When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
]]>Pierre Dobrovolny was born in Brno, Moravia, in October 1933. His father Ferdinand was an artist who worked with, among others, the Czech archeologist Dr. Karel Absolon. Pierre’s mother Růžena was a seamstress. Growing up, Pierre wanted to become a radio mechanic but, he says, this profession was a predominantly feminine one at the time of his graduation, so he went to ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study electrical engineering instead. He graduated from technical university in 1958 and says he was ‘lucky’ to do so, given his outspoken nature and his critical view of the Communist government at the time. That same year, Pierre married his partner Vera. His first job upon graduation was at the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where he worked on equipment to measure radiation.
When the possibility of pursuing a doctorate on top of his work presented itself, Pierre applied to do so, but says the background checks that were run on him by the school resulted in him being kicked out of his job at the research institute as well. Pierre was conscripted and spent six months in the Czech Army; upon his return from military service, he was told he had been let go from the research institute and was being sent to TESLA Hloubětín instead. At TESLA, Pierre’s job was to work on transmitters to be sent to Russia, which he says was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, because he could be penalized if the project went wrong, but had little authority to make changes where they were necessary. The project to develop these transmitters, however, was a success, and resulted in Pierre traveling to Vilnius, Kutaisi and Moscow to show technicians there how to operate them. In 1965, after being repeatedly refused, Pierre was allowed to embark upon a second degree in mathematics and physics. He left Czechoslovakia, however, before he could complete his studies.
Following the Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Pierre was part of a group which set up an illegal transmitter and broadcast non-official news about the invasion, first in the TESLA building in Hloubětín, then in Zahradní Město and finally in the Novodvorská suburb of Prague. He left Czechoslovakia with his wife Vera and their two children the following year. Once in Vienna, the family applied for visas to the United States and registered with the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Their youngest daughter Lucie, however, fell suddenly very ill and so the family returned to Czechoslovakia to seek medical assistance. Several months later, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Dobrovolnys again left Czechoslovakia. After four months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen, Austria, they arrived in Chicago, where Pierre found a job at radio and television manufacturer Zenith. He stayed there until LG bought the company in 1990 and continued thereafter to do some external consulting for the firm. Today, he lives with his wife Vera in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
“When I was in the dorm I believe they knew everything I was talking about. Because those speakers… Every room had a speaker – like a radio – and the speakers were built two-way. And there was a secret room right at the front of that dorm where nobody was allowed to go, only some students who were Communist Party members. Besides that they had also guns with them. So there was something special going on in that room. And I believe they were listening to people in the dorm. But I didn’t… somehow I didn’t care at that time. It caught up with me later. I mean, somehow I was lucky enough to graduate. Then I got my first job which was with the Research Institute for Electrotechnical Physics, where we were building equipment to measure nuclear radiation. I was there for about half a year, and I found out that there was an opportunity to do a PhD – some PhD openings. And since I worked in the ultrasound labs, it was kind of close to what I had been doing before. I applied for that, and they made such a thorough research of my background that they kicked me out, even from my job.”
“There were two parts of the personnel department. One was like here, open where all the files are kept, and there was the other part of it, which was political, which was secret – all your background, even that you had forgotten a long time ago is still recorded. So that guy, who was the head of that department said ‘What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here! You were let go!’”
“You get blamed for it when it is not finished, that thing, but you have what they call responsibility without authority, or something of this kind.”
Vera: “In those days, if something went wrong, he wouldn’t lose his job, but he would go to prison.”
“That’s right, because it could be looked upon as sabotage. So all my colleagues over there, you could see the attitude, they were staying away from it, because the general opinion was – we got all the papers, all the research reports about how things were put together as far as the transmitter is concerned and you could see what they did, how they did it – and the general opinion was ‘It’s an experiment in physics.’ Not something where things have been concluded to the very end. Because some stuff was made really thoroughly, and some other parts were made really in such a way that nobody who was a real engineer would put it together that way.”
Petra Sith was born in Bratislava in September 1979, in Kramáre Hospital where her mother, Anna, worked as a nurse. Her mother married her stepfather, Peter Sith (a mechanical engineer for carmaker Škoda), when Petra was four years old. In 1983, Petra’s brother, Karol Sith, was born.Petra started grade school in Bratislava, of which she says she still has ‘fond memories.’ She did not stay there too long, however, before her family left the country. The Siths went on holiday to Yugoslavia in 1986 and it was there that Petra’s parents told her and her brother they had no intention of returning home.
The family spent about one year in refugee camps in Yugoslavia before moving to Traiskirchen camp in Austria. The Sith family spent another nine months in Traiskirchen before being sponsored by a distant relative in Illinois to come to the United States. They settled first in Chicago before moving to Fox Lake, Illinois, where Petra lived up until three years ago.
Petra says her parents were not able to find jobs at first in the U.S. which reflected their qualifications; her father started sweeping floors at a factory, while her mother worked in a laundromat. Eventually, Petra’s mother became a nursing assistant, while her father became a factory technician. Petra says her parents impressed the value of education upon her; she graduated from Chicago’s Roosevelt University in 2007. She currently works as a billing processor at Robert Half International and is studying for her master’s degree. Petra plays bass in a band called Losing Scarlet, which she describes as making ‘user-friendly, heavier rock music.’ She has a U.S. green card, but still travels on a Slovak passport. She has returned to Slovakia to see her family twice since coming to America; in 1994 and 2007. Today, Petra lives in Ingleside, Illinois, with her husband, Brad.
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Petra Sith was born in Bratislava in September 1979, in Kramáre Hospital where her mother, Anna, worked as a nurse. Her mother married her stepfather, Peter Sith (a mechanical engineer for carmaker Škoda), when Petra was four years old. In 1983, Petra’s brother, Karol Sith, was born.Petra started grade school in Bratislava, of which she says she still has ‘fond memories.’ She did not stay there too long, however, before her family left the country. The Siths went on holiday to Yugoslavia in 1986 and it was there that Petra’s parents told her and her brother they had no intention of returning home.
The family spent about one year in refugee camps in Yugoslavia before moving to Traiskirchen camp in Austria. The Sith family spent another nine months in Traiskirchen before being sponsored by a distant relative in Illinois to come to the United States. They settled first in Chicago before moving to Fox Lake, Illinois, where Petra lived up until three years ago.
Petra says her parents were not able to find jobs at first in the U.S. which reflected their qualifications; her father started sweeping floors at a factory, while her mother worked in a laundromat. Eventually, Petra’s mother became a nursing assistant, while her father became a factory technician. Petra says her parents impressed the value of education upon her; she graduated from Chicago’s Roosevelt University in 2007. She currently works as a billing processor at Robert Half International and is studying for her master’s degree. Petra plays bass in a band called Losing Scarlet, which she describes as making ‘user-friendly, heavier rock music.’ She has a U.S. green card, but still travels on a Slovak passport. She has returned to Slovakia to see her family twice since coming to America; in 1994 and 2007. Today, Petra lives in Ingleside, Illinois, with her husband, Brad.
“I loved school, a lot of learning, dancing. I have a lot of fond memories of growing up in Slovakia – I think because I left when I was so young. I didn’t get to experience what would be the negative aspects of communism, what the adults had to deal with. For me, I was just a kid, I was growing up so… we left when I was only seven.”
“No, unfortunately, me and my brother were both not told – we were little. I was notorious for having a big mouth and I would talk, and my dad could have got into a lot of trouble if anyone were to find out we were defecting. As a matter of fact, my dad started remodeling the apartment we were living in, it seemed like everything was normal and we were just told we were going on vacation to Yugoslavia. So we packed up the car one day and like ‘Oh, we’re going on vacation,’ and I don’t think my parents actually told us until we were in Yugoslavia that we weren’t coming back home.”
“The saddest part about it is that in Austria, the camp Traiskirchen, it was literally 40 minutes away from the border with Slovakia. So our family was right there, and we couldn’t go and see them or talk to them. We were political, you know, in political asylum and we were even told, once we were in the gates of the camp that we were safe, but if we wanted to venture outside the camp in the city, we weren’t necessarily safe – they could come and get us if they wanted to so, it was just really strange.
“When we first got there, we stayed in a building with multiple families in one room – I can’t tell you exactly the number, but it had to be more than 40 people, lots of bunk beds. So once you got there and you were processed, you were then assigned maybe an apartment to live in. So we ended up living in an apartment for quite some time, because I think we were there for about eight to nine months. And so we had our own apartment and I made a lot of friends with different children from around the world, I was with Turkish kids and Hungarian kids and Romanians and at one point, my parents said I was speaking about four or five different languages. I lost that soon after we left there, but when you are a kid, you have the capacity, I guess, to learn that many different languages, so…”
“My dad simply put it that it’s for me and my brother, not so much for my mum and my dad, but he knew… because we left right before the fall of communism. I think the fall of communism happened about a year after we left the country. So, when we got here, I don’t think my dad ever looked back at that and regretted it, because even now, today, all these years later, it’s still hard for all the people who are living there, economically. It’s a new democracy, starting from the beginning and coming here; my dad saw that as a big opportunity for our education, for our work, for our futures.”
“I see where they’re coming from, my nostalgia comes from being a kid, growing up there, drinking Kofola, watching Matko a Kubko, being kids – we were kids at a time when you saw cartoons one hour a week, on the three stations that were available in Bratislava at the time! You come here and kids have so many more opportunities and things to rot their brain and their teeth and everything. So, in a way, I can see it. And I would be lying if I said that it didn’t fascinate me, you know – anything communist related, or movies of anything, because deep down inside, I know that was a part of history that I was a part of, even though it was towards the real last part of it. I can’t say that it doesn’t intrigue me. I don’t know what I’d tell those people. I know a lot of them thought it was better during communist times, and who am I to tell them whether or not it was or not, because now it is harder – it is hard for people out there who are struggling.”
Peter Vodenka was born in Prague in August 1955, but raised in Mníšek pod Brdy where his father, Stanislav, worked as an industrial designer at an iron ore processing plant. Peter’s mother, Jarmila, worked in the same processing factory. In 1970, Peter moved to Prague to attend trade school, where he trained to become a plumber. He graduated in 1973 and remained in Prague, living in the city’s Vinohrady district. Unhappy with his job three years later, Peter moved back to Mníšek pod Brdy and quit plumbing to become a lumberjack. It was at this time that he met his future wife, Ludmila – the sister-in-law of one of his colleagues. The couple were married at Karlštejn Castle in 1978. A lover of nature and an avid ‘tramp,’ Peter moved to rural southern Bohemia to work on a collective farm. It was there, in Hrejkovice, that he and Ludmila started raising their two children. Peter says he moved to southern Bohemia, among other reasons, so that he could have his own horse; he bought a mare and called it Nelly Gray, after an American song he had heard.
Peter says that he has always been fascinated by America: while still living in Czechoslovakia he and his brother Stanislav owned a U.S. military Jeep dating from WWII, set their watches to reflect American Eastern Time and formed a horse-riding, tramping group called the Corral OK. In 1983, Peter decided to immigrate to America with his family. He drove with his wife and two children first to Hungary and then to Yugoslavia, where they left their car at the border and made their way into Austria by foot in the middle of the night. According to Peter, the crossing attracted the attention of patrolling Yugoslav border guards and the family was pursued. They made it, however, into Austria where one of Peter’s cousins, who had emigrated some months previously, picked them up and escorted them to Traiskirchen refugee camp. Peter and his family were there for three days until they were moved to Ramsau. In September 1983, the Vodenkas arrived in America. Peter and his family were sponsored by the First Lutheran Church in Beach, North Dakota, where they settled for a couple of years. Today, the Vodenkas live in Scandia, Minnesota. Peter regularly speaks publicly about coming to America and, in 2007, he wrote a book about his experiences called Journey for Freedom. Today, he runs a construction company and still enjoys outdoor pursuits, such as hunting in the Black Hills.
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Peter Vodenka was born in Prague in August 1955, but raised in Mníšek pod Brdy where his father, Stanislav, worked as an industrial designer at an iron ore processing plant. Peter’s mother, Jarmila, worked in the same processing factory. In 1970, Peter moved to Prague to attend trade school, where he trained to become a plumber. He graduated in 1973 and remained in Prague, living in the city’s Vinohrady district. Unhappy with his job three years later, Peter moved back to Mníšek pod Brdy and quit plumbing to become a lumberjack. It was at this time that he met his future wife, Ludmila – the sister-in-law of one of his colleagues. The couple were married at Karlštejn Castle in 1978. A lover of nature and an avid ‘tramp,’ Peter moved to rural southern Bohemia to work on a collective farm. It was there, in Hrejkovice, that he and Ludmila started raising their two children. Peter says he moved to southern Bohemia, among other reasons, so that he could have his own horse; he bought a mare and called it Nelly Gray, after an American song he had heard.
Peter says that he has always been fascinated by America: while still living in Czechoslovakia he and his brother Stanislav owned a U.S. military Jeep dating from WWII, set their watches to reflect American Eastern Time and formed a horse-riding, tramping group called the Corral OK. In 1983, Peter decided to immigrate to America with his family. He drove with his wife and two children first to Hungary and then to Yugoslavia, where they left their car at the border and made their way into Austria by foot in the middle of the night. According to Peter, the crossing attracted the attention of patrolling Yugoslav border guards and the family was pursued. They made it, however, into Austria where one of Peter’s cousins, who had emigrated some months previously, picked them up and escorted them to Traiskirchen refugee camp. Peter and his family were there for three days until they were moved to Ramsau. In September 1983, the Vodenkas arrived in America. Peter and his family were sponsored by the First Lutheran Church in Beach, North Dakota, where they settled for a couple of years. Today, the Vodenkas live in Scandia, Minnesota. Peter regularly speaks publicly about coming to America and, in 2007, he wrote a book about his experiences called Journey for Freedom. Today, he runs a construction company and still enjoys outdoor pursuits, such as hunting in the Black Hills.
“I was always dreaming about being a cowboy. And I wanted to be in America, because my dad was always talking about being in America and he was singing songs… My dad played guitar and he was singing songs and we used to go out camping, sleeping under the sky and we’d go camping for a vacation and so I was always dreaming of America, and of course the romantic parts about cowboys and Indians, which we read about in the books of Karl May and others, about Winnetou and others – this was really intriguing me. I always wanted to be a cowboy. But because we were living in the town, there was no place to have a horse, and eventually when I got married and had children, we moved to southern Bohemia and I started working on a government farm (JZD) and that gave me a chance to actually purchase a horse, so we had a horse over there and for two years prior to my defection I was living my dream; I was riding a horse across the countryside.”
“Tramping to us was really special, of course you know I was thinking about that when I came to America because the name ‘tramp’ in Czech was somebody who was noble, it was a noble name; it was somebody who was good, a right person, a true patriot, a person who knows nature and loves nature. Of course, in America, tramp is a degrading word, and I didn’t know that until we came over here but the tramping movement was very strong and very big, and like I said, my dad was involved in it, you know, since WWII pretty much. And then of course he lead us that way also.
“The OK Corral was a group which was my brother, myself and a friend of ours. Of course, we read about the battle of the OK Corral and the shoot out at the OK Corral – again that was a part of American history which we really ate up, which we admired and thought was very interesting. So, we named our group the OK Corral, of course we didn’t do it right, we named our group Corral OK, but that was all that we knew at the time. We didn’t speak English.”
“No actually it didn’t. It was totally different. The cattle – I was feeling sorry for the animals – because they were chained to the troughs all the time. They were not grazing outside. They grew up chained to the trough until they died. But of course when the calves were young and little, they were separated from their mothers and put in the one building, and when they came to a certain age they moved into different buildings, and when the cows became another age, when they were impregnated for the first time and started having milk, then they were moved to a different place where they were milked. So it wasn’t really the way I was picturing it – the romantic way. There was one time, there was one occasion, when some calves, actually some steer – it was steer – broke out and they ran out. And now somebody has to go and find them. That was my chance, I jumped on my horse and I ran across the countryside until I found them. And I was trying to push them back in, and it didn’t work because they were scared themselves, because they had never been outside. I was trying to push them back in and soon I realized that they were actually trying to follow me. When I was trying to push them they were trying to get behind me, so I ended up just trying to ride my horse back to the village and they actually came with me, they were actually following me all the way to the building. But it was the one occasion when I actually did some cattle herding.”
“We left that letter in our living room on the coffee table. And we were thinking that if we do defect, if we find a way, we’re going to call them and tell them to go to our apartment, because we gave them keys, and that way they’re going to find more. We didn’t want the government to hear our conversation, so we just told them ‘Go to our apartment and you’re going to find more.’ And if we don’t find a way across the border, we’re going to come back, burn the letter and it’s going to be done and over with. Well, unfortunately what happened is my wife – she had plants, and she was afraid the plants were going to die. So she put the plants in the bathtub and talked to our neighbor, because the apartment was set up that when you open the front door, you walk into the hallway, and when you are in the hallway, you can go into the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and a bedroom. So, she put all the plants in the bathtub, and we locked all the other inside doors and we told her ‘Can you water the plants twice a week’ or whatever they needed. She [my wife] said ‘You don’t need to go anywhere else, I put everything in the bathtub, and all the other doors are locked, so you don’t need to go anywhere else.’
“Well, the nosy neighbor came in, and she tried the inside keys from her apartment on our apartment doors and of course, they opened. So she walked in the living room and she saw the letter. And she had the news that nobody else had. She felt like a big shot – we were living in a small village – so now she’s walking through the village telling everybody ‘Don’t say anything, but the Vodenkas defected, they are going to America.’ Well, we hadn’t, we were probably just barely across the border. Of course, it came to our employer and our employer had to report it to the police. They immediately called the border crossing and said ‘Arrest these people, stop these people with this license plate, with these passports and with these names.’ Well, luckily for us, we were across the border in Hungary by then, so it didn’t stop us but, again, if we didn’t find our way and we just came back acting like nothing happened, we would have been arrested and sent to prison immediately, so…”
“We were not really seeking Czech people, and we also heard in the refugee camp, there were some people who had friends who had actually been sponsored to come to Boston, and they were telling – they were sending letters back to their friends back in Austria and they were saying ‘There’s a Czech community, you don’t even need to speak English over here. There are stores, owners of stores speak Czech, and in the church they speak Czech and in the houses and everywhere, they speak Czech.’ I was actually afraid that we were going to get sent to a place like that, because I wanted to be in America. Because I want to learn English, and the sooner, the better. I knew the sooner we spoke the language, the sooner we could get on with our lives.”
“Everybody’s changing their watch to the local time, everybody takes their watch and changes it to the local time. And I took my watch and I want to change it to the local time and I realize, I have the time on my watch already. For the last eight years, my brother one time figured out that in America (of course in America there are a different four zones, time zones, but we didn’t know it then) in America – because America to people who don’t know too much is New York City and pretty much the East Coast – so in America the time is six hours behind our homeland. So he and I changed our watches to the American time. For eight years we had that time on our watches. It kind of helped us get closer to America, because if you look at your watch and know that in America it is 7:00 in the morning, you kind of can picture what people are doing at that time. And if you know that it is 5:00 in the evening, you kind of know that people are coming home, eating dinner and you get a little bit closer a feeling. There were times actually when we celebrated our new years, and then we would wait until 6:00 in the morning in Czech time to celebrate the new year in America, New York City. And we’d celebrate a second new year coming six hours later. So while I was standing over there with those people I just automatically grabbed my watch and I wanted to change it to the time, and I had had that time on it for eight years. And again, I became really emotional because I realized that with my life I had finally caught… I had finally arrived at that right time in which I wanted to be all my life.”
“Our American friends for 20 years were telling me ‘You need to write a book, you need to write a book. This is an interesting story, people in America need to hear that, they need to know how some people come over here.’ And this is recent also, this is not 100 years ago. People picture this stuff like it was happening decades or maybe even centuries ago. But it’s not, it’s 1983 and people go ‘Oh yeah! My second son was born’ or ‘I got my new job’ or ‘I graduated from high school then.’ So people can relate to it because it’s not a long time ago. And so people were telling me ‘You need to write a book.’ And for 20 years I was saying sure, sure, you know… how am I going to write a book when I don’t even speak proper English? So I was just ignoring it. I didn’t even want to talk about that, I was even getting tired when someone asked me where I was from. Because it was asking too much because of our accent. But then 9/11 came, and suddenly I felt and I was told it was my obligation to talk to people and tell this story. And the idea of the book was brewing in my head. And of course people were pushing us all the time, telling us that. It took 20 years before it actually crystallized, but about two and a half years ago, in the middle of 2007, I started writing that book. I had a helper with me – a lady friend of ours who was doing the grammatical corrections – and I started the book and finished it, so the book is written.”
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
]]>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”
“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”
“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”
“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.
“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”
“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.
“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.
“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”
“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”
How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?
“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”
“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”
The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.
]]>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.
The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.
“Then the Hitler-Jugend came over to Piešt’any, it was a tourist city and they took a lot of hotels over. They were a nuisance to us, they were an arrogant bunch of punks that we didn’t like, they took our places where we used to play. They thought that Slovakia was their colony. Germany was being bombed more, while the war was almost unnoticed in Slovakia, nonexistent, it was peaceful there during the War – especially Piešt’any. There was no bombing, and so they sent their German kids over there to indoctrinate them in Hitler’s propaganda and make them into new citizens, tough new citizens.
“One time I remember there was a skirmish when I pushed one of those kids into a river. We had to hide in our back yards because they were chasing us and there would have been a penalty if they had caught up with us and found out who did that. It was a little river, there was water flowing and in the middle there was only one board, and he purposely… I was on that board first and he thought that he had the right, that I should back up from it, and I did not. So that was the only skirmish that we had.”
“There were two bridges in Piešt’any, we heard that they were blown out by the Germans, so we went up there, and as I got to the bridge there was a boat with soldiers, Russian soldiers, coming across the river, and they had prisoners. And when they came to this side of the river where we were, they told the prisoners to get up out of the boat and walk on the dike. And as one man walked up the dike the Russian soldier who was on the top of the dike pulled his pistol and emptied it right into this guy. So his body rolled down. There was about twenty, thirty, people witnessing this whole thing. They were looking for prisoners, German prisoners, who were hiding. And so people were willing to tell them if they knew somebody was hiding some place.
“Then later on we walked over to around the airport. There was an airport in Piešt’any, and they had bunkers in there. So we went up there to see what it looks like and we saw some dead bodies of Germans, their boots and belts were missing. And some of the explosives were still there, so we tried to grab some of those explosives, we later on used them for fishing. We threw the explosive in the water and the fish popped out and we had it, but we didn’t do too much of it because it was forbidden.”
“We could not go under the Catholic Youth name anymore and so we went under the name Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého. What we did? We put on about five plays every year, and we were pretty good. We competed locally and county-wide and finally we even ended up in Turčianský Svätý Martin, where there was a national competition. And we placed there in a pretty good position, and actually some of us, including myself, were later offered professional acting roles, in Nitra. However, next door to our Orlovna, where we had our own place, was a facility that was owned by a baron. He escaped some place, never came back, and the commies took over that facility and installed a youth program in there. They wanted us to go with them. We resisted. And they were pushing on us in this Catholic Orlovna – what used to be – to get more socialistic. And we resisted, so they were using all kinds of tricks and oppression and threats, and some of the boys were almost ready to go to the military, and I decided to go overseas.”
“We had to go see in the garbage dump and see to find ourselves some kind of a can, washed it off, and that is when we got our first food, some kind of eintopf [stew] – a big spoon of it for both. We had no spoons to eat it with, so we just ate it the best way we could. The next day, Joe had a ring, we sold that ring, and bought a spoon and cigarettes – we were smoking in those days. Breakfast every morning was just a slice of margarine, a slice of kind of a bread and a black coffee. For noon, there were mostly things that were in one pot, like what the Germans call eintopf sometimes, like soup. And the same thing was for supper, something close to it, not much food anyway – and bread with it.”
“We had some political frictions, the Slovaks, but the biggest friction was between the Czechoslovaks and Slovaks. Fights erupted on a weekly basis, and the MPs marched in with big sticks and beat anybody who was outside regardless of what it was, who it was, whether they were fighting or not. Then finally the Germans took over the camp. Rocks were being thrown and even I had to sleep with a pipe in my bed, for my own protection. So anyway, there were a lot of fights, and sometimes the Germans marched in, the German police, and there were a few times that it was so bad that some people… the Germans opened fire and some people got shot.”
“When we got to that place, 25 of us, the wagon was pushed to the side, the train continued, and there was only that little station there, where you could stop the train yourself, and hop on the train and go wherever you wanted to. And at the camp, there was a barrack with bunk beds. You picked your own, wherever you wanted to stay, and then next door was a barrack with kitchen and dining room. We were very hungry and when we got in there we ate like we never ate in all our lives, for maybe an hour or so and finally we filled up! We got back to the barracks and next day was an assignment. It was an assignment to go into the bush, three men to a team. Two pushing the saw and one with a horse bringing the wood to the road. Well, I was not strong enough, nobody wanted to get me in their trio, and there was another Czech fellow who didn’t have no trio. So they assigned us to chop the wood for the kitchen. So we did that for about a week or so, supplied the kitchen with the wood, and in the meantime the others were working as a team piecework. They were making better money, we only got around 80, 79, cents an hour. The food was plenty and good. The sleep was okay, even though there were the trains passing by we never heard them anyway. We got used to it.”
“I suggested at the [Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club]… I came with the idea of a Slovak Festival. And immediately they made a chairman of me of the thing, to organize it. So I started organizing and got some of the factions together, Slovak musicians and all the people to participate. And despite some of the opposition that we had, especially from the older generations, it was a huge success from day one. Nobody ever knew that it would be so successful, people were standing in lines of eight or nine for food and drinks and we had a good program. So we found out that the facility is not big enough if we continue – we started continuing – and we moved to a larger facility. The next year we had so many people that they were fighting outside to get in!”
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
]]>Otakara Safertal was born in Kladno, central Bohemia, in 1947. For a number of years, Otakara lived with her grandparents in the village of Velké Přítočno, as both her parents worked in Prague. Her father, Lubomir, was in charge of a bakery, while her mother, Miroslava, managed a small patisserie and also helped at the bakery. Otakara remembers frequent visits from her parents. She attended kindergarten in Velké Přítočno, but upon starting first grade, she joined her parents and sister, Ivana, in Prague. As a young girl, Otakara remembers participating in Sokol and religious classes which were eventually discontinued. She excelled at badminton and as a teenager travelled throughout Czechoslovakia to play. After finishing school, Otakara applied to economics school in Prague; she says she was rejected because she ‘didn’t have a very good background.’ After one year training to be a salesperson in a drugstore, Otakara was accepted to economics school. She graduated in 1967 and began working for Czechoslovak State Airlines (CSA) as a ground hostess. She married her husband, Frank Safertal, that same year. Otakara remembers the Prague Spring, saying that the mood of the country changed and that in particular, the ‘youth was very excited about the future of the country.’ At that time, Otakara and her husband were part of a theatre group that performed poetry and plays around the city.
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
“I remember at one point in time, he wanted to import some Jewish cookies and things that were used for Sabbath and so on from Slovakia, and he did, and he got into trouble selling it, because it was not something on the government list. It was a constant struggle – him trying to improve the business and the government saying ‘These are the regulations and you can’t do that.’”
“The warning signs were there, but I think that people were just optimistic and didn’t want to accept the fact that the Russians would invade. I think that people were ready; their dreams were just great and I don’t think that the people really wanted a drastic change. They just wanted to live in a country that would be more free, and people would be able to travel, which in 1967 it was already happening. Just before the invasion in July, that was the first we left the country to Austria. It was sort of a family holiday. My parents and my husband, we went to Austria and came back. We were looking forward to going back [home], we had no reservations, and it was just a time that everybody was very hopeful, and all of the sudden it just crashed. People’s dreams crashed.”
“At that time, it was Prime Minister Trudeau who was the Canadian prime minister and he, on the intervention of the Czech emigrants, there was a special status for the Czech emigrants, that they could basically leave immediately. He gave us a special status. We went through the immigration process, but they expedited it. So we came to Austria at the end of August, and on October 4th, we were already on a plane to go to Canada.”
“It was the government that basically was taking care of us, the Canadian government. They had an excellent plan how to integrate us, and we were going to school for six months, either to improve or to learn English. For me, it was improving because I spoke English, but for my husband he had to start from scratch. They opened a school, it was called Brooklin High School and we used to go to school from midnight until about 3:00 in the morning. There were about 500 of us in the school, and it was an excellent program, and after six months, almost everybody was able to start looking for a job.”
“We also got involved with some of the people that came and started a new theatre group, and we were part of the theatre group for about 15 years. That theatre group in Toronto still continues. It’s in the 40th year of existence, and it was just an opportunity for us to stay close with our countrymen and promote Czech culture in the city. We put on about four or five plays a year, and it was a good outlet for people to gather friends and also to give something to the community.”
“I took my two daughters, and it was very emotional. I was very happy to see the family, but I was also very anxious to leave because I felt that I was not sure whether they would shut the doors for me and I would not be able to go back. I loved my life outside and did intend to stay in Czech Republic, so I had nightmares when I was there that I won’t be able to go back. It was mixed feelings – feelings that I was glad to see the family, but also a feeling that I did not belong there.”
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
]]>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from gymnázium, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.
In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.
In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.
“Sport – that was really my hobby. Skiing, and later on I did windsurfing. I built by myself the whole board, so we were doing some windsurfing on the lakes. Other than that, sport was the big escape for people. Camping, going out to the forest, because everybody was leaving the city and going to – they called it a chalupa [cottage]– and going to villages and escaping from the city.”
“In 1962 we went to Vienna and I was nine years old, and when you crossed the border – everything in Czechoslovakia was kind of drab, gray and brown – we went to Austria and it was like a different world. The gas stations with the colorful flags and colors everywhere and new cars. I think that left a huge impression on me. [I thought] ‘I want to live here,’ you know? And Coca-Cola and fries! Eating fries was like ‘Wow.’ It was amazing. That definitely had a big impression on me. It was just once. The funny thing was we had really little pocket money, so we were traveling in Austria by hitchhiking on the highway. It was pretty cool. My dad, he spoke German fluently, because he was born there. Some people let us sleep in their houses. It was great. It was so special.”
“It was amazing. Suddenly you can read. There were new magazines, every month, coming out; new information. People were talking on the radio and on TV about what happened in the ‘50s in the Czech Republic, when they executed any opposition and [had] the show trials. I was 15 years old, but it had a great impression on me; I just hated communists. Then the Russians came in August, and it took like two years to break everybody, and that’s my disappointment with the Czech nation, that we gave up way too easily I think. I’m not saying that we should fight, because we didn’t have a chance, but what happened was people renounced their opinion really quickly. And I think it was much worse in the ‘70s maybe than in the ‘50s, although there were no executions or anything like that. But it was like the dark ages, culturally and morally. Yeah, I think the ‘70s was a really bad time, and when we saw the movie about Milos Forman [What doesn’t kill you…], he was talking about it and he said ‘There was no hope; it will be there forever.’ But 1968 was just amazing. It was so refreshing and everything.”
“We boarded the ship to Venice and we had a big luggage – for a one-day trip to Venice! And everyone was looking at us and, honestly, I was scared. I was really scared. Because you don’t know what to expect, you are leaving everything behind you, and so I didn’t enjoy this sailing across the sea too much. We got to Venice and they said ‘You from Czechoslovakia, there’s one gate and everybody else goes to the other gate,’ and they don’t even open the [other] passports, like Dutch and German; they just went through. And I felt like ‘That’s the reason I have to leave’ because it was so humiliating. I felt justification, like ‘I have to leave this.’ But the Italians told me, ‘You don’t need, for a one-day trip, this huge luggage, so put it back on the ship.’ Another thing, they left our passports on the ship. So I said ‘Ok’ and I took the bag with money and laminated [documents] inside and I went to the toilet, and I had a little pocket knife and I was ripping this bag to get the money and stuff out. I was so scared, but I got it out.
“So we went to Venice and we asked for asylum, and they said ‘No, don’t do it now. Come back when you are coming back and then you can do it.’ So we are wandering across Venice and we went to St. Mark’s Piazza and there were all these tourists having a great time, and we were kind of desperate. So we went back, but we didn’t have our passports, so one Italian guy offered to go to the ship to pick up the passports and some luggage, but he brought the luggage of some other person, so it was a mess; it was complicated. And after that, the Italians took us to the police station, they did a short interview with us, and they gave us tickets to Latina, which was a refugee camp close to Rome.”
“Our sponsors were a group of people from the United Methodist Church in North Carolina, in Raleigh, and it was just a group of fantastic people. Me and Zuzana, my ex, we are not religious people. I wouldn’t say we are atheist; I believe in something spiritual, but I am not necessarily Catholic or Baptist. But these people, they saw one paper with a really bad photo of us, and they decided ‘We want to sponsor these people.’ When we got to the airport, one of them took us to his home; we stayed there for two days; they found an apartment for us. They paid for an apartment for us for six months, they paid for our insurance, they gave us a car, they provided furniture for our whole apartment. Everything. The furniture, every piece was different, but who cares? And when we told this to our friends and relatives in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t believe it. They said ‘What do you they want for it?’ I said ‘Nothing. They want to help.’”
“I know people that went back right away, but I never had any intention to go back because I was so impressed with Americans, with their hospitality, and how they accepted us. That’s the major difference, I feel. And I’ve had big arguments with Czech people about like ‘Be proud that you are Czech,’ and I said ‘You know what, this is my homeland.’ I was treated so well here and when I go back I just don’t feel it. So no, I never had any desire to go back.”
Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.
]]>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.
Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.
“In 1948, when the communists finally took over in Czechoslovakia, people were not accepting it very well, they didn’t want it. Because first of all, people were losing their own property, they didn’t own anything. And my father thought everything belongs to everybody – you couldn’t be having more than I do, or I shouldn’t be having more than you do – we all should have the same. And his own sisters, who lived in a different village, Dubovany, by Piešťany, his own sisters didn’t want to accept that people have to leave their property or something and let Communists run it. And he went over there to talk to his sisters to sign, they had some farmland. My aunt had a small amount of farmland, and my other aunt, and he didn’t feel that they should own that – they should all own it and all together work. So he was very, very strict about it, he would talk and say ‘No, you have to agree, it’s going to be a better life for you, I guarantee you’.
“He had really good ideas, and those ideas which I heard, which he told me, I liked them, because I felt yeah, everybody should… there shouldn’t be hungry people, there shouldn’t be poor people, everybody should have a little piece of something, everybody should have free school, free health program. And that’s what communists promised. So that’s how he believed it.
“Until, I believe, after we left, in the late seventies – he died in 1976. After 1968, it was that Prague Spring and everything, and things were changing. And he went outside, in the city, in Bratislava, and he sees these big shots, these communist leaders talking and being rich, suddenly they were rich, loaded with money and he would say – later on I found out, he never said anything to me, because we were over here – ‘Now something is wrong! Because this is not how I wanted. I wanted to have everything equal, this is not equal.’”
“It was a small village, farmland, there were about 300 population, that’s it. And that teacher who was working with me – her name was Rosie, Ružena, Rosie – she got me involved with the people. We had a drama club, we had the kids involved in pionieri, that was kids… I was a Pioneer when I was in sixth or fifth grade or something! And sväzáci, that was a teenagers’ club, they wore blue shirts, so we were involved with them. With the drama club we put on some play, that was a teacher’s job in the farmland or villages, the teacher has to do that. And because of that, somebody came up with the idea of ‘Why don’t you become a Communist?’ So that woman, that Rosie said ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want to be!’ She was single, 36 years old, she didn’t want to be. I wanted to be because, I think it was something I wanted to prove to my father, or I wanted him to be proud of me or whatever. I thought that he would be proud.
“And when I told him I was asked to be a Communist Party member, first you are on a waiting list for about a year, and then you are promoted, a full-blown… He looked at me and he says to me ‘Wait a minute! Do you want to go because you believe it, or do you just want to go because you think it’s not time to do it?’ I said ‘No, I want to believe it.’ He said ‘Alright then, you have to live by that!’
“So, I lived by that except one thing: I never claimed that I don’t believe in God. That was my private thing. When somebody asked me the question ‘How are you doing with your view on God and religion?’ I said ‘I’m still working on it.’ That was my answer. That was the only thing that I kept with me, I always believed in God. Because I thought, that has nothing to do with it, communism and God. God is taking care of even communist people.”
“I know my husband one time brought some radio, it was about midnight, we were listening to something, but we called it propaganda. I didn’t believe that. I said ‘Yeah, they tell you anything they want to.’ We say in Slovak ‘keď vtáčka lapajú, pekne mu spievajú’ – did you ever hear that? ‘If you want to catch the bird then sing to him.’ So I thought, this is a nice, nice, speech, but that’s not my idea… When my husband brought up the idea of leaving Czechoslovakia, I said to him ‘You know what, why don’t you go, because I know some people, older people, men went to the United States and made money and then supported their wives, sent for their wives. Why don’t you go?’ And he says ‘Well, I think I have some place a marriage license, and on the marriage license you’re in my name. So, that makes no sense, me going without you. We all go, or nobody goes.’”
“My father, because he had contact with everything, he knew what was going on. He said to my husband, ‘You know what, probably you are going to be called to service, because Cuba is happening, and a lot of soldiers are being called and sent to protect the country. Probably you are going to be called too.’ And my husband says ‘Dad, why me? I already did my… I am not like a regular soldier!’ And my father says ‘Well, it can happen.’ We got home and about 10:00 in the evening somebody knocked on the door, a man, in a uniform, and he says to my husband ‘You have to report at the airport tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning.’ And that’s when reality hit me. I had a two year-old daughter, and he left in the morning, he went to the airport, and then, at the end of the day I didn’t hear from him, and it wasn’t like here where everybody has phones. We didn’t have a phone, I was living with my mother in law, she didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a phone. So, the following day, I went to a phone booth, and I called the army reserve or somebody, and I asked about my husband, and they said to me ‘Oh, you know what, súdružka, you don’t have to worry about it, but we can’t tell you where he is, it’s a secret.’ And I didn’t know anything. So, a week went by, I didn’t know anything, and then about maybe ten days later, he called me and he said that he is in Trenčín – I don’t know how many miles it is from Bratislava – he’s in Trenčín, he’s with the army, he is safe, and he is working as a driver. He was driving some big surgeon or big shot in the army, driving him from one place to another. That’s about it. And I said ‘Are you coming to visit or something?’ And he said ‘No, I can’t even talk to you for long, I have ten minutes only.’”
“It was a beautiful day and I took my kids to play outside. We had an apartment building with a little kind of playground; there was a sandbox, trees and a line for hanging your laundry. And I used to, in those days, I used to wash diapers by hand, we didn’t have disposable ones, it wasn’t that good a time like now. So I took those diapers and I hung them on a line and my youngest one was in a stroller sleeping, his afternoon nap. And a helicopter was flying. I was in the building already, and then I heard people, I went on the balcony and I saw people on the other balcony screaming ‘Take the children in! Take the children in!’ So, the helicopter was shooting, I don’t know at whom. So I ran downstairs, a couple of people helped me get the kids inside, and then we find in a couple of diapers holes. I wish I saved those diapers those days!
“I’m sure they were not shooting at the children, probably because it was the center of the city, probably some commotion was going on on one of those streets and one little bullet got lost or something. So I had another reason, I’m not going stay here, I’m moving out of here, I’m going to live with grandma. Because I thought in a village, it’s nice and quiet, what is the city offering you? Nothing!
“Then, later on that afternoon, my husband – I sent him to get the bread, he came home without bread – he says ‘The stores are empty, no bread!’ I said ‘I need milk for my youngest one.’ Over there for babies, you need a prescription for baby milk, you can’t buy it just like that. And it’s also only in drugstores or pharmacies, they were equipped with the milk for babies. So I said, ‘I’m going to get milk for Lubo,’ so I went down the street, I lined up in front of the pharmacy, I’m standing in line, and they say to me ‘We need a birth certificate, we are not giving you this milk, because anybody can come with a prescription. And we have a shortage, look at the shelves, they are empty.’ So I went back home, walked about ten minutes, meantime helicopters were flying and shooting, we were hiding in one house, in a building, we ran. The whole street, everybody ran into the building. They were shooting, nobody got hurt. I got home, I got the birth certificate, I went back to the pharmacy. No more milk.”
“In 1969, when we left Slovakia, it was secret, nobody knew about it, not even my father, because my father would call the police and lock us up. He wouldn’t allow it – he said it later on. He said if he knew we wanted to leave, he would have taken precautions so that we won’t leave, even if we went to jail. Yes, he was very upset. Because he was a devoted communist, and he thought he had raised me the same way, and how can I leave my country?
“And he wrote us letters, kind of mean letters, and in those letters he said ‘I don’t think you have an idea what is waiting for you, life out of your country is very hard. I remember my life, it wasn’t easy, and it’s not going to be easy for you, especially because you have four children.’ And ‘Why did you do that? Did I raise you the wrong way, or did I make a mistake raising you? You left this country, you left your family! You shouldn’t do that.’ And he was very upset, and my husband wrote him a letter and apologized to him for me, saying he shouldn’t be mad at me, because it was not me who was doing that, it was my husband who wanted to leave, and I just followed him because I was his wife. So I don’t think my father ever made peace with me leaving.”
“The language was really tough, my husband went to Berlitz, so he picked up quick, he was talking all day. The kids, they didn’t have problems at all. My daughter, she was a fourth grader when we left Czechoslovakia, when we got over here they put her in second grade, because they said that’s where she should pick up English. About three months later, she went to the principal, that was a nun, and she said to her ‘I think I speak good enough English, I want to go to fourth grade.’ And they transferred her to fourth grade. So she picked up really good, she didn’t have problems, my boys didn’t have problems. My problem was I didn’t want to talk to anybody, when we were living in that town house, I would go outside, my kids were playing and the next door neighbor would talk to me, I turned I went inside because I didn’t understand her. So, I watched TV, there were soaps, and I would watch them and I said ‘Every day it’s the same people!’ I didn’t understand what was said, I didn’t understand when is the story and when is the advertising, the commercials! I didn’t know, I couldn’t.
“Then my kids were watching a lot of kids’ shows and I would watch with them. And you know what show? Sesame Street! Sesame Street helped me… I watched Big Bird ‘one, two…’ and that’s how I learned English from the TV.”
Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.
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Marie Cada was born in the small village of Komorovice, southeastern Bohemia, in 1919. She became an orphan at a young age and spent her early teenage years looking after the family farm with her brother Václav. Marie went to school in nearby Humpolec and then trained to become a teacher at a religious college in Kutná Hora. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1948, she was working at a three-teacher school in Petrohrad, near Prague. Her boss, the school’s principal, had strong anti-communist views. He was let go and Marie was asked whether she would take over his position. Her fiancée, Václav Cada, discouraged her from working for the communists and urged her to escape with him. The pair left Czechoslovakia in March, 1948. They were married in Dieburg refugee camp in Germany in the spring of that year.
Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.
“You know, on a farm, you kind of take care of yourself partly and partly the family. So, there was a time – my sister also died fairly young – there was one time when my middle brother Václav and I lived on the farm alone. So we kind of tried to cook. I was only about 12, and so after father passed away [Václav] was a brick-layer, that was his trade and he made good money, but there was nobody to take care of the farm so he came home and I was just school aged. That was about two years we did things like that, and then he got married, because he wasn’t even married at that time, he was about 20 years old. Well, every family goes through some difficult times.”
“Us young teachers were drafted – women teachers were drafted – there were about twenty of us and we were moved, all of us, to a small town, and our job was to repair German uniforms. It was like an assembly line, there were seamstresses who worked on sewing machines, and those of us who didn’t have sewing machines, we just sewed, you know, whatever. And sometimes there was even blood on these uniforms still, because they had taken it off a dead soldier. But then they decided that this was not enough. They sent us women teachers back to school and young men were drafted.”
“On the way, my husband had an idea that it would be good if he loaned part of his uniform to those three civilians who wanted to escape also. So on the way to Karlovy Vary, not too far away, we stopped the car and we got out and the men, one after another, were putting part of the uniform on. When we finally all assembled back in the car it looked like four policemen and me, and I sat on the floor in the back of the car so I wouldn’t be very visible, you know. We were leaving Karlovy Vary, and at the edge of the city, two policemen stopped us – ‘Stop!’ And oh my gosh, now what? That was bad. But my husband was kind of – he was always that way – quick thinking, you know. And he said ‘We’re going to Oldřichov’, because he knew the terrain. He worked there, on the border, you know.”
“There was a creek, and there was the border. And so then the terrain went kind of up. And so we ran and ran through that creek and then we thought ‘Oh, now we are free, we are free!’ But then we heard ‘tat tat tat tat’. They were shooting after us. Czech people were shooting after us! And it was a German policeman, a border patrol man, who saved us. He waved to them to go back, because we were on his land. And so, it is really an irony, that three years before that, Germans were our enemies, and then a German saved us from Czechs!”
“They told my husband that he has to go to the police station, that they want to talk to him. This was Friday, towards the evening, and my husband didn’t want to do until the following day, but my brother said ‘No, you don’t make your own decision, they wanted you today so you have to go’. So he went. And he was told at the police station that he is not welcome there and that he has to leave in 24 hours. In other words, they threw him out. So, the following day, we had to be at the airport. They took him away and we had to wait. We waited and we waited and they never brought him back.
“I remember then when we walked away from the airport, somebody was watching us, they walked behind us. We went that Monday, that following Monday, to the American Embassy to tell them what happened, that they had taken my husband away and we didn’t know where he was. They asked if we had seen a plane leaving west or east. We hadn’t seen a plane even, when he left. So that last week we didn’t know where he was, we didn’t have any idea if he was at home. Because at the embassy they told us that cases happened that they took refugees like we were to Russia and nobody ever saw them again. So we were scared, you know. But luckily they just took my husband and kicked him out of the country and sent him home. So he was here when we came home. So that was kind of an experience.”
Luke started fourth grade and says that he was a good student despite the language barrier; he became fluent within one year. After graduating from high school (one year early), Luke began work as a free-lance designer and photographer. He received an associate degree in art from the College of DuPage and a BFA from Northern Illinois University. Luke has had a successful career free-lancing for, among other clients, Enesco Corporation. He also works in real estate and as a photographer. Luke’s mother has also become a successful artist and designer during her years in the United States. In 1993, Luke returned to the Czech Republic for the first time. He calls this experience ‘phenomenal’ and is especially interested in medieval Czech history and architecture, and collects artifact replicas and antiques on his travels. Luke says, in recent years, he has made more of an effort to ‘deepen [his] roots’ and has been spending more time with the Chicago Czech community and keeping up his language skills. He calls his mother’s decision to move to the United States a ‘blessing’ and, today, lives in Naperville, Illinois.
]]>Luke Vanis was born in Prague in 1971. His mother, Dagmar, was a high school math and art teacher and a freelance designer, and his father, Leo, was an art professor at Charles University. Luke’s parents divorced when he was young and his mother remarried shortly thereafter. Luke’s earliest memories are of walking to his grandmother’s house with his younger brother, Andy (born Ondřej). He also remembers enjoying time spent at his family’s country house. In 1980, Luke’s mother arranged a vacation for the family in Yugoslavia; once they were there, however, she immediately went to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and asked for asylum. Luke, his brother, mother and stepfather were sent to Austria, where they spent three months in a small village with other refugees. In November 1980, sponsored by family friends who lived in the Chicago suburbs, Luke moved with his family to the United States. After a short time living with their sponsors, Luke’s mother and stepfather found jobs restoring furniture and moved to Berwyn where they rented a basement apartment from another Czech family. Luke says that the Czech community of Berwyn helped his mother feel settled and helped the family a great deal.
Luke started fourth grade and says that he was a good student despite the language barrier; he became fluent within one year. After graduating from high school (one year early), Luke began work as a free-lance designer and photographer. He received an associate degree in art from the College of DuPage and a BFA from Northern Illinois University. Luke has had a successful career free-lancing for, among other clients, Enesco Corporation. He also works in real estate and as a photographer. Luke’s mother has also become a successful artist and designer during her years in the United States. In 1993, Luke returned to the Czech Republic for the first time. He calls this experience ‘phenomenal’ and is especially interested in medieval Czech history and architecture, and collects artifact replicas and antiques on his travels. Luke says, in recent years, he has made more of an effort to ‘deepen [his] roots’ and has been spending more time with the Chicago Czech community and keeping up his language skills. He calls his mother’s decision to move to the United States a ‘blessing’ and, today, lives in Naperville, Illinois.
“It was a subdivision of a bunch of condos and then we had a forest preserve behind the house, so I would love to go out there and ride a bike and go fishing and cause trouble and run around. It was a good place. I guess we spent a lot of time in the country as well. My parents had a cottage, and it was an old, old 1600s inn that was converted to a house, so it was very historic. It was two stories, maybe six rooms. You burnt coal in the bottom and you went out in the back and they had the cellar, so you could go down into this big hill that was dug out where the cellar was and you pumped the water by hand. My parents were remodeling it and rehabbing, so they put in all new hardwood floors and all that kind of stuff but when we escaped it was neglected, so when we came back to visit it was ransacked. We used to have a suit of armor in there; apparently somebody broke in and stole that, which is so sad. I remember when we went there last time, they had a thing that you pump the water with and I took the handle off and brought it home as a souvenir, so I have something from my old house.”
“What she really wanted to do or accomplish when she left the Czech Republic, is she wanted freedom. She wanted to be able to live her life and to do the job she wants to do to be able to provide a better life for me and my brother, and I think that was the biggest choice in her deciding to leave – to provide a better life for me and Andy because she just felt like we were stifled there, both in the schooling aspect of things and political. Just how the country was run, it was like you don’t have any ambition, you don’t have any drive to become a better person, a wiser, more mature individual. It’s so difficult out there to be able to make something of yourself, to be able to stand out and live your life, and she thought the freedom allowed in America would be a great, great asset for he and I to be a part of.”
“We got sent to Austria. So we had to go to Austria and we stayed there for three months at a little village, a very small tiny town, just very picturesque and beautiful. You had rolling hills; you had the meadows; you had the big trees in the back. It was so pristinely kept that people actually mowed the lawn inside the forest. It was just so bizarre. It was a little German cottage resort town we were in and there was a whole bunch of other immigrants there, a lot of them from the Czech Republic. So my mom knew a little bit of English before she left, so she was teaching the other people how to speak English, or at least to the best of her ability, so that was pretty cool and everyone enjoyed having her there. The government sponsored and paid for the lodging and food, but, as far as clothes and necessities like that, we didn’t have any additional funds for that, so people donated old chairs and they were made out of canvas, and so my would take the canvases and cut them down, she’d make her own frames, she’d buy some paints and then she’d go out in the countryside and she’d paint pictures of the countryside – cows, rolling hills, meadows, old farmhouses and just beautiful scenery, and then she would sell them locally at art fairs and to people that lived down there. She’d make a few extra bucks to provide to her family. So it was kind of an adventure.”
“I guess I didn’t grasp the concept of what a refugee means. Nowadays, when you look at refugees, they have refugee camps and they have tents and they have tens of thousands of people that are fleeing war-torn, disastrous areas, and I feel like we got so lucky not to be a part of that kind of refugee evacuation. We left the country for political reasons, and that’s not to say that bad things weren’t happening there, but we didn’t have bombs blowing up around us; we didn’t have the threat of hazardous biochemical weapons; we didn’t have people running in with AK-47s and shooting at us and things like that. So to be able to spend three or so months in Austria in a little quiet quaint village… I mean, we went to school there. I got to learn how speak a little bit of German; I used to be able to count to ten in German from what I remember. It was almost like a little mini-vacation for us because we didn’t really know what was expected or what would be going on in our life. But I wouldn’t say it was a negative experience by any means. I would say it was definitely positive and something that helped us grow and see a little different part of the world and enjoy what we had and also where we’re going and what we’re going to have because, like I said, if you see the worst in the world then you can really learn to appreciate what you have. Happiness isn’t about what you have; it’s about valuing what you have.”
“Once I got out of college was the first time I went back to the Czech Republic. It was a gift from my stepdad to be able to go down and visit, so my mom and I went down there for about two, two and a half weeks. That’s the first time I went back and it was just majestic to be able to be in a place that was so absolutely gorgeous with the stained glass and the cathedrals and the castles and the armor and the knights and the winding streets leading to nowhere. The signage on there and the cobbled streets. It was just historically and aesthetically and architecturally a phenomenal place to visit.”
“I would like to say how much of a blessing it has been to be able to move to the U.S., to have that opportunity, because I think my parents, my mom especially at the time, took a huge risk leaving a country that she wouldn’t be allowed back in or, if she were to come back, she would be thrown in jail. To take a risk of the unknown, to move to a place that you don’t know the language of and you know two people in the whole country – it’s so strong, so adventurous, so kind-hearted for her to want to do that for us. I think that she’s an extremely intelligent, very strong woman to be able to pick up and leave and go to a country where everything is new, from the language to social interactions to work to habits – the driving is different out here, the locations, everything. And I think for her to sacrifice comfort and complacency and her friends, who she never got to see again, is just amazing.”
“What I would like to think it feels like to be an American would be that you are here and you are reliant on yourself and you are available to make whatever life you would like to make for yourself. I feel that if you work hard, if you make the right decisions and you’re disciplined, if you strive for a goal, you have an opportunity here – pretty much more than any other country in the world – to be able to achieve that goal. The things in your way, typically, here are very minimal. And that’s not to say everybody can achieve a goal; I don’t think a lot of people here, unfortunately, have a goal to strive for. I don’t think a lot of people here have dreams. A common thing in immigrants, but an uncommon thing in regular Americans, is to be able to appreciate the freedom and the opportunity that you have to make something of yourself, to make a good life for yourself, to make some kind of a mark, to make your life count for something for yourself, for your family, for the next generation and for society in general. I guess I would like to see more of that; I would like to see people appreciate what they have an opportunity to be able to do here.”