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.”
Peter was separated from his family and transferred to six different camps before ending up in Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945. With the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans liquidated Sachsenhausen and started the prisoners on a forced march. Peter says that he and his compatriots were given food packets by the Red Cross which kept them alive during the 12-day march. On May 2, his group was liberated, and they made their way to Schwerin (in northern Germany) where American troops had taken over the city. With the help of an American soldier, Peter made contact with his father who, in New York City, had not heard from his family for several years.
Although Peter’s grandmother died in Bergen-Belsen, he found his mother on the streets of Prague shortly after liberation. Peter had contracted tuberculosis while in the concentration camps and spent one year in a sanatorium. In November 1946, he and his mother moved to New York City and were reunited with his father. Peter studied European history at Queens College and attended graduate school in Lausanne. He joined the import/export business that his father had started and, when his father died in 1963, took over the company. Peter and his wife Edith (a Czech émigré who was born in Prague) have two daughters and three grandchildren. After retiring in 2001, Peter became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012, he published his memoirs, titledMemories of Evil: A World War II Childhood. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.
]]>Peter Kubicek was born in Trenčín in northwestern Slovakia in 1930. His father, Andrej, owned a drugstore in town and his mother, Ilka, who was from the Sudeten part of Moravia, often worked there. Peter attended a Jewish school in Trenčín; he says that only a handful of his middle-school classmates survived WWII. In August 1939, Peter’s father traveled to Geneva for the World Zionist Congress. As a result, he was not in Slovakia when WWII officially broke out. He made his way to France and Portugal and, in March 1941, to New York. His attempts to obtain visas for his family were unsuccessful and, by December 1941, travel to the United States was impossible. Peter, his mother and his grandmother were deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in October 1944.
Peter was separated from his family and transferred to six different camps before ending up in Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945. With the Soviet Army approaching, the Germans liquidated Sachsenhausen and started the prisoners on a forced march. Peter says that he and his compatriots were given food packets by the Red Cross which kept them alive during the 12-day march. On May 2, his group was liberated, and they made their way to Schwerin (in northern Germany) where American troops had taken over the city. With the help of an American soldier, Peter made contact with his father who, in New York City, had not heard from his family for several years.
Although Peter’s grandmother died in Bergen-Belsen, he found his mother on the streets of Prague shortly after liberation. Peter had contracted tuberculosis while in the concentration camps and spent one year in a sanatorium. In November 1946, he and his mother moved to New York City and were reunited with his father. Peter studied European history at Queens College and attended graduate school in Lausanne. He joined the import/export business that his father had started and, when his father died in 1963, took over the company. Peter and his wife Edith (a Czech émigré who was born in Prague) have two daughters and three grandchildren. After retiring in 2001, Peter became a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012, he published his memoirs, titledMemories of Evil: A World War II Childhood. Today Peter lives in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens with his wife.
“In 1940, they started to promulgate a series of anti-Semitic laws whereby businesses were expropriated. First they started in a small way; for instance, Jews were not allowed to own luxury goods. My father already had a car, which was unusual in those days, so no car. No furs. My mother had to give up jewelry, and there was no sports equipment. So I, at the age of ten or eleven, had to give up my skis, my ice skates, my sled and my most prized possession of all, which was my red bicycle. I loved the red bicycle and I had to give that up. My mother told the story that I once came home crying because I saw a boy riding my bicycle.”
“My father was a great Zionist and in August 1939 he was a delegate from Slovakia to the World Zionist Congress, which took place in Geneva. He was there when the War started and wanted to rush home, and everybody said ‘Hey, hey, don’t do that. You can help your family better by staying out here and trying to get them out.’ Well, that was easier said than done. He was in Geneva; after his visa expired the Swiss kicked him out and he moved to Paris, and when, in 1940, the German troops overran Paris, he moved down south in France, ultimately to Portugal, and in Portugal he applied for a visa to the United States. It took quite awhile. So he left Trenčín in August 1939 and in March 1941 he arrived in New York. So he immediately applied for visas for myself, my mother and my grandmother – my mother’s mother – who lived with us at the time, but that was a rather complex procedure which took a lot of time. So this was in 1941 and then in December 1941 you had Pearl Harbor, and that was the end of all civilian travel across the Atlantic and we were trapped there.”
“Sachsenhausen was liquidated and we were forced on what was called the Sachsenhausen hunger march, which started – this, of course, I got from my later research – started on April 20. They announced that the camp is going to be blown up and whoever remains will die in the camp. The camp at that time contained I think about [35,000 prisoners], and about [32,000 of us] started on this hunger march and about 3,000 stayed.* In the event, two days later the Soviet troops liberated Sachsenhausen and all these prisoners who were too sick and feeble to walk were actually liberated at that point.
“We marched for what turned out to be 12 days in a northerly direction. The food that we received were packages of the International Red Cross, which kept us alive. That was totally amazing. The International Red Cross, which was run by Count Folke Bernadotte from Sweden, had these Red Cross trucks – they were white with huge red crosses painted on the sides and painted on the top. They approached the German lines and they more or less talked their way across German lines and they said ‘We are here just on a humanitarian mission’ and somehow they got permission to cross, and the second day after we left we were stopped by these Red Cross trucks and given food packages. For the next 12 days this happened several times and we basically survived on the food packages given to us by the International Red Cross.”
Peter adds that “during the march, whoever was unable to walk was directed to sit down in a ditch along the road and shot dead by SS guards. It is estimated that around 6,000 prisoners died in this fashion.
“First we discovered that there was a field of potatoes there, so we dug up some new potatoes in May and we made ourselves a fire and we boiled a milk-can of potatoes. There was a small group of us. There was a profusion of German military equipment lying around, so we got some German helmets and we ripped out the leather that fastened it to their chins and we used that as a bowl and we helped ourselves to the potatoes, and kept eating potatoes and eating potatoes until we couldn’t eat anymore. We just couldn’t believe that here was still some more of this delicious food and we were sated. We couldn’t eat anymore. This stays in my mind; we just sat there grinning at one another sort of sheepishly. I mean, this was such an incredible feeling.”
“I wanted to become American and I had the benefit of education here, which was American, and I feel American. To some extent I’m still a displaced person, but also, due to the fact that I’ve worked in the art museum for the last eight years where I give the lectures in English and I try to enunciate clearly, it’s interesting that most of my audience are tourists from out of town. The tourists come from various parts of the United States mainly, and some from foreign countries. The American tourists who come here think of me as a New Yorker because they are used to all kinds of New York accents here and they don’t realize I have an accent. New Yorkers every once in awhile will stop and say ‘Well, where do you really come from?’”