shop and odd jobs in construction. He then started driving a cab – a job he held for three years.</p><p> </p><p>Roman next found a job stringing rackets at a Czech-owned tennis club. He grew his business and, today, owns one of the premier pro shops in New York. Roman toured with Andre Agassi for 16 years and includes several other high profile tennis players as his customers. Because of his work, Roman has traveled extensively, which he says is ‘amazing’ after growing up in communist Czechoslovakia with few options to travel. He became an American citizen in 1986 and calls New York his ‘home from the day [he] landed.’ Today, Roman lives in Queens with his wife and children.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Education
English language
Korcula
Refugee camp
school
Sports