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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Boyhood Hobby</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r5eeQYFARqQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I spent most of my time, not in front of the computer because there were no publicly available computers in those days, but my hobby was to create small electronic devices – radios, blinking stuff, anything which would create a weird noise – little gizmos like that. Very interesting devices in those days, and very popular, were amplifiers, because every good musician needs amplifiers and boosters and all these kinds of devices. So I became famous for my electric guitar specialized devices among my friends.”</p><h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DlfQ9LbF4sk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was in class when it happened. Suddenly everybody went out. Everybody spent a couple of days, a couple of nights, on the streets, and we knew it was over. You knew from the beginning it was over. There was a lot of excitement because now we recognize multiple parties, multiple goals and strategies for how to make people happy in politics. Those days there was only one option – them, Communists, or not them. So I guess it was kind of a surprise for everybody when we realized that we are suddenly free, ok, and what next? Nobody thought of ‘what next?’ means. In the moment we ran away from the school and spent the nights on the street.”</p><h4>Military Service</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rDGPsz5KgpM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was with the Ministry of Defense in Bratislava with an intelligence group, screening through all kinds of newspapers, media, TV shows, and my role was basically to capture any single news which was related to the Army. So my work day was starting at 4:00 a.m. and I was done about noon, and I had another eight hours to have a second job – which was out of the Army in a company named AXA. That’s how I started there. It was interesting in the terms that it was something ‘secret,’ so I felt important. Plus, I didn’t have to shovel roads and run in circles for ten hours and funny stuff like that. I was treated as a professional. So I wouldn’t say it was quite easy, but it was definitely easier than 99 percent of other guys serving in the Army.”</p><h4>Move to Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1YHackubPOI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I landed in Toronto, and my first feeling when I was landing was ‘Oh my gosh. What did I do?’ I realized in that very moment ‘Yes, this is a remote country; yes, English is the language here; yes, I’m alone; yes, I don’t have a job; yes, I don’t know anybody.’ That was the feeling – frustrating.”</p><p><em>So what happened next?</em></p><p>“I never became homesick, that’s the first thing. Plus, I’m not a person who would sit home and wait for a miracle, so I got a job after two weeks. I worked in a warehouse picking fruits and vegetables, loading trucks. Of course I was looking for a job in my area, but I had to pay the bills. There was rent, there was everything else, so I had to make sure that I had income. So I spent nine months in that warehouse until I found a job.”</p><h4>Slovak Heritage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ekvBdv3tY-4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It is a very easy question with a very easy answer. Our lives are like a moving window of 20, 30, 40 years? Nobody knows, right? When you’re gone, whatever you brought to this life is gone unless somebody saves it. Slovak people in Canada came a long, long time ago; they’re dying, everybody will pass away eventually, so if we don’t save what was valuable to them, what was valuable to the community, those days will be gone. There are plenty of historical documents dying in somebody’s basement being flooded, being lost, being thrown away, and the purpose of what we do is to save it. To save it not just for us, but for the future so we know that Slovaks were here, they were not an insignificant group, they did huge things and all these things will not be lost.”</p><p><em>Do you think sometimes that people who are expatriates or people who are abroad have a different relationship to their own cultural heritage than people who stay in their country?</em></p><p>“Absolutely, because staying in a country, you don’t feel the gravity of the situation. In the country, you still speak the same language, you see all those folk groups – professional ones – performing, and you don’t have a feeling that you’re losing something or that there is something that may be lost or forgotten. Away from home, you feel it. Because if a culture is not preserved, people assimilate with native people – which is normal – and after a couple generations there wouldn’t be any Slovaks here.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Pavol Dzacko
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Pavol Dzacko was born in 1974 in Bratislava. Before the Velvet Revolution, Pavol’s father, Štefan, worked in an agricultural processing center; following the Revolution, he took a job providing IT services for a bank. Pavol’s mother, Dagmar, was a teacher who, following the Revolution, began teaching French at a small college. Pavol grew up the oldest of five siblings. When he was two, the family moved to Košice for his father’s job. As a boy, Pavol was interested in electronics and heavy metal music; he says his two hobbies intersected when he created homemade amplifiers and other devices for his friends. Pavol says that although his day-to-day life did not immediately change after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he remembers the time to be one of ‘excitement.’ He attended technical high school and studied computer programming at the Technical University of Košice. Upon his graduation in 1997, Pavol moved to Bratislava where he served one year in the military and simultaneously worked as a janitor at the financial and insurance firm AXA. At AXA (which was contracting for CitiBank), Pavol moved into IT development and, later, became a manager.</p><p> </p><p>In 2002, two of Pavol’s friends who had plans to move to Canada convinced Pavol to join them; Pavol says that he had always thought of Canada as a place of freedom and nature, but that he hadn’t given much prior thought to moving there. He applied for a permanent resident visa which he received less than two months later; he says this was an unusually short waiting period. He and his wife arrived in Toronto where Pavol quickly found a job in a warehouse. After nine months of applying for jobs in his field, he began working for the Bank of Montreal in 2003 and has remained there ever since. Pavol is active in the Slovak community in Toronto, serving on the boards of several organizations including the Slovak House in Toronto and the Canadian Slovak Institute. He is the founder of Canada SK Entertainment, an organization which brings Slovak groups to perform in Canada and the United States. A dual citizen of Canada and Slovakia, Pavol speaks Slovak at home with his wife and keeps Slovak holiday traditions. He lives in Toronto.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Community Life
Kosice
Military service
Pop culture
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Velvet Revolution
Western
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Childhood</h4>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Indoctrination</h4>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p><em>You really felt that you wanted to do this?</em></p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Sweden</h4>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>House Arrest</h4>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Grandparents</h4>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>NYC</h4>
<p>“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.”</p>
<h4>Roots</h4>
<p>“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.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Paulina Porizkova
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paulina Porizkova was born in Olomouc in 1965 and grew up in the Moravian town of Prostějov. Her parents, Anna and Jiří, left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and settled in Sweden. Paulina remained with her maternal grandparents in Prostějov and says that her time with them was ‘delightful.’ Paulina’s parents, meanwhile, were attempting to reunite their family and gained attention in Sweden for their actions. After three years had gone by, they planned to ‘kidnap’ Paulina after flying into Czechoslovakia with the help of Swedish pilots. On her way to Prostějov, Paulina’s mother (who was traveling on a fake passport) was detained for speeding and arrested when her identity was revealed. Because she was several months pregnant, Paulina’s mother was released to her parents’ house and remained under house arrest. Paulina says that her father, who had remained in Sweden, had managed to keep their case in the media, which put pressure on the Czechoslovak government. In 1973, Paulina, her mother, and her brother were allowed to leave the country.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Cultural Traditions
Family life
Prostejov
Rural life
school
Secret police
Sense of identity
Warsaw Pact invasion
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Piano Lessons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/toUgT54m56M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I had to take piano lessons, you know, the parents insisted. And the teacher, the piano teacher, was an old boy scout. That was, of course, that was outlawed. But he had these models of cabins and the little scout things, and so we would spend half the time playing piano, and half the time playing with the scout things. So, my piano is not that good.”</p><h4>Sokol Gymnastics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iBVDviEWprk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had a sort of… Sokol was outlawed, but he [my father] was teaching a little gymnastics class that I and about a dozen boys, we would go into the old Sokol Hall and he made arrangements, he would teach us the stuff, you know, gymnastics: parallel bars, high bar, rings, floor exercises, the sort of typical stuff that the Sokols do – for several years. And I think he always believed in exercise and the whole notion of ‘in a healthy body is a healthy spirit.’ So he was doing it a little bit for himself, because he always liked to exercise and stuff, but at the same time, he put up with a dozen other kids too.”</p><h4>Snap Decision</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/atWhbYHm4zk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had this meeting on the steps of our house, I was coming down in the morning and he was coming up, he proposed that we go and try to go to the United States, and it’s going to be challenging, but we should go. And of course, I was a 13 year old, for me it was just a big adventure. So I said yes, let’s go. And so that day he went to the hospital to do his rounds and work, and I packed whatever I deemed important, some clothing and a sleeping bag. It was kind of interesting because I still have the sleeping bag; I still have it in the car in case we get stranded in the snow. But it is amazing how that one item was sort of like the security blanket, like a little boy’s nene blanket, because we didn’t know where we were going to be. We could be sleeping on the floor of a gym some place or some kind of a camp. So we were dragging this sleeping blanket all around across the continent.”</p><h4>Adventure</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hia1HkxzULY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You need to understand that especially as a young boy like that, anything Western, anything forbidden, was idolized. Anything Western was idolized. If somebody gave us chewing gum, because it was from America it was like the hottest thing. So, when we said ‘let’s go to America,’ it was like this great adventure. To me as a young teenager, it was like, why not? Let’s do it – I didn’t have to worry about all those legalities and technicalities and potential… I knew there was danger, I knew that there was danger, that if things don’t work out it could be sort of nasty at least for him [my dad.] I was a child but… So it was sort of a quick decision, sometimes you just have to make those snap decisions.”</p><h4>Road Signs</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YPPV9nbtkKk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Ironically, travel was complicated because the locals changed the signs. And so if you followed the road signs, you would end up in the wrong place. You really had to go by knowledge of the local area or by map. But if you came to an intersection and it said ‘Prague, this way,’ it would probably point you to the wrong place.”</p><h4>Cleveland</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IEeQR7jewA8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well actually, he [Alex] was more active in the Ukrainian or the Rusyn community, so my first years until college, I was really not involved with the Czech community at all or very little. If anything, there was a Carpatho-Rusyn ski club and he was an officer and we did a lot of traveling, a lot of skiing in the wintertime. And so I was more involved in that culture. It was not until I already was married and had children, and I was taking my daughter to a gymnastics class, and there was a fellow reading a paper, a Czech paper, Nový svět. And so I said, ‘Well, he’s got to be Czech or Slovak or something,’ and he was my age, and so when the opportunity came I said hello to him, ‘Dobrý večer’ [Good evening] or something like that. And he turned out to be a local dentist, Stan Pechan, who is Slovak, Czech – he covers both areas, much like me, and we started talking and he introduced me to, he took me to a meeting of what was then the Krajanský výbor, which now is really defunct, but at the time it was the Czech and Slovak committee for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Cultural Garden</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EGVIE_cjwGs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of my colleagues at work, at Cleveland City Hall, approached me one time and said ‘Hey, you are Czech, you know there’s a Czech Cultural Garden and it’s orphaned and you know, somebody should take care of it.’ And I said. ‘What garden?’ I had no clue about the gardens. And he said ‘Come on, I’ll take you there at lunch time.’ So, we did, we took a ride to East Boulevard and MLK and drove through the gardens and saw the Czech garden and I was impressed and said ‘Yeah, well somebody kind of needs to attend to that.’ And before I knew, it kind of became my commitment to the Czech community, taking care of that. And I think we’ve been pretty successful. We’ve got some grants from the Czech Republic, we’ve got some donations from specifically the Ptak family, got some grants from the Holden Parks Trust, which is a trust which takes care of some of the parks, or specifically that park. So, we did a lot of things, restored the statues, planted new shrubs, tuck-pointed the masonry and over the years I think it’s one of the better… [We have] had virtually all of the ambassadors that were stationed in the United States come and visit and walk through the gardens.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Paul Burik
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Paul Burik was born in the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice in 1954. His father, Nicholas, was a doctor, while his mother, Vlasta, worked as a pharmacist. When Paul was still a toddler, the family moved to Prešov, in eastern Slovakia, which was where Paul’s father (who was ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn) had grown up. After nearly six years, however, the family moved back to Bohemia, first to Prčice and then Sedlčany, where Paul’s father worked as the chief surgeon in the local hospital. When Paul was still a teenager, his mother died of a terminal disease. His father worked long hours so Paul says he grew up fairly independently. In 1967 his father traveled to the United States to visit his brother (Paul’s uncle Alex) who had immigrated to Cleveland shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Paul says his father spoke with a number of American doctors during his visit to the States, but decided to return to Czechoslovakia because, at the time, ‘things were good there.’ Following the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, however, Paul’s father suggested to him that the pair resettle in America. Paul says he looked forward to the ‘adventure’ of emigrating and agreed with his father’s suggestion.</p><p> </p><p>The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.</p><p> </p><p>In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Ceske Budejovice
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Health care professionals
Krajansky vybor
Presov
refugee
Sense of identity
Sports
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Finding Music</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/37R-T3d4Mv0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“As a young child, I was into the domestic things that were available so it was fine. I didn’t feel deprived. But in the later years, in seventh, eighth grade, I was getting into bands from abroad and different styles of rock music and whatnot, and that was not available at all. We had to go Poland and buy bootlegged tapes and that sort of thing. I remember in seventh or eighth grade, when we would go on trips to Poland, I would buy certain tapes and then trade them with classmates in school, so we did do a lot of that.”</p><h4>New York 1990</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OanGi0KKu00?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“[My] first impression when I flew in was a little daunting and scary. At JFK Airport, the path through immigration at that time – I don’t know what it’s like these days – it was in the basement, underground, with literally thousands of people standing in line, and, after having traveled for basically two days straight, I was tired. Everything was dark and people were tense and tired around me. So those were the very first impressions.”</p><p><em>And when you saw New York City?</em></p><p>“When I got out of the airport, things very quickly got much better. We saw the sun, and we had pizza the first day in Brooklyn, which was quite delicious; right off the bat I was a fan. It was great. The first days, weeks, were sparkly and magical.”</p><h4>Two Restaurants</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/07UMOYZlvCM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My love of food, having been brought up in a setting where a meal was always a cultural experience, both in my grandmother’s house and my parents’ apartment; my mom and dad were great cooks and there was a passion for cooking. Throughout graduate studies and thereafter, my other hobby or passion was design, interior design. I did some major apartment designs and renovations and actually built a house from scratch that I initially lived in, and then it became a bit of a business, so that was the other side of me doing things with my hands and loving to cook. So when the time was right, I did have, I guess, an epiphany that joined those two things, in my head at the time at least, and I decided that I will open a restaurant one day, when the time is right.</p><p>“She [Maria] had, aside from being an amazing cook and baker, run a hotel and restaurant in Slovakia after having graduated from college, so she was always in the hospitality business. After I finished my graduate school stuff and we were debating which direction to take our careers in, we very much wanted to start our own business. She had a degree in economics in Slovakia and when debating whether to get a job or do our own thing, we definitely wanted to do our own thing, so she pursued her hospitality studies further. She went to the Institute of Culinary Education where she got a diploma both as a chef and a restaurant manager. I designed my restaurants hands on and we collaborate on the menus, we run it, we don’t have managers; this is what we do. I think it was a very organic transition from doing what we love and having had experience in difference facets of it and doing it.”</p><h4>Balancing Backgrounds</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ya8zwTrvD7I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’d like to say that, as not the youngest person at the moment, but I consider myself an active adult, I’m always pleased when I see barriers being broken down between being Slovak and being American as well. I’m continuously proud when I encounter people who are from Slovakia and the region who get it. Who don’t base their entire existence on the fact that they are Slovak. Who live their lives as good people and are respectful of their background, their heritage, but get with the program of what it means to be an American. I think that’s the fine balance of investing your energy into things that are useful for people, for you, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Do good, concrete things, such as food, such as music, that may or may not be remembered, but I’m trying to contribute. Any time I can make a reference to the old world, I am very proud of doing it. And I’m very proud of living in a country that allows me to do it, and gives me the freedom and is not judgmental of any of it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Otto Zizak Jr.
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Otto Zizak Jr. was born in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1976. Before immigrating, his father, <a href="/web/20170609111930/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otto-sr-zizak/">Otto</a>, worked as an engineer and on an agricultural cooperative while his mother, Božena, was an economist. Otto was a member of the Young Pioneer group and enjoyed sports and music. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Otto’s father left for the United States, and Otto and his mother joined him at the end of the school year. He says that although his first impressions of JFK Airport were ‘daunting,’ his impressions of life in the city improved significantly. The Žižáks settled in Brooklyn where Otto started high school. Otto attended the City University of New York (CUNY) and majored in psychology. He then began graduate classes in the same subject and worked for his parents while they were starting their own business. Otto was also interested in interior design and renovations and worked on several construction projects.</p><p> </p><p>On one of his return trips to Slovakia, Otto reconnected with an old schoolmate, Maria. She moved to the United States in 2002 and the pair married shortly thereafter. Drawing on Maria’s background in the hospitality industry and Otto’s experience in construction, in 2007 they opened Korzo, a restaurant in Brooklyn which incorporates the flavors of Slovakia and other European countries with local, seasonal ingredients. They have since opened a second location. Otto occasionally writes and records music, both in English and Slovak, and has had the opportunity to perform with well-known Slovak artists. Otto and Maria have three children who speak fluent Slovak and enjoy visiting Slovakia. Today, Otto’s family lives in New York City.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Post-1989 emigrant
Restaurant/hotel industry
Sense of identity
Western/Pop culture
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96e09517205e6860c63347c7657b5de8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ppUr41FIxpE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My mother went to an economic high school and she became an administrative accountant. She started to work, I think when I was already a small child, for TESLA, which was a major enterprise, where she ran an office. But during the ‘50s when there was persecution of people of different opinions and non-communists it was discovered that she was of Russian origin, was thrown out of TESLA, and ended up working in a factory called Kablo, which was three shifts during the night, day and afternoons, and that was extremely difficult for her.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eSlOP7Y1SbE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“During the [Cuban] Missile Crisis, he was, as part of the film crew, invited to film a movie called <em>Komu tanči Havana</em>, <em>For Whom Havana Dances</em>, in Havana. He was not allowed to travel because all of the people who went were communists. He was allowed, after many applications by the film director, to go with two people who would guard him. And I have a feeling that my parents discussed the opportunity, but it was very clear that if he would leave [permanently], she and the children would never be allowed. However, during this trip to Cuba, the plane stopped in Montreal and the people who were communists who looked after him themselves escaped. So he arrived to Cuba by himself.”</p><h4>Art</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-P9g1Gk02dc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I really wanted to find a club where maybe I can paint or do something and so, with a friend of mine who later on enrolled in art history, found a place which, again, was under this auspices of folk art, but the person who was there was an academic painter – and probably persecuted also – and he allowed all kinds of people to come at any time and to do all kinds of things. So I started to work with wood and so many things; he was so encouraging. And then I came up with an idea of doing an exhibition of all of these products at a local cinema, and he supported me and it was exhibited in the hallways, and it was a wonderful, wonderful outlet for me.”</p><h4>Teenage Years</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9I-2n4RlIps?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It’s already probably starting in 1964 to 1966. There was a sense of great liberalization, without us completely realizing it. We would listen to the foreign radio – Radio Free Europe, I think, and one other station – we would be completely into Beatles music and all of the contemporary music and outfits and all of these kinds of things. And living in Prague there were outlets; there were small theatres. So I would go to small theatres and see performances, Na zábradlí or Semafor, and they were all incredibly interesting; also kind of political but smartly political so they wouldn’t be closed. We would go to different musical performances. So life became extremely interesting and, at the time, you spoke more openly and my parents spoke openly and so on.”</p><h4>U.K.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DUbJbWeVF0k?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was then that I realized that what was ahead of me in Czechoslovakia was an extremely grim picture. By that time – and I immigrated, or left, in the summer of ’70, so from fall ’69 to summer ’70 – things were changing dramatically. You could already tell, even among young people, that people were making decisions – of those who stayed – who would be collaborating, how they would be collaborating, whether they will become members of the Communist Party, and so on. So you could already see the whole process and you also know that if you weren’t taking part in it you will be succumbed by the entire situation and there would be very few choices for you that would be left. One of the choices would be to live a decent family life, and that felt not enough when you think that you are 20 years old and the whole life is ahead of you. So I desperately, desperately wanted to leave. And at that time I became extremely secretive because I knew that if anybody learned about anything, everything would have been stopped.”</p><h4>Adapting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyHc47vxCDs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think people really are not interested in your past. We can ask ourselves how many people do we ask what sort of experiences they have had in life, particularly when they are not from our culture. And so it became very clear to me that nobody is really interested in the culture that they don’t understand, and I have to thus adopt to the culture in which I am; to adopt those values; to spend free time like everybody of my age; to dress like them; and to start sort of understanding how they live. I found all of this extremely exciting. I can imagine that when you are older all of this is difficult, but I was shaping my personality and it was exciting beyond description; it was just absolutely fantastic.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qXXDKFhOh_U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was very impressed with the people that were around my husband, whether they were Czech or Americans. They felt extraordinarily energized, extremely positive, full of hope – for themselves, for their country, for what they’re going to do. It was almost as if I felt, ‘Well yeah, I am meeting myself; that’s how I feel. I want to be here. They are the same people like me. It’s very exciting; things can happen here.’ So that was kind of a feeling I had when I came to the United States.”</p><h4>Czech Republic</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xkA7NQGlHdU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think young people have enormous possibilities and it’s very much up to them if they are able to take these incredible opportunities. Of course, you can now see the country being economically very successful and people in certain areas really having very full lives. On the other hand, what is really disappointing, particularly during the Klaus period as well as now during Zeman, is the amount of corruption and the fact that kind of democracy and the hope of people, those who fought with Havel, haven’t really completely materialized. I think Havel represented some enormous spiritual and moral hopes, and I think some people hold them very closed in; it’s very important for them. There are many extraordinary talented people, but somehow the oppression, particularly of the government, which seems to be very corrupt, is disheartening for many.”</p>
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Milena Kalinovska
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<p>Milena Kalinovska was born in Prague in 1948. Her maternal grandparents emigrated from the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution due to their anti-communist views, and her grandfather became a librarian who started the Slavonic collection at Charles University. Milena’s father’s family was from Moravia where they had a furniture-making business. Věra, Milena’s mother, worked as an accountant at TESLA, but was fired from that position in the 1950s when her Russian background was discovered; she was sent to work in a factory instead. Milena’s father, Adolf, built camera rails for the film industry and worked for several well-known directors.</p><p> </p><p>Milena grew up with her maternal grandmother in the Prague district of Strašnice. She spoke Russian at home and observed traditional Russian holidays. In addition to participating in sports and the Pioneer youth organization, Milena was also interested in art, having been exposed to museums, film and other culture by her father from a young age. She joined an art club in high school and put on an exhibition at a local movie theatre. As a teenager during the Prague Spring, Milena recalls a ‘great sense of liberalization’ and took advantage of the music and theatre happening in the capital city. Following her graduation from high school, she began studying law at Charles University.</p><p> </p><p>Shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Milena went abroad to work as an au pair in the U.K. She returned to Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1969 and, because of the ‘oppressive’ environment she saw forming the beginning stages of normalization, began making plans to leave the country permanently. With money given to her by her grandmother, Milena secured a three-week trip to the U.K. She did not return with the group and went to London where she was granted asylum. In 1975, she graduated from the University of Essex with a degree in comparative literature and began teaching Russian literature while also working with dissident and exile publications. She then received her master’s degree in Slavonic studies from the University of British Columbia and decided to pursue a career in the arts. Back in London, she found a job at Riverside Studios, a gallery and studio for contemporary and experimental art. In 1986, Milena married her husband, Jan Vanous, a Czech-born American, and moved to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Milena’s art career has flourished in the United States, where, in addition to working as an independent curator, she has held the position of director at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and is currently the head of public programming and education at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Milena’s Czech heritage has played a large role in her professional accomplishments, as she has made it a point to highlight artists from eastern and central Europe, particularly those whose work was suppressed during the communist era. Milena holds British, American and Czech citizenship, and she travels to the Czech Republic annually. Her two children speak fluent Czech and she continues several Czech traditions at home. Today Milena lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.</p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Arts
Assimilation
Family life
Komu tanci Havana
Na zabradli
Prague Spring
Sense of identity
-
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17f3c8652ee46e3c64f21f810a8a3dae
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>Going to Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OCo6UzNiJ-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It became clearer and clearer that the Communists would take over, and we were very fortunate that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – was living already in Israel, and her best friend was the mother of the person who was Israel’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. This lady told my grandmother that if she wants her children to get out of Czechoslovakia, she needs to get there and bring them, because the phones and the mail and everything was censored already. So she did do that exactly, she took a plane and came. Within a very short time my parents put together what they called a lift, which was filled with whatever belongings they could put in. And by the way, my mother had taken courses in photography, so one of the things they put in there was a camera because they thought that maybe she would be able to make a living in Israel as a photographer, and a few other very valuable things because we were well off in Czechoslovakia.</p><p>But when the lift came to Israel, instead of all these wonderful possible resources, there were rags. So on the way or wherever, these things were stolen or taken.</p><p>“So anyway, this is what we did to prepare to go, and because of this terrible experience of flying from England after the War, I developed a very high fever and they had to postpone the trip to the last plane that left Czechoslovakia for Israel. The plane that we were supposed to go on was one that was shot at, and it fell over, I think, Bulgaria. So that forever was kind of a shock to us that we could have been on that plane.”</p><h4>United States</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dS8t85wQOYs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father had had an uncle who lived in the United States when he was a little boy, and this uncle – as uncles from the United States often did – would come to Czechoslovakia and bring for him and his brothers gifts, he always bore gifts for them. He was one of the co-owners of a large shipping company, so he was able to bring them goodies. And from that time on, my father had this dream to come to the United States. My mother and he had papers to leave, but when the War broke out of course there was no way to leave, and as I said, he joined the Army and so forth and so that fell through.</p><p>“So as soon as they came to Israel he started thinking about going to the United States, but it took about seven years until the papers were arranged and we left for Rochester because there was a family friend living there, which is an incredible story.</p><p>A man whose roots were Czech but he studied medicine and lived in Vienna. Evidently, he took care of my mother who was a tennis player and had some problems with her knee, and he took care of her and fell in love with her and wanted her to marry him, but by that time my mother knew my father already. I don’t know exactly what the story was, but he sent his wife to Israel and she came and saw how we lived and she said ‘Oh, we’re going to send you an affidavit, we will bring you to the United States, we will take care of you.’”</p><h4>Living in Israel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/55JMcJfy4pY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First of all, it was my formative years, but it also was the beginning of the state of Israel. That was a very exciting period and everybody was very nationalistic and so forth. I think that in those years, I just did not feel so much of the connection to Czechoslovakia as much as I did later on because my parents were so busy making a basic living, and everyone was trying to assimilate. There were people who came to Israel from all over, and everybody wanted to find a common denominator, so the language was an important factor, and the songs, and the dances and so on.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dw9rEIVKa0E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You know, I never think that you have to choose, especially here because our loyalties to the United States, to Israel, to Czech Republic, they’re not conflicting. We all have very basic, democratic values, so it’s not like if I had to choose between Russia. So I don’t see them conflicting. I also think that religion is one thing, but as I said, I don’t think there’s any conflict between being an American and a Jew, and in the same sense, I don’t see any of it as conflicting. Fortunately, I never had to make big choices between ‘I believe this, or I don’t believe that.’ So I think in a way I look at it as very very enriching, rather than otherwise.”</p><h4>Hardships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zi8tbGPCqwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The wronging, if you will, when you think about it from the economic point of view, yes I know that if it hadn’t happened for it, I’d be living a totally different life because my parents on both sides came from very well-to-do families and I would not have had to struggle with my education, et cetera. But that is not so important. The fact that I never got to meet my grandparents and other relatives; it’s a very painful thing. It’s one thing if a person is taken because they’re ill, but to know that they died such horrible deaths, and with my uncle and aunt and cousin, I really don’t know exactly what happened, because they – the uncle and aunt were young people – they could have been used for forced labor, they might have lived for three, four years, who knows, and who knows what awful life they might have had.</p><p>“It’s a pain that does not go away and it’s a pain that all of humanity has to carry, not just for the Holocaust, but for other genocides, for other wrongdoings that just don’t make sense, not fathomable, not understandable.”</p>
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Title
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Michlean Amir
Description
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<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-2336 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609111851im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Michlean-Amir-SQ.png" alt="" width="260" height="260" /></p><p>Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.</p><p> </p><p>Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Child emigre
emigrant
Family life
Holocaust
Jews
Plzen
refugees
Sense of identity
-
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3b26543ac0a5da6c3d7797e3f81cb597
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Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Hobbies</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TQylLannx0w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Sport – that was really my hobby. Skiing, and later on I did windsurfing. I built by myself the whole board, so we were doing some windsurfing on the lakes. Other than that, sport was the big escape for people. Camping, going out to the forest, because everybody was leaving the city and going to – they called it a chalupa [cottage]– and going to villages and escaping from the city.”</p><h4>Vacation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qckidbNWAIA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1962 we went to Vienna and I was nine years old, and when you crossed the border – everything in Czechoslovakia was kind of drab, gray and brown – we went to Austria and it was like a different world. The gas stations with the colorful flags and colors everywhere and new cars. I think that left a huge impression on me. [I thought] ‘I want to live here,’ you know? And Coca-Cola and fries! Eating fries was like ‘Wow.’ It was amazing. That definitely had a big impression on me. It was just once. The funny thing was we had really little pocket money, so we were traveling in Austria by hitchhiking on the highway. It was pretty cool. My dad, he spoke German fluently, because he was born there. Some people let us sleep in their houses. It was great. It was so special.”</p><h4>Prague Spring</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s7t7NuUKM18?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was amazing. Suddenly you can read. There were new magazines, every month, coming out; new information. People were talking on the radio and on TV about what happened in the ‘50s in the Czech Republic, when they executed any opposition and [had] the show trials. I was 15 years old, but it had a great impression on me; I just hated communists. Then the Russians came in August, and it took like two years to break everybody, and that’s my disappointment with the Czech nation, that we gave up way too easily I think. I’m not saying that we should fight, because we didn’t have a chance, but what happened was people renounced their opinion really quickly. And I think it was much worse in the ‘70s maybe than in the ‘50s, although there were no executions or anything like that. But it was like the dark ages, culturally and morally. Yeah, I think the ‘70s was a really bad time, and when we saw the movie about Milos Forman [What doesn’t kill you…], he was talking about it and he said ‘There was no hope; it will be there forever.’ But 1968 was just amazing. It was so refreshing and everything.”</p><h4>Yugoslavia Trip</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bEzQCZxyRuw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We boarded the ship to Venice and we had a big luggage – for a one-day trip to Venice! And everyone was looking at us and, honestly, I was scared. I was really scared. Because you don’t know what to expect, you are leaving everything behind you, and so I didn’t enjoy this sailing across the sea too much. We got to Venice and they said ‘You from Czechoslovakia, there’s one gate and everybody else goes to the other gate,’ and they don’t even open the [other] passports, like Dutch and German; they just went through. And I felt like ‘That’s the reason I have to leave’ because it was so humiliating. I felt justification, like ‘I have to leave this.’ But the Italians told me, ‘You don’t need, for a one-day trip, this huge luggage, so put it back on the ship.’ Another thing, they left our passports on the ship. So I said ‘Ok’ and I took the bag with money and laminated [documents] inside and I went to the toilet, and I had a little pocket knife and I was ripping this bag to get the money and stuff out. I was so scared, but I got it out.</p><p>“So we went to Venice and we asked for asylum, and they said ‘No, don’t do it now. Come back when you are coming back and then you can do it.’ So we are wandering across Venice and we went to St. Mark’s Piazza and there were all these tourists having a great time, and we were kind of desperate. So we went back, but we didn’t have our passports, so one Italian guy offered to go to the ship to pick up the passports and some luggage, but he brought the luggage of some other person, so it was a mess; it was complicated. And after that, the Italians took us to the police station, they did a short interview with us, and they gave us tickets to Latina, which was a refugee camp close to Rome.”</p><h4>N. Carolina</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G6ZoXshtyeg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our sponsors were a group of people from the United Methodist Church in North Carolina, in Raleigh, and it was just a group of fantastic people. Me and Zuzana, my ex, we are not religious people. I wouldn’t say we are atheist; I believe in something spiritual, but I am not necessarily Catholic or Baptist. But these people, they saw one paper with a really bad photo of us, and they decided ‘We want to sponsor these people.’ When we got to the airport, one of them took us to his home; we stayed there for two days; they found an apartment for us. They paid for an apartment for us for six months, they paid for our insurance, they gave us a car, they provided furniture for our whole apartment. Everything. The furniture, every piece was different, but who cares? And when we told this to our friends and relatives in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t believe it. They said ‘What do you they want for it?’ I said ‘Nothing. They want to help.’”</p><h4>Return?</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fzPFBu_SYow?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I know people that went back right away, but I never had any intention to go back because I was so impressed with Americans, with their hospitality, and how they accepted us. That’s the major difference, I feel. And I’ve had big arguments with Czech people about like ‘Be proud that you are Czech,’ and I said ‘You know what, this is my homeland.’ I was treated so well here and when I go back I just don’t feel it. So no, I never had any desire to go back.”</p>
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Title
A name given to the resource
Michal Tuavinkl
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from <em>gymnázium</em>, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.</p><p> </p><p>In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Americanization
Engineers
gymnazium
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
Rural life
Sense of identity
Sports
Tours
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12f051a6743291309e33c099a4306c45
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Mother Arrested</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zPyfIWWV2wY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Born on the wrong side of the tracks. Capitalists. Enemy of the people. That’s enough. The ostensible charge was that she helped one of her cousins to emigrate. But nothing was proved and 18 months later, after the trial, she was released. She considered herself very lucky. So all this was actually pre-trial custody. She was held in pre-trial custody for 18 months, from 1950 until late of 1951.”</p><p><em>Well, at least she had a trial.</em></p><p>“There was a trial, yes, and there was some semblance of legality because the charge was not proven and she was released.”</p><h4>Finding a Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LhHkYJFkRPM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Even though nothing was proven to her, to have been in prison was kind of a black stain on her reputation and she had difficulty finding a job. So we really struggled, but it’s one interesting proof of how resilient a child is, because I have no memories of hardship. I mean, she made it seem like fun. I remember, a week before the end of the month, she would just empty her wallet on the table and say ‘This is what we have to live on until the end of the month.’ And for me it was fun. I budgeted money per day, and I have no memory of any struggle or hardship because a child has no reference. Everything is normal.”</p><h4>Education</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/avrLbJG3SzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was pretty rigorous training. I had an opportunity to compare myself with others when I came to England, and we grew up as a complex. We grew up thinking we are in a cage, we are separated from civilization by this Iron Curtain and we don’t really know what it’s all about; we are just sort of cut off in the boondocks down here. And that made us… I spent hours in the technical library because, interestingly, even though there was censorship of course and the Western newspapers, Western magazines were not allowed to come in, the technical literature was. We couldn’t take it home, but the library of the technical museum had all the architectural magazines in the world – French, English, Italian, American magazines. So that’s where I was spending my time, familiarizing myself with the architecture in the West. So that, when I arrived in London, to the astonishment of my English colleagues, I knew more about contemporary English architecture than they knew. They started explaining to me about James Sterling, and I said ‘Oh yeah, I know about James Sterling. He did the Lester school and he did that and he did that,’ and they were totally flabbergasted. ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Magazines. Magazines.’”</p><h4>London</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xasv21ntWp0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring, but not even Dubček knew it was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring. But what we knew was that suddenly things started to be a little looser and the main witness was that I was allowed for the first time to leave – I couldn’t go even to East Germany; I never could go beyond the Iron Curtain – suddenly not just for a trip but for a year! It was unheard of. Unheard of. I thought it was a mistake, so I did not question. With my friend, I jumped into a car and drove to London. I thought I would be back in a year. At the time, I had no intention of emigrating for the rest of my life. If I let my fantasy run wild I thought ‘Well, if the first year would go well I might try to extend it for another year,’ and, at the time, to spend two years in London, it was the ultimate to think. Well, as it happened, at the end of the first year almost to the day Russians moved in. I didn’t take much imagination not to return when I saw tanks in Wenceslas Square.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7pjKIQlsaXQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I arrived from London in January of 1970, again thinking this would be a temporary stay in America. Having lived in London for three years, the Brits kind of condition you into thinking that America is this cultural wasteland where everybody’s chasing money and no gentle soul could survive, and I bought it. American tourists on Oxford Street are doing a very good job to support this philosophy. So I truly thought that this would be another three or four years to get the taste of America, test myself professionally here, and then I would come back to civilization – civilization being London. I felt very comfortable in London. I had a good job, apartment. There was really no reason for me to leave, except this curiosity. I considered myself a citizen of the world and you cannot be a citizen of the world unless you’ve experienced America. Professionally it attracted me. When I opened architecture magazines in 1969 I liked what I saw better than what I saw in London. So I had this professional curiosity plus sort of the world curiosity. And very quickly, New York and I clicked and I had no second thoughts about ever returning to London.”</p><h4>No Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SwuZgeTl6kM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I no longer fit in. It’s a very strange feeling, which cannot be unique among emigrants, that when I walk in Prague I feel like a tourist. It’s the town I was born in, I spent the first 28 years of my life, and still I don’t know really how it works now, having been out of there for 45 years. Life develops and the language changes and there are expressions I don’t know what they mean – Czech expressions. And the same thing, I don’t know which way the busses go and which way the streetcars go and I don’t know the names of the streets, so I am a tourist.”</p><h4>Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8C4fY8CVQX4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I feel Czech-American. This is, I think, the only country you can feel that. Having lived three years in London before I came to America, I think even if I lived 50 years in England I would not be an English Czech, or Czech-English. I mean, that category does not exist. I’d be a Czech living in England, yes, but I don’t think I’d ever feel English. I’d be phony; whereas, legitimately here I feel American, but I am also a Czech. Again, it’s nothing unique about it. This country is composed of German-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, French-Americans and so forth. That’s what I think makes America different from other countries.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Martin Holub
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Martin Holub was born in Prague in 1938. His father, Ján, was a lawyer who, after the Communist coup in 1948, was not allowed to continue practicing and sent to work at a cement factory. He later worked in a photography lab and then as a librarian at the Architectural Institute in Prague. His mother, Miloslava, has also studied law and went on to become a rather well-known art historian. During WWII, Martin spent a lot of time in Moravia where his mother’s parents lived. He says that rather than feeling afraid during the War, he recalls events such as air raids as ‘fun’ due to the excitement.</p><p> </p><p>In 1950, Martin’s mother was arrested on charges that she helped a relative illegally cross the border. After 18 months in prison, she was put on trial and released of all charges. While she was in prison, Martin was sent to a boarding school in Poděbrady, where he was a classmate of Václav Havel. Martin returned to Prague, graduated from high school and studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and worked for a state-owned building contractor.</p><p> </p><p>Martin says that since graduating from university he had been hoping to travel to the West, applying for work abroad. Although he was frequently offered opportunities (particularly in Great Britain), he was repeatedly denied a visa. In 1967, Martin had applied for and been offered a job with the Greater London Council. To his surprise, he was given a visa and he left Czechoslovakia in August 1967. Although Martin planned to return to Prague after one year, he was still in London when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and decided to stay in the West. In January 1970, Martin took a job with an architecture firm in New York City and moved to the United States. He settled in Manhattan and opened his own private firm in 1971.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Martin first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and then again following the fall of communism. With a friend living in Prague, he opened a branch of his company there and continued to visit his hometown yearly. Initially reluctant to seek out his fellow émigrés, in recent years Martin has become active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, including assisting in the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall. Today, Martin continues his architecture practice and lives in Manhattan.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Arrest
Arts
Charter 77
CVUT
Education
emigrant
refugee
Sense of identity
-
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60876e46938879f775518db0c3765388
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Fluent Slovak</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hfobfU0EoJU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“When I was younger I didn’t want to speak Slovakian. I thought it was a dumb language and I didn’t need and why would I use it. There’s not a lot of Slovakians… There’s no real use for the Slovak language in America, but there are communities that you can get along with. But now I am so thankful that I know Slovak, I know a different language. A lot of people say that it makes you smarter but I just feel that I am blessed in a way, that I can travel to somewhere and see and be able to communicate with these people and be able to understand each other. So it’s very neat to me.”</p><h4>Slovakia School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/73uHCfc2TNU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to school there for a month and I cried every day. I hated it. But that’s because my mom sent me there by myself and my aunt was still a teacher, so she got me into school so I could learn how to read and write, obviously. I was there for a month and I made some friends but I just didn’t like that you were in the classroom, and it was very different because the teacher would walk in and you had to stand up, and if you didn’t then that was disrespectful and you could get in trouble. They way that they taught was very different. I felt like I was in jail almost. It was very strict there. Here, kids are very spoiled, bratty kids, so that’s the way that I was brought up so I was used to doing whatever I wanted to do, and it wasn’t allowed there so I didn’t like it.”</p><p><em>Did everybody obey the rules?</em></p><p>“Yeah. If one of my friends didn’t listen then they would get a smack on the head or you’d have to clean or something.”</p><h4>Slovak Identity</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xdd_CGq8Rq4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’d probably say that I’m more Slovak. America is like the melting pot, they say. Everyone came from different countries and we’re just all becoming one thing, but I wouldn’t want to put myself in that category. I want to be different, so I like to express that I’m very Slovakian – Czechoslovakian, but I’m more Slovak.”</p><h4>Holidays & Traditions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6-CQD6cTH4s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was younger, you’d say Christmas because you get the presents, but I actually really like Christmas because of the whole getting together. It’s not even the date of Christmas; we get together like two or three weeks ahead of time to make the cookies. All the females get together to make the cookies and prep everything and you tell stories and sing songs and drink while you’re doing it. So it’s really fun to do that. You invite the neighbors over, people you haven’t seen in a long time just to prep all this food, if they want to, just to have that feeling that the holidays are coming up; that it’s going to be the end of the year too.</p><p>“The way my mom does the whole Christmas day, like you can’t eat all day and then everybody helps out. The day before you have to clean – you can’t clean on Christmas day. The day after you can’t put anything together because if you put it together on the 25th it’ll break… There are so many superstitions that my mom puts on to us. Even though I don’t believe them I still deal with them and put up with them. Like, if you leave the house and forget something you have to come back and sit down, because then something bad will happen to you if you leave again. So I still do that.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Margret Vesely
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Margret Vesely was born in 1988 in Aurora, Illinois. Her mother, <a href="/web/20170612093539/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/anna-vesela/">Anna Vesela</a>, had moved to the Chicago area from a small Slovak village the year before and married Margret’s father, a Czech-American. Her sisters, <a href="/web/20170612093539/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/bronislava-grelova-gres/">Brona</a> and <a href="/web/20170612093539/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/zuzana-lanc/">Zuzana</a>, had stayed behind in Slovakia when their mother left for the United States and joined the family several months after Margret’s birth. While growing up Margret frequently traveled to Liptovské Sliače to visit her grandparents and other family members. She even attended school in the village for a short time.</p><p> </p><p>Margret is fluent in Slovak and regularly speaks the language with her family. She says that she enjoys celebrating traditions during the holidays, especially at Christmas. For many years Margret participated in a Moravian dance group, and she enjoys listening to Slovak radio. Although born in the United States. Margret says that her connection to her heritage leads her to consider herself more Slovak than American.</p><p> </p><p>Since graduating from high school, Margret has attended the College of DuPage and the University of Illinois at Chicago with the intent of studying law. She continues to visit Slovakia, and Europe, where she has made lifelong friends. Today Margret lives in Willowbrook, Illinois.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Cultural Traditions
Family life
school
Sense of identity
Slovak Language
-
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cc48e7fa263cc04a1541d841bcf911db
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Languages</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rox4yCr0dZ0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“They wanted to give me more chances in life. People were really… on the one hand, people living in a communist country – or at least in communist Czechoslovakia – were on one hand isolated, they didn’t have access to information and they were definitely not making a lot of money, that’s why they couldn’t travel etc. etc. But on the other hand, education and languages were important, even if they were not very important practically, because you couldn’t travel. It was something that was actually quite wise of my parents to open this gate for me – that was good.”</p><h4>Psychology</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CF0jMzRhe5c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I tried to get to Charles University and that was a typical communist-era anecdote. You know, the whole thing was that I was not accepted, although I had all the best scores with the exception of Russian, where I had a slightly… I had a dvojka z ruštiny [a B for Russian]. But still, you couldn’t get into these quotas. And so, funnily enough, I didn’t even… send an appeal – as far as I remember, I didn’t even do this. And that’s actually when I realized that I want to leave the country; if I cannot study, I will leave. But strangely, my stepfather, he met as it happens – there was this school maybe gymnázium, (secondary school), gathering of people. You know, from time to time, they have this anniversary gathering – and there was this guy who must have been a big-shot whatever in the Ministry of the Interior or wherever – something like this – and he said ‘If you want some help just call me.’ So my dad did, and suddenly I received an answer to an appeal that I never posted, that yes, I am accepted to university, which was rather surrealistic; people had already started university, I came a week later. And that’s how I started psychology, but in my head, in a way, this was the breaking experience, I felt like ‘No, I don’t need this, I want to see the other side.’”</p><h4>Baptized</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QasHK-1kfAY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Maybe a year before leaving the country – so when I was 20, 21 – I got baptized at home, at my friend’s home, where we were meeting regularly, reading evangelical, but, you know, very modern guys, like Bonhoeffer and these freedom evangelists – you know, people who were rather avant-garde in terms of their theological thinking.”</p><p><em>Why did you decide to get baptized at that age?</em></p><p>“That was something that, at the time, was very meaningful to me. It was a very rich (and enlightening to me) alternative to the philosophy that was being served to us politically – Marxism, and those things. And as all religion, it was also obviously because there was a community of people who were very interesting and very strong. You know, people with whom I am friends until today.”</p><h4>Church</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/olP18RDIV3Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was tolerated, now of course, when you were… you know, the fact that I got baptized in an apartment – that would be already a big problem for the friend of mine who made the ceremony, and who actually later on became a professor of theology at the Prague faculty etc. That was really forbidden, but for the rest, it was tolerated. Obviously, a lot of people in these circles were people who were also politically active in their position, but it was not necessarily the same thing. Some people were very far… were clearly opponents to the regime, other people, like my father, were actually, you know, in the Party, as many people were, and still going to church, and somehow he could manage…</p><p>“You know, small towns were always worse, in Prague you could hide somehow, there was so much going on. In a small town like this of 20,000 people, it was actually a little bit more dangerous or you needed more courage, because everybody knew you and you were going to church. But people were going to church, some people were going to Catholic church, it was not exactly like in Poland, where church was really strong and the regime… These churches – the communists did not like them, but it was okay, at least they knew who they were – these people. And as long as you didn’t cross a certain limit, a certain red line, which was basically to be publishing and spreading information of not just religious, but even religious, it was not encouraged… but that was the line.”</p><h4>Coach Tour</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IX0UJ25IumI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“People were queuing in a queue, as I did, for three days, you know, making shifts – there was this self-organization of the people. You know, you came for two hours, and then you left, and then the day after, you came for another two hours and people were helping themselves in the line like this, because – they knew why – because on the day, D-Day, when the sale was open, even though I was eleventh in the line, after these three days, five minutes before the opening of the store, some people from the store came, opened the door and suddenly, even when you were eleventh in the line, there was not enough seats for me on the trip to, what was it? France or Western Europe, which was supposed to have a number of 14 or something. So clearly, things were going on. So I ended up in the trip to Greece – a wonderful country – and I spent my two weeks there. And what happened was that I sold my record collections, my parents gave me some money; it cost 20,000 crowns, which was a lot of money at the time! A lot of money! So, there were not many 20 year olds, young people, taking this trip. And this didn’t escape the people traveling. You know, on this day I came to the meeting point and they would say ‘Oh yes, there were young people like you last year – they didn’t return!’ And I was like ‘Oh no! That’s not my case!’ And you know, I have my sleeping bag with me – a sleeping bag for a trip in a hotel! You know, there were things…</p><p>“And then I was selling these albums, so obviously I had to tell these people, because otherwise they wouldn’t understand why I was selling these albums. So I think I was very lucky, there must have been at least maybe 40-50 people who knew I was emigrating. Nothing ever happened to me; nobody ever denounced me, because there were cases when this happened. People were all ready with their luggage, and two hours – that’s the way they were doing it – they were coming to the house two hours before you were leaving, and they just took your passport and you go nowhere.”</p><h4>Paris</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S4PPOoq_OUw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It just happened that at the time, this was the time that computers were becoming more important, especially, among other things, in the printing business and the publishing business, and they just needed someone in the rédaction to take care, not of IT (I would not be the right person), but someone who could use it – that was the breakthrough, to be able to use it. And it happened to be me – so I started like this: I was actually basically just typing one of Mr Tigrid’s books on the computer – you had people for this at the time – and then from this it moved on and suddenly I was among the inner circle of Svědectví, which was a very small, family owned kind of operation. And this was quite exciting, I was a little bit afraid that it might really affect negatively my family back in Czechoslovakia, but suddenly it happened. And so, after a few years where I was working at the Centre Pompidou, you know, to make my living during my studies, I was offered a job at Svědectví and I took it, and I think I was what you call the deputy editor, or in France they call it secrétaire de rédaction – you know, the guy who is taking care of collecting the manuscripts, keeping to the deadlines and getting the issue together. And I stayed there from 1986, I think, until 1990.”</p><h4>Skeptical</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLFvczEKJkI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Every emigrant, with the time you are [away]… your idea and your image of your homeland – where you are coming from – gets frozen in what you left. Just this very idea that life and changes could continue after you… that there even could be changes, is an abstract thing for you. In your deeper way of thinking, you believe it’s like it was. I mean this was a rather short time, I only left in 1983, we were in 1989, so it was six years, but still, I was not exactly following and realizing that things that were not possible before were [now] possible. But on the other hand, I was actually following Gorbachev and I think I was the only one in the whole editorial committee who probably naively believed that Gorbachev is maybe bringing something… I was not wrong on this, that it was actually opening new opportunities, so it is not that I was totally pessimistic or disconnected, but I was very skeptical specifically about Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Cut Ties</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B5ceNfZg63U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I thought that I would never, ever return to the country unless things changed, and I didn’t believe that they were going to change. It was really like a tabula rasa, which was important, I think. Again, it is something I would recommend to everybody if you jump like this – if you want to really emigrate – I think that’s the mentality. I always believed this; I was not looking specifically to… well, I did have Czech friends, and I worked, actually, with Czechs, which was something, but I was really not looking for it. It was an accident. And this whole time, basically these eight years that I spent in Paris, I was doing my best to become French. I mean, as ridiculous as it might sound or look, that was the philosophy. The philosophy is: you cannot do this halfway. And there is a wisdom in this, the challenge of living a new life wherever in the world is quite huge, and if you stay halfway, I… I always pitied these people who were living in Paris, and actually I had friends like this, and they are friends until today, some of them returned, and I understand them, it’s their point, but in a way I pitied them…</p><p>“I don’t like this ambiguity, you know, I think at some point in life you can overcome this and you, you have [your] identity built enough, and it can be a double identity, and then no problem. But, when you struggle for life, and you start a new life, I think it is definitely more conducive to success and to even some kind of logic, to focus on the world where you live and that was my philosophy – I mean, you can do it both ways, all kinds of ways, there is not one way.”</p>
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Title
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Marek Skolil
Description
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<p>Marek Skolil was born in Slaný, central Bohemia, in March 1962. His mother, Jaroslava, was a nurse who later worked for the national chain of record stores Supraphon, while his father, Pavel (whom he did not see very often following his parents’ divorce), served in the Czechoslovak Army. Marek started primary school in Slaný before being sent to nearby Kládno to attend a special language school where he learned German, Russian and French. After attending the local secondary school in Slaný, he decided to spend his last year of schooling as a boarder at a school in Žd’ar nad Sazavou, which prepared students to go to university in Moscow. Marek says he had no intention of studying in the USSR, but that this year away from his family did subsequently help him live abroad. In 1980, after being rejected and then accepted in a series of events he refers to as ‘surreal’, Marek began a degree in psychology at Charles University in Prague. He left the country before finishing his studies in June 1983.</p><p> </p><p>Marek settled in Paris, where he began by working as an au pair. He resumed his psychology studies at Paris X – Nanterre and, in 1986, started working at the legendary Czech exile publication <em>Svědectví </em>[Testimony], run by Pavel Tigrid. He worked at the quarterly as the deputy editor until after the Velvet Revolution. After a couple of years working as a journalist and lecturer in Paris, Marek was invited to join the new Czech Foreign Ministry (following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992). He did and started his diplomatic career on the French desk in Prague. He was subsequently sent to Paris as the deputy chief of mission, and then to Vietnam and Lebanon as ambassador. It was on a posting to the latter that he met his Slovak wife, Lydia, with whom he has two children. Marek was the first ever consul general of the Czech Republic in Chicago between 2005 and 2010.</p>
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Communist Party members
Diplomatic service
Divorce
Education
Journalism
Kladno
Marxism
national
Politics
Religion
Sense of identity
Slany
Svedectvi
Underground
Zdar nad Sazavou