Vladimir Cvicela
<p>Vladimir Cvicela was born in Kl’ačany, Slovakia in 1946. He came from a farming family and says that, after school, he would chase rabbits with dogs and play hockey with the other village children. Growing up, Vladimir wanted to become an electrician, but began working as a repairman on the local collective farm instead. When he was 19 years old, Vladimir was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and sent to České Budějovice, where he trained as a tank driver. He says his tank unit was disbanded two years later, however, following the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vladimir spent his last year of military service helping farmers in the Šumava region of the Czech Republic. Following his time in the military, Vladimir returned to work at the collective farm in Kl’ačany. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969 when he visited Vienna on a bus trip organized by his employer from which he did not return. He says that he was approached by two Slovak emigrants in the Austrian capital who gave him information about how he too could claim asylum. Vladimir spent five months in Austria, where he found a job as a glazier’s assistant and started learning English. He came to Cleveland in March 1970, where he was met at the airport by two of his distant relatives who had also recently arrived in the city.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir says he almost immediately found a job in Cleveland, at the city’s Sherwin-Williams Paint plant. He worked at the company for 12 years until he was laid off and found employment at Joseph & Feiss tailors. Outside of work, Vladimir was a member of the Cleveland Slovak soccer team, where he played goalkeeper. He met his wife Maria in 1980 when she came to Cleveland from Kolačkov, Slovakia to visit her sister, Ludmila Anderko. The two were married at Sts. Cyril & Methodius Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, later that same year. Vladimir and Maria have two children who were raised understanding Slovak and as members of the Lucina Slovak Folklore Ensemble. Vladimir says it was ‘important’ for him that his children maintained Slovak traditions and the language, and that he is happy his children’s involvement in dance troupe Lucina has taken the family back to Slovakia on several occasions. Today, Vladimir lives with his wife Maria in Parma, Ohio, and is a grandfather. In his retirement, he maintains several rental properties around the city of Cleveland.</p>
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Valentin Turansky
<p>Valentin Turansky was born in Stupava, Slovakia, in 1938. His father, Matuš, worked as a farmer, while his mother, Maria, stayed at home and raised Valentin and his seven siblings, of whom he was the oldest. In 1951, his father was arrested after refusing to incorporate his smallholding into the local co-operative farm. He spent six months in prison, and was then sentenced to a further six months of forced labor, which he spent working in a coal mine. Upon his release in 1952, the Turansky family decided to leave the country. They crossed the Slovak border – as part of a group of 15 people – into Austria. Valentin says the group hit a trip wire on their journey across the border, which detonated a large number of flares but, he says, there was no response from the border guards on duty, which he attributes to the large size of the group.</p><p> </p><p>In Austria, the Turansky family stayed in a refugee camp in Wels for 18 months. Around the time his family immigrated to Australia in 1953, Valentin went to Belgium, where he attended college and gained a qualification in printmaking. A keen soccer player, Valentin played for an amateur team in Brussels upon finishing school and moving to the Belgian capital. He joined his family in Australia at the beginning of 1958 and became an Australian citizen in 1959. There, he started work at the Dunlop shoe factory. He subsequently returned to his trade and worked as a printer for the Cumberland Newspaper Group in Sydney. In 1963, Valentin traveled to America and settled in Chicago. He found a job in a print shop in the city’s Printers Row district. In 1965, he married his wife, Margaret.</p><p> </p><p>Valentin became a U.S. citizen in 1968. He continued to play soccer for the city’s Slovak A.A. (Athletic Association) Soccer Club, which he says enjoyed a good deal of success at that time. Today, Valentin lives with his wife, Margaret, in Prospect Heights, Illinois.</p>
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Savoy Horvath
<p>Savoy Horvath was born in 1933 in Brno, Moravia. Six years later, his family moved to Hradec Králové where his father worked at a German airport as an interpreter and accountant for the Nazis. Savoy’s father was also the leader of a Czech resistance group called 777. Immediately following the War, Savoy’s father was given management of an ESKA bicycle factory in Cheb, a city in the Sudeten region close to the German border. Savoy remembers being active in politics as a young teenager and, as a supporter of the Czech National Socialist (or Beneš) Party, clashing with his peers who held communist views. Savoy went to trade school and began an apprenticeship at his father’s factory, where he became friends with a number of Yugoslav workers. In 1948, he helped a couple of them across the border illegally and, after one escapee changed his mind, Savoy says he was in danger of arrest. Convinced that he must leave the country immediately, Savoy crossed the border into Germany in April 1948.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3499" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609044934im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-211.jpg" alt="Savoy Horvath" width="300" height="333" /></p><p>After time spent in a series of refugee and holding camps, Savoy joined the French Foreign Legion. Because he was only 15, he lied about his age. As a legionnaire, he traveled to North Africa for training and then to French Indochina, before deciding to leave the service. He returned to Germany where he was sent to Aglasterhausen Children’s Center and then to Bad Aibling Children’s Village. Savoy recalls the 10 months he spent at Bad Aibling as extremely enjoyable; he started a Scout troop, made many lifelong friends, and met his wife, Nadia. Savoy’s uncle signed an affidavit which allowed him to come to the United States in December 1949. He lived on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York until settling down in the Chicago area with his parents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1949 (his father had been working for the OSS, collecting information and escorting Czechs across the border). Savoy and Nadia married in 1953 and they had four daughters. He became an American citizen in 1956. He worked as a sheet metal fabricator for the Ford Motor Company for 32 years, and spent 12 years in the Illinois National Guard.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Savoy is a member of the Society for Czechoslovak Philately and has traveled back to the Czech Republic several times in this capacity. He also has one of the largest collection of letters sent to and from Czechoslovak labor camps during the 1950s, and was interviewed for an exhibit at the Museum of Exile in Brno. Upon retirement, Savoy built a house in Readstown, Wisconsin, where he now lives with his second wife.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Rudy Solfronk
<p> </p><p>Rudy Solfronk was born in Žinkovy in southern Bohemia in 1935. He lived with his parents and his brother, Václav, in a house on the edge of town until his father bought a farm elsewhere in the same region. Rudy attended school in Hartmanice. He has early memories of WWII, in particular, of American planes flying over the region and, towards the end of the War, interacting with American and Czech soldiers. In December 1948, officials arrived at Rudy’s house to arrest his father who, Rudy says, was reluctant to give up his farm. Rudy’s father was in the woods near the border, and after being warned by a friend not to return home, he crossed into Germany and made his way to Murnau refugee camp. The following summer, Rudy and his mother and brother also joined him there. Rudy remembers having ‘a lot of fun’ in the camp, as he joined a Boy Scout troop and made a lot of friends. Although most children at the camp were taught by Czech and Slovak teachers, Rudy’s father insisted upon him attending a German school to learn the language.</p><p> </p><p>In January 1951, Rudy and his family arrived at Ellis Island. Although they had been sponsored by a Catholic convent in Pennsylvania, Rudy says his family was released from their obligation to the convent and stayed in New York City. His father began working in a sausage factory and his mother found work as a seamstress, while Rudy and his brother attended school. He remembers receiving help from a German teacher, as he did not know English very well. After about six months, Rudy’s father was offered a job in Cicero, Illinois, maintaining a building owned by the CSA (Czechoslovak Society of America). They moved into an apartment in this building, which also had a movie theater, shops, offices, and a meeting hall. Rudy finished high school in Cicero and went to community college for one year before starting a career in printing. He worked in a print shop part-time for the last two years of school and, because of this experience, was able to secure an apprenticeship. After working at several different places, he got a job at the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>, where became a foreman in the print shop; he stayed there for over 30 years. Rudy also served for eight years in the Army Reserves and received U.S. citizenship through this service.</p><p> </p><p>Rudy and his wife are active in the Czech community around Chicago, regularly attending events, picnics, and dances. He has been back to the Czech Republic several times. Today, he lives in Downers Grove, Illinois.</p>
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Peter Vodenka
<p> </p><p>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 ‘<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Tramping" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tramp</a>,’ 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.</p><p> </p><p>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 <em>Journey for Freedom</em>. Today, he runs a construction company and still enjoys outdoor pursuits, such as hunting in the Black Hills.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://www.journeyforfreedom.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peter’s website</a></p>
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Paulina Porizkova
<p>Paulina Porizkova was born in Olomouc in 1965 and grew up in the Moravian town of Prostějov. Her parents, Anna and Jiří, left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and settled in Sweden. Paulina remained with her maternal grandparents in Prostějov and says that her time with them was ‘delightful.’ Paulina’s parents, meanwhile, were attempting to reunite their family and gained attention in Sweden for their actions. After three years had gone by, they planned to ‘kidnap’ Paulina after flying into Czechoslovakia with the help of Swedish pilots. On her way to Prostějov, Paulina’s mother (who was traveling on a fake passport) was detained for speeding and arrested when her identity was revealed. Because she was several months pregnant, Paulina’s mother was released to her parents’ house and remained under house arrest. Paulina says that her father, who had remained in Sweden, had managed to keep their case in the media, which put pressure on the Czechoslovak government. In 1973, Paulina, her mother, and her brother were allowed to leave the country.</p>
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<p>Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.</p>
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<p>Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.</p>
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Mila Rechcigl
<p> </p><p>Mila Rechcigl was born in Mladá Boleslav in 1930. His father (also named Miloslav) was a miller who became the youngest member of parliament in Czechoslovakia when he was elected as a representative of the Agrarian Party in 1935. Mila was raised in and around the family mill in Chocnějovice and remembers traveling by horse and cart to nearby Mladá Boleslav in order to sell flour in town. During WWII, Mila says his father was unable to continue his political work, but became president of the Czech Millers Association and was active in the resistance group Obrana národa [Defense of the Nation]. Mila himself remembers people traveling to the mill from Prague to buy flour there on the black market.</p><p> </p><p>Between 1945 and 1948, a period which he refers to as a time of ‘illusionary democracy,’ Mila attended <em>gymnázium</em> in Mladá Boleslav. Following the Communist coup in 1948, his father escaped Czechoslovakia when a warrant was issued for his arrest. Mila also tried to leave the country, but was caught at the border and jailed for a number of months. Mila says he was released as there was an amnesty announced which affected those legally considered to be minors, and he was allowed to return to <em>gymnázium</em>, though he received a <em>dvojka z mravů</em> – a poor grade for personal conduct. In 1949, Mila tried again to leave Czechoslovakia and this time succeeded. He was reunited with his father at Ludwigsburg refugee camp in West Germany, where he stayed until February 1950. Mila says he never saw his mother, Marie, again. In the late 1950s, she was imprisoned for taking grain from the Rechcigl mill (which had been nationalized) and feeding it to her chickens. She received a prison sentence of ten years, though was released after six. Mila came to New York City with his father in 1950. The pair’s first job was at a small jewelry factory, making earrings and bracelets using Czech glass beads. After a couple of years, Mila’s father started working for Radio Free Europe in the city, while Mila himself received a Free Europe scholarship to attend Cornell University. He gained his BS, MNS, and PhD degrees there, specializing in biochemistry, nutrition, physiology and food science.</p><p> </p><p>Mila worked for the National Institute of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and then the State Department, where he became chief of the Research and Institutional Grants division. His involvement with the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) dates back to 1960 when he became the secretary of the society’s Washington, D.C. chapter. He was president of the international organization between 1974 and 1978 and again between 1994 and 2006. One of his proudest achievements was the establishment of the biannual SVU World Congress, which began in Washington, D.C. in 1962 and continues to this day. Today, Mila lives with his wife of 58 years, Eva, in Rockville, Maryland.</p><p><a href="/web/20170609150111/http://www.ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/e-Rechcigl_Final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Full transcript of Mila Rechcigl’s interview</a></p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609150111/http://www.authorhouse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000419564" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Mila’s personal memoir ‘Czechmate: From Bohemian Paradise to American Haven’</a></p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609150111/http://www.rozhlas.cz/svobodne/kdobylkdo/_zprava/miloslav-rechcigl-1904-1973--866956" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Mila’s father Miloslav (in Czech)</a></p>
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Michal Tuavinkl
<p>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 <em>gymnázium</em>, 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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Luke Vanis
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
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Ludmila Sujanova
<p>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s <em>chata</em> [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.</p><p> </p><p>In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.</p>
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