Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
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Joe Gazdik was born in the spa town of Trenčianske Teplice, in western Slovakia, in March 1940. His family had a small farm, which he and his brother helped look after. To make ends meet after WWII, Joe’s father worked on both the family farm and the land belonging to the spa itself. Joe went to school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and, as a keen sportsman, gained a place at Charles University’s Faculty of Physical Education in Prague upon graduation. He studied there for one month until his father died and, Joe says, money ran out. In 1961, Joe entered the Czechoslovak Army and was sent to the officers’ academy in Nitra. He left the army in 1963 and began to study technology and machine maintenance at the Stredná priemyselná škola in Dubnica nad Váhom; during this time he also worked in a local factory. Joe says it was when he was denied promotion at this plant (called Strojárske a metalurgické závody Dubnica) that he decided to leave Czechoslovakia.
He did so with two of his friends in August 1969 in the course of an organized coach tour to East Germany and Denmark. In Copenhagen, the trio went to the Danish police with their passports and said they did not want to return home. Joe subsequently spent 21 months in Denmark, working at the port in Copenhagen, before moving to Munich, Germany, and then the United States. He was sponsored to come to the United States by the International Rescue Committee in 1971. Joe first lived in Annandale, Virginia, before settling in Alexandria and then Arlington, where he lives to this day. He started working in construction in the Washington, D.C. area before securing a job with ABC News, where he worked as a building and maintenance technician for 21 years. He retired at the end of 2001. He is married to Maria Amparo Gazdik and has two daughters, Leyla Margareta and Lucy Ann.
“Everybody was almost poor, because people didn’t have too many things after the War – everything was destroyed. I remember I didn’t have shoes; I couldn’t go out and play because we didn’t have shoes for a few months, because it was not available to buy anything. At the end of 1946, the supplies started to come to the people, because the factory and everything was destroyed, and people didn’t have, you know, too much money to buy things and it was very hard. Just after I started to go to school, I remember, it was much better everything.”
“We were very careful not to say one word to anybody in the group, because we knew that in the group they have some informer. Exactly what happened was, we were in Warnemuende in Germany, which is in the North Sea region, you know, which is like a recreation area, and the German secret police came – the Stasi – and they took one girl away from us. The told her, ‘Take your suitcase and come with us immediately.’ They showed this ID to our leader who was with the group and said ‘We are police from DDR Germany and this girl must go back with us to Czechoslovakia immediately.’ And the girl was crying, unbelievable, you know, she was so sorry. Just two guys come and they say, right away ‘You must go with us.’
“Her idea probably was if she goes to Denmark she will stay over there, that is my thinking, you know. Just they took her away, we didn’t say anything, we always said ‘Oh, we are coming back, I must finish my house’ (because I was remodeling,) ‘We must do this when we come back.’ You know, we had a good time and we were friendly with everybody in the group, just we never ever said something bad about the government or ‘we will not come back’ or something. We always looked to the future back in Czechoslovakia, that ‘we will do this and come back and do that…’”
“You see, you went to the police in Denmark, and we said ‘We don’t want to go back.’ And they said ‘Ok, give us your passport.’ We must give them our passport, a young police officer in civilian clothes said ‘Come with me.’ We went to his car, we went to the hotel where we stayed and he said to the doorman ‘These guys go with me.’ He said ‘Let them go into the room, pick up their things and they go with me.’ And the doorman said ‘Well, it’s a police officer,’ you know, he didn’t say anything. We picked up our things, we went to his car, and he takes us to the penzion. It was not like a camp or something, it was a pension, a nice pension, in Copenhagen, and it was full of refugees – Czechs, Slovaks and Polaks.”
“I sent my mum, I tried to send her some money in the letters, and all the time, I sent the letters registered, you know, [to be picked up] in the post office. And what really bothered me was that the director of the post office told my mother ‘Open the letter here.’ And mother opened the letter, there was money in it, and he said ‘I give you one week to go into the bank and exchange this money the legal way.’ Because at this time there were bony and my mum could sell these dollars to somebody and some people liked to buy bony [with this foreign currency], because they liked to buy cars or go to Tuzex – at this time there was Tuzex [a shop where luxury goods could be bought for foreign currency] and all kinds of things. Just no, they told my mother something that was not right, because you have the law, you have secrecy, no? You’re supposed to have, in your letters, secrecy. And they said ‘Forget it, open it, right now!’”
“I was leaving the shipyard in Copenhagen and they sent me to this superintendent, because he must sign the paper for me to release me, and he asked me, he said ‘I heard that you are going to America.’ I said ‘Well, I would like to go.’ And he said to me ‘I lived in America for 15 years,’ he said, ‘I was working over there.’ He said ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ He said ‘If you don’t make it, come here and see me and I will take you back.’ He told me that. And I always remembered that, him saying ‘America is hard, just if you make it, you will be happy.’ Thanks god, I was working hard, you know, working in construction in this country – it is not easy. I was working, I remember, I was working for this company for six years – it was George Hyman, it is now called something different – they changed it, now it is Clark Company. We were building this new Senate office building, it was like a big hole, three floors down, and the Washington temperature was 102 degrees. Back in the hole it was maybe 120 degrees! It was not easy, it was hard – and thanks god I made it. I was working most of the time inside construction, finishing everything, this kind of thing, you know, not outside. Just that time we were building that Senate office building I was working outside, because I didn’t want to leave the company, I wanted to stay with the company. And, it was not easy.”
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
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Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
“He was an avid mushroom picker. He had an eye that would see every mushroom everywhere in the forest, and while he was walking around picking the mushrooms, he started a new hobby. He started picking up pieces of branches of wood and carved them into shapes of animals, like snakes, birds, etc. And that became his sort of profession in his retirement. Then he built little chalets out of wood and pinecones, and then he progressed into carving different statues from folklife in Slovakia. The biggest was larger than life statues that he not carved, but actually chopped out of the big pieces of wood for the festival in Východná. They had a competition of folk artists, and he actually received the official folk artist title. He did many carvings for the museums, and so he became quite famous later in his life.”
“I remember we had to walk across – it had to be about five miles – through the forest and fields to a different church, not the same place where we lived. That’s the way many people went to church also, to different locations where maybe nobody knew them or something. Especially people like teachers, even some policemen, government employees, because they didn’t want people to know that they actually believe and go to church, so they would go to a different town or a different village to attend services.”
“I think the teachers at my age were still the old class of teachers that became teachers before the communist regime, and they didn’t change their style of teaching, just didn’t teach us everything they would like to. Then more and more new teachers came; they were a different style of teachers. What I remember is that those teachers were sort of not teaching as much, but they were trying to catch you doing something wrong, like why didn’t you do your homework, what is this, like punishing and punishing, where the old teachers, they would try to make you understand why you were supposed to do it.”
“There were sports clubs in the communist system. I think that’s probably the only thing, one of the couple of good things in the communist system was that they were supporting the youth, supporting financially all these clubs that my mother or other parents didn’t have to pay any money for us. So everything was paid for, travel and equipment, by the government. I was competing in cross-country skiing. In 1960, I was the second junior in Czechoslovakia, but I wasn’t allowed to go to any outside country to compete. They were always afraid that I would just try to escape and try to get to England where my father was.”
“In ’65 I came back to civilian life and right away I tried to go for vacation to England to visit with my father. When I went to the passport office, the man told me, he looked at the black book again and said ‘Ah, you’re not going anywhere, just don’t even bother.’ So every time I tried again, he told me ‘Get out of here, I told you, you’re not going anywhere,’ until the spring of 1968, when the same man says ‘Please come in and sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ So I thought, ‘Uh oh, something changed, something is brewing.’ So then I got a visa and I was just married for a few months at that time, but I was so afraid that the system was going to change again, that they were going to take the travel permission away from me, that I didn’t even wait until my wife had papers ready. I just wanted to get out and go to England before somebody said ‘No, no that was wrong, you’re not going anywhere.’”
“We did lots of support for young blood coming from Czechoslovakia willing to learn the western system of life and business and politics. They would come out here and didn’t know much, didn’t know anybody so we would help them to make contacts and open the doors for them, help them to attend some internships or schools. After awhile I thought my phone number was written somewhere in Vienna at the airport on the wall ‘When you come to Washington, call Oliver,’ because all of the sudden I had phone calls from complete strangers without any recommendation, calling, ‘Can you help me? Can you give me advice?’ or whatever. And I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it because I was sorry to miss the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so this was my contribution to finally put the final nail in the coffin of communism.”
Vlado Simko was born in Bratislava in 1931 to a Slovak father and Czech mother. His parents, Miroslav and Mária, were both educators; his mother taught at a high school in Bratislava while his father served in the Ministry of Education. His sister, Olga, was born five years after Vlado. Vlado says the onset of WWII was difficult for his family, as his mother lost her job because of anti-Czech sentiment in the newly-independent First Slovak Republic. Towards the latter half of the War, Vlado and his family were evacuated from Bratislava and sent to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town in northwestern Slovakia. Upon their return to Bratislava, Vlado resumed his schooling. He spent the summer of 1947 in London as part of a student exchange program. After graduating high school in 1950, Vlado enrolled in Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine. While studying, he worked part-time in a physiology research lab. He met his future wife, Mary, who was also a medical student, while attending a concert. After finishing graduate school, Vlado and Mary married, and he found a job in the physiology department of the Research Institute for Human Nutrition where he eventually became director of the laboratory.
Vlado says that he and his wife were given permission to travel outside the Eastern Bloc to attend conferences and present papers; however, they were not allowed to take their son, Daniel (who was born in 1959), with them. In the late 1960s, Vlado joined the Communist Party. He says that faith in the leadership of Alexander Dubček spurred this decision; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 led him to rescind his membership. It was at this time that Vlado began searching for ways to leave the country and sent out letters to his contacts in the West. He was offered a two-year visiting professorship at Cornell University in the School of Nutrition and, on April 1, 1969, left Czechoslovakia with his family. After three years at Cornell, Vlado completed a two-year fellowship at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, and was then offered a job as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Simkos lived in Cincinnati from 1974 until 1982 when they moved to New York City where Vlado became head of the gastroenterology department at the Brooklyn V.A. Medical Center.
Vlado became involved in the Czechoslovak community shortly after arriving in the United States. He served on the board of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and is the current president of its successor, the Czech and Slovak Solidarity Council. Vlado is currently on the board of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Relief and is the executive vice-president of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU). Vlado refers to his immigration as ‘the best decision of [his] life’ and considers himself an international citizen. Today, he lives in Staten Island, New York.
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Vlado Simko was born in Bratislava in 1931 to a Slovak father and Czech mother. His parents, Miroslav and Mária, were both educators; his mother taught at a high school in Bratislava while his father served in the Ministry of Education. His sister, Olga, was born five years after Vlado. Vlado says the onset of WWII was difficult for his family, as his mother lost her job because of anti-Czech sentiment in the newly-independent First Slovak Republic. Towards the latter half of the War, Vlado and his family were evacuated from Bratislava and sent to Trenčianske Teplice, a spa town in northwestern Slovakia. Upon their return to Bratislava, Vlado resumed his schooling. He spent the summer of 1947 in London as part of a student exchange program. After graduating high school in 1950, Vlado enrolled in Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine. While studying, he worked part-time in a physiology research lab. He met his future wife, Mary, who was also a medical student, while attending a concert. After finishing graduate school, Vlado and Mary married, and he found a job in the physiology department of the Research Institute for Human Nutrition where he eventually became director of the laboratory.
Vlado says that he and his wife were given permission to travel outside the Eastern Bloc to attend conferences and present papers; however, they were not allowed to take their son, Daniel (who was born in 1959), with them. In the late 1960s, Vlado joined the Communist Party. He says that faith in the leadership of Alexander Dubček spurred this decision; however, the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 led him to rescind his membership. It was at this time that Vlado began searching for ways to leave the country and sent out letters to his contacts in the West. He was offered a two-year visiting professorship at Cornell University in the School of Nutrition and, on April 1, 1969, left Czechoslovakia with his family. After three years at Cornell, Vlado completed a two-year fellowship at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, and was then offered a job as an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Simkos lived in Cincinnati from 1974 until 1982 when they moved to New York City where Vlado became head of the gastroenterology department at the Brooklyn V.A. Medical Center.
Vlado became involved in the Czechoslovak community shortly after arriving in the United States. He served on the board of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and is the current president of its successor, the Czech and Slovak Solidarity Council. Vlado is currently on the board of the American Fund for Czechoslovak Relief and is the executive vice-president of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU). Vlado refers to his immigration as ‘the best decision of [his] life’ and considers himself an international citizen. Today, he lives in Staten Island, New York.
“It did not start too well because my mother was Czech and the Slovak government made a strong anti-Czech movement and anybody who was a Czech national, and who didn’t have a [Slovak sic.] passport, couldn’t get a job in then-Slovakia. So my mother lost her teaching assignment at the high school in Bratislava and she became a housewife. My father actually was limited because his wife was Czech. That was not a good kind of evidence or proof, at that time, because he worked for the government. He also had a difficult time because he was not Catholic. He was Lutheran; he was Protestant. So our family had a dual label – mother, Czech, and father, Protestant. But somehow we managed. My father, actually, managed to get through this, but it was not very pleasant.”
“Toward the end of the War, we were evacuated because the big cities were prone to bombardment. So we were in a small spa city which is called Trenčianske Teplice – there are mountains around – and one day there was this kind of an air raid situation. All of the sudden, I remember, I heard this wailing sound of an aircraft approaching which was louder and louder, and then all of the sudden I heard a big boom and nothing, and we knew something happened. So the older villagers, including me as a boy, started running in that direction and, true enough, when we came to a hillside we saw smoldering debris of a four-engine Liberator which crashed there. Maybe two or three of those airmen happened to jump out and, I remember now, they wound up with their parachutes hanging from the branches of the trees around that smoldering ruin of the aircraft. Unfortunately, there were also just remnants of a body around the smoldering aircraft, and I’m still deeply moved by what I found there. There was a residue of a New Testament in English which was all burnt around. I took that relic. I cherished it with big respect all my life and when we moved to the United States I lost that piece of a relic and I’m very sorry about it. It was very important to me. This was my, probably, first direct contact with the West and with the United States.”
“While I was at the medical school I never knew when I would be thrown out of the medical school. Somehow I managed to graduate and I was a very good student. I graduated with the best marks and the best index [transcript] – one out of only four people in my class. Despite all this, they considered me to be unreliable, an unreliable element. They didn’t make it impossible for me to finish my medical education, but after I finished the medical school, they assigned me a job in a small village just at the border of Slovakia with the Soviet Union – Ukraine – and this would have been the end for me. I don’t even recall what was the name of the village. I did everything possible not to go there. Because I had good contacts with the Institute of Physiology where I worked as a student volunteer doing a little student research, I managed to get a job in the physiology department at the Research Institute of Nutrition in Bratislava. So that was a big, big deal for me because I could stay in the big city of Bratislava.”
“I did fairly decent research and my papers were published in fairly prestigious journals in Switzerland and in Sweden. I had a paper published in Hungary in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Science. I got permission to attend from time to time an international convention in the West. That was a big deal but, by the time, we already had our first son Daniel, our only son, and when we went for instance to a congress of diabetes in Sweden, where I had a report because I did some research on diabetes in experimental animals. We were permitted to go to Stockholm, but we had to leave our son behind, for obvious reason. They knew that we were good parents; we would never leave our son alone and stay out in the West. The same thing happened when we went to an endocrinology convention in Marseilles, France. Imagine what it meant for me. I always longed for distances and for travel. By the time, we already had our first car, a little Škoda, and that car was loaded with food, with cans. We had a tent and we would camp out all the way to Marseilles and back, eating through our forage of canned food. But we were in the world.”
“About two or three months before the Prague Spring, because at that time everybody was siding with Dubček. Because everybody thought ‘This is something that is going to pull us out of the misery.’ There was this reform movement and people wanted to help the reform movement. With me, I also had several of my colleagues who did the same thing. As soon as the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, in August ’68, I simply cancelled that thing, and that was also a very bad mark on my profile. This was one of the reasons why I started to do everything possible to get out of the country.”
“After I came to the United States, I started to write my diary. By today, I’ve already written about 2,682 pages of my diary which are very carefully indexed so when you mention a name or something, I can immediately find out at what page of my diary I have a note about that entry. People laugh at me and they say ‘Listen guy, you think anyone ever will be interested to read what you write? You think anybody will try to look at those slides, those thousands of slides that you made on your trips around the world?’ And my answer is ‘It’s obvious. If not for good recording, we would know nothing now about human history. Whether anybody’s going to read it or not, it’s part of civilization; it’s part of human culture to keep records.’ And this is also what you are doing with me right now.”