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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>Grandfather</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5L4eopcWoV0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He was an avid mushroom picker. He had an eye that would see every mushroom everywhere in the forest, and while he was walking around picking the mushrooms, he started a new hobby. He started picking up pieces of branches of wood and carved them into shapes of animals, like snakes, birds, etc. And that became his sort of profession in his retirement. Then he built little chalets out of wood and pinecones, and then he progressed into carving different statues from folklife in Slovakia. The biggest was larger than life statues that he not carved, but actually chopped out of the big pieces of wood for the festival in Východná. They had a competition of folk artists, and he actually received the official folk artist title. He did many carvings for the museums, and so he became quite famous later in his life.”</p><h4>Baptized</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2n95YOUQKUM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I remember we had to walk across – it had to be about five miles – through the forest and fields to a different church, not the same place where we lived. That’s the way many people went to church also, to different locations where maybe nobody knew them or something. Especially people like teachers, even some policemen, government employees, because they didn’t want people to know that they actually believe and go to church, so they would go to a different town or a different village to attend services.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PBpX2lMBshA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think the teachers at my age were still the old class of teachers that became teachers before the communist regime, and they didn’t change their style of teaching, just didn’t teach us everything they would like to. Then more and more new teachers came; they were a different style of teachers. What I remember is that those teachers were sort of not teaching as much, but they were trying to catch you doing something wrong, like why didn’t you do your homework, what is this, like punishing and punishing, where the old teachers, they would try to make you understand why you were supposed to do it.”</p><h4>Sports</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4XdGWRUxB38?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were sports clubs in the communist system. I think that’s probably the only thing, one of the couple of good things in the communist system was that they were supporting the youth, supporting financially all these clubs that my mother or other parents didn’t have to pay any money for us. So everything was paid for, travel and equipment, by the government. I was competing in cross-country skiing. In 1960, I was the second junior in Czechoslovakia, but I wasn’t allowed to go to any outside country to compete. They were always afraid that I would just try to escape and try to get to England where my father was.”</p><h4>Permission to Travel</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FT5T93ZlMgc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In ’65 I came back to civilian life and right away I tried to go for vacation to England to visit with my father. When I went to the passport office, the man told me, he looked at the black book again and said ‘Ah, you’re not going anywhere, just don’t even bother.’ So every time I tried again, he told me ‘Get out of here, I told you, you’re not going anywhere,’ until the spring of 1968, when the same man says ‘Please come in and sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ So I thought, ‘Uh oh, something changed, something is brewing.’ So then I got a visa and I was just married for a few months at that time, but I was so afraid that the system was going to change again, that they were going to take the travel permission away from me, that I didn’t even wait until my wife had papers ready. I just wanted to get out and go to England before somebody said ‘No, no that was wrong, you’re not going anywhere.’”</p><h4>American Czechoslovak Society</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mj9CN7-UbrA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We did lots of support for young blood coming from Czechoslovakia willing to learn the western system of life and business and politics. They would come out here and didn’t know much, didn’t know anybody so we would help them to make contacts and open the doors for them, help them to attend some internships or schools. After awhile I thought my phone number was written somewhere in Vienna at the airport on the wall ‘When you come to Washington, call Oliver,’ because all of the sudden I had phone calls from complete strangers without any recommendation, calling, ‘Can you help me? Can you give me advice?’ or whatever. And I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it because I was sorry to miss the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so this was my contribution to finally put the final nail in the coffin of communism.”</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
Oliver Gunovsky
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
Banovce nad Bebravou
Catholicism
Community Life
emigrant
Liptovsky Hradok
Military service
Mushrooms
refugee
Religion
Restaurant/hotel industry
school
Sports
Trencianske Teplice
Trencin
Vychodna
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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>Summer Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rWnlkBGJSU8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I played guitar. When I was about 14, I went to work for a summer in a cinderblock factory. It was hard work, but I made some money and bought my guitar. That’s also a time when I met a lot of people. You look, it’s a cinderblock factory, but everybody was an ex-professor, ex-teacher, ex-accountant, because they lost their job and the only thing they could do was doing manual labor. So that was another thought, ‘Now hold on just a minute, this is not right.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BvDlBWw_ek8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father was always kind of enterprising, and what happened is he was a mechanical engineer taking care of construction machinery. At that point in time, there was a problem. They had a high rate of breakage, and he came up with an invention how to grease and maintain those things. And he was talking to everybody ‘Please start doing this,’ even going to the Ministry somewhere in Prague, but nobody wanted to do it. So he decided ‘Ok, I’m going to do it on my own.’ And he did. Except eventually, he was jailed and sentenced for reintroducing capitalist enterprise. So he spent I think about a year in jail in Jáchymov, in those uranium mines. And he was so good of an engineer that even when he was in jail he tried to make things better, ‘How can you do this better?’ So, as a matter of fact, they even let him out early for good behavior.”</p><h4>University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GbUwtuW-Wnc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went through college and then graduate school in a very good time. I started in ’65. In a couple of years, the Prague Spring started, and you could see it in schools. Suddenly it was open. They taught pretty much a more Western style. I got my undergraduate degree in political economy, graduate degree in business management, and postgraduate in systems engineering, and those were all things they pretty much taught Western style management, and I knew more about the stock market than people in the U.S., and systems engineering as a discipline – it was more related to what I did when I finished university – it was not so well-known even in the U.S. It started to be taught some ten years later, kind of building big systems and things like that. So that’s why I’m saying that it was a good time; because at the same time, the Prague Spring started at that time. There were a lot of new ideas.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NYaCqmEsv6Q?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were very much in touch with what was going on, and I knew some people who signed it and things like that. But what was happening – I guess it was happening at every company – everybody had an interview and was asked ‘Sign this document that you do not agree with it Charter 77.’ I had a problem, so again I opened my mouth, and I eventually signed it, but I put ‘Signed under duress’ or something like that. That was an additional reason they were kind of saying ‘Well, you’re not going anywhere in your career.’ We had copies distributed. We had a copy of it; it was an underground copy, but yeah, we had it.”</p><h4>Refugee Camp</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ADg-ssHg7S0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were trying to go [to America] on – I don’t know what kind of visa it is – but reunion of family, because my father was already in the U.S. and he was a naturalized citizen at the time. But we needed my birth certificate and all the kids’ certificates to be able to prove that I’m his son and these are really my kids and we didn’t know that, we didn’t have anything. My family sent us photocopies; that was not good enough, it had to be originals. Finally, my family sent it through somebody who went to Greece. Well, the scumbag asked for a lot of money for doing that, but never delivered. My father started threatening that he’s going to put Interpol on it. Eventually, we got the documentation that we needed, but it took close to a year. Other people sometimes left after four months and were on the way to the U.S. or Australia. We’d been there for a year.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Z6wpOwHHbs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Those were not easy times, because when we moved in, we didn’t have anything. You wanted to cook dinner, we don’t have a pan, we don’t have any plates and things. So everything you had to buy. We came really with a pair of t-shirts and jeans for each of us. So you had to buy from scratch and start from scratch. Friends of my father gave us some tables. We bought a mattress to sleep on and stuff like that, but it took time until you set yourself up. We didn’t have anything.”</p><h4>Exile Organizations</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ilVAVdKX7K0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We went to a few meetings with people, and I didn’t like one aspect of it. You had generations of immigrants – some people came during WWII, some people came after ’48 when it changed, then some people came in between, and then ’68 was another move, and then we came in ’78. Now what I didn’t like much was that people living in the U.S. were trying to tell me how it is, when I just came from there and knew. Their view was totally skewed because they – well, we didn’t like what was happening either – but they knew, ‘We know everything and this is what it should be like,’ and it was more like they were angry at the system, and I didn’t want to deal with that much. Especially, I didn’t want to talk so bad about the country back home, because then I would be talking bad about my family who is still there, about my friends who are still there, so I kind of avoided that for that reason.”</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
Miro Medek
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
Charter 77
Education
Engineers
Jachymov
Prague Spring
Sports
Vrutky
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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>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GRseQV9xF08?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were living in our house in the cellar, or basement, which had metal plates on the windows, and because there was a sign of ‘Doctor’ in front of the house, soldiers would be bringing their wounded colleagues to the house, and as a little boy I would be mingling around and I would see the blood dripping from the stretchers and stuff like that. My father had to attend to them, even though it might have been dangerous. It might have been German soldiers; it might have been Russians and Bulgarians later toward the end of the War. I vividly remember when, before the end of the War, Germans put gas on the Kroměříž castle – it was a big tower – and they set it on fire, and my parents woke me up around 3:00 in the morning and they said ‘This is the end of the War, but look what they did to us.’”</p><h4>Bike Trip</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fyV1O2bxk7c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our school had a friendly relationship with one high school in Slovakia and people who were interested in bicycles and tourism, they would ride on bicycles every summer to this university and stay with Slovak students for three weeks in the summer, and then the Slovak students would come back to Moravia. So I was part of that activity; I was actually carrying the first-aid box and if somebody had a scratch on their knee I would attend to them. And my brother, the second one, was the official reporter. He was making a movie about the trip. It was really enjoyable and we learned to speak Slovak, and that was the highlight of the year, always.”</p><p><em>Whereabouts was the school in Slovakia?</em></p><p>“The school was in Liptovský Mikuláš, which I think is Fatra, Malá Fatra. It would take two or three days to get there, so you would have to sleep overnight in some kind of barn on the hay or on the straw, among cows sometime, and we would have to look for some food. It was very exciting. If the weather was nice, it was great. If it was raining it wasn’t so fine, because we had to dry off somewhere, but I have good memories of those trips.”</p><h4>Medical School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H2VZm5Xj7Xo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was top of the class and basically, I passed the admitting exam, but I was hanging in the air. Somehow, luckily, that was the only way you could do certain things at the time, my father had a patient who had some connection to the Secretariat of the Communist Party, and I’m sure there was some money involved, that the guy actually issued that I was accepted on a special permit. It was only four days before the university started, so it was quite a nervous summer. But by the same token, because there was already a way established how to get to university, my brother, who was two years younger, by this way also got to technical school in Brno.”</p><h4>Politics in School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LIiRuo24KP4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Interestingly enough, some of the teachers – especially in Olomouc because they didn’t have enough teachers educated in Marxism ideology and who would be good – there were some teachers who were not members of the Party and who were actually on the blacklist, and they were very good. It was the brother of Jan Zrzavý, the painter; there was a professor in anatomy, and we as students, we knew that, so their lectures were really attended 100%.</p><p>“The first two years we had Russian, even at the university level and then of course, first year, we had political economy I believe, and then second year we had Marxism-Leninism. You basically had this nonsense and you had to sort of say ‘Yes, yes’ and you had to study something for exams. I just barely passed this Marxism-Leninism because the teachers knew your background and they really wanted to let you fail, so that was very unpleasant. But Czechs are <em>Švejks</em> and we made fun from it too, even if it was almost impossible. But you had to do it. But we were not forced to join the Party or anything like that. We were students; we still had fun.”</p><h4>Profession</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WDMj5HsCY7s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think in Czechoslovakia – like in all Europe – that the thing was prestige and, because doctors had such low salaries, they would be getting some presents from the patients; it was a normal thing. Because actually, the workers and miners had a salary three or four times higher, and I think the doctors were even below teachers’ salaries. But then three years after I graduated, they started suddenly paying you for night calls which were free before. So with the night calls, if you would do two, three a week, you could make some extra money, so there had been some improvement, and every year you would get two percent more or something.</p><p>“Medicine in Czechoslovakia was actually on a very high level. Maybe technologically not so much – that was before the time of computers – so certain technical things were not there, but Czechs were very good diagnosticians just with simple things and techniques, and I read some foreign literature so I could compare; I know we had very good medicine.”</p><h4>Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BMIBn6QBLWc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents were told, when they wanted to visit, they were told they would never be allowed to visit. And then after Helsinki [Accords] was signed, my father completely refused to go back for permission, but my mother asked the city hall and they told her that one of the conditions would be that she would talk us into returning. She said ‘Well, you know, I can tell them, I can try.’ So they allowed my mother for the first time in 1979. Quite late. She came for a few weeks and when she was going back, my brother in Germany had a son born about six months before, and I said ‘Why don’t you stop in Germany?’ She didn’t have a visa, so I asked for a visa for her at the German Consulate and they wanted to put it in her passport and I argued. I said ‘You can’t put it in her passport because when the poor woman goes back to Czechoslovakia she will be punished!’ So after long interviews, they gave her special papers, and she stopped at my brother’s place for about four days, saw her grandson, and came home. And only after 1989, when we looked at our dossiers, we figured out that she was followed. They knew everything about her.”</p><h4>Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nzbsz7nBM_s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started to visit the Czech theatre and, of course, concerts. If there were some Czech musicians, we would be involved. Then later on I joined a chamber music organization and was on the board of directors for many years downtown, and always tried to bring Czech musicians.”</p><p><em>Did you do this even before 1989 and was that a fairly straightforward process? How did that work?</em></p><p>“Well, before 1989 there were still some Czech groups that were allowed abroad because they were bringing money back. So if you knew who was coming, you could get them to Toronto. Because we were in contact with agents in New York, and I had my brother involved with music back in Prague, we could bring people here. Of course, it was in limited numbers; it wasn’t so free like now. But it was a little different. Everything was cheaper, so that was one way, but then, it wasn’t so free.”</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
Milos Krajny
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Education
German language
Healthcare professionals
Kromeriz
Liptovsky Mikulas
Palacky
Prerov
Sports
World War II
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bcba8548571cd04e87a86c4ef5ba36f4
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>Liberated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/56wIMqRlnnM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were actually lucky that Plzeň was liberated by the American Army. General Patton was there, and General Harmon actually lived in the little village that my parents had a country villa. That’s where his headquarters were, near Plzeň. It was about 40 kilometers from Plzeň. We as children – I was barely two years old and my brother was six years old – we were welcoming the American Army there in our national costumes. I have a picture with one of the soldiers, one of the black soldiers because it was something very unusual for us. We’d never seen a black man before, so this was really something unusual. I have a picture which was printed in <em>Americkè Listy</em> later on. It was a big celebration. All the people were really happy and we were hoping that the American Army would be allowed to go all the way to Prague and liberate Prague, and if they had been able to liberate Prague, the whole Czech Republic would have been liberated. But, of course, according to the treaty and Stalin’s orders in those years, they were ordered to stop right before [Prague sic.]. So our destiny would have been very different if the American Army would have been allowed to go all the way to Prague.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qY1fiKlLENc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My father, as a doctor, wanted one of us, me or my brother, to follow in his footsteps and study in a medical school, but we wouldn’t have been accepted in a medical school because we were not children of working-class parents. We were so-called ‘bourgeois’ because our parents were intelligentsia. My father was a doctor and my mother was a lawyer, so it was not desirable by the Communist Party for us to have a higher education. The only way for me to get a university degree was to study in the physical education field because they wanted to have well-qualified professionals in the sports. To the communists, sports were actually a means of showing to the world that they are a strong system. They wanted to show the world ‘We have the best athletes in this and that field, so we are the best system…’ That was part of their plan. So actually, I was only allowed to study sports to be a qualified professional in that field later on. So that was my only possibility to go on to higher education.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8zT0xYkN50E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After four years, I interrupted studying and joined the Vienna Ice Show (a professional skating show) which was the only way to be able to travel throughout Europe, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to leave the country. So I traveled with the Vienna Ice Show in many European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, so it was really valuable experience for me. After the two years’ contract, I went back to graduate, to do my last fifth year and graduate. But after the two years, it was the summer of 1968 and there was the Russian invasion on August 21, and that left me actually stranded in northern Germany and I was thinking if I should return to the country or shouldn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen because it was totally unexpected and none of us knew what to do, so I waited almost until the end of September to figure out if I should go back to finish my fifth year and graduate or stay in the West. I really didn’t want to back to the dark ages of the communist regime of the 1950s and that’s actually what happened later on.</p><p>“I did return; I finished my fifth year; I graduated. But during that fifth year, from September of 1968 until June of 1969, it was clear to me that the country was returning to the so-called normalization process which was returning to the bad time of the dark ages of communism. So I said ‘If I ever marry and have children, I don’t want them to grow up in this regime.’ I said ‘I have to get out of the country. If I marry and have children, I want them to live in a free country.’ So after I graduated, I first looked for a job in Czechoslovakia. I wanted to teach skating in one of the larger cities that had skating rinks, but of course the jobs in the larger cities went to the kids of communist parents, so everybody from those families got a better job. And to us, to the remaining people, we would have to take a job somewhere, maybe in the border villages or something like that. So I decided to join the Vienna Ice Revue again, to sign another contract and went with them on a tour of Belgium and Holland, and afterward there was a tour of American and Canada, and at that point I decided that I’m going to stay in the United States and I asked for political asylum.”</p><h4>Ice Show</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqCwhTGFaD4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in the Vienna Ice Show and he [Milada’s brother Jaroslav] joined the Skala Ice Revue, we joined these professional ice shows officially. We got a contract through an organization which was called Pragosport, and there was also Pragokoncert. Those were two organizations that negotiated contracts with Western companies. But for that, we had to pay the government a pretty large amount of our salary in Western currency. That was the only way we were able to travel to the Western countries.”</p><p><em>How did they justify that?</em></p><p>“Because nobody else was allowed to travel outside, so for the privilege of negotiating contracts with Western companies, we had to pay them quite a large amount of our salary, quite a large percentage of our salary.”</p><h4>First Job in America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oei0F0a3QTg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The first place I lived in was LeFrak City in Queens, which is near the Long Island Expressway, and the nearest rink to it was the World’s Fair skating rink, which doesn’t exist anymore, but in those days was the closest rink to the apartment where we lived. I used to travel to that rink on a bicycle before I had a car. They knew about my international skating background, my competitive background, so they gave me a job right away. I started teaching there; I had some nice kids there. Actually, in those first days I didn’t know much of the skating terminology and I was just learning from the students I was teaching. So I was showing them a move, a jump or spin and I said ‘What do you call this? What do you call that?’ That’s how I learned the terminology, so that was interesting.”</p><h4>New York Czech Community</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kXVp6iR3xUE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think it was almost immediately, because I had some friends who brought me to the Bohemian Hall and [Beer] Garden in Astoria, and I went to the celebration of Czech and Slovak Day which was usually during Memorial Day weekend. At first it was Sunday and Monday and now we are celebrating it every Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. I met a lot more friends there. I started to get involved in Czech theatre in Queens, which was led by Mrs. Božena Snížková. The theatre’s name was the Theatre of Jan Snížek who was her husband who died just before I met her. She was continuing his work and brought to the Czech and Slovak community a lot of beautiful performances, and I even acted in some of those performances. She talked me into it and it was a great time. My kids were little at the time and they started attending Czech school in Winfield, which is also in Queens, and their teacher was Mrs. Marie Miladova who was a wonderful lady. She always put on a show of the Winfield school at Czech and Slovak Day, so my children were reciting Czech poetry at that time, they were singing Czech songs and they were dancing Beseda, and I even danced Beseda with them once when one of the girls was missing. So it was really a happy time. And that’s how I developed my relationship to BCBSA (Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria) and, this past March, I even became a president of that society.”</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
Milada Kubikova-Stastny
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Education
Plzen
Snizek
Sports
World War II
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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>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>
Dublin Core
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Title
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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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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>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C-SlXShaNew?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Swimming was something I grew up with. I started swimming when I was six or seven years old, so by ten I started having success within the Czechoslovak Republic at the time and that’s why I was picked to be recruited for the sports school in Prague. Swimming was fun. As a child, you pursue this differently. It’s not as a drill, although when I was nine or ten years old, I started swimming in the morning before school. So you get up at 5:00 in the morning; 6:00 you are in the cold water; 8:00 you are in school; 2:00 you’re back in the pool ‘till 4:00 or 5:00; you get back home at 6:00 and do your homework and then you have to go to sleep because you will get up at 5:00. But that was life. It was fun because you swam with a group of people you grew up with. And then we traveled a lot. Every weekend for the meets, and when I moved to Prague, it became more serious in the way that we traveled also outside the country. That was during communism, which was rare for some people, but because it was part of my life, it was something natural. I didn’t realize it was rare for other people. So I had a chance to travel. I remember not everything, but we went to Moscow and Vilnius. So it was interesting. Also to Germany. There were international meets so we met people from other countries.”</p><h4>Unsure of Studies</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RhRwFjtTdx0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For instance, in the architecture field, I was supposed to already be very good in drawing. In order to get into architecture school, I would have to be excellent in drawing to compete with hundreds of applicants at the time. In addition, very good in mathematics and things like that. So I didn’t even try that. But then I wanted to be a journalist. I did apply to go to the school of journalism, but I had no chance. At the time, I had not such a knowledge. Again, the tests were quite difficult and I didn’t have the broad knowledge to pass that. So as a result, I went to law school because I’ve always loved history. I graduated from law school; I worked in a very good firm, but there was something missing. After a few years in practice, I realized that I preferred to create something. Instead of helping someone to go over contracts and work with numbers, I preferred to create.”</p><h4>Law School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mi4TULCzgFg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“While I was in law school, where I learned English, I was looking for a chance to practice the language somewhere, and I found this agency that was looking for counselors for summer camps. I do not remember the year, but I ended up in Kentucky and I became a camp counselor in a Girl Scout camp. That was a fantastic experience because I was raising the flag. It was my first time in the U.S.”</p><h4>DOB2010</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LOvtqCghaaY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in art school here, during art history classes, I was sad not to hear anything about Czech culture, or whatever Czech culture is – Czechoslovakian culture, Bohemian culture. The artists and architects that I knew did the movements that happened in the 1920s and 1930s that are important in the European context, and that are not known or not taught on a general level here. I graduated, life was busy, and when I moved here two years ago, to New York City, it just happened that I was so close to Bohemian National Hall. I started meeting people, Czech and Slovak immigrants, and I became more interested in knowing why what we built so far is not visible and how to make it visible by writing about it. Writing not only about past success, but also about what’s happening now. Contemporary architecture, contemporary design for instance. Very high quality things were happening one hundred years ago in that region and it’s not known really much.</p><p>“So I am on a journey, in a way, to make it visible; to promote it in the U.S. Not only as a way to promote the Czech culture, but also to connect with Czech and Slovak people, immigrants, their daughters, the first, the second, the third generation, Americans who come from that region – not only from Czech Republic, Slovakia, but Poland, and sort of connect somehow and see what we are doing here, because there are designers here; there are artists. In Canada, too. In Toronto there’s a big community. So there is technology today that can connect us and get us closer and use that network for visibility. To show to our neighbors where we are coming from.”</p><h4>Two Homes</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I-fHM_HQSmc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Before he died, I met Jiří Kárnet, a Czechoslovak journalist and playwright who lived here in New York City, and I had this chance to meet him, visit him twice or three times before he died. In his last book he published – not that he wrote it as his last book, but he published it the same year he died. It was called <em>Posmrtný deník</em> – he wrote about his relationship to Czechoslovakia as his homeland and trying to justify his love for his new home. Not to justify, to explain it. He said that the way the son has a mother and he leaves his mother for his wife, the same he has two loves for his two homes, for Czechoslovakia and America, and he doesn’t have to choose. And I took it personally in a way, and I always think about that when I think about him because that helped me to resolve some of the tensions I sometimes had. You know, where is my home, where do I belong, what is my culture?”</p>
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Title
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Katerina Kyselica
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
Arts
Community Life
Education
English language
Havirov
Post-1989 emigrant
school
Sports
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6ff2adb99c91282573d5e06a4bc37cef
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>Police Officer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jWKsFmlEVE4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were drafted into the Army. Three of us [two friends and I] were eligible so we went to the Army. And we went to the Army, which didn’t have any guns, any uniforms or nothing, it was just a joke. There was one sergeant up there, who woke us up in the morning and we ran around – but that was just for one week. Then they told us that they are forming some police force in Prague, and that we would be eligible to join that. So I says ‘okay,’ so I offered to join. But we had to go to Prague and I was the one who passed, the other two didn’t pass, I had the highest education.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/76L4Wf80-7U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I – as the officer of a unit – I was immediately suspended and put down among the troops. And there was a new guy who took my place, Fred Kužel, who didn’t know how to write a služební lístek [office memo], if you know what that is. I did all the administrative jobs myself. So, we went around and around, and everything continues. And then one day, one day I got a telephone call from I don’t know where, and a voice says ‘Pepík, is that you?’ I said yes. He said ‘Tomorrow morning at 8 they’re coming to arrest you.’ So that sort of jerked me up a little bit, you know?”</p><h4>Guarding the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/533qT7G88xw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At night we went on duty. And there was a little hill, and down at the bottom there was a creek and a flour mill. And so I says ‘You know, you guys, I want to go down and see if there is somebody, if I can catch somebody, down by the mill.’ So I went back there, nobody followed me, nobody looked where I was going. Well, I came to the mill, I looked around, nobody was following me, nobody was calling. So I just – being a good Christian – I made my cross on my forehead and crossed the border.”</p><h4>Ski Event</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PmMviCqxBeE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in the Army, I also joined the ski troops and I wound up in the 1953 Olympics [sic. International Ski Championships in Garmisch Partenkirchen]. I was not that good, you know. Because I went down the hill, in Garmisch Partenkirchen, and something came into my ski and I flipped over and they carried me out of there.”</p><p><em>So while you were in the Army, you also went to the Olympics?</em></p><p>“Oh yeah, that was in the Army. I was representing the Army there. So they took me to the hospital and there wasn’t anything broken, just a sprain. So they took me in and patched me up, and the next day, there were games going on, so they took me in an ambulance and drove me right to the field where they have the exercises for the Olympics. So, I had a beautiful, beautiful view up there.”</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
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Joseph Pritasil
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Anti-communist
Border patrol
Community Life
Domazlice
Family life
marriage
Military service
Miretice
Refugee camp
Religion
Sports
-
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9d9af03900feecee695732126b81e66d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Moving Back</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R7Xen0UpKN4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Well, it was the Depression, and my father – he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to raise the family here, that it would be easier in Slovakia. You know, you’ve got a little farm there, a little garden, so you can grow some of your own stuff. Or maybe, I don’t know, kill a chicken or maybe a rabbit. So, it was easier to be there than here. Here you’ve got to buy everything, so…”</p><h4>Sister</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qB-DI0GVyEw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My sister, she was working in the shoe factory, Bat’a – it was about 12 to 14 kilometers away from our village – they traveled on the train early in the morning (because at 7:00 in the morning they started to work in the factory already). So, my sister she worked there, and the poor, poor girl, she was only 17, and she got killed there, in the village where she was working. Not in the factory, but Russians – airplanes, two of them – came down and the train just pulled in the station and the people were getting off that train, like the workers and they heard a noise… So everybody was ducking wherever they could, so they were running, there was a hospital close-by, maybe about half a block from the train. So most of them were running there, because they had a basement and that’s where most of the people hide. So they were running there and my sister – she was one of the unluckies – there was another one that got killed too. She got shot. They didn’t throw a bomb there, they were just shooting a machine gun from the airplane, so they just came round a couple of time and that was it.”</p><h4>Bat'a Shoe Factory</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qOUz3ijOAzE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Like I said, they started work at 7:00, and you had to make sure you don’t miss the train, because it was pretty far to walk. I had to walk from the factory to our village once, because sometimes the trains were so loaded there was no room to go inside the train. A lot of times, a lot of us climbed up onto the roof and we were there. But you came home and you looked like a chimney sweep.”</p><h4>Soccer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GQLb3r_znjQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, they used to have a good soccer team and most of the time we used to go to the soccer game, because we had to do something before we got to know different things like… They used to have a place in churches, just about every church had some kind of little hall where we could have a stage play and, you know, one time one guy comes from a different place and we hadn’t met yet and we met him, then he had some other friends and he brought those friends over and so… And like I said, even during the winter we used to have indoor soccer, in Chicago Armory.”</p><h4>Slovak Athletic Association</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sUMkxERiA-0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When we first came and joined the club, so we used to rent places here and there, like a storefront. So finally, us younger guys we said ‘Don’t you think that it would be nice if we buy our own joint and have our own club?’ It takes some money, but you can get nothing without money, so anyhow…We talked about it more and more, so we got together and we used to pitch in. One guy would [lend] $100 and another guy $50 and, little by little, we accumulated enough for a down payment. The first club we bought, it was in Chicago on 27th and Hamlin. And like she [my wife] said, we always bought old buildings, no matter what they were – a church or an undertaker’s – and make it into a club! So that’s what we did there too. It used to be an undertaker’s, it used to be [a] church, and we converted it into a club, and so that was the beginning.</p><p>“Then finally we sold that too, because the neighborhood changed and so we were mostly living out further west, and so we bought – we started looking for a different joint – so I was in charge of looking for the place to buy. I used to have a plumbing store right next door to this building where there was an undertaker and it was like a double store. And so I went there and I talked to the daughter because I couldn’t talk to the parents, they were both dead already. I talked with her and she said ‘Well, I never thought of that to sell it, where am I going to live?’ I said ‘No problem! You can rent a place, any place you want!’ So that’s what she did, we talked more and talked more and I talked her into it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Joseph Kmet
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Joseph Kmet was born in Chicago in 1930 but moved back to the family home of Bystričany, northwestern Slovakia, with his parents and siblings before he was one year old. Joseph says his father, Ignác, was worried that the family would not have enough to eat in the United States during the Depression, and so decided to return to Czechoslovakia to farm the land the family owned instead. Joseph’s father returned to Chicago alone to work at Western Felt Works, and found himself cut off from his family with the outbreak of WWII.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph says the War was hard for his family, with his older sister shot dead in a raid on a train carrying her and other commuters to the nearby town of Partizánske (which was known at the time as Šimonovany). Following his sister’s death, Joseph says he was sent to work in her stead at the Bat’a shoe factory in Partizánske as some money was needed by the family, and he was now the oldest child. At the end of the War, the family was reunited and, after some discussion, it was decided that the Kmets would all resettle in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p>Joseph left Czechoslovakia in October 1947. He took a train to Amsterdam, where he boarded a freighter which took him first to Havana, Cuba, and then Florida. Joseph says his family’s first home in Chicago was on Hamlin and 24th Street, which was a very Czech and Slovak neighborhood at the time. Joseph’s first job was at the Kimball Piano Factory; he subsequently worked at Florsheim Shoes and then retrained to become a plumber. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Korea for two years. Upon return, he married his wife Mary, with whom he has four children. Joseph was active in the Slovak League of America and is the former president of the Slovak Athletic Association in Chicago. He lived in Westchester, Illinois, with his wife Mary until his death in September 2011.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Bata
Bystricany
Child emigre
Community Life
Great Depression
Military service
Partizanske
Russians
Simonovany
Sports
World War II
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8dd3b5b4941ad30374d3c0c0e443e936
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eY0PWrIGZDA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everybody was almost poor, because people didn’t have too many things after the War – everything was destroyed. I remember I didn’t have shoes; I couldn’t go out and play because we didn’t have shoes for a few months, because it was not available to buy anything. At the end of 1946, the supplies started to come to the people, because the factory and everything was destroyed, and people didn’t have, you know, too much money to buy things and it was very hard. Just after I started to go to school, I remember, it was much better everything.”</p><h4>Leaving Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yJ2sRFGbMlA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were very careful not to say one word to anybody in the group, because we knew that in the group they have some informer. Exactly what happened was, we were in Warnemuende in Germany, which is in the North Sea region, you know, which is like a recreation area, and the German secret police came – the Stasi – and they took one girl away from us. The told her, ‘Take your suitcase and come with us immediately.’ They showed this ID to our leader who was with the group and said ‘We are police from DDR Germany and this girl must go back with us to Czechoslovakia immediately.’ And the girl was crying, unbelievable, you know, she was so sorry. Just two guys come and they say, right away ‘You must go with us.’</p><p>“Her idea probably was if she goes to Denmark she will stay over there, that is my thinking, you know. Just they took her away, we didn’t say anything, we always said ‘Oh, we are coming back, I must finish my house’ (because I was remodeling,) ‘We must do this when we come back.’ You know, we had a good time and we were friendly with everybody in the group, just we never ever said something bad about the government or ‘we will not come back’ or something. We always looked to the future back in Czechoslovakia, that ‘we will do this and come back and do that…’”</p><h4>Danish Police</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zan_pyOCHdM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“You see, you went to the police in Denmark, and we said ‘We don’t want to go back.’ And they said ‘Ok, give us your passport.’ We must give them our passport, a young police officer in civilian clothes said ‘Come with me.’ We went to his car, we went to the hotel where we stayed and he said to the doorman ‘These guys go with me.’ He said ‘Let them go into the room, pick up their things and they go with me.’ And the doorman said ‘Well, it’s a police officer,’ you know, he didn’t say anything. We picked up our things, we went to his car, and he takes us to the penzion. It was not like a camp or something, it was a pension, a nice pension, in Copenhagen, and it was full of refugees – Czechs, Slovaks and Polaks.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jWpo0OF1XV4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I sent my mum, I tried to send her some money in the letters, and all the time, I sent the letters registered, you know, [to be picked up] in the post office. And what really bothered me was that the director of the post office told my mother ‘Open the letter here.’ And mother opened the letter, there was money in it, and he said ‘I give you one week to go into the bank and exchange this money the legal way.’ Because at this time there were <em>bony</em> and my mum could sell these dollars to somebody and some people liked to buy <em>bony</em> [with this foreign currency], because they liked to buy cars or go to Tuzex – at this time there was Tuzex [a shop where luxury goods could be bought for foreign currency] and all kinds of things. Just no, they told my mother something that was not right, because you have the law, you have secrecy, no? You’re supposed to have, in your letters, secrecy. And they said ‘Forget it, open it, right now!’”</p><h4>Warned About America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jkAAh0PRLtg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was leaving the shipyard in Copenhagen and they sent me to this superintendent, because he must sign the paper for me to release me, and he asked me, he said ‘I heard that you are going to America.’ I said ‘Well, I would like to go.’ And he said to me ‘I lived in America for 15 years,’ he said, ‘I was working over there.’ He said ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ He said ‘If you don’t make it, come here and see me and I will take you back.’ He told me that. And I always remembered that, him saying ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ Thanks god, I was working hard, you know, working in construction in this country – it is not easy. I was working, I remember, I was working for this company for six years – it was George Hyman, it is now called something different – they changed it, now it is Clark Company. We were building this new Senate office building, it was like a big hole, three floors down, and the Washington temperature was 102 degrees. Back in the hole it was maybe 120 degrees! It was not easy, it was hard – and thanks god I made it. I was working most of the time inside construction, finishing everything, this kind of thing, you know, not outside. Just that time we were building that Senate office building I was working outside, because I didn’t want to leave the company, I wanted to stay with the company. And, it was not easy.”</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
Joe Gazdik
Description
An account of the resource
<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>
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
Catholicism
Catholics
Cuban Missile Crisis
emigrant
Engineers
Military service
Nove Mesto nad Vahom
refugee
Sports
Tours
Trencianske Teplice
World War II
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Dublin Core
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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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
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Transcription
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<h4>Art & Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SEE3YItFE7Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He really loved languages and he spoke about three, and my mother two. They all spoke, of course, German, and my father actually learned Russian because he loved Russian literature. So he read Tolstoy and Pushkin in Russian. So he always wanted us to learn languages. My brothers were not really oriented, but I liked it very, very much. He loved poetry. He recited poems and, as a little kid, I learned all the poems by heart. So when we went for a walk, which was usually on Sunday to the museums because he was a big art collector, we would recite poems on the way.�?</p><h4>Studies</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H757yO7cGAU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“After I graduated high school, I applied to Charles University to study languages, and I was probably the most nervous because I kind of had to lie in my resume. I could never be truthful about my father’s past. Of course I said he was from a family of 14 and that kind of thing, but I never really talked about his business success. After the communists actually nationalized his business, he worked for quite a while at some business ministry because the communists didn’t know how to run things, so they needed people like my father, so he had a pretty good job. That was all in my resume and to my greatest relief I did get [admitted] to the faculty of philosophy to study linguistics. I wanted to study English and German or English and French, but they wouldn’t allow you to study two Western languages; you had to have one Slavic language. So I took Russian because we had Russian probably since the fifth grade, so it was no big deal. I was fluent already in Russian, so it was at least easy.�?</p><h4>University Games</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RWyD5FbCRkg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“That was awesome. I won the gold medal, and we were a very small Czech team. We only had one tennis player – that was me – and we had a men’s volleyball team and a runner, and we won most of the medals and the Brazilian government decided to give us a special prize and invited us for nine days to Rio de Janeiro. It was fantastic, and all the Czech immigrants who left before the War, after the War, they all looked us up; we were all over the newspaper. They celebrated us so much and we were not used to it. With the communists, you won and they never said a word of praise. They would almost say ‘Oh she won because the other one played so badly.’ That was their usual approach, and there, when I won, they lifted me up and carried me through the town and there were big billboards with a photo double my size. Wherever we came, they said ‘Oh my god, are you the tennis champion? Would you like some coffee?’ So that’s something I will never forget. The most precious victory.�?</p><h4>Taught English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oBSzQ_u59BE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started teaching on a university level. First I had to learn all the expressions for mechanical engineering, because that was something I never knew much about. So I studied the scripts and learned words in Czech and then in English. The great advantage was that at the university level, you only taught eight to ten hours a week and that was all, which was wonderful because I had all the time in the world for training for tennis. I had a special deal that I taught double the amount in the winter semester and I took off for tennis tournaments in spring. We started usually on the French Riviera, and then it was Italy, and then it was Paris, then it was London – Wimbledon – and then it was all in Germany and Austria, and then we always had some special trip, like to China. So I traveled, and then in September I resumed my teaching again. So that was wonderful.</p><p>“The other was, in the ‘60s, things were getting looser and looser so we were not feeling the communist oppression that much. People started traveling and the deans of the technical faculties in Czechoslovakia started traveling and they were very smart guys, engineers, but they were totally at a loss when they were traveling. They didn’t even know what “entrance�? and “exit�? were. They didn’t understand. So they were looking for somebody who could teach them English and they hired me. I had five deans from various faculty [and I was] teaching practical English to these guys, which was great fun, because I made my own vocabulary for them, and I taught them through jokes. It was just wonderful and they loved me to death. And then, I taught only four hours a week and just one class of students, so that was great.�?</p><h4>Tennis Student</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fWxvI8bkJKA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“He wanted a lesson and I said ‘I’m sorry, I can’t give you a lesson.’ He said ‘What is so important?’ I had no idea [who he was]; I never ask people what they do. I said ‘Well, they have a painting at Christie’s at auction which I want to bid for,’ and he said ‘Christie’s? Did you know that I’m the head of Christie’s?’ He was the chairman of Christie’s! I had no idea. So I went and I got the piece and we became kind of more personal, and then they offered me a job at Christie’s at the Russian department, because they said ‘There are Russians who come from Russia and they have lots of art and they bring it to Christie’s and nobody really speaks Russian. So you could actually accept that art and stuff.’ And that was a very interesting part of my life and I said ‘Yes, I will do it, but only if I can do it only in wintertime, because in summer I want to keep that job on Long Island.’ And that’s what I did for a few years. I worked at Christie’s and I learned more. It was fantastic because there was so much art every day. I would learn about antique furniture and paintings which you never saw because they went into auction, so that enriched my life too.�?</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jitka Volavka-Illner
Description
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<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>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arts
Community Life
English language
Horcickova
Krkonose
Russian studies/speaker
Sports
Teachers
Translator/interpreter