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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>Schooling & WWII</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2Y5HJ3gCr8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We could sort of tell that something very unusual and very unlucky was happening to us. At the beginning of the next school year in 1939, we were asked to cut out the pictures of Presidents Masaryk and Beneš from our textbooks, and we got new students coming in, especially those who were expelled from Slovakia, or [who] left Slovakia in a very difficult position. Among them was a young man who became my good friend, whose father was a dentist in Bratislava and also had to leave.”</p><h4>Trouble with Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zI063PTqETg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was that one unfortunate, well, peculiar incident just one year before I went to gymnázium when I was on the street with a couple of my friends and one of them was eating, I think it was plums, and was spitting the pits out into the street. And suddenly a German who had a swastika attached to the fender of his car stopped and seized us, claiming that we were desecrating the German flag. And he called a policeman who then went and took us to the police station. And our parents had to come and take us out. It seems as if the matter was somehow settled without any further consequences, but needless to say we were very scared by the whole event.”</p><h4>Shocking Vengeance</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fUx0ljKO9-A?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One of them happened right under our windows where, in 1939, I saw the coming of the German tanks. This time, a large procession of German prisoners was being taken up the street, and occasionally one of the guards would shoot one of these Germans, about four or five during the time we watched, and I remember my mother got very upset about it and thought this was really bestial behavior. And the other one, even more gruesome, event which I witnessed, was the burning of two presumably Germans on Wenceslas Square, about two or three days after the Russians came in. And these two victims were hanging by their feet, with their heads down, in an arch which I think was used for advertising where Vodičkova ulice comes into Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square]. There were Soviet tanks close and it looked like both Soviet soldiers and members of these Revolutionary Guards were pouring gasoline over these bodies, which were still squirming and alive, and setting them on fire. So that was very shocking, but it was kind of in a way overshadowed by the rejoicing over liberation.”</p><h4>Fashion Mom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xdRoO2LjcB0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mother actually did take on employment after essentially working at home after the Communist seizure of power. Women were supposed to, everyone was supposed to, work. And she found an interesting job for herself with a fashion magazine which also was designing knitting patterns, and that was one of her great hobbies. That was something she got some training in when she was going to the art school. So she continued there, and she enjoyed the people she worked with.”</p><h4>Wilson Center</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QU1IEJDW8M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My mentor James Billington became the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1973, and a year later he brought me to the center to be on the staff. And it seemed particularly fitting that it should be an institution honoring Woodrow Wilson since Woodrow Wilson was so intimately involved in the creation, independence of Czechoslovakia and therefore also the Czech Republic. So I started working at the center, involved again in building up the library resources and, more importantly, surveying resources for the study of certain foreign areas available in Washington, D.C. And that resulted in a series of some 14 volumes discussing the resources in Washington for the study of various major areas of the world, such as the Soviet Union, China, the Near East, Africa and Latin America.”</p><h4>Palacký Medal</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UYkOKvZmNSA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Because of my work on the Bohemian Reformation, especially for my book, I was awarded the Palacký medal for social sciences, which is given, I believe it’s annually, to a scholar who is to be honored for his contribution to Czech history. This happened in [September] 2009.”</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
Zdenek David
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zdenek David was born in Blatná, South Bohemia, in May 1931. He moved to Prague at age seven, however, when his father Václav (a judge) was appointed to the capital’s circuit court. Zdenek spent most of WWII in Prague and remembers his schooling changing under German occupation. He says students at his gymnázium on Husova Street were taught no history during the War and were expected to learn subjects such as mathematics in German. Zdenek remained in the capital at the time of liberation and remembers ‘chaos’ as reprisals were inflicted upon ethnic Germans and those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Zdenek left Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1947, when he gained a one-year American Field Service scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Putney School in Vermont. When the Communist takeover happened in 1948, his parents urged him not to return home in light of the political climate.</p><p> </p><p>Zdenek enrolled at Wesleyan University to study a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1952, he was accepted at Harvard, where he gained both his master’s and doctoral degrees. As a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan in 1964, Zdenek was awarded a one-year scholarship to conduct research in Finland. It is here that he saw his parents Julie and Václav again for the first time in 17 years. After nearly a decade at Princeton University, Zdenek moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He works there to this day, now as a senior scholar at the center. A frequent visitor back to the Czech Republic, Zdenek says the Velvet Revolution in 1989 ‘inspired’ him to conduct more scholarly research on Czech topics. In 2003 he brought out a book about Czech religious group the Utraquists, titled Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. He published a new work focusing on 18th-century Czech history called Realism, Tolerance, and Liberalism in the Czech National Awakening. In September 2009, he was awarded the Palacký Medal for social sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences. A longtime member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Zdenek is now the organization’s secretary general.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609043310/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=sf.profile&person_id=3405" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A profile of Zdenek on the Wilson Center’s pages</a></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
Blatna
Child emigre
Czech-German relations
Education
emigrant
German occupation
gymnazium
Munich Crisis
Nazis
Palacky Medal
refugee
Teachers
Vaclavske namesti
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>Grandfather</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ov3W5odcdpU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>I remember my grandpa returning from the concentration camp, which was very lucky because his good friend learned of his imprisonment and intervened with the Allies and put him on a list to be exchanged. So my grandpa and the other leaders of Sokol – he was one of the five leaders – were on transport to Auschwitz, all the others died there, but they took him out of a railroad car, cattle car in Terezín and gave him a ticket to Prague.</p><h4>First School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b1polGDAGMM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>I was largely with my aunt in southern Bohemia, and I started going to school in the village of Radějovice which was about three miles away. I had to walk across tracks and through the fields, and I loved that, because the first bench, first row, was first grade, second row was second grade, fifth row was fifth grade, everything together. The teacher was fantastic: ‘Now I’m teaching for the first graders, now I’m teaching for the second graders.’ I listened to it all. It was very stimulating. And he was such a dedicated guy who loved to teach. He played the violin for us in class; he would hit our fingers with the bow. That was during the War, it was a great memory. I liked it more than the school in Prague when I came to regular school with a big class. So education does not only depend on how much money is spent and how big classes are. That guy, he achieved alone more than probably the teachers gave me subsequently.</p><h4>Skiing and a Patent</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Amm1F4mHrhw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>I invented, in 1958 after a ski accident which busted my knee, a ski binding – which was an alternative to Marker, which was the first, a year before – and had it patented. With a big effort, I managed to get it produced. It was not so easy, but eventually, in 1962 or ’63, one third of Czech skiers – by my sales figures – were using my binding, the ZPB binding. Then I had some other patents of systems for bridges and such things, but this one is the best known. It is actually exhibited, my binding, in the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, New Hampshire. On the other hand, the income was decent but not like it would be here, so fortunately I didn’t go into this kind of business, otherwise I would have been diverted from what I really like.</p><h4>Education Systems</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KCqdhk3oL9U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>In this country, we recognized quickly that education has a completely different spirit. My children never had a systematic course of history or geography. But what they do for example, my son in the second grade – already from the first grade at school – they have to go to the library and the teacher says ‘You study Richard III’ and then he has to make a presentation at school, or study the Napoleonic Wars and make a presentation, or tell us something about Indonesian history. But they never had a systematic drill, the rote learning, so I think in this regard, many Americans are not properly educated, like systematically, but it leads them to be creative and that’s a plus.</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
Zdeněk Bažant
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-3237" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609085212im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Handler-119.jpg" alt="Zdeněk Bažant" width="200" height="253" /></p><p>Zdeněk Pavel Bažant was born in Prague in 1937. He was raised in Prague, though during WWII he spent a long period in southern Bohemia with his aunt. His father and grandfather were engineering professors ČVUT (Czech Technical University) and his mother – a junior colleague of Milada Horáková – held a doctorate in sociology. Zdeněk recalls the time following the Communist coup in 1948 as difficult for his family. He was labeled ‘bourgeois’ because of his parents’ backgrounds. His maternal grandmother had acquired a number of properties through the sale of her factory; at this time Zdeněk says that all of these buildings were nationalized. He says that it was at this young age that the idea of leaving the country began to germinate. An excellent mathematician, he was national champion of the Mathematical Olympics in 1955.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Zdeněk studied civil engineering at ČVUT and graduated at the head of the class. He was not, however, accepted into a postgraduate program, which he attributes to his decision not to accept an invitation to join the Communist Party. Instead, Zdeněk began working as an engineer for Dopravoprojekt, a state company, and was able to complete a doctorate in engineering as an external student. In 1966, after earning a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University, he traveled abroad on two fellowships, to Paris and Toronto, and then on a visiting appointment to Berkeley, California. Zdeněk was in Toronto during the Prague Spring in 1968. He and his wife Iva (whom he had married the previous year) were planning on returning to Czechoslovakia; however, upon hearing the news of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, they decided to stay abroad.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1969, Zdeněk was appointed associate professor at Northwestern University, and is still today at this school, holding a distinguished professorial chair in civil engineering and materials science. He is a world-renowned, frequently-published researcher with much of his work focusing on structural and materials engineering. Zdeněk and Iva have two children, Martin and Eva, who, although they did not learn it at home, can both speak Czech. Zdeněk enjoys many hobbies, including skiing, tennis, and playing the piano. His passion for skiing led to his 1959 patent of a safety ski binding which was mass-produced and became very popular among Czech skiers. Although he visits Prague several times a year and says he misses the ‘beautiful landscape of Prague,’ Zdeněk says that he has been ‘very impressed with America’ and has no plans to return to the Czech Republic to live. He also has no plans to retire. Today, Zdeněk lives with his wife (a retired physician) in Evanston, 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
Concentration camp
Education
emigrant
Engineers
Radejovice
refugee
school
Sports
Teachers
Zdenek Bazant
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aaca6a9eb4e7b7a3df7539e8a10b599e
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/rYJIiThjVh8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was nine at that time when the War ended and of course the Russian Army came to the great enthusiasm of the population. And well, the country was believed to be liberated. There was one little incident that I recall and that some people probably wouldn’t like to hear even today in the country: that was still in May ’45 and in the streets we saw a line of people being taken away by the so-called Revolutionary Guards. They were Germans who had been collected before being shipped away. Now, there was a long line of people, and there was an old lady there, who was carrying a little suitcase with all her belongings there. And one of our neighbors in the same building where we lived, a big guy, he ran to this lady and grabbed her suitcase. He took it away and said ‘You are not going to need that.’ So this patriot later became a leading figure in the Communist Party in the neighborhood.”</p><h4>Soviet Troops</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Yd72RVGTMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Most people were enthusiastic about them, and so was I. Even my mother who was inherently a skeptic, much more so even than my father, as well as very well educated (including in history), she was enthusiastic as well and said ‘Well, now we’ll all have to start learning Russian.’ And indeed some timid attempts at that were made in the family. Well, the Soviet Union was seen widely as President Beneš at that time saw it – as a great friend – and Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, a bridge slanted slightly to the East.”</p><h4>School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i8ObziKdjcU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was ugly, because it was a game – a ruthless game – played by the parents, by the teachers, by the students themselves trying to get to this selective school, but moreover to avoid something much worse. Now, some of them played the game in a very imaginative way. I recall one of my classmates who was seriously ill, I think he had leukemia, and his mother who was an ardent Communist, or at least pretended to be, she registered him, or he volunteered actually, to become a miner – a coalminer, whom of course was considered at the time to be a hero, the socialist hero. So this classmate of mine who had leukemia volunteered to be a miner, or rather was volunteered by his scheming mother, knowing full well of course that he would not be accepted, but that he would be rewarded for his readiness to be a miner by being allowed to study, which is exactly what happened.</p><p>“Well my parents, fortunately, were not quite such accomplished intriguers; they argued that since my record was very good in the school, maybe I deserved to continue to study. Well, the record was fully acknowledged and after endless interviews and whatnot, I was indeed accepted to the entering grade of that three-year program at the school at Malá Strana, and was delighted, was elated, so were my parents who said ‘Well, there is still justice, despite all that has been happening in this communist country.’ Well, their joy was premature. When I first turned up at the beginning of the school year, I was called to the director of the school and he said ‘Well, the National Committee made a decision, and as a result of the decision, you are really not starting here at the <em>gymnázium</em>, but you’ll be starting next week as a mechanic in a factory near where you live.”</p><h4>News</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i7w33BgbEzY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I lived in Prague, I didn’t listen to Radio Free Europe at all, not only because it was jammed, but because it had a very bad reputation, not only among the communists, needless to say, but also among their enemies, which was the majority of the population. The general attitude was ‘Well, what do these people, who were lucky enough to get out of the country… What are they going to tell us about what we should do?’ So once I learned English – and I was working really very hard with Aunt Paula, she was a very good teacher – I was able to listen to the Voice of America in English, rather than in Czech, and to the BBC also in English. Because I wanted to know what they were telling to people in general around the world, rather than what was tailored to the conditions in Czechoslovakia.”</p><h4>Charles University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nLQgaFqJ7hQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My interest was always in modern history and increasingly in contemporary affairs, in what we would call today contemporary history, because by that time I was following avidly what was happening in the world, and trying to look at it as a historian. So history was the field, but of course, at Charles University at that time, which prided itself on being the oldest university in Central Europe but was in fact an outfit run by current or former members of the secret services and similar institutions, history was not a field that anybody in his right mind would want to study – that is to say modern or contemporary history. That was politics; that was not any scholarship.</p><p>“The only part of history that could be studied seriously, although in a rather old-fashioned way, was medieval history. So that’s what I studied; I specialized in archival studies. It gave me what one would call a solid background, but it was a very old-fashioned background. It was the way history was studied back in the 19th century when what mattered was, well, as Ranke, the famous German historian said – <em>wie es eigentlich gewesen</em> – how really it was. But not what it meant, not why things happened the way they did, the emphasis was on the facts.</p><p>“So that was the kind of medieval history that I studied, and I think that it prepared me in some way for what I was to do later. Of course, in the Middle Ages, there was a very limited amount of written history, one had to do with fragments, and even what was produced at that time, very little of it has survived. And so I had to deal with fragmentary evidence. And later on when I tried to study contemporary history at the time when the archives were still closed, or most of them, and one had to do with the fragments, the methodology, I realized, was not all that different.”</p><h4>US Visa</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pltqGeRqZ9M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At Christmas time – or after Christmas actually – I decided while waiting for the visa to take another hitch-hiking trip and go down to the desert, all the way to the Sahara as far as I could get, together with the Slovak guy. So the two of us hitch-hiked, and he had the address of some priest at an oasis down in southern Tunisia. So it was quite an adventure and we both loved it, and got quite far south, as south as we could, when the message came faintly on the telephone in the priest’s house that the visa is here and that it really has to be picked up by the end of January if it is to be used this year – otherwise I would have to wait for another year. So I got a taste a little bit for the bureaucracy also, but I wanted to make sure that I would get back quickly.</p><p>“There was no way of flying, but there was one train on the one railroad line that cuts across the country. So I got on the train, not on the first class, not on the second class, not in the third class but in the fourth class on the train, which was sort of a cattle car where the locals were traveling with their chickens and other animals. So, it was another adventurous ride, 24 hours or so, to get to Tunis and pick up the visa.”</p><h4>Re-Entry Permit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pAjrALXd6OA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The only problem, but it really wasn’t a big one – it was more a nuisance than a problem – was that I was stateless, I didn’t have a passport. So when eventually I got fellowships for research abroad, and I was able to travel to Europe, I needed a document, and so what I was traveling on was a so-called re-entry permit, which looks like a passport, but all it says is that the United States allows me to return. Otherwise I had to have a visa for every single country I traveled to, and I also couldn’t afford to be away for too long, because as everybody knows, one had to have certain uninterrupted residence physically in the country before becoming a citizen. So all this had to be taken into account, but I was on course and that was the least thing that bothered me.”</p>
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Vojtech Mastny
Description
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<p>Vojtech Mastny was born in Prague in 1936. His great uncle, also named Vojtěch Mastný, was one of the most important Czechoslovak diplomats of the interwar period. His father, Antonín, meanwhile, worked as a high-ranking official for the Ministry of Trade, while his mother, Jindřiška stayed at home raising Vojtech, who was an only child. Vojtech attended elementary school and the first years of secondary school in the Prague district of Letná, where the family lived, but was unable to pursue his education further the way that he had hoped because of his class background and school reforms in the early 1950s. Instead of being sent to <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague’s Malá Strana, Vojtech was sent for reeducation to work as a mechanic at the Elektrosignal factory not far from his home. On a part-time basis during this period, he attended Střední škola pro pracující [Workers’ Middle School] which, he says, was a good institution. At this time, Vojtech also became interested in learning English, and subsequently German, which he was taught by his great aunt Paula in her flat in Žižkov.</p><p> </p><p>After a time at Elektrosignal and a car parts factory, Vojtech was hired as an assistant archivist at the National Museum, which eventually wrote him a letter of recommendation, paving the way for him to study at Charles University. Despite becoming ever more interested in contemporary history, Vojtech says this was not an appealing field of study at Charles University, which he says was run by apparatchiks in the late 1950s, and so he opted for medieval history and archival studies instead. Vojtech’s graduation was postponed by one year when he was sent for further reeducation to work at a collective farm. He finally obtained his degree in 1962, which was the year that he left Czechoslovakia. He booked himself onto a Soviet cruise and, after some research, decided to split from the group during a stopover in Tunis. He applied for a U.S. visa immediately and received one after a couple of months. Vojtech first settled in New York City, where he worked at the municipal port and studied at Columbia University under the tutelage of Fritz Stern. He wrote his dissertation about Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia.</p><p> </p><p>Vojtech has taught history and international relations at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and the Naval War College, among other institutions. He is a senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Vojtech has written a number of award-winning books on the Cold War and heads the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Rebecca.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609134730/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.profile&person_id=73635" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A short biography of Vojtech Mastny on the Wilson Center’s website</a></p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Education
English language
German language
Letna
Mala Strana
national
Politics
Russians
school
Stredni skola pro pacujici
Teachers
World War II
Zizkov
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Dublin Core
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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>Refusing to Vote</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LfzKdCLHjSI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“There was one moment when there were elections and I refused to vote, which was tantamount to voting no for the Party. She [my mother] was very scared about that and she was trying to convince me to go and vote. But I didn’t.”</p><p><em>What was the voting age?</em></p><p>“Eighteen.”</p><p><em>You didn’t go and vote?</em></p><p>“I didn’t go and vote, I was actually… I was on purpose not at home on the day of the voting, on the election day. Because I knew, somehow I knew that they might come to – the election committee might come and invite me to vote. And they did in my absence.”</p><h4>Acting</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fTtHxCKIHfg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Talking about the politics, it was very tightly controlled by the government, by the Communist Party. You were told what plays you could produce and what you could not stage. You also had to produce a Soviet play, and a play that was so-called ‘progressive’ – that was a political propaganda play. I was fortunate that actually I didn’t have to play, for the year that I was in this theatre, I didn’t have to play in any of those propaganda pieces. I even got to play in an American play. It was controlled, you were only allowed a certain percentage of Western plays, so I was in that ten percent of Western plays we were allowed to play. The theatre had altogether ten plays in a year. We would split the company and stage ten plays, of which I was in five.”</p><h4>Charter 77</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eCML_74gbaw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She once, during Charter 77, she – there was a meeting at her school and the Communist Party chief was talking against Charter 77 and she asked her, my mother asked her, “Well, have you read it?” And the communist said “No,” and my mother pulled out Charter 77, a copy, and handed it to her. That was definitely the wrong thing to do. Fortunately they kind of hush-hushed it, she just had to move, she couldn’t teach in that particular part of Prague anymore and eventually she stopped teaching altogether and became a dorm supervisor for high school kids, which she liked better anyway. I remember that moment when… She actually had a nervous breakdown when this happened to her, and I remember us children telling her “How could you do that? This is just something that’s not done!” And then I realized the absurdity of it, that she was doing something that was right, but of course, under that current regime, it was suicidal to do anything like that.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qNTa0PNIuu0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was scared of the United States before coming here. I knew… I guess there were still some remnants of the communist propaganda in me about America. There was what I knew from novels about crime in the United States and I was expecting that I would immediately be meetings gangsters at the airport. But that did not happen. I was met by a friend, because already in Prague we – there were three of us at [Charles University’s] Department of Philosophy that decided we would leave, and we planned together and all managed to leave at around the same time, and they already were in the United States, so I stayed with them in Queens for a little while. But my first impression: I didn’t quite meet the gangsters, but my first impression was that New York was tremendously dirty.”</p><h4>Marionette Theatre</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xiq6y2RuN8I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1984, while I was with the black light theatre [<em>Ta Fantastika</em>], I did a storytelling performance at Jan Hus Church with my three marionettes. And they told me, “We used to have a puppet theatre here.” So I kept asking what happened to the puppets until they let me go to the attic and there, in an old chest, were 24 marionettes – 24 large marionettes – between 18 and 26 inches.”</p><p><em>… The dimensions of the ones…</em></p><p>“No, these are 48 inches. These are much bigger. Maybe we can pan later on across some of those puppets here. So, I did two shows at Jan Hus Church and the second one, the next week after the discovery, I brought out a king and a <em>vodník</em> (a water spirit) and did a story with <em>vodník </em>and a story with the king. And then kind of kept thinking about them. And when I quit the black light theatre I put together with another friend, Jan Unger, who studied puppetry at the puppetry school in Prague – the Academy of Musical Arts [DAMU] had a puppetry department – so with him I put together a puppet company.</p><p>“My own training in puppetry really goes to childhood when I played with my mother’s toy puppet theatre from the 1920s and, together with my brother and sister, we put on shows. Fairy tales, mostly.”</p><h4>New York</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DZhSVrgwvvw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was really determined not to be closed in a Czech community. So I met some Czechs, but I was trying to totally live in an American circle, in American circles, and I purposely avoided Czechs. And despite that I met some Czechs who are good friends, but it took quite a while before I joined some Czech organizations, and that was after I started our theatre company. And surprisingly enough – that is contradicting everything I was saying, but I was trying not to meet Czechs, but I was telling Czech stories and started a Czech puppet theatre company.”</p><h4>Daughter</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Qk_IG_S6L0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At one point I tried, I was reading to my daughter in Czech when she was really small, and at some point she started refusing it, at a point where she recognized that she didn’t understand, she suddenly started refusing reading in Czech. And I gave up too easily, I guess, because years later she complained that I never taught her Czech.”</p>
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Title
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Vit Horejs
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vit Horejs was born in Prague in 1950. His father, Jaromír, was a teacher and author (who published over 50 books), while his mother, Věra, taught gym and Czech. Vit was the youngest of three siblings. Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, he says he ‘believed in the system’ and even became Young Pioneer of the Year when he was around ten years old. Vit says he became disillusioned following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That same year, he made his first trip to France. It was at this time that Vit began studying French, philosophy and theatre at Charles University in Prague. He returned to France in 1969, having faked an invitation to secure himself an exit permit. Also during his studies, Vit visited England which, he says, made him ‘fall in love with English’ and consider a life abroad. He stayed in the United Kingdom for longer than his exit permit allowed and so had his passport confiscated upon his return to Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p>Vit graduated from university in 1975 and went to the Moravian town of Šumperk to take an acting job in the municipal theatre. He left the theatre after one year so as to move back to Prague, where he worked as a freelance actor and developed plans to leave the country. The chance came in 1978 when Vit was translating Primo Levy’s <em>Il Sistema Periodico</em>; he says he managed to procure an invitation from the author to consult with him on the translation in Italy. Vit left Czechoslovakia in March 1978. He did travel to Italy, but continued on to France, where he spent one year in Paris, studying mime and waiting for either the United Kingdom or the United States to process his visa request. He arrived in New York City in February 1979, sponsored by the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees. Vit settled briefly in Queens, working first as a bike messenger and then a cab driver. He subsequently moved to Manhattan and became involved in the Czech-American black light theatre company <em>Divadlo Ta Fantastika</em>. He stayed with <em>Ta Fantastika</em> for a number of years, moving to Florida in the mid-1980s with the company. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, Vit embarked upon his own venture, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre – using (among other props) puppets unearthed in the attic of New York City’s Jan Hus Presbyterian Church.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vit has toured the United States with the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre on several occasions, often performing his adaptations of traditional Czech fairytales (such as Rusalka and Jenůfa) in American schools. He serves on the board of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie. The couple have one daughter, Sarazina, who is currently in the Czech Republic on a scholarship learning Czech.</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
Alternative culture
Americanization
Arts
Charter 77
Czech language
English language
school
Sumperk
Teachers
Vodnik
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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>Vancouver</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q0lnYDiITPc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I loved it. I mean, I loved it. That was the first time that I opened my eyes – I was 16 and 17, that was the time – and I was like a sponge. I absorbed everything. Everything, good and bad, but I lived only a good life because I could not afford to be some silly person. They put us in school where we learned English, and in the evening I would be at home. Actually, I was able to get a part-time job with a Jewish Czechoslovakian person who emigrated before 1938 and he was so kind. He had plenty of servants; he didn’t need me really, but he was kind enough that he paid me and all my job was to serve him lunch, really on a silver platter, because he wanted me to have something to do. He wanted to have a reason to pay me for some work so I could earn the money. I mean, let me tell you, it was a totally unnecessary job, but he was kind enough that he gave it to me so I could make money, I could go to school and enjoy my life while I was in Vancouver.”</p><h4>University</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IlLbX72p5bA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Not quite. I did not have extreme difficulties for one reason. Because I’m the black sheep of a family. What that means is, my parents were both in finances, and lots of people wanted to get into college of economy but me, because that’s what my parents were. I went to an engineering school. I’m a mechanical engineer. The system at the time – what we were told at the time – you imperialists were going to attack us and you were going to destroy us. So therefore, we needed our men who would be working in military factories, making tanks and everything, and we women needed to run the show. So they welcomed us with open arms. If I had wanted to go maybe into a different field, maybe if I wanted to be a doctor or a dentist, maybe that would have been a problem with my father’s situation, but it wasn’t because I applied for mechanical engineering.</p><p>“We were taught quite well. What it was is – I understand it now, I didn’t understand it then – the communist system said basically this: ‘We are paying for it; therefore, you will take the classes we tell you to take. You are not going to take any Mickey Mouse classes. There will be no Mickey Mouse classes. We are paying for it; therefore, you take Math I in the first semester, Physics I first semester, Statics, and there were five courses in every single semester. By the end of the fifth year, we will turn you into a mechanical engineer.’ And indeed they did.”</p><h4>Habits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d1NG3Z5tYQY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I finished college and I became a university professor, I didn’t go to church in Bratislava. I would not dare. I didn’t want some students to see me. They could go because they were students. If you are a student, you can go to church. What is going to hurt you? Nothing. But if you have this job and somebody sees you and somebody reports you, you will get into trouble, and I couldn’t get into trouble. It’s not like here, you quit and you go somewhere else, no. It stays in your record forever, and so I wouldn’t go to church. But when I back to my little village, behind everybody’s back, that’s when I went to church. I carried on my ordinary life. That’s where you could be the person that you were.”</p><h4>Escape</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/adeKD4BWQNI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I quit [my job at the] university because I knew that I would not be able to get the permission to travel, so I quit the job and I went to work for an aviation company, and I worked there for only half a year. I have thought that was bad behavior on my part. I did purposely quit my job and went there to deceive them because I wanted a fresh start and I wanted the permit. I needed permission from the president of the company and I needed permission from the Communist Party member, and I needed also from the police department in my region. I needed so many permissions that yes, well, I deceived them. I admit that. I had done this, and so I went and worked there, only for one reason. Really I changed my job to be able to do this because otherwise I would have never been able to get out.”</p><h4>United States</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BcwgGmr00nc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“What I do remember is that when I got off the plane and when my foot touched the ground of the connecting bridge, I had this feeling that I never had before and I don’t think I will ever have again. It felt like I was back at home again. It wasn’t Canada, but it was this Western society, Western, American society that I felt that I was finally back at home. I didn’t have to pretend anymore, I didn’t have to try to be married, I didn’t have to do this, I didn’t have to do anything that I had tried to do in that system. It was what I realized, everything I had been doing was nothing else but hard work. It was work on my part because I tried to fit. I didn’t fit. Once I came back from Vancouver I didn’t fit ever again, but I tried. I knew who I was, I was a 20 year old young person, so I tried. Nobody told me, it wasn’t my mother or my father who told me ‘You have to do this and that.’ I tried on my own, but I never fit. And when I came here after so many years, that foot touched that ground, that’s what I remember how I felt, ‘I’m finally back at home.’ I don’t have to pretend anymore, anything. And I was 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
Viera Jamrich
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Viera Jamrich was born in Nitra, western Slovakia, in 1952. Her father Ludovit was an accountant and her mother Antónia was a clerk at a canning factory. When her father was promoted at his work, the family moved to Prievidza. Growing up, Viera also spent time in Kamanová, where her mother’s family lived, and Topol’čany, where her father inherited land and built a house. Viera was attending a technical high school when, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, her mother decided to emigrate. Viera accompanied her mother to Vancouver where she took English classes and found a part-time job. Viera’s mother was unhappy abroad and, although Viera did not want to leave, the two returned to Czechoslovakia in August 1969. After graduating from high school, Viera studied mechanical engineering at Slovak Technical University (STU) in Bratislava. Her first job after graduation was working for the engineering company Montostroj. Later, she joined the faculty at STU and taught engineering classes. At this time, Viera married and had a son named Marek.</p><p> </p><p>In early 1982, Viera began making plans to leave the country for a second time. Because she felt it would be difficult to travel while working at the university, she quit her job there and found employment with an aviation company. After receiving the necessary permissions and visas, Viera went on a two week trip to Turkey in June 1982. She claimed political asylum while there and lived in a refugee camp in Istanbul for five months. She subsequently traveled to Italy where she stayed in a refugee camp in Rome for several months before flying to the United States. In March 1983, Viera arrived in New York City and says that, when she got off the plane, she felt like she was ‘back at home.’ An acquaintance of Viera’s helped her find a job as a draftsman in Bethesda, Maryland. She says that as her English improved, she was able to work her way up to an engineering position in the same company. In 1989, Viera received American citizenship and was granted permission to travel to Czechoslovakia. She visited very soon after the Velvet Revolution and brought her son back with her to the United States. Viera is an active member of the Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C. and has hosted the society’s picnic, helped organize the Svätý Mikuláš [St. Nicholas] party, and served on the board of directors. Today, she is an engineer for the U.S. Postal Service and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.</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
Americanization
Community Life
Education
Engineers
Kamanova
Religion
Svaty Mikulas
Teachers
Topolcany
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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>Olympics</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fe7eOfAqydk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“He participated in cycling. He represented Czechoslovakia. He was a seven-time champion of Czechoslovakia; that’s why he got his spot on the Olympic team, and he had wonderful memories of it. First of all, he made his own bicycle when he went to the Olympic Games. He said that when the group arrived in Paris, nobody waited for them with fanfares, so they had to do things on their own. It was just absolutely wonderful when he started to talk about it, when his friends came by to talk about the Olympic Games. And I think that’s where my interest in sports started. He planted it for me. So when I was two years old, he made me a bicycle. Then I grew out of it and he made me another bicycle when I was four years old, six years old. So I grew up and he always made me a bicycle, because he had the machine shop and he was extremely talented. He was kind of an artist with this thing. He was a super, super influence, and I think deep inside he planted the seed for my future.”</p><h4>Church</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0LgXlSARj_w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was a teacher I could not go to church in my town. So if I wanted to go to church I went to Prague because nobody knew me. If I would go into my town church, I would not be able to be a teacher because religion was something which was not favorable to the communists.”</p><h4>Travel Plan</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8CRw_OsJ4ss?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I presented my mother with the idea of me going to America, she said to me ‘Go.’ Just like that. I started crying and I thought that she didn’t like me, that she wants to get me out of the house – because I was still living in the house. But my mother saw ahead. She saw that I will have a better life in America than I had when I was back in Czech[oslovakia]. As I mentioned before, when I was a teacher I had my love for my students, I had my love which my students gave back to me, but if I make a comparison with the American way of being in school, it’s just no comparison. The opportunity which America gave me is incredible, and that’s what my mother saw. My mother saw that my life will be better in America. We did not plan that I would stay here, but she thought it would be a wonderful experience and she said to me ‘Go.’ So, it was kind of brave on her part, but it worked out just fine.”</p><h4>1st Day</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zvCFgooZG2o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I felt like I am such a small person compared to these huge big skyscrapers. And then my goal was to come to see the Statue of Liberty, and that was moving. To see the Statue of Liberty from a distance and then to be nearby and then to climb up to the hat to see the freedom… When I left, and I remember the National Museum [in Prague] being full of bullet marks from the Russians, and now I am coming [to the United States], I said ‘Wow. This is something like a dream come true to see the Statue of Liberty.’ And, interesting story, when my mother came to visit us in 1975, she wanted to go see the Statue of Liberty, so the two of us went. She climbed all the steps. I explained to her about Eiffel, who did the Statue of Liberty, and we came all the way to the head and I said to her ‘Wouldn’t that be nice if somebody could take a picture of us right here in the head?’ And there was a person who spoke Czech and they heard us and they took a picture of us. And my mother said ‘Well, that’s how the story goes. That before Columbus came to America, there was a Czech playing the violin.’ So that was my happy story with my mother.”</p><h4>Bohemia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A5m8dautnNY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I knew that I would get the job, my first place that I went to was the cemetery. I walked in the cemetery and I knew that this is where I want to be. The first name that I saw was Novotny which was my stepfather’s name. Then I saw a statue of Jan Hus. And then I walked around the cemetery and I felt ‘I am home,’ because I saw all these different names – Czech names – and I said to myself ‘This is incredible that the people came here.’ Later on I learned that there were three families – Kolar, Vavra, Kratochvil – who found this village in 1855. When I started teaching, the open school night was absolutely wonderful because some parents, whose grandparents were Czech, knew some Czech language words so we were able to speak some Czech. The grandmas sometimes sent me kolačhe [pastries], some buchty [buns], some tomato omáčka [sauce], all these goodies, and it was like back home. It was just incredible. There was Kruta, there was Emanovsky, there was Stejskal, there was Nadvornik. All these students, I had.”</p><h4>Prague Visits</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3kSn4IxjrLw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Prague has changed very much, and I am very happy for people, that they do have the chance to experience freedom – freedom of traveling, freedom of food. I remember when I came back to America in 1974 and I went shopping and I started crying because when I saw the amount and quality of all kinds of fruit that we have here in the stores – peaches, oranges – to have oranges or tangerines was only for Christmas. Only during Christmastime my mother could afford to have tangerines, and here in America there is everything. So when I go there now, I see that they have everything, especially because of the European Union. So sometimes they even have things that we do not have here in America that they have in stores, because they have things from all over the world. And so things are very, very good in the Czech Republic now – if people have money. If people have to live on Social Security, that’s a different story.”</p><h4>Czech Involvement</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3M-gc7dnjTc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Here in the museum we always have the Czech Christmas, so my specialty is that I bake vanočka [Christmas cake] and everybody loves it. Another dish which everybody loves is my dumplings, my knedlíky, with all kinds of gravy and all that stuff. But it’s not just the food. I think what I am trying to do is help this organization to bring the Czech spirit here. So when we had here the 150th anniversary of this village’s establishment, I invited our ambassador, Aleš Pospíšil, and his wife to come and celebrate with us. I had our gymnasts performing and he loved it. So I like to have the connection, and I think it’s important. Even when I gave my presentation in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Gandalovič, who is now the ambassador, he said this is what he would like, that the Czech organizations and the societies would be in touch with the museum, would become part of the museum. So he kind of thought that was nice that I was able to bring the proclamation from Bohemka [Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria] and the greetings from the Bohemian Historical Society. Let the world know that there is Bohemia, Long Island. That the people came here and worked very hard to establish this village.”</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
Vera Truhlar
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vera Truhlar was born in Říčany in central Bohemia in 1940. Her father, Jaroslav, a cyclist who competed in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, owned a machine and repair shop. Vera’s mother, Marie, in addition to raising Vera and her younger brother, helped with the business. At the insistence of her mother, Vera began private English lessons when she was in fourth grade; she continued learning the English language through high school. Vera played on her school volleyball and basketball teams and was also an avid skier. She attributes her lifelong interest in sports to the influence of her father. After graduating from high school, Vera attended Charles University in Prague where she studied physical education and Czech language. She then began teaching at a school in Mukařov, a town a short distance from Říčany.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3871" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609033249im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler71.jpg" alt="Handler" width="350" height="496" />In 1969, Vera made plans to travel to the United States for two years to improve her English. A friend’s brother who lived on Long Island offered to sponsor her. He paid for her plane ticket and gave her a job as a receptionist at the nursing home he owned. Vera was able to secure a visa and, on July 18, 1969, flew to New York City. She first lived in Patchogue on Long Island while working at the nursing home. Shortly after arriving, Vera met her future husband, Joe Truhlar, a third-generation Czech who spoke Czech. When the couple married in 1970, Vera knew that she would not be returning to Czechoslovakia. She says that because of her failure to return, her mother was repeatedly questioned by authorities and only stopped being bothered when Vera asked the government for an official pardon. Vera and Joe settled in East Islip and Vera was hired as a physical education teacher by the Connetquot School District. She taught at Oakdale Bohemia Junior High for 33 years and coached the school gymnastics team. She keeps in touch with many of her former students.</p><p> </p><p>Vera lives a short distance from the town of Bohemia, New York, and says that she has felt at home there since her arrival because of its Czech history. As a member of the Bohemia Historical Society, the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, the American Friends of the Czech Republic and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Vera believes it is important to keep the ‘Czech spirit’ alive in herself and her surroundings. She has kept up her love for sports and participates in cycling and track and field in local and national senior competitions. Vera travels to the Czech Republic once a year to visit her family. Today, she lives in East Islip, New York, with her husband, Joe.</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
Brozova
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
marriage
Mukarov
Ricany
Sports
Teachers
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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>Elementary </h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6JC_kreNgis?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was two years in the elementary school and my recollections of that time are not happy ones. I was being punished by my teacher constantly for being able to read when I came to first grade.”</p><p>So that was out of line for the times?</p><p>“Today that would be something a teacher would welcome probably. I was reading already Greek mythology and all sorts of things and I was bored with the primitive things that you learn if you are learning to read. I already was reading quite well.”</p><p>And how had you learned to read? Did anyone teach you, or did you just pick it up yourself?</p><p>“Well, I had an uncle who was a teacher – a first grade teacher – and he said, ‘Don’t let her learn to read because she will have problems.’ So I asked the maid to teach me. And I learned to read from tabloids.”</p><h4>American School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9nSsuNTQwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This school was just really outstanding. It was a Presbyterian missionary school, and it was such an outstanding [school]. We learned things that, well, we learned about democracy. We learned about getting together and having relationships – good relationships – with people of other nationalities or religions. In that school, when I was graduating, we had 200 students, 20 different nationalities, and eight different religions. Tolerance was one of the things we learned, above all. And the principal [Commodore Fisher] was the best man I ever knew.”</p><h4>Vet Dreams</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iyC0DKFrgKc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My favorite uncle was a veterinarian. Since I was a little kid, he would take me around when he was making his rounds all over the country, and I wanted so badly to be a veterinarian like him. There weren’t many veterinary school and they really didn’t want women either, and I said ‘I want to go to that university in Brno that you went to.’ And he said ‘What do you think you are? Look at yourself, you’re too [small].’ I was littler then. And he said, ‘You don’t have the strength to be a veterinarian. Come with me.’ And he took me out and he showed me how he was pulling out a calf, how he was pulling out a colt. And he said ‘Can you do that? That’s what a veterinarian has to do. No, you go to the philosophical school in Prague and do something else.’ So I went and I did English studies and then later I was lured into Oriental studies because of my living in Iran and knowing something about Persian literature.”</p><h4>How We Met</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7IZyJIjUJpA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Then one day he [my boss, František Slabý] said, ‘Věruška, I have to find you a nice husband. I have just the man in mind. He’s in Ludwigsburg [refugee camp], and I will call him and he can be our accountant here.’ And guess who arrived? Sasha Borkovec. When he arrived I thought ‘Good looking enough, but he seems so aloof and so stand-offish.’ I wasn’t particularly interested. But then, František, my boss, invited us to a party and I went there with my sister, and Sasha was playing the guitar and singing beautiful songs. That was it. And then at that party, I think that’s what sort of started things going, he asked me if I would teach him English. And I said yes, and we would take walks and I would teach him English, spoken English, and I guess that brought us together.”</p><h4>Immigrating</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nB7bbzruyuw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We thought we would stay in Bolivia. It was a beautiful country. I was working for Braniff Airways and Sasha was working for a pharmaceutical company; we were quite comfortable and everything. But then they had another revolution. We lived through three different revolutions during the year and a half that we lived in Bolivia, but the last one was socialist. They were going to nationalize everything, and so again we said, ‘This is not for us.’ Because I was working for Braniff Airways, I could get Sasha a ticket for five dollars to go to Brazil to find out what Brazil looked like, and to Uruguay. And he went on this expedition to find out where we could move to. And then he came back very happy from Brazil. He had been to Uruguay as well and to Paraguay. But he came back from Brazil and said, in front of a gathering of Czechs, ‘So we are moving to Brazil. Brazil is a fine place and we can find work.’ And I said ‘No we’re not. We’re not going to Brazil, we’re going to the United States because we received immigration visas to the USA.’”</p><h4>PhD</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/66bT-_lNEgg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In 1968 when we were in Prague, my relatives and friends would say ‘You poor thing, how can you teach that awful language, that awful Russian literature?’ And I would say ‘The Russian language is a beautiful language and Russian literature is really world-class literature. I don’t teach socialist realism. I teach the classics, which have nothing to do with communism.’”</p><h4>Czech Playwright</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BZUGIuSLZdg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Recently, two or three years ago, I published a book on Josef Topol and his various plays. But I wanted to meet the man, and I knew people here at the embassy who knew him and they said ‘Oh, you will not have a chance to meet him because he’s very shy and he doesn’t want to meet other people.’ So I asked people in Prague and everybody said the same thing, that you just can’t get close to this guy, that he doesn’t want to meet anybody. And then finally, the former cultural counselor came very happy to me and he said ‘I have found a way and Mr. Topol is willing to accept you. He’s inviting you to his home.’</p><p>“And he took me inside, brought the dog inside, he put me on the sofa and asked if I wanted coffee. I said ‘Yes, please, thank you.’ And so he went to the kitchen to make some coffee and the dog and I were sitting there together. And you know I told you that I wanted to be a veterinarian and how much I love animals and dogs especially. I called Zorinka – her name was Zorinka – I called her over and she came, sniffed me, and then she sat in my lap. And the playwright comes out of the kitchen with the coffee, he nearly dropped it and he said ‘My god! She’s sitting in your lap. Zorinka sat in your lap!’ And I said ‘Well she knows, she knows I like dogs.’ Well that did it. He started talking, he was telling me his whole life story, his love stories, whom he was going to marry, whom he married, how he worked with [Václav] Havel. He didn’t want to let me go home. And we have seen each other ever since. Every year when I go to Prague we see each other, in Café Slavia usually.”</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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Vera Borkovec
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vera Borkovec was born in Brno in 1926. She grew up in Prague with her parents and younger sister until 1934, when her father became the director of Škoda Works in Tehran, Iran. Vera remembers Tehran as a progressive city, and the schooling she received there was an important influence on her. After graduating from the American Community School, she began teaching sixth and seventh grades there, and the principal encouraged her to continue with her education. Vera moved to Beirut where she attended a French school for one year. After WWII, Vera and her family returned to Czechoslovakia; she says they were very happy to be back. Vera majored in English and Oriental studies at Charles University and received her degree in 1949. That same year, she left the country with her family. Through an uncle (who had been involved in the resistance during WWII) Vera’s family was introduced to a guide who helped them across the border into West Germany on July 4, 1949.</p><p> </p><p>Vera stayed in refugee camps in Germany for one year and a half. She and her sister were able to get secretarial jobs at the International Refugee Organization in Munich, where she met her husband, Alexej (Sasha) Bořkovec. Through an acquaintance of her father’s, Vera’s family received permission to immigrate to Bolivia in the spring of 1951. While there, Vera and Sasha married, and Vera worked for Braniff Airlines. Vera and Sasha obtained U.S. visas in the spring of 1952 and they moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, where Sasha was able to accept a fellowship at Virginia Tech that he had been offered five years earlier. Vera worked as secretary for the head of the university’s Department of Dairy Science and also became involved in the theater on campus. She says they became good friends with the faculty and even the president of the university. After short stays in Texas (where they became U.S. citizens) and Roanoke, Virginia (where Vera obtained an M.A. in French at Hollins College), the couple moved to the Washington, D.C. area when Sasha got a job at the Department of Agriculture. In D.C., Vera gained a second masters degree, in Russian, from American University and received her doctorate in Russian literature from Georgetown University. She became a professor at American University, and taught in the Language and Foreign Studies Department for more than 30 years.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Vera and Sasha were instrumental in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU) at both a local and international level. Vera became a member in 1965 and sat on several committees before being elected Secretary General of the organization in 1977. She was Chairman of the Washington, D.C. chapter, and also started a student essay contest to promote interest in SVU and Czech and Slovak culture among younger generations. In her retirement, Vera has worked as a translator and published several books. In 2003, she received the Artis Bohemiae Amicis award from the Czech Ministry of Culture for her translations. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.</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
1948
Community leader
Community Life
Education
emigrant
Ethnic diversity
interpreter
marriage
refugee
Refugee camp
Russian studies
school
Skoda
speaker
Teachers
Translator
Vera Zandova
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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>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKda885FPwo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father was a journalist, but he had to be very careful about what he said. He worked at the Ministry of Information, and of course everything was very strictly audited and basically controlled by the Germans. He got into some trouble with the Gestapo one time by using a sort of pun. He was forced, because he had a good speaking voice, he was compelled to read the news once a week and, on this one particular occasion, they were talking about the collision of the German troops and the allied troops. And the term used in Czech is <em>srazka</em>, which means collision, and there is also a vulgar word very similar to that which means diarrhea. And, of course, his colleagues – when he was rehearsing – his colleagues were teasing him and said ‘What if you said this?’ When my dad sat before the microphone, he blurted that out, and of course, before he was finished, a couple of Gestapo officers were waiting for him and took him into this infamous Petschkuv Palac. My father wasn’t tortured, but he was interrogated for 24 hours. And then, oddly enough, a high ranking official intervened on his behalf and he was released.”</p><h4>Cleared</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HFlNKVM3Dm4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p class="wp-caption-text">Tony’s father Antonin in 1946</p><p>“It was a difficult job for him, you know. On one to pretend, you know, that he was not against the German occupation and on the other hand still knowing and feeling that the Nazi occupation will not last very long. And during those days of the uprising in Prague, he was also actively involved in broadcasting and running messages from various centers of resistance in Prague.”</p><h4>The War</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Gw6EEIWZBU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a sort of a black market, whereby city dwellers would trade various items. Like my dad traded books and, I think, a bicycle for a goose or a turkey with a farmer that he knew. And of course, you had to be very careful bringing it to Prague during the, usually on weekends, because they would have special civilian officials who would control what was being brought to Prague and quite often it would be confiscated. So yes, for us [children] it was sort of funny, but there was an element of danger, certainly, for the adults.”</p><h4>Communist Coup</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTltUpQjLKM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I got a new pair of skis, and this was a two-week stay in the mountains, near where my father was born. And I was very anxious of course to be there, to try my new skis and so forth. My father knew that the crisis was developing in Czechoslovakia so he was very reluctant to let me go, but my mother was on my side. She begged him to allow me to go. And of course, by the time I returned to Prague, a week or so later – two weeks later actually – my father was gone already. He had crossed the border to West Germany successfully. While I was still away from Prague, and my father was gone at this time, the Communist police would come and look for some incriminating documents against my father, trying to punish my mother for the anti-communist work that my dad did. And of course my mother said that she did not share my father’s views and so on and so forth. She said ‘Well, I’m willing to divorce him because he abandoned the family.’ But they didn’t believe her, of course. And we were not directly persecuted, but obviously, there was no pension, there was no money during this time for my mother to have, but we had relatives and friends who supported us financially for a few months until our escape from Czechoslovakia in September 1948.”</p><h4>Escape into Germany</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHWxyBuqBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They registered everything. My mother had some valuables, some dollars and some gold rings, I think, that she had sewn into her bra of all places. But they threatened to punish us if we did not turn everything over to them. But be it to the credit of German precision, they recorded everything and it traveled with us from one refugee camp to another and, 27 months later, when we were leaving Germany, all this stuff was returned to my mother!”</p><h4>Refugee Camps</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_s8N3S9mQ8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For children, it was not the worst of times. I think a lot of adults suffered from various forms of depression, when it seemed almost hopeless, that they would never get out of these refugee camps. We had to go before an American consul in the occupied zone of Germany – the American zone – and he told us, and various other immigration authorities told us ‘Well, why don’t you go to Australia? You can meet your father there, and, after all, this is not going to last forever! The Iron Curtain is not going to last forever! In a few weeks you will be able to go back to Czechoslovakia.’ Everybody was ignorant of how long the Cold War would last, you know, in those days. Fortunately, we did not give in to that suggestion, but, we had to stay for 27 months, or two years and a quarter, in those refugee camps.</p><p>“Children, I think, adjust far better than adults, you know. Even though I had thoughts of perhaps never leaving Germany, I didn’t take it as hard as my mother. But we sort of leaned on one another and, you know, became very close.”</p><h4>American Citizen</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1BbEXNzJ24?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’m happy to be an American citizen, but my heart is still in the old country, in many, many ways. You know, I just cannot forget – I have very vivid memories, as you’ll notice, of my childhood and my recent visits to the Czech Republic have always been very pleasant. So, I like to go back, but I wouldn’t want to go there and live permanently. I just became too much of an American over the years.”</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
Tony Jandacek
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Tony Jandacek was born in Prague in 1934 and grew up in the city’s Smíchov district. His father, Antonín Jandáček, was a journalist who worked for the Ministry of Information during WWII, while his mother, Marie, worked as a secretary at a glass cutting company during the War. In 1945, Tony’s father was found not guilty on charges of Nazi collaboration and continued to work for the government until the Communist coup. When the Communists took over in February 1948, Tony was away on a ski trip in northeastern Bohemia. By the time he returned from the mountains one week later, his father had fled the country; Tony did not see his father for another three years. The family received no news of Antonín Jandáček until May 1948, when they received a postcard sent from Chicago, bearing no name but clearly in his handwriting. In September 1948, the remaining Jandáčeks crossed the border illegally at Železná Ruda into Germany. They pretended they were hunting for mushrooms, says Tony, who led the expedition.</p><p> </p><p>Tony spent 27 months with his mother, sister and brother in various refugee camps in Germany (including Regensburg, Ludwigsburg and Pforzheim), before the family was allowed to travel to the United States and reunite with Tony’s father. Tony became an American citizen in 1954. He served in the United States Air Force between 1953 and 1957 and later became a Czech teacher at Morton High School, where he was formerly a student. Tony lives in La Grange Park with his Czech-American wife, Carmella, and works as a court interpreter with Czechs in Chicago.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Child emigre
Communist coup
Czech language
Education
German
Journalism
Mushrooms
Nazis
Occupation
Prison
Refugee camp
school
Smichov
Teachers
Translator/interpreter
World War II
Zelezna Ruda
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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>Life Quality</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n4WjXKJa9os?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”</p><h4>Nazis</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ROiTP1qRmGw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”<br /></p><h4>Barely Jewish</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L2ImxFTI9Oc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”</p><h4>Friendship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvVpDPRgPPw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.</p><p>“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”</p><h4>Leaving Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4OPVbqdCs0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.</p><p>“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.</p><p>“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”</p><h4>Radio Free Europe</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7y8uO8PD9NE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”</p><p>How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?</p><p>“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”</p><h4>Prolific Writer</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PqfDxVVVNMU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about 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
Peter Demetz
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948
Arts
Brezina
Communist coup
Concentration camp
Czech-German relations
Divorce
Dobrovsky
Education
emigrant
German language
German occupation
gymnazium
Holocaust
Jews
Journalism
Judaism
Nazis
refugee
Refugee camp
Ruzyne
school
Skutecnost
Teachers
Terezin
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>Anti-Communist</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cJL7jr6ksHA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“After ’48, he joined the underground and worked through a front firm – it was a French firm, but it was a front for the underground – and he was like a courier. In ’49, October ’49, he received information from a friend of his who was in the local police department that they would be arresting this group of spies in the underground. He left Prague in October after he got word that they were going to arrest him and he spent a month in hiding. Part of that was in Jevany in a mortuary in a cemetery for a week, where he hid out in the mortuary where my uncle would bring him food, until he was able to make his way to [České] Budějovice. [He spent] a total of a month hiding out and then he and a good friend of his made their way into Germany and he was in a camp there, and he tried to get my mother over and the three boys as soon as possible.”</p><h4>Trouble</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zRyjQImt4p8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“In January, my mother was visited by two gentlemen who told her that they had met my father at one of the refugee camps in Germany and that my father had sent word through them for my mother to give them money for my father. My mother said ‘I don’t have that kind of money. My husband wouldn’t ever have asked for that money’ and the guy said ‘Well, we had a letter from him but we lost it crossing the border.’ So my mother, being the charitable person that she was, gave him some money because he said he needed money to go and visit his wife in Bratislava. So she gave him some money for the train and she gave him a change of clothing and fed him, and then later that day he returned with another gentleman and again asked her for more money. She said she didn’t have any more and, with that, he said ‘Well, you will regret this decision,’ and he left.</p><p>“Next thing you know, my mother was arrested, January 25, and was detained in Pankrác in solitary confinement for two months. At that time, we didn’t know this story – when we were here in the States. My family didn’t really talk about what they went through in Czechoslovakia. My mother never spoke about it and my father very rarely spoke about it. But later, through my brother’s investigations in the archives, he found this story about the two guys who visited my mother and tried to shake her down and blackmail her. Well, instead of going to Bratislava, what they did was they went to the local bar, got drunk, and started bragging about how they go back and forth from Czechoslovakia to Germany and, naturally, there were spies there, communist spies, and they were arrested. When they were arrested, they mentioned my mother giving them aid and, as a result of that, my mother was arrested. All along we thought, prior to this story coming out, that my mother was detained there because of my father, but they had come to arrest my father the morning of October 7 in ’49 – they didn’t find him there – and my mother claimed that she had no knowledge of where my father was. That he left for work that morning and never returned. So in a way, they were not looking for her because of my father; they arrested her because she aided these two guides or blackmailers.”</p><h4>Yorkville</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O1C6VPwfopo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“[My father] became a machinist. The first few years were rough before he was able to get a machinist job. He painted; he was a waiter; he did handy-man work; he did whatever he could. My mother was home with us; however, the first apartment that we got in New York City, we were janitors, so my mother had to clean the building while my father was at work. So there were many times when my mother would be washing the hallways on her hands and knees with a bucket and a scrub brush; my brothers relate those stories to me. Later on, when I was older, I would go with her cleaning offices, things like that. Much later, my father got my mother a job at the machine shop where he was working, and she worked in the assembly area, putting together the parts that were being manufactured there.</p><p>“But my mother worked at Sokol Hall in the kitchen, weddings, making dumplings, whatever they needed, and my father was a porter there at times. My father worked at [Bohemian] National Hall, on 73rd Street, as a waiter during affairs. My brothers did [too]. My father always had two jobs when he was working; the machine shop during the day and a waiter at night. He was a waiter at Vašata’s on 75th between First and Second [Avenues]; he was there for many years. We wound up living in that apartment later on before they retired. We bounced around Yorkville as janitorial jobs became available. We were not janitors at Vašata’s but we moved to 71st Street after 76th and we lived across the street from Sokol Hall. I became very involved there starting at the age of six, and we were the janitors there as well, until we had to move because they renovated and then we lived on Second Avenue between 73rd and 74th around the corner from National Hall. By that time, my father had been working strictly as a machinist and still working nights as a waiter. All my brothers, we all worked. I worked at the restaurants in Yorkville – Vašata, Ruc. My brother Charlie went to school. He became a pharmacist; he worked in a Czech pharmacy in Yorkville.</p><p>“Yorkville was a wonderful place to grow up. It was an area where there were ethnic groups. You had your Slovaks, your Czechs, your Hungarians, your Germans. It was like a little Central [Europe sic] there. Czech butchers, Czech bakers, Czech doctors, optometrists. It was like being home away from home for us.”</p><h4>Sokol</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/imM7karwRls?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went to Sokol camp in Connecticut. They had a beautiful camp there, and I spent a few summers there, fortunately, to get out of the heat of the city. I had memorable occasions over there. It was a lot of fun [being] amongst other Czech immigrants, and we even had a few Hungarian boys who were there. It was a wonderful experience. Being part of Sokol, the entire organization, was a great experience.”</p><h4>2005 Return</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-nh-nYc5RsQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My youngest daughter, the schoolteacher, when she was going to school at New Paltz, she decided to study a semester in Prague, at Charles University. So, actually, she’s the first one from my family to go back, because I didn’t go back until she was studying there. That was my first trip there. It was 2005, so that’s going to be seven years ago, and so we went to visit her. Her sister went to visit her before we did, and she came and said ‘I can’t believe you were born there and you didn’t go back yet.’ So I said to my wife ‘Ok, we’re going to go there while Jill’s studying’ and we spent two weeks there, and then I returned there again two years ago. It was an emotional trip for me, naturally.</p><p>“I got to visit Strašnice, and I got to go to Kostelec nad Černými Lesy where my cousins live. My father came from a family of butchers, so they’re all butchers. His father was a butcher, his brother was a butcher, my first cousin’s a butcher, his son’s a butcher. Naturally, during the communist years, my uncle was arrested as well. After my father left, my uncle Joe was in the uranium mines for awhile. He suffered a stroke and thank god that they released him early. But being that they were not of the Communist Party, they weren’t allowed to do certain things. [If] you were a butcher, you’re going to be a butcher. You can’t be anything other than that. Educations were stifled; they started school at a later age. So it wasn’t easy for them having stayed back. So I visited them. I went to Tehov where my mother was born. Naturally you visit the cemeteries. I went to Jevany where my father hid out in the mortuary. I saw that little hutch there that’s run down. I couldn’t imagine him spending a week there in the middle of a cemetery waiting to get out of the country.”</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
Pavel Paces
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Pavel Paces was born in the Strašnice district of Prague in 1949. His father, Karel, owned a liquor distillery and his mother, Marie, was the office manager for the business. After the distillery was nationalized following the Communist coup, Pavel’s father became a courier for the anti-communist resistance. In October 1949, (shortly after Pavel’s birth) he was warned by a friend on the local police force of his imminent arrest and left Prague. He spent one month in hiding and then crossed the border into Germany where he stayed in a refugee camp. Pavel’s mother, meanwhile, aided two men who claimed to have met her husband in Germany and said they were traveling to Bratislava. The men were arrested by communist authorities for their illegal cross-border trips, and named Pavel’s mother as an ‘accomplice.’ She was subsequently arrested and held in Pankrác prison for two months. She was released in March 1950 and, one month later, had a guide assist her and her three sons (Pavel and his older brothers Karel and Miloslav) across the border near Cheb. They were reunited with Pavel’s father and lived in Germany for 18 months, first in refugee camps and later in Munich. The family sailed to New York City in November 1951 and settled in the Yorkville neighborhood.</p><p> </p><p>Pavel says that the area where they lived was home to many Central and Eastern European immigrants, including other Czechs. Pavel’s father found work as a machinist and his mother held cleaning and janitorial jobs. His whole family was active within the local Sokol chapter – Pavel and his brothers attended gymnastics and language classes, and his parents worked as a cook and a waiter during events. The family spoke Czech at home and Pavel enjoyed attending Sokol summer camps. Today, Pavel is still active in the Czech community in New York; he is on the building committee for Sokol Hall and attends events at the Bohemian National Hall.</p><p> </p><p>Pavel majored in education at NYU and became an industrial arts teacher for the Yonkers Public School district, a job which he held for 34 years. He married his wife, Vicky, in 1976 and the couple has two daughters. In 1979, they bought a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they still live today. Pavel first returned to the Czech Republic in 2005 when his younger daughter was studying at Charles University. He says that the trip was ‘emotional’ as he visited his family home and met his cousins for the first time. Now retired, Pavel hopes to travel to Europe more frequently.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1948 emigrant/refugee
Anti-communist
Arrest
Child emigre
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Kostelec nad Cernymi Lesy
Pankrac
Strasnice
Teachers
Vasata