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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iqS28OF33Mo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I remember that the Germans came to my house a few times looking for some revolvers or some guns, trying to catch something that could make problems. It worked out all those years pretty good, thank god. We had the pastry shop, so I never knew what it meant to be hungry after all. For example, I walked with my friend home, and her father was working at the match factory. She opened the door and she was yelling, ‘Mom, I’m hungry!’ I thought ‘How does that feel?’ because I really didn’t ever have to feel that, until later when I was on my own.</p><p>“I had a curfew at 8:00 at night no matter what, so I had to be home. I had friends coming, actually even relatives from Prague, because they couldn’t go to their places in Šumava, so they stayed in Sušice and we had good times, because there was a couple of cousins and they’d bring their friends. I had four cousins in Sušice, so we all ganged up together and it was ok. We just had to be careful about what we were doing.”</p><h4>Immigration to Australia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SRjmW9ETevU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We boarded a boat in Bremerhaven in Germany and [the ship] used to be a military boat before. It took us 38 days to go from there, through the Suez Canal – I should say Gibraltar first – the Suez Canal, and then we finally made it to Melbourne, Australia, and they had a strike so we couldn’t get off the boat. But anyway, we had a good time on the boat. There was about 18 Czech people, guys and women, and everybody had some little duties and I was an assistant to a doctor who was from <em>Podkarpatská</em> [Sub-Carpathian] Russia and he studied in Prague, so he spoke perfect Czech. And he helped us on the boat; we were able to go to the bridge, and the time passed okay. The sea was pretty nice to us; it wasn’t really too bad.</p><p>“So we came to Melbourne, finally made it out, and the Czech people who came already, who came before us, [saying] ‘Is there any Czech on the boat?’ and this and that. So they took us to Bonegilla which was another camp and we stayed a month. I had a month of a beautiful vacation. Beautiful weather; there were guys who rented horses so we went horseback riding; we had bicycles we could go around on; there was a lake we could go swim in; and they cooked for us! Can you imagine?”</p><h4>Pastry Shop</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8-8hCD4GmPA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We made Czech pastries, Czech <em>kolačky</em> and Czech turnovers. Czech this and Czech that and Czech cookies and Czech rye bread, and it was said that it was a very good bread. So we had a good recipe for it, I guess. I didn’t know how to make bread. My younger son, he would sit in the proof box, watching the bread rise, and when the oven was cleaned up, he would take a rest in there. He would lay down on one of the floors.</p><p>“Cermak Road in the main street in Berwyn and we were close to the crossing of Oak Park – it was like the center of town almost. There were about seven Czech bakeries at the time, and there were different Czech stores, like a furniture store and a clothing store [called] Pivoňka’s, and different things like that. A lot of people spoke Czech in the stores, but they spoke Czech like the Franz Josef Czech was which different. Then came the younger generation, younger emigration. We were not in the store anymore, but we still kept up with all that.”</p>
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Title
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Dagmar Kostal
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Dagmar Kostal was born in Klatovy (in southwestern Bohemia) in 1925 and grew up in nearby Sušice. Her parents, Karel and Marie, owned a bakery in town. Dagmar attended elementary school in Sušice, but after fifth grade was sent to a school in Hartmanice, a town close to the German border. When the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938 and Hartmanice (as part of the Sudetenland) was annexed to Germany, Dagmar returned home and finished her schooling there. She then went to school in Písek to learn the baking trade. Following the War, Dagmar apprenticed in Prague, where she also took English classes at Charles University. In 1946, Dagmar continued her training in Basel, Switzerland. When this was complete, she found a job in a pastry shop in Neuchatel where she met and befriended other Czechs. She says that her father urged her to stay abroad, as he was anticipating a communist takeover. When the coup occurred in February 1948, Dagmar knew that she would not be able to return to Czechoslovakia and turned to the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO helped her immigrate to Australia in 1949 where she, after a 38-day boat trip, arrived in Melbourne.</p><p> </p><p>Dagmar stayed at Bonegilla refugee camp for one month – a time that she calls ‘a beautiful vacation.’ She found a job at a bakery and took a room in a house with her fellow Czech émigrés. In 1950, Dagmar married Miroslav Kostal. The pair bought their own pastry shop in a suburb of Melbourne and, shortly after, had their first son, Michael. Eight years later, the Kostals moved to the United States with the idea of going into business with Miroslav’s uncle. In 1959, they sailed to San Francisco and drove to New York while stopping at landmarks throughout the country. After a short time in New York and New Jersey, Dagmar and her family moved to the Chicago suburb of Berwyn where they had friends and had enjoyed the large Czech community while passing through. Dagmar and Miroslav again bought a pastry shop which they owned and operated for a number of years. They were active in the Chicago Czech community. Dagmar says that the family spoke Czech at home and both her sons (their younger son Martin was born in the United States) went to Czech school. Dagmar is a dual citizen of the United States and the Czech Republic and says that despite more than 50 years in the United States, her ‘heart is completely Czech.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Hlavata
Refugee camp
school
Susice
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
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Depression</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GST28mHKmBc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Yes, very much so, because that was in the ‘30s, the high ‘30s, and I remember that at that time my grandmother died, my grandfather died, work became less and less and the firm had to be sold, and my father went to work at the Škodové závody in the woodworking department, and that life was quite different afterwards. He never complained, but of course it was different work than what he was used to and what he liked. And it was shortly before the war, I remember that in ’37, ’38 especially, people were talking and afraid of the war. We in school for instance, as little girls – I was 12 years old – we were learning about first aid, and the Morse alphabet even. It was sort of a preparation for the war. And then it of course happened in ’38 that Czechoslovakia was stripped of the border areas, of the <em>Sudety</em>, and in ’39 we were occupied by the Nazis and became a Protektorat of the German Reich. That was bad.</p><p>“I remember my father, who was a member of the Czechoslovak legions during WWI and worshiped President Masaryk, volunteered to go and defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. I saw him, he was past 50 years old. But he volunteered, I remember him marching in Hradec with other people going to the borders. Of course, the Munich Dictate changed everything. Czechoslovakia was stripped of this part. My father, he returned, and then I saw him cry. It was bad.”</p><h4>Theatre Group</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vdluSpDyqlE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, we had a group of friends in Hradec which was very nice, which sort of saved us all. And one thing which we did – well, we were for instance reading poetry or singing – but then the most interesting thing which we liked very much, and I liked very much, was amateur theatre. The group of us formed this amateur theatre group, we were reading lots of plays and rehearsing very, very, very sincerely and carefully, making our own sets. And we staged or produced [in] several theatres several performances, first on a little stage in Slezské předměstí – that was the part of Hradec where I was living – and then even in the famed Klicperovo divadlo in the Old Town of Hradec. And that was very nice, that was really wonderful. We enjoyed that very much. We were doing that for a long time.”</p><h4>Reporter in Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LfhPgQC1Il8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In Louny, I experienced some awful thing. Well, of course, the news was fine, but it was a terrible experience. There were so-called <em>Lidové soudy</em> – a <em>soud</em> [court] which didn’t have an elected judge or a prosecutor with a law degree, or a jury, or defending lawyers. It was people, this so-called <em>soud</em>, normal people selected by the communists in Louny to judge, the defendant usually was a farmer. It was a farming area around Louny. [They] judged and sentenced the farmer immediately for so-called ‘crime against the republic,’ meaning they were accused, for instance, of having for example just an extra goose more than they were supposed to have, or that they didn’t return the proper amount of grain which they were supposed to give to the state, to this supply office. It didn’t need to be true. It was strictly political abuse, and a political way of making the people afraid. And the judgment was swift and fast, and the sentences were harsh and immediate. Even prison terms, the confiscation of property, or at least harsh fines. I could not believe that something like that, that such abuse of power, is possible! And abuse of people! So, of course, I wrote article after article about that, and that didn’t please the communists very well at all. To this day, I think that was something that was terribly hard to take.”<br /><strong><br /></strong><em>Were the Communists in power in the local government?</em></p><p>“Yes. That’s why it was possible for these things to go on. Well, in ’48 of course everything changed. I was still in Louny on February 25, ’48, when the Communists staged a putsch in Prague. I was told by the city to leave immediately and never to return. So I went to Prague to the newspaper, where it was very gloomy, nobody knew what was happening, what will be happening. And in a few days I received a notification that I was expelled from the association of journalists, that I couldn’t be a reporter anymore.”</p><h4>Crossing the Border</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kEWvRPpnOPE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We walked for several hours and came to a meadow where there were huts with hay, you know, just for hay. And there we hid for the rest of the night and the whole day. I was very afraid, I couldn’t understand that, I thought that we would be surely discovered, hiding there for the whole day. But the guide said ‘No, don’t worry, nobody comes. I do it always the same, it’s alright.’ Well it was, nobody came. So then in the evening, at night, we were supposed to continue and cross the border that same night. The moon was shining and this big meadow in front of us which we had to cross to the woods – the woods were on the other side. So we waited until the clouds came, little clouds which would make it not so clear to see. And we quickly ran across the meadow and into the woods and started to walk and walk, and walked and walked. It’s mountains, so we went up the hill. And I was very glad that I don’t have a heavier suitcase to carry. And I know it was late at night, but all of a sudden we heard dogs barking, and some voices yelling in the direction that we were going, ahead of us.</p><p>“So we stopped and turned around and went sideways and walked away from that until we knew that we were in the distance; we didn’t hear any more barking or any voices. So we walked and walked and at one point we rested. We sat down under a tree and I know that I fell asleep and when I woke up it was raining and raining and pitch dark. So we walked, but in the morning we found out that we are hopelessly lost. The woods were terribly deep. And it still was raining and raining and an absolutely dark sky – you couldn’t even see which way is west, because we knew we have to go west, but which was the west? So I remember from nature studies we knew that lichen grows on the north side of the trees, but lichen grew all around the trees because it was such an old, old woods. So we were simply lost, and the guide didn’t have a compass because he was so sure about it – he always was doing the same route so he knew that. And he didn’t have a compass, and of course we didn’t have a compass. So we didn’t know where the west is. The whole day it rained, the evening it rained, we walked a bit, we rested a bit hoping that we will somehow find the way, which we didn’t. But then at night the stars came out. And the Big Dipper came out, with the North Star. And we knew where is the west.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OLPgXNzkViY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were extremely lucky. My husband met in ’48, in Frankfurt, an American officer – Army officer – of Slovak origin who was very kind and very good, and he took care of Slovaks and so on. And he offered us an affidavit of support, because without that assurance you couldn’t get to the United States. And that was an extremely valuable and kind thing to do, because the sponsor – he – was assuring the United States that we won’t become a burden on the States. Well, you know, what did he know? It was an extremely kind thing to do. But he did that. He and his wife did that, so we had this assurance and then through the process we emigrated in May, we left Germany in May 1950.”</p><h4>Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dWBjkfgtDQg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I thought after Vienna… You know, Chicago was quite different in 1968. But I grew to love Chicago. It became a beautiful, beautiful city. Do you know Chicago? The [lakefront] is beautiful. You could bicycle for miles, to Wisconsin practically, on the flat land. The architecture was wonderful there. Of course, Frank Lloyd Wright to start with, but then Helmut Jahn built these fabulous buildings on Wacker Drive. It was beautiful!</p><p>“When we came the lake was not clean, but they cleaned it up and it was absolutely gorgeous. The architecture on the lake and the beaches – it looked like you could be in Rio de Janeiro! It was just marvelous, and then underground, it simply was just a very beautiful city. I liked it there very much, and I liked the theaters. And we were going a lot to the theater, also to the little theaters – Steppenwolf I remember, of course Goodman but also Steppenwolf which became very famous. We started to go to Steppenwolf theater when they were playing in a church in Highland Park, you know, in the suburbs. Well they were wonderful. Northern Lights was another one, there were a lot of small theaters which we liked very, very much. Museums, and I used to go on Fridays to the concerts, to the Chicago Symphony. The Art Institute was an excellent, excellent place to be, and the opera. I liked it there very much. So then we came to Washington and I said ‘well, Washington is a nice city.’ And I came to love Washington too – again theaters, operas, the symphony. I continue doing that.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Helena Fabry
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Helena Fabry was born in Hradec Králové, Bohemia, in 1925. Her father was a cabinet maker who, among other commissions, restored the interior of the town’s cathedral, while her mother stayed at home and raised Helena and her younger sister Věra. Helena says that around the time of the Depression, business dried up for her father and so he went to work in the carpentry department of the local Škoda factory. Helena graduated from business school in Hradec Králové during WWII and was assigned a job at the local <em>zásobovací úřad </em>[supplies bureau]. She remembers WWII as being ‘uneasy’ and ‘disquieting’ and says that it was her involvement in amateur theatre in Hradec Králové which helped her during this time. Following the end of the War in 1945, Helena moved to Prague to learn English, which she did for one year before taking a job at<em>Svobodné slovo</em>, a newspaper allied with the Beneš Party. She says she loved working as a reporter in the capital. In 1947, Helena was posted to Louny to gain more experience as a local reporter for the newspaper. There, she reported on the trials of local farmers before <em>lidové soudy</em> [people’s courts], which she refers to as ‘a terrible experience.’ She says her reports sparked the ire of the local Communist administration, and when the coup took place in Prague on February 25, 1948, she was told to leave Louny immediately, and expelled from the association of journalists.</p><p> </p><p>Helena stayed on at <em>Svobodné slovo,</em> though was no longer able to write. She became involved in underground efforts to destabilize the new Communist government, encrypting and deciphering messages. In the summer of 1948, she was told that one accomplice had been arrested and that she should leave the country immediately. A guide told her to pack one suitcase with clothes meant for a week on a farm and meet him at a designated place in Prague at a certain time. Helena traveled with a small group and this guide to Sušice by train; from Sušice, they walked until they crossed the border, which in this instance took several days. The group got ‘hopelessly lost’ on their journey but, says Helena, they were able to find their way west eventually by using the stars to navigate.</p><p> </p><p>Helena spent just under two years in Germany, primarily in refugee camps in Dieburg and Ludwigsburg. There, she met and married her husband, Milan Fabry (a Slovak economist who had been the political secretary of Transport Minister Ivan Pietor prior to the coup). The couple sailed to America on the <em>General Blatchford</em> in May 1950. Their first job was helping an elderly couple cook and maintain their summer home in Heath, Massachusetts. Later that year, the Fabrys moved to Washington, D.C., where they stayed for a short time before Milan found civilian employment with the U.S. Army, leading the couple to move back to Germany. In 1958, Helena’s husband took a job at Sears Roebuck and so the couple lived briefly in Chicago, before moving to Vienna, Austria, where he established a buying office for the firm. There, the couple’s son was born. The Fabrys returned to Chicago in 1968 and lived there for a further 15 years until Milan was transferred to Washington, D.C. There, Helena found a job at the Center for Hellenic Studies and played an active role in Czech and Slovak organizations such as the SVU (Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences). Today, Helena lives in Bethesda, Maryland.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948
Anti-communist
Arts
Communist coup
emigrant
Fabianova
Hradec Kralove
Jan
Journalism
Masaryk
refugee
Refugee camp
Skoda
Susice
Svobodne slovo
Women workers
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
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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
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Growing Up</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2eiBM4GdVg4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Because it’s not far away from the German border, there was a huge Czech Army station and Sušice was just the first city outside of what used to be the Sudetenland. So historically, Sušice was a diverse place. There was always a Czech, German and Jewish community. But it wasn’t in the German zone, so it was considered a Czech town and it was not affected by a Sudeten history, but there was the Army base. So when I grew up, there was always a strong sense of the communist regime’s presence, in the sense that the people who were army people were always coming and going and privileged. They had a lot more money that the rest of the people and, especially through my mother’s profession, I was very aware of that because any time there would be a new army family coming, wives would always be privileged by getting jobs very easily in schools or anywhere, and the children were privileged. My mother as a schoolteacher was always tense when children from these families were evaluated badly in school.</p><p>“So there was a strong sense of awareness of that and I grew up in a family that was always very clearly on the other side, meaning that if Havel, for example, talks about a certain schizophrenia in a society, which I write about in my book, I was strongly aware of this as a child, where when you talk about it at home, history is one way, and different history is told in school, and different things you can’t say or act in school. The city was liberated by the American Army and my grandfather, who was a photographer and also a musician, was friendly with American soldiers, so we always had in our family albums pictures of my father and American soldiers in my grandfather’s studio. So I grew up knowing that the city was liberated by the American Army while other kids who didn’t have this connection through visuals were living in the world of imagining that we were liberated by the Soviet Army only.”</p><h4>Education</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v8IYyGh2GjY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think it was more well-rounded and cohesive. We had a lot of gym, we had art and I also think we had wiggle-room for people with different gifts. I remember I was good in visual arts and it was seen as a plus. It was seen as a talent that’s good to groom and it is okay if you do well in arts or music and you maybe don’t do so well in other subjects. I felt that art education, music, creativity was overall more valued. Math was good; I think science, not so. Given the ideological [constraints] I think history was good, but I think overall there was more stress on trying to find your skills or your niche or talent and pursuing that and supporting you on that.”</p><h4>Mother</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CxmWWHSeSbY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think that in Czech[oslovakia] there were situations where people sometimes were able to hide in certain places, like I know that the school where she taught had a president who was sympathetic and a nice person and an interesting personality who was somehow able to survive, and he would hide some people and I think that happened to my mother. By the time the 1980s came, when I could see that there were strict divisions between teachers who were in the Party and who were not, it was almost like an agreement. People sort of lived next to each other with this agreement: ‘We’re not crossing these boundaries; we’ll just take you for what you are, communist, and we’re here.’ And they co-existed with certain parameters, like you don’t cross over certain lines. You had to go to certain meetings. They had an organization for teachers that was, of course, a communist-affiliated organization. It wasn’t the Party, but it was a union, the teacher’s union, which, in a socialist state, was a socialist organization. So my mother was in that, but it was just like a union.”</p><h4>High School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYDZADM9yHI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got very involved in the Catholic religion at that time. There was a huge revival; the people in my generation were very interested in spirituality as a form of looking for a place of truth, looking for different, alternative environment. It was very ecumenic. Ecumenic in a sense that Catholic and Protestant was very mixed, there were no boundaries, and it was more about being a teenager and looking for the meaning of life and a place where you can trust people. There was a sense that you could trust religion after it was suppressed. There was a lot of this happening underground and there were a lot of things that, because my parents were secular, I had no idea about, so it was also newness to it. So I got very involved in a Catholic, not so much a church, but various underground activities that united people. You met a lot of intellectual people through the Catholic underground, so I was very involved in that.”</p><p><em>So how did you get involved in that and what sort of activities were you doing?</em></p><p>“There were certain parishes in Prague that would be popular to go to for young people, meaning that there would be certain priests who would have Mass and homily for young people. They would be more provocative, more modern – within its limits – but then also certain groups organized after church groups where people would get together and talk, sing, become a community, sometimes read from the Bible and had theological readings. I wouldn’t call that Catholicism; it was more spiritual and theological interest in reading the Bible. So that was one thing. The other, being in Prague, young people would often travel outside [the city] on weekends and summers, so there would be parishes around the country where you would go for weekend retreats, where you go and spend time together. You may sing; you may pray. It was social, but with a religious program.</p><p>“Now this is so different from here. I would want this to be really clearly distinct from here because that kind of activity was spiritual. It was not important that it was the Catholic Church, in other words. It happened to be for me, but it could have been Protestant. I had friends in my classroom from both Catholic and Protestant [churches] and we would often, as a gesture of solidarity, go back and forth to churches. There was no animosity or competition between churches.”</p><h4>Kicked Out</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mue4cahwgsc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was, through my friend, recommended to a woman named Miloslava Holubová who lived in Malá Strana in a beautiful apartment overlooking Malostranské náměstí and she was a Czech intellectual who signed [Charter 77]. She was a writer intellectual who was connected and, in fact, her apartment was often a place for meetings of various groups, like theological groups, and when books were brought to Czech[oslovakia] secretly from Britain or Germany they were often delivered to her place then sent around. Literary people, underground Charter people often met in her apartment and so the fact that I was expelled for my religious activity and found this room in this woman’s apartment changed my life again in a major way because I became close friends with her, but also she was sort of my mentor and my aunt and my grandmother and my everything. We had an amazing couple of years together. From her, not only was I exposed to all these underground, literary circles and religious circles and literature that I normally wouldn’t have access to, because she was my mentor, we would spend a lot of time together and she would often talk about her life before WWII, during and after, and so I would learn through her about Czech history and the history of experience.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxbzZ0d1CWk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was in FAMU, my last two years or year, I witnessed a number of people coming back home from the West after the Revolution. A number of immigrants who decided they would like to come back and try, and I saw how Czech people in their professions were not supportive; were jealous and actually quite evil and nasty to them, and anything that they came with. There were mutual tensions between people who came from outside and wanted to contribute their knowledge from outside; there was real hatred, sort of this insecurity – ‘Don’t come back and tell us now’ – and the real serious sort of animosity. It was very sad for me for me to see that because I felt that, as a young person, I wanted to see other… what was coming from elsewhere, other ideas. I was open and to see that these older guys in charge are frightened by that and afraid to let go, and not accepting people who were Czech people coming back. It was depressing. Of course, now I made myself to be in the position where if I ever want to go back, I know I would never be accepted, for the very same reasons. But, that was really the reason I left. I was in love with my husband and wanted to be with him, but he would have probably stayed. If I said ‘I’m not going, stay here, make it happen’ he would probably stay; I wanted to go, and I would have gone anywhere in the West. I really wanted to study more.”</p><h4>Research</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zVeoOdTcGAk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I noticed a group of older men sitting at a table, Sunday morning at 9:00 or 9:30 and they were having coffee or a little glass of wine and, as a photographer, I was intrigued and sort of curious. What was bringing them to this café that was mostly a younger crowd or foreigners? So I walked up to them and introduced myself as a photographer and asked them if I could photograph them or talk to them, and they sort of looked at each other and said ‘Sure.’ So it turned out that they were men who were political prisoners from the ‘50s and they were a group that would gather every Sunday. So I met them, and we talked, and I asked if I could photograph them, so I set up my tripod and my camera and I did an interview about their lives. I interviewed six or seven people and after that I came back the next summer and decided to meet more of them and I also decided to find women and see if women had different experiences or not.</p><p>“In 1995, I began this project where I would interview former political prisoners, people who were arrested in 1948 and spent many years, ten or more years in what were Czech labor camps, equivalent to what Solzhenitsyn writes about in <em>The Gulag Archipelago</em>. I first started with life histories and these portraits and then, as I was progressing towards my dissertation, I started to ask questions, not so much about their individual lives, but more about their life as a community. I discovered that they have this community that has political aspirations, that has social aspirations. So I started to hang out with them more. Not with all, but some of them I met with individually, some of them through the community and some of them I stayed friends with and visited, like this man for example. We were very close friends. So really, until 2004, I was going every summer regularly, meeting, if not interviewing, individuals or their spouses or children. I would participate in their annual gatherings and celebrations. They would often return to these places or camps and I would join them and photograph them, and I wrote a journal and records and that all became my data for my doctoral dissertation.”</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jana Kopelentova-Rehak
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jana Kopelentova-Rehak was born in Sušice in southern Bohemia in 1968. Her mother Jana was a teacher while her father Jaroslav was a photographer for the city. Jana’s paternal grandparents had owned a photography studio in Sušice which was nationalized after the Communist coup in 1948; her father has since reclaimed the property and works with some original family equipment. Jana says that her parents both held anti-communist views and that she was aware of history that wasn’t taught in schools; for example, the liberation of Plzeň and Sušice by the American Army. Exposed to photography from an early age, Jana was accepted to the art school Střední průmyslová škola grafická in Prague. While living in a dormitory, Jana became interested in religion and attended retreats with fellow classmates. When a Bible was found in her room, Jana says that she was expelled from school housing and had to find her own accommodations in the city. She finished high school living with Miloslava Holubová, a writer and signatory of Charter 77 whom Jana says was a big influence. After graduating from high school, Jana worked for three years as a photographer for an art restoration company. In 1990, she began studying fine art photography at FAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). While at FAMU, Jana studied abroad in Norway and Glasgow and says that she learned English thanks to the international makeup of the FAMU students.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1994, eager to continue her studies in the West and with plans to marry Frank Rehak, an American who was in Prague on a Fulbright scholarship, Jana moved to the United States. She settled in Baltimore, Maryland, and married Frank a few months later. To adjust to the move, Jana says that she spent some time taking photographs of Baltimore neighborhoods. She completed her MFA in photography from the University of Delaware in 1997 and was accepted to a doctoral program in anthropology at American University. Jana’s research focused on 1950s political prisoners in Prague. For several summers, Jana and Frank returned to the Czech Republic and taught a summer photography school for international students. Jana is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola University in Baltimore and Towson University in Towson, Maryland. She also teaches Czech language classes for the local Sokol group. A dual citizen, Jana received her American citizenship two years ago, which she says was an ‘emotional decision.’ She lives with her husband and two daughters in Baltimore.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
Arts
Education
Holubova
Plzen
Post-1989 emigrant
Religion
school
Stredni prumyslova skola graficka
Susice
Teachers