Charlotta soon found a job at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo where she worked for 13 years. She and Petr had a second son, Jan, in 1972. In 1983, the Kotiks moved to New York City where Charlotta began working at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She retired from there in 2006 as head of the department of contemporary art. Charlotta says that she did not regularly speak Czech to her sons, which helped her master the English language; however, they both spent one year studying in Prague, and Jan eventually settled there, married, and had two children before his death from cancer in 2007. Today, Charlotta is an independent curator. She visits the Czech Republic several times a year where, in addition to visiting her grandchildren, she works with an organization that supports young artists. She is also a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and is on the advisory board of the Czech Center New York. Now divorced, she lives in Brooklyn.
]]>Charlotta Kotik was born in Prague in 1940. Her father Emanuel was an art historian and her mother Herberta was a musician. Charlotta’s maternal great-grandfather was Tomáš G. Masaryk and, as a result, one of her earliest memories is of an SS soldier living in her family’s house during WWII. She also clearly recalls the funeral of Jan Masaryk, her great-uncle. While growing up, Charlotta often spent time in Rybná nad Zdobnicí in eastern Bohemia where her grandmother lived. Following her graduation from high school, Charlotta says that she found it impossible to continue her education due to her background, but was able to get a job as a curatorial assistant at the Jewish Museum in Prague, thanks to a friend of her mother. She was responsible for the photo archives and also worked with children’s drawings from Terezín. After three years, Charlotta began working in the Asian department of the National Gallery. She enrolled at Charles University as an evening student and, in 1968, graduated with a master’s degree in art history. Charlotta also worked for the National Institute for Preservation and Reconstruction of Architectural Landmarks, where she was involved in monument preservation during the building of the Prague subway. In October 1969, Charlotta’s husband Petr left Czechoslovakia to take a job at the University of Buffalo in New York. Although she had reservations about leaving her family and her country, Charlotta and their son Tom (who had been born in May 1969) followed, and they arrived in Buffalo in January 1970.
Charlotta soon found a job at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo where she worked for 13 years. She and Petr had a second son, Jan, in 1972. In 1983, the Kotiks moved to New York City where Charlotta began working at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She retired from there in 2006 as head of the department of contemporary art. Charlotta says that she did not regularly speak Czech to her sons, which helped her master the English language; however, they both spent one year studying in Prague, and Jan eventually settled there, married, and had two children before his death from cancer in 2007. Today, Charlotta is an independent curator. She visits the Czech Republic several times a year where, in addition to visiting her grandchildren, she works with an organization that supports young artists. She is also a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and is on the advisory board of the Czech Center New York. Now divorced, she lives in Brooklyn.
“Because we were closely watched, that’s why. Because Masaryk, as you probably know, was suspect by not only communists, but by fascists. Any kind of dictatorial regime hated President Masaryk and because he was the grandfather of my mother and my aunt and father-in-law of my grandmother, obviously my family was basically in a bad situation, whether it was communism or fascism.”
What was that like, living with an SS man?
“It was not funny obviously, but you have to find ways to survive.”
And what ways did you find?
“We were out in the country a lot where he didn’t accompany us all the time, and you have to find a modus vivendi under any circumstances.”
“In 1948, when Jan Masaryk died and we went to the funeral, my grandmother was very upset because she was listening to Klement Gottwald talking about Jan, saying ‘Our friend, Jan’ and all that stuff, and she stood up, because we were in the front row, and she said ‘And now you will just shut up’ – in Czech obviously – ‘because you know that you killed him. And you will not be saying things like this because it’s not true.’ And we all sort of died because we thought ‘Oh my god, this woman is going to be arrested immediately.’ Again, she got away with it, because she always stood up, and she was very tall and very skinny and very monumental in her own way, and she could just tell anybody anything. She was absolutely fearless. Absolutely fearless. And I guess if you are fearless you can do things, because you have the inner power and inner conviction which sort of gets you away from the trouble.”
“When I was applying for school, for stipends, for travel, for anything, on all the bureaucratic paperwork was always one sentence: ‘Mother of Charlotta Poche (and later Kotík) is Herberta Masaryková!’ and that said it all. So I was not allowed to do anything. I couldn’t find a job, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t join any groups, I was persona non grata, simply. It was as if I had some major disease, if I were a leper. I was totally blacklisted on everything. It was not only the regime or the officials of society; it was people who sometimes were afraid to be friends because they associated me with all these troubles which could spill over on them. So it has been a very difficult situation. It was simply ‘No’ to everything. Every little thing had to be fought for.”
“We wanted to improve the system because there were a lot of good things in the system. The free education, the free medical care. There were a lot of good things and if you could have political freedom and travel and exchange, then I think the system would have been very good. I didn’t understand why anybody would say no to it, because we didn’t want to declare war on Russia or some stupid thing like that. It was just making decent living conditions, so I didn’t understand. But older people, like my mother, they were saying ‘Oh no, this is not going to work. They will come and crush it.’ I said ‘Mom, you are crazy. Why would they do that? We don’t want to do anything against them. We just want to improve what we already have. But I was wrong, because I am slightly naïve. But I really felt it was a great experiment and people were so nice to each other at the time. It was like the society blossomed. People were just so different. They were so hopeful. They were so nice. It was just amazing.”
“It was very difficult for me to make the decision of leaving because I was leaving my mother and my father and my aunt there and I felt I was deserting them, and also I felt that I was deserting a country that was in a really difficult situation. It was a little bit like leaving a sick person, and I felt that’s not the right thing to do, but ultimately I joined my husband. I was also thinking about the future of Tom [her son] – at the time it was only Tom, not Jan – because I had so many difficulties, really. It was very difficult and I didn’t want them to have to go through – Tom at the time, and I was hoping to have another child later – so I didn’t want to prepare for them the same life I had. I felt that it’s not right. Since I had a chance to leave, I ultimately decided to do it.”
Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.
His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.
In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper Mosty. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.
]]>Gabriel Levicky was born in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, in 1948. His parents, Hungarian-speaking Slovak Jews, both survived concentration camps during WWII; his mother was in Auschwitz and his father in Sachsenhausen. Gabriel says that they were not forthcoming with their experiences of the Holocaust. Gabriel’s father, a member of the Communist Party, was the director of the Dom kultúry (municipal cultural center) in Humenné. Gabriel says his teenage years were heavily influenced by Western culture, most notably music and literature. He was in a band called The Towers and subscribed to Svetová literatúra, a periodical devoted to world literature. Gabriel’s lifestyle and his involvement in the hippie movement in Czechoslovakia led to conflicts with his father; following his schooling, he left home and traveled around the country.
Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.
His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.
In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper Mosty. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.
“It’s the supreme example of highly sophisticated survival skills. You don’t want to jeopardize anything. You don’t want to jeopardize your family; you don’t want to jeopardize the future; you will say everything to everybody just to leave you alone. That was the whole principle. In other words, yes, I disagree maybe inside, but I openly say ‘Yes, of course, you are right.”
“I think that the most incredible period for me personally, for us as a young generation at that time, was the invasion of rock and roll. The music. Rock and roll culture. Radio Luxembourg. For us it was a fascinating world because we thought that if this is possible, something over there must be right. And it’s very difficult to explain to people who don’t understand the impact of culture on young minds or a young outlook. And rock and roll really changed a lot in Czechoslovakia. Bands mushroomed almost instantly. Right after a show on Czechoslovak TV, ‘the decadent West’ and they showed a picture of the Beatles running on the street from A Hard Day’s Night, and that day, those idiots created a mass movement. From day one to the next day, everybody started to look, or attempted to look like the Beatles and play the music.”
“I managed to arrive [in Humenné] late night; it was already martial law declared, and I didn’t know of course. So I was coming from the train and I’m walking towards my parents’ house, and boom. I come to the square. All these Russian tanks, lorries, trucks, they had this white paint through the body for identification. Every Russian vehicle was painted with a white stripe in the middle. So all I could see were these white stripes in the middle of the night, and here comes the patrol. A Russian officer with two soldiers. In Russian – I understand and speak Russian – he says ‘What are you doing here?’ and I said ‘What are you doing here?’ So this dialogue was happening in the middle of the night, and these two guys are holding their guns against me and he’s holding a handgun. And I start to shout ‘You mother f*****s’ – I was 20 – ‘Wait until the… you will see you are going to be kicked out of here when the Germans and Americans come and kick your ass outta here!’ And when they heard the ‘German’ and ‘American’ because it was ‘Ruskii, Amerikanskii, Nemetskii,’ they unlocked the guns, aimed at me, all three of them aimed their guns at me, and they said ‘Run.’ And I realized that’s it. So I said ‘Please don’t shoot,’ and I was running backwards like this, to the passage – there was a passage in the building which my parents lived around the corner – ‘Please don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ and they let me go. But it was a second. A split second. They could kill me, nobody would find anything about me, they could discard my body, nothing could be done about it, because I was the only one on the square.
“And the next day, I woke up and I went out, collected money and went to the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship House, I bought Soviet flags. I got all these kids with matches and they were walking around burning Soviet flags walking around the square around the Soviet tanks. I thought ‘Hey, they’re not going to shoot the little kids; they’re going to shoot us, but they’re not going to shoot the kids.”
“I was young. I was 20, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was my first time in the West. I wasn’t really ready for Israel. I was young, I was naïve. I was also sentimental, I was not ready. I was emotionally drained, I was physically drained.”
“The police essentially attacked my office. They came to do a search. Plainclothes police. They raided the place with Volgas, [Tatra] 603s and all these other cars and then they left. They took the samples from my type machine. Then my boss, this guy who hired me – he passed away; he was an alcoholic, died a few years ago; he was a very interesting guy – and he came to me and said ‘What was it, a ticket? A speeding ticket?’ And I said ‘No, no, no.’ ‘So what it is it? What happened here?’ ‘Well, nothing really, I just signed Charter 77.’ And he looked at me and said ‘You asshole, now I can’t protect you. Now you are out.’ And in one month I was pink, I was out.”
So, why did you sign Charter 77?
“For me, it was a moral imperative. I might sound like an idealist, but the moral imperative was very clear. I’m not supporting the regime. I have a lot to lose – some people had more to lose than me of course – but I’m not going to anymore do it halfway. I’m not going to compromise anymore. I’m just going to make a statement because it’s my responsibility as a citizen of Czechoslovakia to bring up these issues that are destroying the country. That was essentially my argument.”
“I asked them for my files; they brought it to me, and I was going through all the interrogation they did with my relatives, my friends, my ex-girlfriend, my ex-wife, including my letter I sent to Charter 77 reporting on abuses in Slovakia, which never arrived there because they confiscated it. Then I found an interesting section that said ‘350 pages erased’ or destroyed. And I said, ‘What the f*** is that?’ So I asked the guy who worked there, he said ‘Well, that’s what they did in ’89.’ Can you imagine? December 1989, they destroyed 350 pages. Some of them are referring to people who are actually spying on me, but it’s missing, it’s gone. So I asked them ‘What happened to my file? Somebody can access my file?’ Can you imagine, people can actually, for study purposes, can access your file which I think is totally absurd. This is your private file. The police could do anything, they could even imitate the signatures if they wanted, they could manipulate anything they wanted.
“So what’s the big deal, you can’t bring it back, you can do nothing about it, so what are you gonna do? I don’t dwell on it anymore. I mean, it’s my file ok, of course it’s disturbing, it’s mentally disturbing, and very very threatening because you see how they manipulated people and manipulated interviews.”
When she was 14 years old, Jana was told that she would no longer be able to attend school and was sent to work for TESLA making televisions. Growing up, Jana says, her goal was to become a pediatrician, and so when the opportunity presented itself for her to work at Prague’s Bulovka hospital the following year she seized it. Jana’s first job was in the operating room, cleaning blood from the floor after surgery. She applied for nursing school on a number of occasions, but was refused each time on grounds of her family background. Following her father’s release in 1959 Jana says she was able to attend night school to gain a qualification in nursing. In 1966 she applied for a visa ostensibly to go and visit her birthplace in Wales, but she did not return home from that trip and settled instead in Vienna, where she became a nurse. At a preordained time and place in Vienna, she met her fiancée, Jan, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia separately. The couple were married in Austria and then moved to England, where Jan studied for his doctorate and Jana became a ward sister in a Brighton hospital.
The couple moved to Hampton, Virginia, in 1974 when Jan was offered a job at NASA. Jana says her first job in America was selling cosmetics for Avon. She subsequently became a clinician at NASA. When the pair divorced Jana moved to Washington, D.C. She worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital for more than 20 years and studied for a master’s and doctoral degree at the same time. Her postgraduate work (in political psychology) focused on daughters of political prisoners in 1950s Czechoslovakia. With some of the women she interviewed for her doctorate, she founded an NGO called Dcery 50. let (known in English as Enemy’s Daughters). Members of the group regularly visit Czech classrooms to talk about their experiences. Today, Jana lives in McLean, Virginia, and works as a tour guide of Washington, D.C, and as an usher at the Kennedy Center.
Website of Enemy’s Daughters – the NGO that came about as a result of Jana’s postgraduate work
Full transcript of Jana Svehlova’s interview (contains some graphic medical descriptions):
]]>Jana Svehlova was born in Cardiff, Wales, in December 1943. Her father, Jan, was a Czech who had moved to England at the start of WWII to fight with the Royal Air Force (RAF). He met Jana’s mother, Eleonora (a German speaker originally from the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia), at the Air Force Club in Cardiff. The pair were married in May 1943. Jana lived in Wales until the end of WWII, when her father decided the family should return to Czechoslovakia and settle in Prague. One year after the Communist takeover, in 1949, Jana’s father was arrested because, she says, the new regime viewed those who had fought for the Allies with hostility. Jan was sentenced to ten years hard labor. He worked in the uranium mines of Jáchymov and Příbram, and spent time in prison in Bory and Ilava. Jana says that she and her mother were able to visit him about twice a year.
When she was 14 years old, Jana was told that she would no longer be able to attend school and was sent to work for TESLA making televisions. Growing up, Jana says, her goal was to become a pediatrician, and so when the opportunity presented itself for her to work at Prague’s Bulovka hospital the following year she seized it. Jana’s first job was in the operating room, cleaning blood from the floor after surgery. She applied for nursing school on a number of occasions, but was refused each time on grounds of her family background. Following her father’s release in 1959 Jana says she was able to attend night school to gain a qualification in nursing. In 1966 she applied for a visa ostensibly to go and visit her birthplace in Wales, but she did not return home from that trip and settled instead in Vienna, where she became a nurse. At a preordained time and place in Vienna, she met her fiancée, Jan, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia separately. The couple were married in Austria and then moved to England, where Jan studied for his doctorate and Jana became a ward sister in a Brighton hospital.
The couple moved to Hampton, Virginia, in 1974 when Jan was offered a job at NASA. Jana says her first job in America was selling cosmetics for Avon. She subsequently became a clinician at NASA. When the pair divorced Jana moved to Washington, D.C. She worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital for more than 20 years and studied for a master’s and doctoral degree at the same time. Her postgraduate work (in political psychology) focused on daughters of political prisoners in 1950s Czechoslovakia. With some of the women she interviewed for her doctorate, she founded an NGO called Dcery 50. let (known in English as Enemy’s Daughters). Members of the group regularly visit Czech classrooms to talk about their experiences. Today, Jana lives in McLean, Virginia, and works as a tour guide of Washington, D.C, and as an usher at the Kennedy Center.
Website of Enemy’s Daughters – the NGO that came about as a result of Jana’s postgraduate work
Full transcript of Jana Svehlova’s interview (contains some graphic medical descriptions):
“Many people who fought with the Allies then became the enemies of the state. So my father was arrested three days after Christmas, on December 28, 1949. And I remember that they were turning the apartment upside down and looking for stuff, knowing that they wouldn’t find anything. I know that they confiscated his Air Force uniform and the flight jacket – that was the first thing they took – but they also took all our photographs. I do remember my father standing there and his face was white, like this wall… This wall is not as white as my father’s face was. That’s all I remember of that day and I remember asking one of the secret police agents ‘Where are you taking my daddy?’ And he said ‘Oh, we just need to ask him a few questions.’ And I can still remember my mother standing by the window waiting for my father to come back and of course we didn’t know… I learned later it took six months before they let us know where he was. And I just kept asking, I kept asking my mother later ‘How did I react?’ Because I adored my father. My mother was the disciplinarian, because I would kick my father and he would say ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ But she told me that I just kept asking ‘Where is daddy? Where is daddy?’ and she told me ‘Well, when he comes back he’ll be back.’ And I remember her crying a lot, but that’s about all I can remember.”
“My mother was working and I was home with tonsillitis listening to my beloved radio – we had two stations. And suddenly they announced that they would be singing Stalin’s favorite song, ‘Sulika,’ and we all knew from school that this was Stalin’s favorite song. I was in bed with scarves and everything around my neck to keep warm. I pulled them all off. I was maybe 10 years old, 11 years old. I stood to attention, nobody told us ever we needed to stand to attention when they sing ‘Sulika’ [but] I stood to attention and I was listening to ‘Sulika’ from the radio… Because Stalin in a way was my temporary father and I just never know how to explain it to people. I had no other input. That’s what I believe, that that guy, who sent my dad to prison, became my temporary father.”
“For me, it was like going on a school trip. Those hardboiled eggs never tasted so good like on the train to the prison camp! Of course, it took all night because they had special trains from Prague. We were lucky, we were from Prague – imagine the people coming from other parts of the country. It was an overnight train with all the people going to the same place. We would go to Jáchymov, Příbram, and I remember the train would arrive, let’s say, at 4:00 in the morning and then they would let us wait in that cold train station for the local little train to take us to the labor camps. And of course I have plenty of stories about that. But for me it was kind of an adventure. And I was very proud because when we visited the prisoners, every prisoner had a guard standing right next to him following our every word. The visits were about every half a year for about 15 minutes. And I was told by my mother to be sure to shove some food into my father’s pocket. So, I always had to watch for the guard not looking for a second and I was always very proud of myself when I managed to get something in.
“My father was taken away when I was six and he came back when I was 16. When I was 14, my mother had one of her migraine headaches and that was the only time that she could not go to visit him. She sent me alone, and it was Příbram. And today it may take an hour by train but I remember then it took forever. I arrived at the town square, got off the train and there were buses that would go to the labor camps, [but] I didn’t see anybody, except there was a bus with the driver kind of sleeping there and I said to him ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do! Where are all the buses? I must have missed them!’ And he said ‘Where are you going?’ I said ‘To see my dad; he’s in the labor camp, and my mother will kill me if I don’t get there!’ He said ‘Well, get on’ and he took me to the labor camp. I see that they were already closing all the gates because this was a place which was just for the visits, it wasn’t the real place. It looked kind of like when you see some of the wooden barracks in concentration camps. They were just for visits.
“So I come to the gate and the soldier is closing the gate and I start crying – I’m 14, I look like I’m 11, and I said ‘My mother will kill me if I don’t see my father!’ He says ‘Well stay right here.’ Actually, it was the commandant of the labor camp that came out and he said ‘Okay, here is a piece of paper, and you will go to the place where your father is and show them this paper.’ So, you need to imagine that this was in the middle of a field where there was nothing except, on the little hill, those watchtowers with, you could see, those soldiers with guns. But mainly you saw all those signs everywhere. In Czech it would be Nevstupovat! Střílení bez výstrahy! (Do not enter! Shooting without warning! Or something like that.) And it was everywhere. And I still remember running, with this piece of paper – holding it in front of me and thinking ‘Well, how do those soldiers there know that this paper says that I can be here?’”
“Maybe it’s my personality; I kind of always enjoy what I am doing so, you know I enjoyed when I learned the craft. I enjoyed it. And then when I worked at that hospital I left the operating room and they allowed me to work on the floor. It was the urology floor. And the nurses, I will always be grateful to them because some of them preferred to sit at the nurses’ station and talk and laugh and do nothing if possible. And of course I was all eager. So they taught me how to give injections and how to change dressings and of course, we didn’t have to worry that anybody would be sued! So I loved it, I enjoyed it and I had the best time. I loved my job and, I mean, I didn’t have a good title.
“I was also humiliated, interestingly, that also stayed with me, because there were now girls, women, 18 year olds, who had just finished, who’d become registered nurses at the age of 18, because it is a different system. So of course, they were basically my superiors, because they had the diploma and I didn’t. And I still remember one of the girls, and I was told that she hardly managed to get through nursing school, she wasn’t very bright, but she had the power, she had the diploma and I still remember how she told me ‘Go to the blood bank and bring the blood transfusion for the patient.’ And I still remember the tone of her voice – no please, no thank you – it stayed with me.”
“We arranged for him to come over and then when he arrived at Heathrow, the passport control officer said ‘Do you have a visa?’ And my father said ‘Well, when I came here to fight for you in 1939 you didn’t ask me “Do you have a visa?”’ And the official said ‘Welcome back, sir.’ It always kind of gets to me because my father was not happy in England. He was a Czech. He loved Prague. He was not happy in England; he used to tell me ‘holčičko’ (my little girl) ‘I would walk back if I could.’ The only reason he left was because there was a rumor in Prague that they will arrest the former political prisoners. And he was by then 54, because he was born in 1914, and he did not want to go through that again. And that’s the only reason he left, and he wasn’t happy.”
“Avon didn’t care whether you had a work visa or not so I became an Avon lady. And I didn’t know how to drive, so in the heat of the South; in Hampton, Virginia, I schlepped about in that little neighborhood with my Avon case. I didn’t make any money, because when I would walk in – and this was kind of a lower middle-class section – I mean, the women, all they wanted to know was about my background. So I didn’t make any money, and Jan would say ‘Well, you didn’t make any money,’ because at the end of the visit they would buy a lipstick just to kind of justify the visit. I’ve never drunk so much coffee and tea in my life!
“But anyways, then they opened a shopping mall in Hampton, and the most prestigious store at that Hampton mall was JCPenney. And I went to the manager of the cosmetic department and asked him if he would hire me. And he said ‘Well, you don’t have any experience’ and I said ‘Oh yes I do! I know how to deal with people because I was a nurse in England’ – I didn’t tell him those were sick people – ‘and I sold Avon’ – and I didn’t tell him I didn’t make any money! So he said ‘Okay, I’ll take you for three months.’ Well, he made me sell Zsa Zsa cosmetics. Now, young people don’t know probably who Zsa Zsa was – Zsa Zsa Gabor. But, I had an accent, and who would have known in Hampton, Virginia, that it wasn’t a Hungarian accent. Zsa Zsa didn’t advertise, and the only time that people knew who Zsa Zsa was was when she was on the Merv Griffin Show. That shows you how old I am! So, the next day people would come and buy her cream, and at that time, one ounce of her cream was $32.”
“I think the main impact that it had was that feeling of injustice, [about] what happened to the families, and the lack of recognition after the fall of communism. That’s what bothered them so much. They basically had this ‘Why doesn’t somebody come and say “You went through some awful stuff?”’ And nobody did. And suddenly everybody was a victim, and there was a lot of whitewashing. But it’s changing now because… You asked me if I wrote: I’m not much of a writer, I haven’t written too many articles, here is one in Slovo. But when I asked those 12 women [whom she interviewed for her thesis] whether they would like to meet the others, they said yes. So, from these 12 women is now an NGO, a non-governmental organization. There are over 100 of them. They meet once or twice a year in different places and mainly what they are doing now is they are going to schools and they are talking to schoolchildren about what they have been through. So not only that it is therapy for them, but also they are getting some recognition, and that’s what I am the happiest about.”
Jarka and her husband were planning on taking a trip to Yugoslavia in September of 1969; however, her brother-in-law warned them that the borders would be closing soon, so they decided to leave for West Berlin, where Jarka had friends, in August of that year. The pair lived in Germany for two years where they applied for a visa to the United States. In 1971, Jarka and Mila settled in Cleveland. Jarka remembers that finding their own apartment was difficult as they had no credit when they first arrived; however, they soon were able to rent a place. After a few years, they bought a house in Parma, Ohio. Jarka worked in accounting at American Greetings while Mila was an electrical engineer who had several jobs. Jarka says that the two traveled throughout the United States, especially to Colorado and the Southwest, as Mila was fascinated with American cowboy culture. Jarka has been back to the Czech Republic many times, although she says that after her first visit back in 1978, she was subsequently denied a visa for about ten years. She says that after being in the United States for 40 years, she feels more at home here than when she is in the Czech Republic. Today, Jarka lives in Parma, Ohio.
]]>Jarka Stepina was born in Prague in 1944. She lived in the city’s Žižkov district with her parents and younger sister until 1953, when her parents divorced and she moved to the Letná district with her mother and stepfather, who worked at the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. Jarka’s father also remarried and, as he lived in Prague as well, she saw him often. Although it was her desire to become a pediatric nurse, Jarka attended business school at her parents’ behest. She had a variety of jobs over the summers, including caring for children with Down syndrome and working in a factory and at a camp. Upon graduation, Jarka started a job as a payroll cashier. As a young adult, Jarka was involved in a youth group which afforded opportunities to travel to places such as Austria, West Germany, and Yugoslavia. It was through her activities as a young woman that she met her husband, Mila Štěpina.
Jarka and her husband were planning on taking a trip to Yugoslavia in September of 1969; however, her brother-in-law warned them that the borders would be closing soon, so they decided to leave for West Berlin, where Jarka had friends, in August of that year. The pair lived in Germany for two years where they applied for a visa to the United States. In 1971, Jarka and Mila settled in Cleveland. Jarka remembers that finding their own apartment was difficult as they had no credit when they first arrived; however, they soon were able to rent a place. After a few years, they bought a house in Parma, Ohio. Jarka worked in accounting at American Greetings while Mila was an electrical engineer who had several jobs. Jarka says that the two traveled throughout the United States, especially to Colorado and the Southwest, as Mila was fascinated with American cowboy culture. Jarka has been back to the Czech Republic many times, although she says that after her first visit back in 1978, she was subsequently denied a visa for about ten years. She says that after being in the United States for 40 years, she feels more at home here than when she is in the Czech Republic. Today, Jarka lives in Parma, Ohio.
“Some people at that time of my age, we loved country music, and we had tramping. We’d go to forests, which belonged to everybody, nobody can shoot you – there was no private property. We had campfires and the boys played guitar and sing old kind of country songs, so that was kind of our weekend. In Europe, everybody had weekend houses – most of them, like 95% – or you knew somebody who had a weekend house. In the wintertime when parents stayed home, then we’d go to a weekend house in the winter and have fun there. So it was just a different life, and I would never change it. I’m glad that I had it, and I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“They let me go back, in 1978, to the Czech Republic. So I was there for six weeks with my three year old son, and I had a good time. I went to my old company and saw my old friends and everything. After that, I never got a visa for ten years. I got a feeling my [former] supervisor found out I was there and I think she went to the secret police and made a report of some kind and made sure I was never granted a visa. My husband went every year – he could twice a year – and he never had a single problem. I was the only one they told was a danger to the government. I was marked like a terrorist – I’m a danger to government and I am not good for the country.”
“My husband met, in Europe, some kind of famous country music group, which was KTO with Waldemar Matuška, and then he met Fešáci, and then he met Greenhorni (Zelenáči), and then he met Šlapeto, and all these men came. So first thing was Petr Novotný with Karel Poláček from Fešáci came to America by themselves, kind of snooping around, and my husband took them to Kentucky and showed them all kinds of things and they had a concert there later on. I had a tape but somebody borrowed it and never returned it, but I definitely have a couple of tapes in Europe. So they came as whole groups, and we always had concerts in Karlin Hall; the boys stayed at our house. When Waldemar was here with Olina, they stayed with Daša Poseděl; they came here for the picnic, so we had a concert in my backyard and we invited my neighbors. So I told Fešáci learn some Škoda lásky and all kind of old polka which people know. So he sang for them and a whole bunch of people came.”
In 1989, Katya was in Bratislava at the start of the Velvet Revolution. She returned to Prague where her brother was involved in the student leadership of the Revolution and told her about a job opening. Katya succeeded Rita Klímová (who left the position to became ambassador to the United States) as interpreter for the press office of the Civic Forum. She held that job until the first elections took place in June 1990 and then returned to the United States. Katya subsequently lived in Seattle where she held interpreting and translating jobs, and worked in several art galleries. In 1999 she moved to New York City and married her second husband, Doug Heller. Today, Katya is the director of the Heller Gallery, which showcases glass sculpture. She also serves on the board of directors of the Czech Center in New York.
]]>Katya Heller was born in Prague in 1960 to an American mother and Czech father. Her mother, Joy, had left the United States in 1947 to travel to Europe with hopes of going to the Soviet Union, but decided to stay in Prague. She then met Katya’s father, Jiří, while they were studying Russian at Charles University. Both of her parents held communist beliefs (her mother was denied membership in the Communist Party because she was American); however, Katya says that following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, they both lost their jobs and her father became disillusioned with the Party. Katya says she first began having thoughts of leaving the country when she was having difficulty getting accepted to the high school of her choice because of her parents’ backgrounds. She was admitted to Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty where she studied English and Spanish and enrolled in the school’s translating and interpreting program. While in school, Katya had several freelance interpreting jobs which she says put her in contact with the secret police who hoped that she would pass on information she gathered about the West. In 1985, Katya married her first husband, an American who was teaching in Prague at the time. The couple left Czechoslovakia in 1986 and went to Barcelona, as Katya’s husband had received a one-year fellowship. Their daughter was born the same year and, the following year, Katya and her family moved to the United States and settled in Seattle.
In 1989, Katya was in Bratislava at the start of the Velvet Revolution. She returned to Prague where her brother was involved in the student leadership of the Revolution and told her about a job opening. Katya succeeded Rita Klímová (who left the position to became ambassador to the United States) as interpreter for the press office of the Civic Forum. She held that job until the first elections took place in June 1990 and then returned to the United States. Katya subsequently lived in Seattle where she held interpreting and translating jobs, and worked in several art galleries. In 1999 she moved to New York City and married her second husband, Doug Heller. Today, Katya is the director of the Heller Gallery, which showcases glass sculpture. She also serves on the board of directors of the Czech Center in New York.
“My mother was never able to join the Communist Party because, even though she was leftist, she was suspected by the Czech communists of being a U.S. informer, which was a very awkward situation because she was in fact suspected by the U.S. government also of being a leftist-leaning communist – not suspect – they knew she was a leftist-leaning communist. So she was caught kind of in a catch-22. But because of her own beliefs, and I think because, interestingly enough, I think that the American communists were in some ways the most fervent, but the most naïve at the same time. And also I think because she had given up a lot. She left her home in the United States and as she went through the 1950s in communist Czechoslovakia she also had to give up her U.S. citizenship under duress, and so she, at that point, had to make the decision that she would possibly never return here, and I think in making that decision, she kind of went wholeheartedly for her beliefs over her country.
“Whereas my father was in a different situation because he was at home. So whatever happened there, there was nowhere else to go. There was no possible fallback position; this was the ultimate position and he chose to be much more of a dissident, in a way, than my mother because my mother couldn’t give up the hope. I think communism became almost like a religion to her. She really couldn’t give it up. And so we were brought up in this slightly bipolar household. Not completely, because my mother was very intelligent and of course she understood the subtleties, but she would always be genuinely questioning ‘If you are being so critical, are you actually trying to do things that would improve things?’ Whereas my father was much more cynical in the Czech way and he really, I think, stopped believing after 1968.”
“Because I was at school and I had opportunity to do some interpreting, I did that, but of course that got me into further trouble – not really trouble, but further conflict – with the regime. The communist government always worried about the people that were on the forefront of the contact between the West and the East and of course they were the people they could either use or abuse, or different things could happen in those situations. There were not that many of those people and they tried it with everyone, I assume. So they kind of came to me. A secret policeman showed up one day. The first time it happened I was completely in shock because I didn’t even understand what was happening. I was working at a summer job in a little chicken rotisserie place off of Wenceslas Square and I got this job interpreting for a European basketball championship where some amateur American team was going to come in and I was going to be an interpreter for them, but also for everybody else. And this guy comes into this store where I was working with the chickens and he basically said ‘Look, I am from the secret police and I need to talk to you after you finish work today. So I tried to think about what would be the best thing for me to do and I thought ‘Ok, I’ll just be quiet and I’ll say that I’m willing to listen but I’m not willing to say anything right now.’ They tried to be kind of jovial, which was also very strange, and we went to this little café called The Mouse and it was right near the place where I was working, and I remember sitting there in this t-shirt and the sweat running down my arms but I didn’t want to let on, so I kept trying to smile and be polite but not say anything.
“That was the first encounter, but I had several more of them because they would come after me asking me would I work with them? Would I just tell them; they didn’t want anything really bad; they just wanted basic information, where people were and when they were coming and going and things like that. And I said ‘Look, I don’t really feel comfortable. I would prefer not to do this, this is not something I want to do.’ And then they would always start saying, ‘Well, we know that your father is in a precarious job at the State Pedagogical Publishing House and we know that your brother is trying to get into the school of architecture and we can help…or not.’ So it became very difficult.”
“We were living in this house that was called ‘The Hotel House’ [hotelový dům] I guess, and it was basically a building that was designed and built for foreigners to live in. That of course meant that it was thoroughly bugged. It had a doorman downstairs. There were no phones in any of the apartments that had an outside line; there was only a buzzer downstairs to the door and to the doorman, and the doorman had the only phone. It wasn’t even a public pay phone; it was just a phone. There was a public pay phone in the vestibule, but you could only call locally. For example, if my in-laws were calling from the United States, they had to call the downstairs of thehotelový dům and the doorman, who spoke no English – which I always marvel at how they were watching us if these people didn’t speak a foreign language; they spoke a little German, I think – and that person would buzz you upstairs to say you had a phone call and you had to go downstairs eight floors to get the phone. Of course, ‘yes’ in Czech is ano and for short people say ano, no, no, no, and so the doorman would get on the phone and he would say, ‘Yes, Stephen Garrow, ano, no, no, no’ and the Americans thought they were saying ‘No,’ so they hung up. So by the time you got downstairs they would have hung up. It was like a comedy of errors.”
“There was a lot of rather humiliating paperwork. Some of it was just paperwork and some of it was stupid paperwork, like the government required that you make a list of all your possessions that you take out and you tell them how much they were worth when you purchased them and how much they are worth now, and that included everything including your underwear and all personal items. And they sent somebody to examine that and to close your suitcases for you and to seal them, and you couldn’t leave the country with those suitcases unless they were still sealed. For example, when we were leaving, I was pregnant and some of our friends gave us baby clothes and I couldn’t take that with me because they said I had no baby so I couldn’t bring the clothing. It was all really a kind of harassment I suppose.
“We drove out of the country through southern Bohemia and into Austria. That was a little bit weird. It was difficult. Everything seemed so finite at the time. It’s very hard to even think about it now because it is so different now and it is so easy to go back and forth and there isn’t any sense that something can be so finite. There was a gate – I don’t know what it’s called in English. It’s like what they used to have at the railroad crossing; they used to be made out of poles and they would just go down – and that’s what they had the border and it would close and you drove out and you felt like I just left everything I knew behind me. There was no easy way to go back and that was very difficult. You had to apply for paperwork with the same idiots that you just got paperwork to get out from, and that was the toughest time, I think, for me.”
“I have to say that there are some things I look at today with hindsight and I think to myself that we had certain privileges that we didn’t understand. We were completely shielded from a media culture. We were taught to question almost every message that we received from the outside which, while exhausting to live like that, it can also be very rewarding and I think it breeds a greater curiosity about the world around you. It was also easier somehow to become more involved because there was a greater cause; there seemed to be a greater need. It was like, ‘Ok, if we don’t get rid of this government, nobody will.’ Or, ‘If we don’t get rid of it or if we don’t vote with our feet and leave, it will not happen.’ Whereas here, when I look at my daughter’s generation and I think how relatively few of those young people that I knew were involved politically, compared to my generation. I always question what are all the benefits? It’s a much more complex situation. It becomes a much more complex situation.”
“The transition was not easy. It was such a time of trying to figure out how do you make a new government with people who were very educated and everything, but who were not necessarily prepared for these jobs. It was an interesting time to be around. I remember, for example, one of the people that I interpreted for, when Lithuania became its own country, separating from the Soviet Union which actually happened while we were, in Czechoslovakia, running up towards our first free elections in June of 1990, and they elected the first president and his name was Vytautas Landsbergis, and he was a musicologist and he was like Havel who was a playwright, and he was not necessarily being groomed for years to be president; he was a dissident musicologist. He came to Prague and you were talking to these people who still had one foot in a different world and one foot about to step on the world stage. It was very emotionally charged in a way. You were kind of operating on this raw energy, and I knew many of these people because they were friends of my family or friends of friends of my family, and we knew them from this underground, dissident environment where we were in the opposition, and all of the sudden the opposition becomes the ruling party. It’s a little difficult, and not everybody can make that transition.
“I will never forget that one of the smartest people who I think is in that group has never really emerged to be any great political figure in Czechoslovakia, Jan Urban, and I remember very early on thinking ‘Why didn’t he run for president?’ I was working with my friend Peter Green and we were together having a beer with Jan Urban and a couple other people, and somebody said to Urban ‘Why aren’t you running’ for something, and he said ‘I don’t do well in those jobs. I think I have a disposition to the opposition and I don’t feel like I can change.’ So it was very interesting.”
“My dream was always to work in the arts. I originally thought that I really wanted to work in the theatre. That I wanted to combine my ability to speak both languages and be a translator but, specifically, also a dramaturg who adapts texts for the theatre. That avenue, it became clear, was not available to me in Czechoslovakia, and when I got to the States, I really didn’t pursue it further because I needed to make a living and I became interested in finding out how I could best do that. The easiest way for me, it seemed, was to find a connection through my ability to speak another language or understand the communist world and the United States and speak two languages that gave me the greatest earning power and the most interesting jobs.”
Upon graduation, Ladislav worked for one year in Karlovy Vary before marrying and accepting a job in Levoča, not far from where he was raised. Ladislav enjoyed a deal of professional success at the hospital, becoming the vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department. In 1986, he decided to visit the United States as a tourist with his wife. During this visit, he met some of his cousins who lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the first time. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav says the secret police took an interest in the fact that one of his relatives was working for GE. In 1988, Ladislav says he was approached by an StB agent who told him that the secret police would fake his escape from Czechoslovakia and that he should move to Connecticut to infiltrate GE. Ladislav and his family fled Czechoslovakia shortly before his faked escape was due to take place in September 1988.
The Fedorko family spent 22 months in Austria, in the course of which communism fell in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav says his family did not want to return as they no longer had a home, and all of their belongings had already been seized and redistributed. He found it difficult to work with the American Embassy in Vienna, which he says insisted there was no longer any political reason for him to seek asylum in the United States. Eventually though, in 1990, the Fedorkos did receive U.S. visas and settled in Youngstown, where they remained for the next seven years. Ladislav says it was a slightly more active Slovak community which attracted his family to Cleveland, among other things. He now works as a family doctor in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, and lives with his wife in nearby Strongsville. The couple have two children.
]]>Ladislav Fedorko was born in Spišské Tomášovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1946. His father, Jozef, worked as an engineer on the railroad passing through the town (which linked Prague to the Soviet Union), while his mother, Žofia, stayed at home raising Ladislav and his brothers. The family kept a number of animals and produced a lot of their own food, says Ladislav. Growing up, Ladislav says he wanted to become a forest engineer, but when his application to university was rejected, he decided to become a military doctor, as he knew such individuals were in demand and this gave him the chance to obtain a degree in science. Ladislav started his medical studies in 1964 in Hradec Králové. He studied there until Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, after which he quit the Army and transferred to the Prague campus of Charles University to finish his degree as a civilian medic.
Upon graduation, Ladislav worked for one year in Karlovy Vary before marrying and accepting a job in Levoča, not far from where he was raised. Ladislav enjoyed a deal of professional success at the hospital, becoming the vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department. In 1986, he decided to visit the United States as a tourist with his wife. During this visit, he met some of his cousins who lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the first time. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav says the secret police took an interest in the fact that one of his relatives was working for GE. In 1988, Ladislav says he was approached by an StB agent who told him that the secret police would fake his escape from Czechoslovakia and that he should move to Connecticut to infiltrate GE. Ladislav and his family fled Czechoslovakia shortly before his faked escape was due to take place in September 1988.
The Fedorko family spent 22 months in Austria, in the course of which communism fell in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav says his family did not want to return as they no longer had a home, and all of their belongings had already been seized and redistributed. He found it difficult to work with the American Embassy in Vienna, which he says insisted there was no longer any political reason for him to seek asylum in the United States. Eventually though, in 1990, the Fedorkos did receive U.S. visas and settled in Youngstown, where they remained for the next seven years. Ladislav says it was a slightly more active Slovak community which attracted his family to Cleveland, among other things. He now works as a family doctor in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, and lives with his wife in nearby Strongsville. The couple have two children.
“My daddy got one horse which was carrying soldiers for years during WWII. And because my village was situated only seven kilometers (that was four and a half or five miles) from an airport, the horse was trained that once there was an airplane in the air, [it] would run into the ditch and lay down, you know, not to get hurt. So my daddy tried to use the horse for agricultural work and I remember that the horse was carrying I think hay or something, and then an airplane came so he just pulled everything into the ditch and we experienced this kind of funny disaster. So the horse was, for agricultural work, absolutely worthless, because every time an airplane was in the air, he was just running away. It was funny.”
“At the time, the Army was looking for new doctors in the Czech Republic, and the Czechs were a little bit unfamiliar with Slovak conditions so they didn’t care [about Ladislav’s background] – and there was a parity, there was 25 percent Slovaks, 75 percent Czechs who had to get ready to be a military doctor. So I fitted into that 25 percent, and so I moved to the Czech Republic and I studied medical school to be a military doctor until 1968, when we found out that to serve the Communist Army… We became again newly occupied by the Russian forces… So we somehow – many of us – only 12 from the entire group of 120 students, only 12 stayed as military doctors, the rest of us transferred to medical school. I was almost done, I was ready to go into the fifth year of medical school, and so I finished in Charles University in Prague, not far from Hradec Králové, which was a city with a medical school preparing doctors for the military.”
“I have a diploma in Marxism-Leninism. I was vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department so, as one of the top positioned physicians, I had to be well educated in politics. So Marxism – the philosophy and economy and whatever else comes… I had to go and take a state exam at the state board, and I have a diploma in political sciences now.”
Can you tell me about studying for that? Was that in a night school where you had to go and study Marxism and Leninism?
“Yes, it was a night school, it was like continuous education. But the basic stuff, even in medical school, from when I started in 1964 ‘til 1968, we had except from medical classes, we had to take always… first it was history of Marxism and Leninism, so it was first and second year at medical schools. We took classes and then the exam eventually. Then it was political economy – I think that was in the second year. Then it was… I forget, but in 1968, everything ended. Eventually it was implemented again in the ‘70s – during Husák’s era – but I was out of school by that time.”
“I think that medicine was the only science that was not too influenced or penetrated by those dangerous, stupid ideas because even big communist shots needed occasionally doctors. Teachers, my wife was a teacher, [they had] trouble, because they had to teach and preach different kinds of stupid ideas, but in medicine it was not… If it came to it in medicine – to real pain, to a real appendix – there is not too much politics. So we were a little bit saved from this propaganda. Our field was always a little bit out of this big oppression or pressure.”
“So, until the last minute I was pretending I was going to work for them; I was going to take this position to be trained in September in Jevany, close to Prague (it was a big training center for espionage.) But it was May and he [the StB agent in contact with Ladislav] said, ‘You know, our general in Prague – he trusts you, but he still has some kind of problems, I don’t know what. You have to show some proof that you are going to work for us, not against us.’ I said ‘Okay, what do you want?’ They said ‘We want you to go to Yugoslavia for vacation and prove that you are coming back. We are going to watch you.’ So I applied for vacation in Yugoslavia, I got dinars, the money (it was not easy to get them.) So I was about to leave for vacation and everything was okay. After my return I was supposed to start my training in espionage and then pretend to emigrate and… like I said…
“I got a visa, my daughter got a visa, and my son. But we didn’t get approval for my wife from the school. I went up there and said ‘Okay, but the papers were here – we have to travel tomorrow and I have no papers for my wife! I remember everything was okay so, she can go, his [her boss’s] approval was done, but the papers are not here!’ The director of the school was already vacationing and the vice-chairman said ‘Okay, I remember it was okay,’ and so he wrote me by hand another permission so that she could travel. It was his big mistake – poor guy – he lost his job after that.”
“[Our] experiences in Austria with the American Embassy, how they were handling political refugees, it was another horror; I don’t like to talk about it. This was one very sad part of my story. Those people in the American Embassy in Vienna – that was just a very bad impression. But I had applied for a visa here and I couldn’t do anything. I eventually changed my mind, I said okay – because in the meantime communism crashed down – I said ‘Okay, I’m going to live in Austria,’ because I had enough friends up there or whatever, the local people. But they said ‘Sorry, we cannot do anything, you applied for America.’ And America was behaving… Especially during the time when communism was crashing down, they said ‘Okay, you have no more political reasons to go to America.’ We were waiting 20 months and then communism crashed down. You have no political reasons… but I had no house, I had nothing, they took everything. And not only that, but this kind of so-called democracy, one week old, I’ve experienced in 1968. Democracy lasted six months, they came back, and who were the first in Siberia? Those guys who enjoyed the so-called democracy! So I said ‘No, no. I’m not going to go back.’”
“Okay, there are several factors, people probably don’t talk about it. There’s the age factor; you don’t want to jump back and forth, back and forth, first. Secondly, coming back up there – it’s a little bit superficial, but the neighbors… ‘Hah! Fedorko is back here! He thought America was going to welcome him!’ So to prove this? No, I would not come back. Many of my neighbors when communism fell and I was fighting for my house, to get it back, everybody was telling me ‘What do you want it for? You’re in America! You don’t need your house back!’ So they were even mad with me that somebody had stolen my house, and I was fighting for it to get it back. So, you don’t want to live amongst those people again. Another factor was that my kids were in the middle of education here. You cannot just go back – they have to finish somewhere. They were in Slovakia in gymnázium, Austria ingymnázium, here… three times in gymnázium! So that’s something unusual. And then the age factor – let’s say it this way: in this area where I am right now, if I get a heart attack or I get a stroke, within a couple of minutes I am in the hospital, my family will bring me, and I know they are going to save me here. We know our potential, there’s no doubt about it: the level of medical services is the highest in the world here, right here in this Cleveland area.”
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.”
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.
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.
]]>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.
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.
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.
“My childhood was delightful. It was wonderful, even though my parents left to go to Sweden and they left me behind with my maternal grandmother, and that happened when I was three years old and that happened during the Russian invasion in 1968. So my parents got on a motorcycle and they escaped across the border to Austria, like many other people were doing at the time, and I suppose this was quite a dangerous trip so they didn’t want to take a three year old on a motorcycle between them, so they left me with my grandmother. I wasn’t going to see them again, my mother for three years and my father for six years.
“During this time I lived with my grandmother and, I think even before my parents left I was [part of] the old Czech family where grandma takes care of the grandchildren and the aunt takes care of you. You know, it takes a village to raise a family, so we were always either at grandmother’s house or in the country with our great-aunts, so I didn’t feel the loss of my parents too much because I was really used to my grandmother. I also had my other set of grandparents that lived two streets away – my paternal grandparents that were lovely and that I spent a lot of time with as well – so I was a very protected and happy child that felt no deprivation at that time. I do remember babička going and waiting in line for milk for me from 4:00 in the morning and all that. When I speak about my childhood here in America, people are sort of slightly horrified: ‘Really? You didn’t have a bathtub until you were eight years old?’ We had a toilet inside our house, but we didn’t have a bathtub for a long time, and my grandmother cooked on a coal stove; there was no central heating. It was very much turn of the century living.”
“We were taught a lot of Russian propaganda, a lot of Russian songs. We left when I was in third grade, just at the end of third grade, but already by that time I had won a contest in which I recited a Russian poem; I won a Russian pen that never worked. My aspiration of my life was to be a Pioneer and to go and see Lenin’s grave. I thought that was just… That was it. That would have been it for my life. Fortunately that didn’t happen.”
You really felt that you wanted to do this?
“Yes, yes. It was very real to me. The Russians were our best friends. Everything Russian was… It was like a protective older brother. Things red were very good. The sickle and the star were symbols of goodness. Lenin was like a nice old uncle that you wanted to hang out with. I was a child; I believed all this stuff. You didn’t know any better. I was completely indoctrinated. I was a little communist from head to toe.”
“They were sent a letter, somehow, from the Czech government saying that since they had abandoned me, I should be adopted to a suitable Czech family for the proper communist upbringing unless they returned to claim me – which was a bit of a problem since if they returned to claim me they would be put in jail since they were criminals for leaving in the first place, and if they didn’t then I was going to be taken away from my grandmother and given to somebody else, so this was not a good situation in any way. At this point, they had become sort of celebrities in Sweden and they put together this plan, I think with some Swedish journalists that were going to have rights to the story and pictures and they were going to do a documentary and all this stuff, and so they got together two Swedish adventure pilots that were going to fly a plane into the Czech Republic. One of the pilots’ wives sort of looked like my mother, so my mother took her passport, and she had a wig and she glasses to look like this lady. So they decided they were going to fly into Czechoslovakia. They were going to fly into Brno, which was the closest big city to where I lived, they were going to get a car, and they were going to drive to Prostějov; they were going to kidnap me on my from school; they weren’t going to tell anybody, grandparents or anybody, because the grandparents might try to stop them or delay them or something. This was very important that it was all happening very quickly. They were going to kidnap me on my way to or from school, take me to the airport and leave. That was the plan and, like all well-laid plans, it didn’t quite work out that way.
“What happened was they landed fine in Brno, they rented a car, and they were driving on the highway from Brno to Prostějov, and they got caught for speeding. So they were taken to a police station; they started getting interrogated; things weren’t looking right – maybe they’re not who they claim they are, and there was also maybe a question of a possible anonymous letter that had reached the Czechoslovakian police or authorities that said my mother was coming to the country in order to kidnap me. I’m not too sure about this part of the story and I think my parents aren’t either, but I remember it mentioned that it could have been a possibility because it was very quick they way they sort of nabbed them in the car, brought them to the police station and all of the sudden started bringing in my mother’s friends: ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ And most of my mother’s friends looked at my mother and said ‘Never seen her before,’ which screwed them in the long run, but good for them as people. And then of course there’s that one odd uncle that’s like ‘Anna, what are you doing back?!’ So they all got put in jail.”
“Then my mother was under house arrest for a year or more, possibly the entire time she was in the Czech Republic. I’m not sure. I do remember we had police renting an apartment across the street with guys hanging out the windows with binoculars, taking the names of everybody that walked into our house. My mother didn’t have any friends at first for a long time because nobody dared to visit her; they would all lose their jobs. My father this whole time is in Sweden, fueling the fire in Sweden [playing] the devastated father: ‘Oh my god, my wife, my children.’ It worked out well that way; he was stoking the fires in Sweden and my mother was trapped in the Czech Republic with me, and now my baby brother. That took three years of nothing happening. It was sort of a stand-off. My mother there in the house, always being watched, my father over in Sweden, and the Swedes were just going at it. There were journalists coming to the Czech Republic. Of course this is all very illegal, so it had to be very hush-hush that there were Swedish journalists coming over and they would take all these pictures of us.
“For three years, my father kept fighting his battle over there in Sweden, and the Swedes were on-board. God bless all of them; the entire nation of Sweden. I owe it all to them really because the people kept writing letters; the Swedish hockey team wouldn’t play the Czechs in the Olympics because of us. The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was supposed to make a state visit and refused to make a state visit because of us. You know, we were cause célèbre. After three years, I guess the Czechs just went ‘This is more trouble than it’s worth. Passports here. Bye. Don’t come back. You’re no longer Czech; we want nothing to do with you.’ They actually kicked us out.”
“I wasn’t allowed to go back to Czechoslovakia. When we got kicked out, in ’73, we got kicked out. We were not allowed in ever. As long as the communists were in power, that was completely off-limits to us. This means the woman that brought me up, really, was my babička and I wasn’t allowed to see her because now it was the situation that we were in Sweden and, to me, what felt like my real family was in Czechoslovakia and we had no way of seeing each other. Those were some very, very bad years for me, some very sad years, because I felt like I was taken away from my home and I wanted to go back. I’d much rather have been in the Czech Republic because I didn’t know. So, about once a year, my mother would save up enough money and we would go to Poland or Yugoslavia or Romania or Hungary, one of the communist countries, and my relatives would go there, like my mother’s sister and my cousins, my grandmother, and we would meet up with them. For a week or two we would have a holiday together in one of the communist countries to get to see each other.”
“First of all, it wasn’t very pretty. But I was not shown the pretty parts. I was stuck somewhere in Midtown on 56th Street, just concrete buildings all around, all the people. Everything was so rushed and so money-oriented. If you lived in Paris and you don’t know where to go in New York, the food wasn’t overwhelmingly good. To me, it was anti-culture. Nobody cared about books here; nobody cared about classical music; nobody cared about art. It was all money. It just felt like it was not a world that made any sense to me. But of course, being young and arrogant, I just didn’t really want to explore it. I took it at face value of what I saw when I was here, I was having a terrible time, and I thought ‘This place sucks. I can’t wait to get back to Paris.’ So later on, when I started considering actually moving here because of the money – because I wasn’t modeling to get pictures out of it; I was modeling to make money and the proposition was just undownturnable – I started searching out the different areas. The ones that wouldn’t be so what I thought New York was, but that I thought would feel right for me. And I did, of course. New York is a city of all cities. It has a little bit of everything. You can find Tokyo here; you can find France.”
“When you live in a country, when you plant your roots in a country, it’s really about that. It’s about roots. It’s about soaking up the nourishment of your environment. This is children’s songs, children’s stories, pop culture going on around you, and when you move as an adult, as a fully-formed person, to another country to settle, you’re missing all this roots stuff. You’re missing all this basic stuff that everybody else grew up with, all these references that you don’t have. So I got my Czech ones, then I moved to Sweden and I had to re-root my roots and go to the Swedish ones, and then I had to do it in France and then I had to do it in America. Because I did it so early, I think I was conscious that this is what you have to do to live in that country. You can’t just live on the country. You can’t just sit on the surface of a country and pretend you live there. You have to learn everything from the beginning, and I’m the richer person for it, actually having learned four different countries from the ground up. It gets a little confusing sometimes.”
In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.
He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal Skutečnost [Reality], which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia and Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
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Peter Hruby was born in Prague in June, 1921. His father, Petr, owned a shoe shop in the Prague district of Karlín (which Peter says went bankrupt as shoemaker Tomáš Bat’a cornered the local footwear market), while his mother, Marie, stayed at home raising him and his younger brother Jiří. Peter graduated from high school in 1939 and planned to study at Prague’s Charles University, but with all Czech universities shut by the occupying Nazis that same year, he went to work in a factory making military equipment in the nearby town of Chotěboř. Upon liberation in 1945, he did enroll at Charles University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, literature and languages.
In 1948, Peter says he was worried by political developments in Czechoslovakia, and so he approached renowned journalist Ferdinand Peroutka about publishing a journal which, he says, was designed for both the Communist and non-Communist cultural elite. Peroutka backed the idea, but the project was never realized following the Communist takeover in February. Later that year, Peter fled Czechoslovakia, securing a visa to a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from which he did not return.
He settled in Geneva and completed his university education there. It was at this time he founded the journal Skutečnost [Reality], which he says today is one of his proudest achievements. In 1951, Peter began work at the Czech section of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. He worked there for six years until he was transferred to RFE’s U.S. office in New York. He remained at Radio Free Europe until 1964. Peter’s next job was with the University of Maryland Overseas Division, teaching history and politics in Thule, Greenland, Izmir, Turkey and Bermuda, among other locations. Peter is the author of a number of books such as Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia and Daydreams and Nightmares: Czech Communist and Ex-Communist Literature. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
“I liked Christmas, Christmas dinner was on the 24th – the night before – we had always carp and once in a year a glass of wine (which I wasn’t allowed to touch until I was quite a lot older). And the gifts were distributed, I was usually disappointed because there were mostly things that they would buy for me anyway like socks and shirts and pants and things like that. And when my father discovered that, he asked me always what book I would like to get and that changed Christmas. I loved Dumas and so I was getting all his books, stories and so we finished eating and right away I started to read!”
“I was one of the few people who expected that there would be a Communist coup d’état in February. Somehow I had a good political instinct or something! So I went to see a prominent Czech publisher and writer, Ferdinand Peroutka, and I was just a student and I came to see him. His mistress Slavka Peroutkova introduced me to him, and I told Peroutka whom I liked to read – he didn’t know me, but he trusted me immediately – I told him I expected the Communists would create a putsch before the elections, and he said ‘I am afraid of that too.’ And I told him I would like to create some kind of a magazine-journal, which would be led by Jan Masaryk, who was a very popular politician and no-party man. And he said ‘Yes, I agree with you, I will give you 200,000 Czech crowns for it and try to persuade Masaryk to take over the editorial job and give you more, 200,000 [crowns.]’ So that was one of the actions – incredible, that he trusted me right away like that.
“So I started to build up a group of people who would publish the journal. It was supposed to become not only for the members of the young elite, of the cultural society that I founded at the same time with the help of my professor Jan Kozák, but it would be a journal that would represent the whole society of cultural leaders of the Czechoslovak Republic, who were not only Communist, but non-Communist too. But unfortunately when we had a meeting with Jan Masaryk in February, [Soviet Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Valerian] Zorin was faster than we – he was already in Prague in order to lead the coup d’état. And so the journal was never published.”
“First I had to persuade the man in charge of passports. And when I came in (which wasn’t allowed, I just marched in his room and he said ‘What do you want? What do you want?’), he looked up my papers and he said ‘You know, I have a problem with getting proper shoes…’ So I brought him shoes and got a passport – I never did anything like that before! My father knew more about what to do in a world that’s corrupted. So I gave him shoes, but then they introduced a new special permission by secret police…
“So again, that was the so-called kachlikarna, because it was a gray building of the Ministry of the Interior on Letná, and there were large groups of people there, but I saw that some people were coming by the side door bringing food. So, I used the side door and went straight to the top man. Again, he started to shout at me and I said ‘They invited me, they insist on me coming, it would be a scandal…’ He said ‘We will never give it to you!’ And I said, ‘What do I have to do in order to get it? It would be a scandal!’ He said ‘If you bring from the factory a confirmation by the action committee that you are progressive…’ The action committees were always three people, devoted Communists, that were leading then the whole country everywhere. So I took the night train to Chotěboř where I worked during the War and I was lucky. They opened 7:00, I went in, and there were three members of the committee; one was a friend who knew that my girlfriend was a worker and he was a relative of hers, another was a worker with whom, as a worker, I founded a chess club and theater, so he signed it too – I don’t remember the third one. So they said that I was socially progressive, which I was!
“There was a misunderstanding, they believed only Communists were socially progressive, I thought that was retrograding, that was never really social progress. So I brought it to this man again by the side door, he gave me the stamp and the next day I was in Austria going to Switzerland.”
“In 1948, in August, several months after the coup d’état I left for Geneva and started a journal there, which I couldn’t have done in Prague. And the journal became very important. It started as a student type of a magazine, but became really the leading journal for a new program, not pan-Slav, not pro-Soviet, but pro-European, Atlantic-oriented. And gradually older people joined us, even Ferdinand Peroutka and so on. And that became… for five years that was really showing the way to European unification when it wasn’t yet so clean. It was still being discussed, for example, the problem of German participation. And again, Truman and Atchison and so on realized that Germany should be allowed to rearm to create a European force. So that was… I’m quite proud of that achievement; that was quite a successful journal.”
“I started to discover by reading local papers from Ostrava, Moravská Ostrava… because they started to have a problem with miners, because the miners were paid very well, but it was very dangerous work, so many of them died. Because the Soviet Union was very much interested in all of the coal and all the steel that they could get from Czechoslovakia. So that was crucial for the Soviet Union – and uranium mines – so I discovered that there was a lot of trouble there; people were dying and trying to leave. So I concentrated on starting to write programs for Moravská Ostrava. So one really got to know quite a lot when one read carefully the communist papers.”
“I couldn’t get my American citizenship for a fortnight. And finally, the head of the [diplomatic] mission in Munich asked me to come and said ‘you know…’ You have to understand, under the McCarthy era, we were worried about intellectuals, we didn’t want to have them in America. ‘Just answer me one question,’ I said ‘Sure, I’ll answer any question.’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said no. He said, ‘How can I give it to you when you don’t believe in God?’ I said ‘I knew if I told you I believed in God I would get it, but I didn’t want to lie.’ You know, you get so many spies in America by asking such simple questions that communist agents can answer the way they are supposed to answer them – which later was proved to be true, you know. So he said ‘I have to think about it.’ I said ‘If you explain to me your idea of God, not just somewhere in the clouds and so on, but a vital force and life and so on, I would agree.’ He said ‘I have to think about it,’ and in two weeks I received citizenship.”