Oliver Gunovsky
<p>Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.</p><p> </p><p>In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.</p><p> </p>
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Miro Medek
<p>Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.</p><p> </p><p>At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.</p><p> </p><p>Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.</p><p> </p>
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Milos Krajny
<p>Milos Krajny was born in Kroměříž, eastern Moravia in 1941. His father, a doctor who practiced internal medicine, changed the family name from the German-sounding Kreuziger to Krajny following WWII. His mother, who had studied philosophy and spent one year at the Sorbonne, stayed home to raise him and his two younger brothers, and later taught music lessons. Milos has early memories of WWII, including the burning of the town’s castle at the close of the War. In 1953, Milos’s father’s practice was nationalized, and he was placed in a factory as the company doctor, caring for thousands of employees. Milos enjoyed school and extracurricular activities; he especially looked forward to a cycling trip that he made each summer to a school in Slovakia. Although he was an excellent student, Milos says that his ‘bourgeois upbringing’ hindered his acceptance to medical school. He was accepted to Palacký University in Olomouc four days before the start of the term after a patient of his father’s intervened on his behalf. After graduating in 1964, Milos practiced internal medicine in Přerov, and then, the next year, he returned to Olomouc where he began training as an allergist.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos was urged by a former professor to apply for a fellowship in Montreal. He was awarded the position in 1968 and says that he almost did not accept it because the stipend was so low; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year changed his mind. He left for Montreal in September 1968. Two months later, his wife and young daughter joined him. After completing the two-year fellowship, Milos started his internship at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. He was also in constant correspondence with his parents back in Czechoslovakia, and they often sent him LPs of classical Czech music. He says that although music was always an integral part of his life, these records inspired his love for classical music. Milos began attending Czech concerts and theatre in Toronto which brought him contact with the Czech community there. As a member of the board of directors of a chamber music group, he was instrumental in bringing Czech groups to the city. Recently, Milos has started a series of classical music concerts called ‘Nocturnes in the City,’ which aim to bring Czech music and musicians to a Toronto audience.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Milos currently holds dual citizenship and travels to the Czech Republic twice a year. He has made a habit of reading Czech-language newspapers and stays on top of Czech current events. His son and daughter are both fluent in Czech and he says that his son is especially enamored with his Czech heritage. Today, in addition to his work as an allergist, Milos is the president of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Milada Kubikova-Stastny
<p>Milada Kubikova-Stastny was born in Plzeň in 1943. Her father, Jaroslav, was a doctor and her mother, also named Milada, was a lawyer. When Plzeň was liberated by American troops at the end of WWII, Milada (then two years old) and her brother were dressed in Czech folk costumes to welcome the soldiers. Milada began ice skating at the age of seven and for several years skated pairs with her older brother Jaroslav. Along with her later pairs partner, Jaroslav Votruba, Milada became a national champion, competed in the European and World Championships, and placed tenth at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck.</p><p> </p><p>Milada moved to Prague to study physical education and Russian at Charles University. One year before graduating, however, she joined the Vienna Ice Revue and toured for two years throughout Western Europe. She was in West Germany at the time of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and although she considered not returning to Czechoslovakia, Milada did return and finished her degree. Upon graduating, Milada again joined the Vienna Ice Revue which was undertaking a tour of North America. In the fall of 1969, as the ice show was ending in New York City, Milada decided to stay in the United States and claimed asylum. She settled in the borough of Queens where she had two children with her first husband and worked as a skating instructor. Milada says that she became involved in the Czech community ‘almost immediately,’ where she became a member of the BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria), participated in Czech theatre and enrolled her children in Czech school. Milada married her second husband, Bretislav Stastny, who was a jeweler in Manhattan, and moved to Long Island. The pair had a son in 1976. Milada continued to teach skating and became the director of a large skate school in Great Neck, New York.</p><p> </p><p>In 2001, Milada, along with her pairs partner Votruba, was honored as one of ten ‘Sports Stars of the Twentieth Century’ in Plzeň for her international success. She travels to the Czech Republic yearly, in part to visit her brother Jaroslav who also left the country as part of a touring ice show. He returned to Plzeň in 1991 and now runs three skating rinks in the city. Today, Milada is active in the Czech community in the United States. She is a member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, and in March 2012 she was named president of the BCBSA. Milada lives in Roslyn, New York.</p>
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Michal Tuavinkl
<p>Michal Tauvinkl was born in Brno in 1953. He grew up living with his mother who worked as an accountant, his father who taught physical education and geography at a vocational school, and his older sister. In his youth, Michal enjoyed hiking with his parents and playing sports. He also loved to read. When he was nine years old, Michal and his family visited relatives in Vienna – a trip that Michal says had a ‘big impression’ on him. After graduating from <em>gymnázium</em>, Michal worked one year in construction and then enrolled at VUT (University of Technology) in Brno. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering and began working in this field.</p><p> </p><p>In June 1987, Michal and his then-girlfriend Zuzana bought a trip to Yugoslavia which included a one-day boat ride to Venice, Italy. In anticipation of this event, Michal smuggled some foreign currency and documents in his luggage. They successfully made it to Venice with their passports and claimed asylum and were sent to a refugee camp near Rome. Michal says the conditions in the camp were ‘awful’ and the pair decided to leave. They took the train to Austria (but crossed the border on foot as they did not have permission to enter the country) where they were sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. After a few days there, they moved to a guesthouse where they lived for 15 months with other refugees.</p><p> </p><p>In September 1988, Michal and Zuzana traveled to the United States. They were sponsored by a church group in Raleigh, North Carolina, who helped them secure an apartment and a car. After a few months, Michal found a job as a draftsman at an engineering company. He took English language lessons and completed a professional degree in civil engineering from a local college. After five years, Michal and Zuzana moved to Wilmington where they stayed for another five years. They had a daughter and moved to Detroit. Michal worked at an engineering firm for a few years and, in 2005, moved to the Chicago area. Today he enjoys attending and photographing events put on by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. He received his American citizenship in 1995 and calls America ‘my homeland.’ Michal lives in Harwood Heights, Illinois.</p>
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Katerina Kyselica
<p> </p><p>Katerina Kyselica was born in Karvina in northern Moravia and grew up in the city of Havířov. Her parents, Ladislav and Marcela, now retired, worked as a technician and a nurse while Katerina and her younger brother, Robert, were growing up. Katerina began swimming at the age of six and, when she was 14, was selected to attend a sports school. She moved to Prague where she boarded with other athletes and traveled outside the country for competitions. Katerina graduated from high school and says that although she was interested in architecture, she did not have the technical skills and knowledge to study the subject at university. She instead entered law school at Charles University in Prague. Katerina learned English during her years at law school and, in order to improve her language skills, spent one summer working as a counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Kentucky – an experience which she calls ‘fantastic.’ After graduating, Katerina worked in the tax and legal department for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Prague for about five years and then decided to move to the United States to join her husband, an American whom she had met during her summer abroad. She arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on December 31, 2001.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Katerina says that the decision to abandon her law career upon her arrival in the United States was ‘an easy choice.’ She took drawing classes and, after a conversation with an art professor, decided to go back to school. She attended the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and majored in interior design. She quickly found a job at a large firm specializing in the design and architecture of airports and hospitals. Katerina then moved to the Washington, D.C. area and worked for a number of years for FOX Architects. She says that her experience in the legal profession came in handy while working there, as many of her projects involved law offices. Katerina moved to New York City in 2009, after she and her husband divorced. She now freelances as an interior designer and project manager. Katerina has also started a project called <em>dob2010</em> which aims to promote Czech design and architecture in the United States and to connect people of Czech and Slovak heritage interested in these topics. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Czech Center in New York. Katerina travels back to the Czech Republic each year to visit friends and family and says that she is content with having two homes.</p>
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Joseph Pritasil
<p>Joseph Pritasil was born in Miřetice, eastern Bohemia, in 1925. He was one of seven children raised on a farm by his father, Antonin, and mother, Anežka. Joseph says he had to walk three and a half miles to school on a daily basis and, on Sunday, the family walked the same path to the nearest town to attend church. After receiving his basic education, Joseph attended metal-working school and, from 1942 until the end of WWII, he worked in a local factory as a machinist.</p><p> </p><p>Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.</p>
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Joseph Kmet
<p>Joseph Kmet was born in Chicago in 1930 but moved back to the family home of Bystričany, northwestern Slovakia, with his parents and siblings before he was one year old. Joseph says his father, Ignác, was worried that the family would not have enough to eat in the United States during the Depression, and so decided to return to Czechoslovakia to farm the land the family owned instead. Joseph’s father returned to Chicago alone to work at Western Felt Works, and found himself cut off from his family with the outbreak of WWII.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph says the War was hard for his family, with his older sister shot dead in a raid on a train carrying her and other commuters to the nearby town of Partizánske (which was known at the time as Šimonovany). Following his sister’s death, Joseph says he was sent to work in her stead at the Bat’a shoe factory in Partizánske as some money was needed by the family, and he was now the oldest child. At the end of the War, the family was reunited and, after some discussion, it was decided that the Kmets would all resettle in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph left Czechoslovakia in October 1947. He took a train to Amsterdam, where he boarded a freighter which took him first to Havana, Cuba, and then Florida. Joseph says his family’s first home in Chicago was on Hamlin and 24th Street, which was a very Czech and Slovak neighborhood at the time. Joseph’s first job was at the Kimball Piano Factory; he subsequently worked at Florsheim Shoes and then retrained to become a plumber. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Korea for two years. Upon return, he married his wife Mary, with whom he has four children. Joseph was active in the Slovak League of America and is the former president of the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. He lived in Westchester, Illinois, with his wife Mary until his death in September 2011.</p>
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Joe Gazdik
<p> </p><p>Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Jitka Volavka-Illner
<p>Jitka Volavka-Illner was born in Prague in 1939. Her father, Václav, was a successful businessman who owned two coal mines while her mother, Věra, who had studied law, stayed home to raise Jitka and her three siblings. Jitka’s parents were avid art collectors and she remembers walking to museums and galleries with her father each week. Her family often went skiing in the Krkonoše mountains and, at the age of 14, Jitka won the junior national championships in giant slalom and downhill. That same year, Jitka was the national singles champion in tennis and she says that she had to decide between the two sports. Her father eventually steered her towards tennis and she went on to have a successful career on the international circuit; she first played at Wimbledon at age 16 and several times was ranked in the top 20 in the world.</p><p> </p><p>Jitka studied linguistics at Charles University, focusing on English and Russian languages. After graduating, she taught at a high school for one year and then began teaching English to university students studying engineering. Jitka says this job was ‘great’ as it gave her time to train for tennis and compete internationally. In 1967, Jitka and her husband moved to London for one year where she taught English at an elementary school. They returned in the fall of 1967, a time which Jitka calls ‘wonderful’ because of the reforms that marked the Prague Spring. Immediately after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Jitka and her husband left Czechoslovakia. While waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States, Jitka lived in Munich where she learned German and worked as a nanny. In March 1969, the pair moved to New York City. For one year Jitka worked as a Russian interpreter for the United Nations. She then began teaching lessons at a tennis club in Manhattan where her clients included Robert Redford and Walter Cronkite. Jitka says that her first years in the United States were ‘lonely’ and that she sought out Czech connections. She joined the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) in the 1970s and is currently the president of the New York chapter. In 1973, Jitka had her daughter Nicole and moved to Long Island where she continued to teach tennis. She became the tennis director at Cold Spring Harbor Beach Club and worked there until the late 1990s. For a short time she also worked for Christie’s interpreting for Russian art dealers.</p><p> </p><p>Since moving to the United States, Jitka has become an art collector and has exhibited the work of Czech artists. She has been involved in charity work and often uses the connections she has made from tennis and with her fellow Czech émigrés for fundraisers and other events. Jitka has also hosted Czech students and opened her home to newly-arrived Czech immigrants. Although she loves to visit Prague, Jitka says that she ‘feels more American than Czech.’ She lives in Manhattan with her second husband, Pavel.</p>
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