1
10
4
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/26ff161e406e64d5de40026832d257c6.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=XLbg2Z0lwI8x6wzWPHGf59Pf1P3ExqaTOdC8Rd0bYHWStWuGR6iBGiGBWtmBcWthHEJMOmFeqLXAKehoNBHMvzNfhC0byvdBgwVB7%7EtS-QSEyHobcMTQUfZjtejMc8Cbd4VUBube3Ijdo6cf3NCBe3cYIc0507FZGXT8IF2Nwv-uvvIbzDvu4y8tdoSMJX4AEuCkZgc%7EJNNyrCrC4%7EMqLHZhsbUXck86ySxfUL02xXmuZbKo2r6bgEtaxdU6kkvs83zr-U2NMNPlb%7EAz87%7EVZSplb57Pe3RCnR79hkIY6YUbGIbAVkGl5fUSwN5sTeMdvjUN7abSmot6BrKe4SIgMw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
9d9af03900feecee695732126b81e66d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Moving Back</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R7Xen0UpKN4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Well, it was the Depression, and my father – he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to raise the family here, that it would be easier in Slovakia. You know, you’ve got a little farm there, a little garden, so you can grow some of your own stuff. Or maybe, I don’t know, kill a chicken or maybe a rabbit. So, it was easier to be there than here. Here you’ve got to buy everything, so…”</p><h4>Sister</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qB-DI0GVyEw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My sister, she was working in the shoe factory, Bat’a – it was about 12 to 14 kilometers away from our village – they traveled on the train early in the morning (because at 7:00 in the morning they started to work in the factory already). So, my sister she worked there, and the poor, poor girl, she was only 17, and she got killed there, in the village where she was working. Not in the factory, but Russians – airplanes, two of them – came down and the train just pulled in the station and the people were getting off that train, like the workers and they heard a noise… So everybody was ducking wherever they could, so they were running, there was a hospital close-by, maybe about half a block from the train. So most of them were running there, because they had a basement and that’s where most of the people hide. So they were running there and my sister – she was one of the unluckies – there was another one that got killed too. She got shot. They didn’t throw a bomb there, they were just shooting a machine gun from the airplane, so they just came round a couple of time and that was it.”</p><h4>Bat'a Shoe Factory</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qOUz3ijOAzE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Like I said, they started work at 7:00, and you had to make sure you don’t miss the train, because it was pretty far to walk. I had to walk from the factory to our village once, because sometimes the trains were so loaded there was no room to go inside the train. A lot of times, a lot of us climbed up onto the roof and we were there. But you came home and you looked like a chimney sweep.”</p><h4>Soccer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GQLb3r_znjQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, they used to have a good soccer team and most of the time we used to go to the soccer game, because we had to do something before we got to know different things like… They used to have a place in churches, just about every church had some kind of little hall where we could have a stage play and, you know, one time one guy comes from a different place and we hadn’t met yet and we met him, then he had some other friends and he brought those friends over and so… And like I said, even during the winter we used to have indoor soccer, in Chicago Armory.”</p><h4>Slovak Athletic Association</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sUMkxERiA-0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When we first came and joined the club, so we used to rent places here and there, like a storefront. So finally, us younger guys we said ‘Don’t you think that it would be nice if we buy our own joint and have our own club?’ It takes some money, but you can get nothing without money, so anyhow…We talked about it more and more, so we got together and we used to pitch in. One guy would [lend] $100 and another guy $50 and, little by little, we accumulated enough for a down payment. The first club we bought, it was in Chicago on 27th and Hamlin. And like she [my wife] said, we always bought old buildings, no matter what they were – a church or an undertaker’s – and make it into a club! So that’s what we did there too. It used to be an undertaker’s, it used to be [a] church, and we converted it into a club, and so that was the beginning.</p><p>“Then finally we sold that too, because the neighborhood changed and so we were mostly living out further west, and so we bought – we started looking for a different joint – so I was in charge of looking for the place to buy. I used to have a plumbing store right next door to this building where there was an undertaker and it was like a double store. And so I went there and I talked to the daughter because I couldn’t talk to the parents, they were both dead already. I talked with her and she said ‘Well, I never thought of that to sell it, where am I going to live?’ I said ‘No problem! You can rent a place, any place you want!’ So that’s what she did, we talked more and talked more and I talked her into it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Joseph Kmet
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Joseph Kmet was born in Chicago in 1930 but moved back to the family home of Bystričany, northwestern Slovakia, with his parents and siblings before he was one year old. Joseph says his father, Ignác, was worried that the family would not have enough to eat in the United States during the Depression, and so decided to return to Czechoslovakia to farm the land the family owned instead. Joseph’s father returned to Chicago alone to work at Western Felt Works, and found himself cut off from his family with the outbreak of WWII.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph says the War was hard for his family, with his older sister shot dead in a raid on a train carrying her and other commuters to the nearby town of Partizánske (which was known at the time as Šimonovany). Following his sister’s death, Joseph says he was sent to work in her stead at the Bat’a shoe factory in Partizánske as some money was needed by the family, and he was now the oldest child. At the end of the War, the family was reunited and, after some discussion, it was decided that the Kmets would all resettle in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph left Czechoslovakia in October 1947. He took a train to Amsterdam, where he boarded a freighter which took him first to Havana, Cuba, and then Florida. Joseph says his family’s first home in Chicago was on Hamlin and 24th Street, which was a very Czech and Slovak neighborhood at the time. Joseph’s first job was at the Kimball Piano Factory; he subsequently worked at Florsheim Shoes and then retrained to become a plumber. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Korea for two years. Upon return, he married his wife Mary, with whom he has four children. Joseph was active in the Slovak League of America and is the former president of the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. He lived in Westchester, Illinois, with his wife Mary until his death in September 2011.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Bata
Bystricany
Child emigre
Community Life
Great Depression
Military service
Partizanske
Russians
Simonovany
Sports
World War II
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/2ae13f0503055c1e5b74a9cf888c9e5f.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=MwGzB8Hs1IKJnWVTEdWwxFw4kYOU%7EK66xzJn1UzLbhUheoJb1btyeQ2bRB6f%7Eb0CNwCRyrBrgP5pGkN0PBR0DBQZUBmjnrZwzyi8zOmKNpb6rOvGvnzkwrOxHb7BXH%7Ei%7EM%7EtB-wGFCoDAgyt48yYudCEfwBDfKX02n1b3DsthxjPGfHLG-ywIBYO%7EWgHhJQzEAWFBvcWWHkvI93FtbOV8DhY35D91e7%7EW-m2-9sjHcS9%7EUPXIys-11l8ouGvFiTo4pzg20DQkEsT305nn7IS2K78Q%7E0dCcRPo3JdjAEIEKiYEDpUTk3mLARkvRqOYN1kcWexQ7r81%7ERcf3RxecLs6A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
82a75d505cd817229c79d508e3dd6cbc
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/12500f261c32af46f9496af0658352b9.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=tf148tBXgyQjHRfwHznWe7hTOGnnkKW5DVTNQUUFZzzsSwhBqaNF%7Ef0Av0k6PTo9Mzb615KLBixfK1x-DME9cytBmkebd-L73ltNEzOrdCR3umu8bYF4rjSEZ7wd9NPN7Y4-aAFsoY%7Ej7lZKCitIkIrp2EerJ4g9-YWxr8MJax9BhRQ6J6LCTsKzRUYz2ye2xoZ74qWIyklXO-dkfkrnKnXXUTy%7E9qYDuyinESAs-YT%7EDYwzU3I%7EtSJyyT4S1-KayTePvvIotqKOB0hqn08T3oZjulBOxeh7T03wKBME%7EWOZU-BhED9GNFodKmcSO-SPm4z-h0O-xppAUAgujf7PRw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
51595652f86ae930ba8032adf7bff3f4
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/f5e984abccd781fae8d8ca05502b3bb8.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=stT53uH-hiKArURbiRdkAhx2VCjwjYJnkVEovxBuR5n5JGhdn3eAqOrlbDq0vyPlqn%7Ek-71joP6vD1DflmKcmbTYs5TliDWN18klBm1ne-VHiovZA87hVUICIVo2HqlcW4AcLRZJALv4uNYh5RRrolHlwFR6tmkJgPPUAKCJgYplEaxe7EL9e-ZJWRyqCBbO6oJO5bqpyRlb9tcqGsIMLU33yxn7vCWrQZPDKGANezekA44HDmi0Vfy-rT4YCUna81Bpw22u5ae1aTa1dxXgi49MxRX4ajOOEDT42SdXNa8PIsFrzMC%7EZZJUVtWQfuBSKKHDrtJ9V36ToDK-7KRubQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
db3f56dcc2ce2bb84fba0c32b835a8df
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/0fb695489b43f1f3e21eca3dafa33aa8.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=OMvCXU1hIFrzBHfiTgG80Lc9qSHVxIBDewDJvHS-U3B5dAdkaCVwogwk8vOJbbXtPTesda6gFvPmo9fpiNq%7EuljWSP%7E4BWUB9DiWh8lj4E-RntQvwZQOPPbkbcY9lIXyu-iBhRssBqDJfuo9LNAtaayFtR3kASHprPSltUI7DRYuhZrrMEoRsoDY4xl9068Ets27YN3IrYe9l1EtLAhDHZDsQjvk0NxbJOLeef-HqzC7nQI2c-K4zTmlcpBAOhI1F-4ZZwU0oz-3oSHdtfdW5Z0RnexIMTXPFaBMITenB7F2qhZ%7EVj6A61TJfUS5eSplio4DlX6XPYDRRzyaJmvG4Q__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
4a80c5e948bd2aebd3a1f0893ee9e47d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/83w-f2SmRwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Our mother, she was jailed twice, and she spent a long time in German jails, and during that time our maid was still with our family and also our grandmother, who came also from a family which was German speaking, so she was looking out for us and actually, it was our grandmother and our maid who saved us when our mother was taken prisoner, when she was in the jail. So, she saved us from going to be reeducated and re-assimilated into the German folks. Our grandmother went to the authorities and she said, when they wanted to take us away, she said ‘look, I am going to look after them, I am German and so I am going to bring them up in the proper frame of mind so don’t worry’ and this is how we were kind of saved.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5PkzIynDqbg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The Russians were very, very friendly, very nice. We just loved them, everybody threw flowers at them, because we were all allies, we just did not recognize… they were our brothers. And as a matter of fact, the first troops which came to Poděbrady, who stayed there, we were so friendly with them. In the evening, they used to dance kozáček and they used to sing and they used to play harmonicas and us kids, we just loved it. And they had the troops… they had women soldiers also and officers were women also and sometimes they even had kids – not their own kids, but somewhere in Ukraine or Poland they were abandoned, orphans, these kids – so they took them with them and they were moving with them. So for us it was all new and they would share their food with us because there was no food, it was a pretty bad situation. So, initially it was all very friendly, it turned 180 degrees later on.”</p><h4>Bravery</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ch3Zc7hKSEY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When the Germans were emptying some of the concentration camps, they were moving these Jews in open railroad cars during the winter time. And when these people, when they froze, their co-prisoners, they just threw them out of the railroad cars. And these guys, there were two guys, who simulated being dead. They were thrown out and they came through this Colonel Vaněk, they came also to the place where our POW, the Russian guy, came to [a hiding place made by the brothers inside one of the walls of their home].</p><p>“And as a matter of fact, before then, I don’t know if you have any experience of this, but kids when they are in their teens, 12, 14, everybody was playing clubs – so we had a club and our club, we dug a hole. Near our village, there was a little patch of woods and a sandpit, and in the sandpit there was a bunch of rabbits and these rabbits, they dig holes, and we enlarged one of the holes and made a kind of cave underneath, and it was our clubhouse. And as a matter of fact, in our clubhouse (because we did not have any place to keep our POWs) after we moved him out of our house, we moved him and these two Jewish ex-German prisoners; they were moved for a certain period to our clubhouse. So we kept them there. We were getting food to them also, because as kids we were not very obvious, we could carry the food and deliver it to them.</p><p>“And we have also, at that time through Poděbrady near the place we used to live, German military supply trains used to move and for example, they were moving fighter planes on these supply trains, on flatbed cars. So we went on these flatbed cars with hammers and so on, and we were damaging these fighter planes so that they could not be used elsewhere. But it was not that simple, because when they were moving these military freight supply trains, there was always anti-aircraft… there was the last car and the car right after the steam engine, they had cars with anti-aircraft guns and military guards. But these guys sometimes… either they were drunk or towards the end of the War, the discipline was not what it should have been, so they have not noticed or something and so we were able to do those things. And for these activities after the War we got this medal from Beneš.”</p><h4>Escape Plan</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1SFXmsfVkU0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was raining, it was freezing, it was snowing. We were wet, our navigation was pretty bad because things in East Germany were not what we thought they would be. We decided… especially Zbyňa [Zbyněk Janata] was nudging us to move quickly, and so we decided to carjack, do carjacking, get a car and move to Berlin on four wheels.</p><p>“On that occasion, Radek let his gun… because Zbyněk wanted to have a gun there so just, he let him have the gun and he, for no reason, just to scare people, he fired the gun. And other people traveling on the road, which was the road by Freiburg going up north towards Berlin, other people started stopping, having heard the shotgun. Other cars started to stop and we had to abandon the effort. Because the fellow who was driving the car – it was a Volkswagen, an amphibious Volkswagen, and there was not enough place even in that vehicle for all of us, but when we pulled him out and Radek gave him chloroform, so before then, he pulled the key out of the ignition, and we had no way to start the car. We started to look for the keys, Zbyněk fired the gun and so there were about five, six people all of a sudden, several cars… before then, no cars stopped, but at that time all the cars started to stop and there and they started to chase us through the woods and Zbyněk sprained his ankle real bad.”</p><h4>No Visits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/73esh6VbLYY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Why we don’t go there? Because it’s not the country we fought for. In the army, in the U.S. Army, we had Slovaks, good Slovaks, there was a fellow; his name was Pokorný – he used to be a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army and he was in Special Forces, there were a couple of other Slovaks. We fought, we wanted to fight for something for Czechoslovakia, united Czechoslovakia, democracy and everything. None of this happened.”</p><h4>Dangerous Democracy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zXW--Clv3z0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Democracy is not to drive a Mercedes, svoboda [freedom] is not to go to Cuba on vacation, or to the Caribbean or Mallorca, you know? It takes a little bit more; it’s a frame of mind.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Joseph Masin
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Joseph Masin was born in Prague in 1932 and was raised nearby in the Czechoslovak military barracks at Ruzyně, where his father Josef was an army commandant. With the outbreak of WWII, Joseph’s father became a leading figure in an anti-Nazi resistance group called the Tří králové [The Three Kings]; he was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Gestapo one year later. Joseph’s mother, Zdenka, meanwhile, was interned in Terezín concentration camp. Joseph and his brother <a href="/web/20170609145800/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/radek-masin/">Radek</a> spent most of the War in the spa town of Poděbrady where, says Joseph, the pair carried out a number of anti-Nazi actions, for which they were decorated by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after the War.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3662" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-141.jpg" alt="Joseph Masin" width="240" height="350" /></p><p>Upon graduation from high school, Joseph found himself unable to pursue his education further. He became a truck driver in Jeseník, North Moravia. During this time, he and his brother Radek headed a small, nameless anti-Communist group. In 1951, the group decided to escape Czechoslovakia and make contact with the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Berlin; the initial plan was to return to Czechoslovakia and work from inside the country to undermine the Communist regime. The escape, however, was foiled and both Josef and Radek were arrested, with the latter spending two years in prison. Joseph says he was unable to locate his brother during this period. During Radek’s imprisonment, Joseph made plans for a second escape attempt; he and members of his group held up a payroll transport and took hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak crowns.</p><p> </p><p>Upon Radek’s release in 1953, the brothers set out with three friends to contact the CIC in Berlin. They decided to go through East Germany as the border with West Germany was almost impenetrable by this stage. What was supposed to take around three to four days took one month and saw thousands of East German Volkspolizei [people’s police] mobilized to hunt the group down. The group was involved in a number of shoot-outs and two of its members were captured and later executed.</p><p> </p><p>In Berlin, Joseph and Radek signed up for the U.S. Army. They did not return to Czechoslovakia, as they could not agree with the CIC on terms for doing so. Upon discharge in the 1960s, Joseph settled in Cologne, Germany, and established first a business selling stuffed crocodiles imported from South America and then a flight school at which military pilots retrained for a career in commercial aviation. He subsequently moved back to the United States and today lives in Santa Barbara, California. In 2008, Joseph and his brother Radek were awarded a Prime Minister’s Medal for their actions by former Czech premier Mirek Topolánek.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609145800/http://www.gauntletinfo.com/homepage.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Website for ‘Gauntlet’: A book written by Joseph’s daughter Barbara about the Masin Brothers’ escape</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Anti-communist
Arrest
Benes
Collaborator
Concentration camp
Family life
Military service
national
Podebrady
Politics
Prison
Resistance
Russians
Ruzyne
Terezin
Tri králové
World War II
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/f0d837e4546ed60e9fea204bd16d079f.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=KrH-70J5kqJAEYDEeJz2u0ryjUA3yonOy7Qu998tu6Vs1r4DWJ6XU54IIoLyakx470pvQWYrIwLVjHdCEde-ReJJfNHDfhVYZMcy1feckkdfD2%7ElIHl%7EdM1UdedgVrOp41iCq-orFZ4GRZSJFPYJzLZtdkiGLnIcZc-KZia5o6MWvDVngGr87IFMj%7EYK-b609ZTd4WWnsCsKIUPMpeJmFfMx1MAE9p6i5COXlgtjvogbOUUEa9a0b6vC3Pygq4kO6UIVjQYh0Cm-c0aYspKQKO6My-i-w254Wnau0DkEb4VD0XG7wnMVjfnAfufWLY5g-b2jL3z85RxetzuLQ8ms%7EQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
33724a1de87d4e5fc4490aa7534175e9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Deaf Parents</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQSjLK5REK4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My parents, between them, used mostly sign language, but with us they insisted on lip reading and actually an oral communication, because they were both trained. It’s interesting; the schools for the deaf in Germany and the former Czechoslovakia used both methods in educating them. My grandmother, my Czech grandmother, was one of the persons who very much insisted on the education of deaf people. She traveled abroad – was still under the old monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian system – and consulted specialists, purchased literature in German and French, translated it, and she helped to improve the teaching of deaf people in the former Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia. She’s very well remembered.”</p><h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K1SIjUM4OiQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One day there was a knock on the door and I went to open the door, and there was a tall Russian officer standing. He had a brown bag under his arm, which will appear later in the story, and one eye was a glass eye. I had never seen somebody with a glass eye, so I walked around him and tried to see the eye turning after him, but it was all frozen always directly in front of him. When he saw that I was lip reading my mother and we used some signs, gesticulated with hands, he must have realized my mother was deaf. I don’t know what his mission was. I think that later I learned that these last-minute patriots sent this Russian to our apartment and that there’s a German woman there, take her out in the prison, or the camps which were built up around Prague for German civilians. He was a bit embarrassed, so he asked for a glass of water, in Russian <em>вода</em> [<em>voda</em>], in Czech <em>voda</em>, it’s the same, I understood him. So my mother gave him a glass of water and he drank it – it was warm outside – quickly, and he asked for another one, and then she brought a bottle of sweetener which was kind of syrup which we used during the War because there was no sugar, some fruit sweetener, and that broke the ice. He started to play with us, with me and my brother, and after a while he simply gave us this little brown bag he brought in and that was full of cherries. So that is my first lasting impression of the Russian barbarians. He in fact was very humane.”</p><h4>Love of History</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g_xQJjo_knw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was obsessed with history, it was clear. Everyone in my class knew that I was obsessed with history; I had the best knowledge of history in the classroom, always challenging the teacher and reading history books under the desk. I had a vast library because due to the fate which befell my relatives on my father’s side, my grandfather and uncle, when they were arrested, some of their books – if they were not confiscated – landed in our house. So I had three libraries accumulated by my grandmother, my grandfather, and my uncle. I never managed to read even a fraction of them.”</p><h4>Suspicious Background</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xdDXOAzNjHY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I applied to go to the university and the director refused to give support to my application because he was uneasy to see that I was born in Germany and that my mother was German, and therefore he wanted to speak with both of my parents. He felt rather ashamed when my father told him that he lost his father and uncle during the Nazi occupation. So he immediately apologized. So these are the two sides of my upbringing, if you like.”</p><h4>Warsaw Pact</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UJh14cyL1Go?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I returned to London and joined an organization which was called Toc H which is a branch of Quakers. And for just some food and shelter I was helping to extract political news from the newspapers that was every morning on the front desk, on the wall, and what we provided was information about jobs and shelter for Czech and Slovak students who were fugitives. And I must say the reaction of the English people was extraordinary. Almost everyone who came to us received an address where he could stay overnight and some little money. I think it was kind of a late reaction to the Munich complex among the English people; they felt the analogy was so striking between the Nazi invasion and the Soviet invasion, so they were helping us.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Milan Hauner
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Milan Hauner was born in 1940 in Gotha, Germany. His Czech father, Vilém, married his German mother, Gertrud, when she was threatened with sterilization (because of a handicap) by the Nazi government under the Nuremberg Laws. During WWII, Milan’s grandfather and uncle were arrested and executed on charges of anti-Nazi activities. Milan moved to Prague with his parents when he was just over one year old and grew up there. Vilém was a renowned book binder and Gertrud worked as a seamstress. Both Milan’s parents were deaf and, in addition to speaking German and Czech, he and his younger brother Roland learned sign language. From an early age, Milan loved history and says he had access to many older books, including some that were eventually banned by the Communist government. He attended elementary school and <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague, and began studying history and literature at Charles University in 1957. Upon graduation, Milan was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and served for two years. He remembers spending most of his second year in the army in prison as punishment for ‘breaches of discipline’ and his outspoken ways.</p><p> </p><p>After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Czech-German relations
Education
emigrant
Family life
gymnazium
Military service
refugee
Russians
school
Teachers
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/24397/archive/files/9544a43ad64d6221a443b2300f62858a.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Tnel6afJa-dqVxVl5HrFc4cOjtAYoLQ%7EgXt4LHBXfvgneZMHreQ8cNlUgnU6zfDCt58FspV1zbIrGxMMlS4sPN0b2sR7%7EcwQkf35uCL7V7tgUHiMxx2Nd%7EiMmCFtNBkuPpXIknftX0vN9bE9L3NoA2rpDF4EWGh%7E92wfzq6cBWnLPKfHOlnGAJM26sSc%7ELRzSKwxXLtVQOIr%7EXQgTRbFKWFC4i22jPyD-tNBNmtbFtZDf4ViohetIK6UARfEyYB2b8-p7OtTOenesSr1Teb2OxlEBkzZC8CgiH12ZBKsnTXOBxLNaV0u5jNn28qRvcE4jUH3bMrERlMbgum7xLpAfQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
aaca6a9eb4e7b7a3df7539e8a10b599e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rYJIiThjVh8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was nine at that time when the War ended and of course the Russian Army came to the great enthusiasm of the population. And well, the country was believed to be liberated. There was one little incident that I recall and that some people probably wouldn’t like to hear even today in the country: that was still in May ’45 and in the streets we saw a line of people being taken away by the so-called Revolutionary Guards. They were Germans who had been collected before being shipped away. Now, there was a long line of people, and there was an old lady there, who was carrying a little suitcase with all her belongings there. And one of our neighbors in the same building where we lived, a big guy, he ran to this lady and grabbed her suitcase. He took it away and said ‘You are not going to need that.’ So this patriot later became a leading figure in the Communist Party in the neighborhood.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Yd72RVGTMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most people were enthusiastic about them, and so was I. Even my mother who was inherently a skeptic, much more so even than my father, as well as very well educated (including in history), she was enthusiastic as well and said ‘Well, now we’ll all have to start learning Russian.’ And indeed some timid attempts at that were made in the family. Well, the Soviet Union was seen widely as President Beneš at that time saw it – as a great friend – and Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, a bridge slanted slightly to the East.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i8ObziKdjcU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was ugly, because it was a game – a ruthless game – played by the parents, by the teachers, by the students themselves trying to get to this selective school, but moreover to avoid something much worse. Now, some of them played the game in a very imaginative way. I recall one of my classmates who was seriously ill, I think he had leukemia, and his mother who was an ardent Communist, or at least pretended to be, she registered him, or he volunteered actually, to become a miner – a coalminer, whom of course was considered at the time to be a hero, the socialist hero. So this classmate of mine who had leukemia volunteered to be a miner, or rather was volunteered by his scheming mother, knowing full well of course that he would not be accepted, but that he would be rewarded for his readiness to be a miner by being allowed to study, which is exactly what happened.</p><p>“Well my parents, fortunately, were not quite such accomplished intriguers; they argued that since my record was very good in the school, maybe I deserved to continue to study. Well, the record was fully acknowledged and after endless interviews and whatnot, I was indeed accepted to the entering grade of that three-year program at the school at Malá Strana, and was delighted, was elated, so were my parents who said ‘Well, there is still justice, despite all that has been happening in this communist country.’ Well, their joy was premature. When I first turned up at the beginning of the school year, I was called to the director of the school and he said ‘Well, the National Committee made a decision, and as a result of the decision, you are really not starting here at the <em>gymnázium</em>, but you’ll be starting next week as a mechanic in a factory near where you live.”</p><h4>News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i7w33BgbEzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I lived in Prague, I didn’t listen to Radio Free Europe at all, not only because it was jammed, but because it had a very bad reputation, not only among the communists, needless to say, but also among their enemies, which was the majority of the population. The general attitude was ‘Well, what do these people, who were lucky enough to get out of the country… What are they going to tell us about what we should do?’ So once I learned English – and I was working really very hard with Aunt Paula, she was a very good teacher – I was able to listen to the Voice of America in English, rather than in Czech, and to the BBC also in English. Because I wanted to know what they were telling to people in general around the world, rather than what was tailored to the conditions in Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nLQgaFqJ7hQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My interest was always in modern history and increasingly in contemporary affairs, in what we would call today contemporary history, because by that time I was following avidly what was happening in the world, and trying to look at it as a historian. So history was the field, but of course, at Charles University at that time, which prided itself on being the oldest university in Central Europe but was in fact an outfit run by current or former members of the secret services and similar institutions, history was not a field that anybody in his right mind would want to study – that is to say modern or contemporary history. That was politics; that was not any scholarship.</p><p>“The only part of history that could be studied seriously, although in a rather old-fashioned way, was medieval history. So that’s what I studied; I specialized in archival studies. It gave me what one would call a solid background, but it was a very old-fashioned background. It was the way history was studied back in the 19th century when what mattered was, well, as Ranke, the famous German historian said – <em>wie es eigentlich gewesen</em> – how really it was. But not what it meant, not why things happened the way they did, the emphasis was on the facts.</p><p>“So that was the kind of medieval history that I studied, and I think that it prepared me in some way for what I was to do later. Of course, in the Middle Ages, there was a very limited amount of written history, one had to do with fragments, and even what was produced at that time, very little of it has survived. And so I had to deal with fragmentary evidence. And later on when I tried to study contemporary history at the time when the archives were still closed, or most of them, and one had to do with the fragments, the methodology, I realized, was not all that different.”</p><h4>US Visa</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pltqGeRqZ9M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At Christmas time – or after Christmas actually – I decided while waiting for the visa to take another hitch-hiking trip and go down to the desert, all the way to the Sahara as far as I could get, together with the Slovak guy. So the two of us hitch-hiked, and he had the address of some priest at an oasis down in southern Tunisia. So it was quite an adventure and we both loved it, and got quite far south, as south as we could, when the message came faintly on the telephone in the priest’s house that the visa is here and that it really has to be picked up by the end of January if it is to be used this year – otherwise I would have to wait for another year. So I got a taste a little bit for the bureaucracy also, but I wanted to make sure that I would get back quickly.</p><p>“There was no way of flying, but there was one train on the one railroad line that cuts across the country. So I got on the train, not on the first class, not on the second class, not in the third class but in the fourth class on the train, which was sort of a cattle car where the locals were traveling with their chickens and other animals. So, it was another adventurous ride, 24 hours or so, to get to Tunis and pick up the visa.”</p><h4>Re-Entry Permit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pAjrALXd6OA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The only problem, but it really wasn’t a big one – it was more a nuisance than a problem – was that I was stateless, I didn’t have a passport. So when eventually I got fellowships for research abroad, and I was able to travel to Europe, I needed a document, and so what I was traveling on was a so-called re-entry permit, which looks like a passport, but all it says is that the United States allows me to return. Otherwise I had to have a visa for every single country I traveled to, and I also couldn’t afford to be away for too long, because as everybody knows, one had to have certain uninterrupted residence physically in the country before becoming a citizen. So all this had to be taken into account, but I was on course and that was the least thing that bothered me.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vojtech Mastny
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Education
English language
German language
Letna
Mala Strana
national
Politics
Russians
school
Stredni skola pro pacujici
Teachers
World War II
Zizkov