Pavel Zuštiak
<p>Pavel Zuštiak was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1971. His father, Ján, was a director at a construction company while his mother, Zuzana, was a meteorologist for a TV station who did research and collected data. Pavel is the youngest of three boys and he recalls frequently visiting his grandparents who lived on a farm near the High Tatras. At age nine, Pavel was cast in a musical children’s television show called <em>Zlatá brána</em> [Golden Gate]. He also participated in a modern dance group and played piano. After high school, Pavel applied to JAMU (Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts) in Brno for theatre directing, but was advised to re-apply again since he was only 17 at the time. He instead began studying business at the University of Economics in Košice and, shortly after classes started, the Velvet Revolution occurred. Pavel says that he realized he was ‘witnessing a major moment in history.’ While studying business, Pavel took one year off to study at a performing arts school in Canada. He then returned to Slovakia, graduated university, and did one year of alternative Army service where he translated books from English to Slovak.</p><p> </p><p>Pavel says that after his Army service, he had to make a decision about pursuing the arts professionally or beginning his business career. He says that although the time period was excellent for getting into business, he enrolled at a small school in Canada to pursue a performing arts degree. After one year there, he transferred to the School for New Dance Development and finished his degree in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, Pavel applied for the U.S. green card lottery. Many months later, while he was completing an internship in Louisiana, Pavel was notified that he had been selected for an interview. As he was not able to return to Europe in time for the interview, he rescheduled the interview and finished his internship. In September 1999, Pavel moved to New York City. After unsuccessful pursuit of performing with established companies he started producing his own work instead. In 2004, Pavel formed his own company, Palissimo, and today continues to be the artistic director there. He lives in Manhattan.</p>
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Ondrej Krejci
<p>Ondrej Krejci was born in Prague in 1974 and grew up in the Smíchov district of the city. His father was a scientist while his mother worked in the accounting department of a Prague hospital. Ondrej was the oldest of two boys. While growing up, frequent trips to an airfield with his father (who flew gliders) inspired him to take up flying; he received his pilot’s license when he was 14 years old. He was also interested in science and belonged to a biology club that was part of the Pioneer youth organization. Ondrej says that while growing up he had trouble deciding whether to become a scientist or a pilot and, though he ultimately chose science, flying has remained a passion of his. Ondrej was 15 when the Velvet Revolution took place; he remembers following the events of the Revolution and participating in a student strike at his high school. One year later, he had his first introduction to the United States when his family traveled to DeKalb, Illinois, to visit his father who had found work there.</p><p> </p><p>Ondrej says that a lack of career opportunities for scientists in the Czech Republic led him to study medicine at Charles University. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician at Motol Hospital (FN Motole) for a short time before beginning a doctoral program in biology – also at Charles University. In 2003, Ondrej was offered a cancer research fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and moved to Ohio. After his four-year fellowship, Ondrej accepted the position of research fellow in a joint program with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Although he is happy in the United States, Ondrej says that his plan was never to settle here and, in fact, he had only planned on being in the U.S. for one year. He says that in the future he will go wherever his research takes him and is always eager to experience different places. Ondrej returns to the Czech Republic several times a year to visit his family and currently lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.</p>
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Matt Carnogursky
<p>Matt Carnogursky was born in Bratislava in 1960. His mother Isabella had a job as a chemical engineer and his father Ivan was a mechanical engineer working for a construction company. After the fall of communism, Ivan served in the Slovak parliament and held jobs concerning the business and economic development of the country. Matt’s uncle, Ján Čarnogurský, was a fairly well-known lawyer and political dissident who held the post of Prime Minister of Slovakia from 1991 to 1992.</p><p> </p><p>Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.</p><p> </p><p>Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.</p>
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Marek Soltis
<p> </p><p>Marek Soltis was born in Prešov in eastern Slovakia in 1969. He grew up with his parents, Ondrej and Maria, and his younger brother and sister. Marek and his family lived with his maternal grandparents in Rokycany for several years while his parents were building a house. Marek says that he dreamed of being a musician from an early age, and he learned to play the accordion and the guitar. Beginning in early high school, Marek joined a band which played gigs around the city. He attended a technical high school and then studied physics at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Prešov with the intention of becoming a university professor. Marek was a university student when the Velvet Revolution occurred in November 1989. He says that students at his school were particularly active during this time, and he distributed newspapers and traveled to factories. Marek calls this time ‘indescribable.’ After graduating, he began playing music professionally and played in a theatre orchestra.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1996, Marek traveled to the United States to visit a friend. He says that corruption in the newly-democratic Slovakia combined with professional opportunities in the United States led to his decision to stay permanently. He settled in the New York City area and, although he says his first months were difficult, he quickly became involved in the music and Slovak communities. Marek took classes at Hunter College and joined a band. Today, Marek owns a music and entertainment company which, among other things, helps to bring Slovak music to the United States. He is also the sound engineer at the Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan. Marek and his wife, also a Slovak émigré, have a young daughter and son to whom they speak Slovak. Today he lives with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut.</p><p> </p>
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Madeleine Albright
<p>Madeleine Albright was born in the Prague district of Smíchov in 1937. Shortly after her birth, she traveled to Belgrade with her mother, Anna, to join her father, Josef, who worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in the Yugoslav capital. With the outbreak of WWII, the Körbel family traveled to Britain, where they settled first with relatives in Berkhamsted before moving to the London district of Notting Hill Gate. It was here that Madeleine experienced the Blitz. Madeleine’s father began work for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, serving as both the private secretary to Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and the head of the Czechoslovak service of the BBC.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine remembers her schooling in the United Kingdom during WWII, as well as a starring role she played in a Red Cross film about refugee children (in return for a stuffed rabbit). She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in 1945 and spent several months living in Prague on Hradčanské náměstí before her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. Over the two years that followed, Madeleine says she led a “pretty constrained life” at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade, as her father did not want her to attend school with communists and so she was taught at home by a governess. In 1948, Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland in order to learn French.</p><p> </p><p>Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Madeleine’s father was appointed to a UN commission on Kashmir. As a result of this appointment, the family traveled to the United States to live. In 1949, following the coup, the family sought asylum in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where Madeleine’s father took a teaching position at the University of Denver. Madeleine attended Kent Denver School and then Wellesley College for her undergraduate degree. She subsequently attended Columbia University in New York City, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of the media in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine became involved in politics as a campaigner for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, and then as a member of his staff. She worked for the Carter administration under Zbigniew Brzezinski and then as the head of the National Democratic Institute. In 1993, she became the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1997, she was appointed Secretary of State, making her the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. government until then.</p><p> </p><p>Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including <em>Madame Secretary: A Memoir</em> and, most recently, <em>Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War</em>, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.</p>
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Ludmila Sujanova
<p>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s <em>chata</em> [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.</p><p> </p><p>In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.</p>
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Lubos Pastor
<p>Lubos Pastor was born in Košice, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1974. His parents, Marie and František, were both math teachers – his mother taught at the high school while his father also taught computer science at the local university. As a student, Lubos’s hobbies included computers, chess, math, and athletics. He competed in chess tournaments and participated in math competitions and camps. He also often joined his parents and younger sister for hikes and gardening. Lubos attended a math-oriented <em>gymnázium</em> for high school. He was in his second year there when the Velvet Revolution occurred. Lubos recalls crowds and protests in Košice and says that the fall of communism changed his life as he saw that ‘anything was possible.’</p><p> </p><p>After high school, Lubos studied economics at Comenius University in Bratislava. In the newly-formed College of Management, Lubos says that much of the curriculum was not only American-based, but also taught in English. In 1994, Lubos traveled to Kansas for a study-abroad program at Wichita State University. He decided to finish his undergraduate education there and, one year later, began a doctoral program in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving his doctorate, Lubos accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where today he is a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.</p><p> </p><p>In 1996, Lubos’s future wife, <span class="ApplyClass">Sonia</span>, arrived in the United States. The pair had met at university in Bratislava. They married and, today, have three children. Lubos says that the family speaks Slovak at home, and they return to Slovakia each summer to visit family. Today, Lubos lives in Chicago with his family.</p>
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Luboš Brieda
<p>Luboš Brieda was born in Brezno in central Slovakia in 1980 and grew up in nearby Banská Bystrica. His mother Katarina worked in the local dom kultury [House of Culture] as an event organizer and his father Peter was an economist who worked as a restaurant inspector. Following the fall of communism, Luboš’s father opened his own restaurant. Luboš’s family owned a chata, or cottage, in a village outside Banská Bystrica, and he has fond memories of spending weekends gardening and hiking. In 1989, Luboš recalls traveling to Prague with his father to witness the speeches and happenings of the Velvet Revolution. Luboš joined the Boy Scouts and attended a language-focused school where he studied English and German.</p><p> </p><p>In 1993, Luboš’s mother moved to the United States on the advice of a friend. One year later, Luboš (who had been staying with his grandmother as his parents were divorced) joined her. He arrived in the Washington, D.C. area where his mother had first worked as a nanny and tutor, but when she found a new job, they moved to a suburb of Chicago. Two months later, they returned to D.C. and settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Luboš started ninth grade. He says that because he was ahead of his classmates in most subjects, he was able to concentrate on improving his English. After high school, he attended Florida Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to Virginia Tech, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Luboš lived in California for three years where he joined the Sierra Club and enjoyed hiking and climbing. He returned to Northern Virginia in 2008 to pursue his doctorate at George Washington University. Today Luboš works for NASA as an engineer and also runs his own computing consulting company. He is the creator of the web site SlovakCooking.com which shares traditional Slovak recipes. Luboš received his American citizenship in 2004, but says that he does not rule out the possibility of returning to live in Europe. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife Sandra.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609072246/http://www.slovakcooking.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Luboš’s web site, Slovak Cooking</a></p>
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Lubomir Ondrasek
<p> </p><p>Lubomir Ondrasek was born in Topoľčany in western Slovakia in December 1972. His father, Ľubomír, was a military officer and his mother, Elena, worked in various clerical positions. In the early years of his life, he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Anna Nemcová, who lived in the small village of Beckov and with whom he maintained a life-long close relationship. In 1976 he moved with his parents to Martin, a city in northern Slovakia, where he attended elementary school and started <em>gymnázium</em>. Later Lubomir attended <em>gymnáziums</em> in Topoľčany, Žilina, and Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where he earned his high school diploma. A junior in high school in 1989, Lubomir has strong memories of the events of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.</p><p> </p><p>In 1995, Lubomir left Slovakia for the United States with the purpose of pursuing his theological education. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Zion Bible Institute in Barrington, Rhode Island, in 1999, Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston in 2003, and Master of Theology from Harvard University in 2005. While pursuing his theological education Lubomir worked several odd jobs and also served as a minister in two New England congregations.</p><p> </p><p>Lubomir moved to Chicago in 2005 and is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago where he is concentrating on political, philosophical, and theological ethics as well as the ethics of war and peace. He is the president and co-founder of Acta Sanctorum – a Chicago non-profit founded with his wife in 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution – and also is an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston. Lubomir became a naturalized United States citizen in 2007. In the same year, he successfully fought a battle with cancer. Today he lives with his wife and daughter in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.</p><p> </p>
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Katya Heller
<p>Katya Heller was born in Prague in 1960 to an American mother and Czech father. Her mother, Joy, had left the United States in 1947 to travel to Europe with hopes of going to the Soviet Union, but decided to stay in Prague. She then met Katya’s father, Jiří, while they were studying Russian at Charles University. Both of her parents held communist beliefs (her mother was denied membership in the Communist Party because she was American); however, Katya says that following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, they both lost their jobs and her father became disillusioned with the Party. Katya says she first began having thoughts of leaving the country when she was having difficulty getting accepted to the high school of her choice because of her parents’ backgrounds. She was admitted to Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty where she studied English and Spanish and enrolled in the school’s translating and interpreting program. While in school, Katya had several freelance interpreting jobs which she says put her in contact with the secret police who hoped that she would pass on information she gathered about the West. In 1985, Katya married her first husband, an American who was teaching in Prague at the time. The couple left Czechoslovakia in 1986 and went to Barcelona, as Katya’s husband had received a one-year fellowship. Their daughter was born the same year and, the following year, Katya and her family moved to the United States and settled in Seattle.</p><p> </p><p>In 1989, Katya was in Bratislava at the start of the Velvet Revolution. She returned to Prague where her brother was involved in the student leadership of the Revolution and told her about a job opening. Katya succeeded Rita Klímová (who left the position to became ambassador to the United States) as interpreter for the press office of the Civic Forum. She held that job until the first elections took place in June 1990 and then returned to the United States. Katya subsequently lived in Seattle where she held interpreting and translating jobs, and worked in several art galleries. In 1999 she moved to New York City and married her second husband, Doug Heller. Today, Katya is the director of the Heller Gallery, which showcases glass sculpture. She also serves on the board of directors of the Czech Center in New York.</p>
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