In the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, Dagmar recalls ‘a mood’ brought on by ‘everybody leaving Czechoslovakia.’ In addition to several friends who emigrated, Dagmar’s brothers left, as well as her sister-in-law. Although her brothers returned, she and her then-husband decided to leave the country as well. They crossed the border into Austria on December 28, 1968, only a few days before the borders tightened. After three months in Austria, Dagmar and her husband traveled to the United States and settled in the Chicago area, where Dagmar’s sister-in-law now lived. Dagmar found a job at Western Electric one week after arriving. One year later, Dagmar’s son was born.
After several years in Chicago, Dagmar’s family moved to upper Wisconsin to join some friends in the restaurant business. In 1975, Dagmar bought the Village Square restaurant in Evansville, Wisconsin, which she ran for over 17 years. She also had a daughter while living in Wisconsin. Dagmar then returned to the Chicago area, where she has lived ever since. Dagmar first returned to Czechoslovakia for a visit in the late 1970s, and she describes Bratislava as appearing ‘gloomy.’ Since then, she has returned many times for visits, and has seen a difference in the country since the Velvet Revolution. Today, Dagmar lives in Itasca, Illinois.
]]>Dagmar Lawrenz was born in Bratislava in 1941. Her mother, Irena, was a secretary while her father, Jozef, was an engineer. The oldest of five siblings, Dagmar was often tasked with watching her younger brothers and sisters when her parents were working. As a child, Dagmar participated in the Pioneer organization and says that she and her siblings were ‘expected…to do well in school.’ After graduating from high school, Dagmar attended Comenius University where she studied to be a teacher. She says that the availability of jobs as well as the attractive schedule led her to choose this profession. Dagmar taught math and physics at a middle school for about seven years.
In the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, Dagmar recalls ‘a mood’ brought on by ‘everybody leaving Czechoslovakia.’ In addition to several friends who emigrated, Dagmar’s brothers left, as well as her sister-in-law. Although her brothers returned, she and her then-husband decided to leave the country as well. They crossed the border into Austria on December 28, 1968, only a few days before the borders tightened. After three months in Austria, Dagmar and her husband traveled to the United States and settled in the Chicago area, where Dagmar’s sister-in-law now lived. Dagmar found a job at Western Electric one week after arriving. One year later, Dagmar’s son was born.
After several years in Chicago, Dagmar’s family moved to upper Wisconsin to join some friends in the restaurant business. In 1975, Dagmar bought the Village Square restaurant in Evansville, Wisconsin, which she ran for over 17 years. She also had a daughter while living in Wisconsin. Dagmar then returned to the Chicago area, where she has lived ever since. Dagmar first returned to Czechoslovakia for a visit in the late 1970s, and she describes Bratislava as appearing ‘gloomy.’ Since then, she has returned many times for visits, and has seen a difference in the country since the Velvet Revolution. Today, Dagmar lives in Itasca, Illinois.
“Ever since her first child was born she was working. She was a career woman. First we had some help at home, but then after the communists came you couldn’t have the domestic help anymore. So when I was seven, eight, I had to take care of the kids. Over there, they start working at 7:00 in the offices, or everywhere, so my mother and father had to leave before 7:00 – at about 6:30 or so – and my father, at the time he was a [telecommunications engineer] and we had a telephone ever since I remember, so when they went to work, we were still in bed. So then they called us to wake us up over the phone and we got ready to go to school and we had to drop the youngest ones off at the daycare center, or like a daycare center for little ones. The youngest one was like two; the other two were four and five. We had to drop them at another daycare center and then the two oldest ones, me and my sister, we went to school. It wasn’t far, but I was like eight years old. Many times, the two that went to the other daycare center… We went from home and, as we were walking to school, there was a little side street they had to go down to get to the daycare center. So we didn’t go down there with them; we went on to school and they went down to the daycare center. They were supposed to go there and sometimes they just went down to the city. They never went there! Sometimes people brought them home – they had found them somewhere in the city.”
“She [Dagmar’s mother] always worked as a secretary, and she had to be at work at 7:00 in the morning and she got done about 3:00. She had some friends that became teachers, and she always envied them because they went to work at 8:00 and by 12:00, 1:00, they were done. Plus they had Christmas vacation for about two weeks, then in January there’s a half year break (about a week), Easter vacation, summer vacation [for] two months, and growing up we were hearing all these things about this being such a great thing to be a teacher that I automatically went to be a teacher because it was the best career to have because of all this free time. So that’s why I went to be a teacher. And, actually, all three of us – we were three sisters – all three of us were in education.”
“When we lived there we didn’t realize it, but when we came back for a visit, it was so gloomy. It was gloomy all the time until I went for the first time after communism was over, and it was kind of more optimistic all over the place. I don’t know what it was, if it was just my impression or something, but before the revolution, it was so gloomy all over the place. People were so… gloomy. That’s the only way I can describe it. And then after the revolution it just kind of changed. The mood changed.”
“That was about time. You knew it was going to happen. In ’68, before the Russians came, it was kind of building to that point. So I kind of expected that something like this is going to happen. What really kind of bothered me and shocked me was the fact that they broke up Czechoslovakia. I don’t like that part. As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t a good thing to do. In 1968, when the Russians came, it was getting better already. I can’t really pinpoint, but it was getting not so… There was times when they would just come, pick up somebody, load them on the truck and move them out from the apartment or whatever, and these things were not happening anymore. In school too – I taught school about seven or eight years – the first few years was a lot of emphasis on doing different things to distract kids from doing religious things, and as time went on that kind of died out. I was glad it happened and it was about time.”
Eva graduated high school and enrolled in an international program through Comenius University which allowed her to study at affiliate colleges in the United States while traveling back to Slovakia to take exams. While in Richmond, Eva had been given a modeling contract and when she returned to the U.S. she settled in New York to pursue modeling. She also became a project manager and marketing director for a brand of luxury watches. Eva received an MBA from Columbia University. She now owns a branding and licensing firm and does PR consulting for luxury watches and jewelry.
Upon her return to the United States, Eva made friends with a number of fellow Slovak-Americans and émigrés and began organizing small cultural events and get-togethers. One of these events was attended by the newly-appointed Slovak consul general who expressed an interest in collaborating with Eva to formalize these events. She helped to form the non-profit +421 Foundation and is co-president of the organization, whose biggest event is Slovak Fashion Night. Eva says that while Slovakia will always be her home, she is glad to have had opportunities in the United States that have helped shaped who she is. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
]]>Eva Jurinova was born in Žilina in northwestern Slovakia in 1979. Her mother L’udmila is a pediatric neurologist and her father Vladimír is a nuclear physicist who, prior to the Velvet Revolution, worked in the Ministry of Health. He now heads the radiation protection section of the public health authority of Slovakia. Eva started school in Trnava and later moved with her family to Bratislava. She says that her childhood was ‘beautiful’ and ‘pure’ and that she spent a lot of time visiting her grandparents, who lived in more rural parts of the country. She was an active child and participated in sports, dance, and theatre. Eva was ten at the time of Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and says that although her parents’ careers improved, she did not notice any immediate changes. In 1997, Eva spent one year of high school studying abroad in Richmond, Virginia. Upon her return to Slovakia, she made plans to move back to the United States.
Eva graduated high school and enrolled in an international program through Comenius University which allowed her to study at affiliate colleges in the United States while traveling back to Slovakia to take exams. While in Richmond, Eva had been given a modeling contract and when she returned to the U.S. she settled in New York to pursue modeling. She also became a project manager and marketing director for a brand of luxury watches. Eva received an MBA from Columbia University. She now owns a branding and licensing firm and does PR consulting for luxury watches and jewelry.
Upon her return to the United States, Eva made friends with a number of fellow Slovak-Americans and émigrés and began organizing small cultural events and get-togethers. One of these events was attended by the newly-appointed Slovak consul general who expressed an interest in collaborating with Eva to formalize these events. She helped to form the non-profit +421 Foundation and is co-president of the organization, whose biggest event is Slovak Fashion Night. Eva says that while Slovakia will always be her home, she is glad to have had opportunities in the United States that have helped shaped who she is. Today, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
“My grandparents lived in Kysuce and Orava, these two beautiful mountainous regions, so I spent most of my childhood there and the memories are just beautiful because it was the nature, the animals, the kindness and love of my grandparents. And of course my parents, but they were studying and getting their doctorates, so I was spending a lot of time with my grandparents and cousins. Both sets of grandparents had huge yards, animals – chickens, cows, geese, and ducks – so it was very farm-like and I loved it. I learned a lot about plants and animals and people and love.”
Were you allowed to run wild there?
“Oh yeah, of course! And we would go to the forest, mushroom picking, blackberry, blueberry picking. It was wonderful, really.
“Childhood in former Czechoslovakia was so pure. I was not touched by anything I learned later or read in newspapers about oppression during communism. I definitely felt very secure and safe and all those clichés about communism, that everybody is equal and there is no crime. I really felt that. It was a great level of security, and I really enjoyed that and I don’t see that anymore nowadays, I’m sorry to say.”
“Since my parents were scientists, they tried to be neutral. They were raised Catholic and both of my grandparents were active participants in the church, but since they were living in remote parts of Slovakia, it never really had an effect on my parents’ careers, and my parents were always going to church when we went to visit my grandparents; they went to mass and, yet, they had good positions. It never really impacted them. My dad had a leading position at the Ministry of Health; my mom was a very accomplished doctor. Back then, scientists didn’t really make much money and didn’t have recognition in our society, and I remember my parents complaining about that and my mom sometimes feeling like she was a rag that everybody was wiping their feet on. She would make more comments like that, especially dealing with patients who were workers, plumbers, and who were treating her not very nicely. I recall some memories like that.”
So did life for your family change for better after the Revolution?
“Yes, absolutely. My mom opened a private practice and my dad became a board member of all the multinational organizations, from the UN to the World Health Organization. They’d been traveling always because my dad had to travel for work, even before [the Revolution]. The government would send him on certain missions, and my mom would go along with him sometimes; she would get her visa permit. But, of course, after communism collapsed, my parents were taking full advantage of exploring the world and aligning it with their careers.”
Were your parents in the Communist Party?
“Yes they were. Not active participants, but they understood that if they wanted to advance, or even be functional somehow, they had to do that. It somehow worked out. We would still go to church when we went to visit my grandparents, and then they would be part of the Communist Party and somehow they didn’t think much about it. They just did what they had to do to survive and provide a healthy and happy environment for us.”
“It’s all about the people you meet and the activities you put yourself in, and I felt like that was my new home. Yes, I was very lucky. I met some people who are stimulating and a job that was very inspirational. So it was a flow. I didn’t make the cognitive decision ‘I am going to stay here.’ I just stayed because it was a no-brainer. Everything just fell into place, and with Grimoldi, it was a career that just…It was an international firm, so everything happened so fast. We were working with celebrities of the top format so it was just so exciting that one day you wake up and ‘Oh! It’s five years later.’ So it just felt very organic and natural to stay and be here.”
“I had some celebrity friends from Slovakia, so they would come and visit and they were always asking about possibilities of making it here or presenting their works here. So I had a lot of contacts in the music and entertainment industry, so I would try to help them and then through friends – I became friends with a lot of Slovak-Americans and Slovaks living or working in New York, especially – we started organizing little events for my friends coming from Slovakia. And it was very unofficial; it was always just a gathering for the community – the New York friends and the European friends. But then, I think the epiphany came when the first Consul General came to New York – Ivan Surkoš of Slovakia – and the Consulate General was opened, and the Consul General and his wife came to one of these concerts I organized. It was actually for my friend Misha who was a famous singer in Slovakia. And they were like ‘Wow, look at this. It’s so many people and an international crowd. How did you pull this together?’ And that was actually in cooperation with Slovak Info and a friend of mine, Otto Raček, who is also a very active Slovak-American. And the question was how can we institutionalize and enhance these activities? So the question was answered with two possibilities: one is to establish a non-profit organization that would help us obtain funding and would help to really attain volunteers and the whole community of artists and performers and other diplomats who are wanting to be active. And the second was for my ability to become part of a consulate team. So I’ve established, together with the Consul General’s wife, L’ubica, this non-profit organization called the +421 Foundation.”
“We organized many small exhibitions, concerts, book presentations, film festivals that the following year started to grow and they were not so small anymore. So one hundred people that were attending the first year became three to five hundred to fifteen hundred this year. And I do have to depict the biggest – and my favorite program – which is called Slovak Fashion Night.”
That’s the signature event, correct?
“That is. Not only because I used to be in fashion, but because it’s New York. Fashion is the breathing organism of the city, or one of the major industries in the city; and of course it’s very glamorous, models are always very attractive, and we have a very wide scope of guests, so we decided to organize a fashion show. I had to convince the Consul General and the whole team who, at the beginning, was very hesitant to do that, but eventually gave in, and the next thing you know, Slovak Fashion Night becomes a huge event where we get approached by our Austrian colleagues or other European consulates or non-European consulates or other colleagues in the cultural field to co-produce events with them, and it’s very pleasing. Also, since it’s such a popular program, it provides a platform where we can really introduce not just our upcoming and talented fashion designers from Slovakia, but also other performing artists like dancers, singers, photographers, visual artists, moderators. We’ve been able to compile a whole program of different art sections and put it all together and create one huge show that’s definitely, very surprisingly, great.
“It attracts Slovaks living here or other emigrants who have forgotten how Slovakia is and how it’s been growing and evolving, and this is an opportunity for them to come and see, and they’re like ‘Wow, we have all this? This is amazing!’ And I’m very happy to be able to provide this reality check, or this educational aspect in raising awareness about what’s going on in Slovakia and how Slovakia is growing. Also, culture, in my opinion – and this is my little phrase I use every time I promote Slovakia or what we do – culture is the best marketing tool to promote Slovakia as an economic or investment destination, and to help us form mutually beneficial relations, not only in the cultural sphere, but in the economic and beyond as well. So yes, we do invite all of the investors or potential business partners for Slovakia to these beautiful events, and strengthen their relationships. Show them how wonderful we are and what we can do.”
“It’s a constant aspiration of ours, and we do bring in the traditional aspect of Slovakia and all those features that you mentioned – the folklore, the beautiful traditional embroidery, the beautiful music and dances and traditional attires of Slovakia – but that’s not what we want to showcase only because that’s something that’s always been there and we’ve always been showing it in the past. But we bring the old and the new and bridge the modern, evolving, ascending culture and the arts that Slovakia is, as a modern, world-leading country. That we definitely are not stuck in the past or all we have are the wooden dolls and corn dolls and those beautiful, but yet older, traditions. So we bring the old and the new, and our fashion shows have folklore dances or the demonstration and presentation of the embroidery or the traditional costume, and I think it’s just a fun and very innovative way to connect both worlds. I think our guests can relate to that and have been relating to that very well. It’s refreshing, in my opinion.”
“It’s very simple and pure in a sense, because, when I come home to Slovakia, I just feel a sense of belonging. This really deep, gut feeling that that’s my home and that’s where I’m from, and the nature, the feel, the essence, the flair – that’s something that will always be me, my true essence. And when I am in the U.S., especially New York or Los Angeles – I’ve been spending a lot of time in Los Angeles because of my company that’s based there – I feel like this is great, this is where I have my house and my friends, but it’s sort of like a pied-a-terre. It’s not the true house, the true home. So, Slovakia will always be my home, and I hope I will be able to marry someone or find someone who will be either European or Slovakian or somehow will always be able to have that home with me there, too. I don’t have a vision how yet, but I know it’s possible to maybe have an international home, but always be able to spend a certain amount of time there.”
“I think it doesn’t matter whether it’s communism or it’s now or democracy or this era or the other era. It’s about individuality and who we resonate with or what we resonate with, and I as an individual definitely resonated with and found my perfect match in the USA and found my way to create another realization and self-actualization, and that’s what I think is wonderful about the world being open and the world being your oyster. But, my roots will always be in Slovakia and I will always come there and it’s always my home. But America really allowed to become who I am becoming. Who I feel that I can identify with. Who I can understand. And I’m very grateful for that.”
The family settled in Chicago, where George says they were greatly helped by the congregation at Ravenswood Presbyterian Church. At first, George’s mother earned money cleaning houses while his father found work in a factory cleaning meat-cutting equipment. George says a ‘breakthrough’ took place for his father when he became the caretaker at the city’s St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, where the German-speaking congregation encouraged him to attend night classes at John Marshall Law School and reopen a legal practice.
After staying in several Chicago neighborhoods, the Drost family moved to Rogers Park. George attended Taft High School and then Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He followed his father into the legal profession, obtaining his law degree from DePaul Law School. He is now an attorney at Drost, Kivlahan, McMahon & O’Connor LLC. George is a previous head of the Bohemian Lawyers Association of Chicago and, between 2000 and 2005, was appointed honorary consul of the Czech Republic for Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. He is a current director of American Friends of the Czech Republic and the Council of Higher Education (Matice Vyššího Vzdělání) and is an avid collector of Czech art. Today, he lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
]]>George Drost was born in Brno in December 1946. His father, John, was a lawyer while his mother, Doris, stayed at home and raised George and his older brother Rudy. George says the Communist coup in 1948 was a ‘turning point’ for his father, who left Czechoslovakia within days. Two weeks later, George’s mother and brother followed, crossing the border into Austria and leaving George in the care of his grandmother. It took two years before George was reunited with his family. George says both legal and illegal attempts were made to transport him to Austria, but in the end a family friend, Marie Bednar, and one of his aunts worked together to smuggle him across the border and bring him to Innsbruck, where the rest of the family were staying. The Drosts, who had already applied for American visas, waited for their paperwork to clear in a guesthouse in Kranebitten in the Austrian Tyrol. They sailed to New York City on the General Blatchford (a U.S. troop transport ship) on July 27, 1950, arriving in America some ten days later.
The family settled in Chicago, where George says they were greatly helped by the congregation at Ravenswood Presbyterian Church. At first, George’s mother earned money cleaning houses while his father found work in a factory cleaning meat-cutting equipment. George says a ‘breakthrough’ took place for his father when he became the caretaker at the city’s St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, where the German-speaking congregation encouraged him to attend night classes at John Marshall Law School and reopen a legal practice.
After staying in several Chicago neighborhoods, the Drost family moved to Rogers Park. George attended Taft High School and then Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He followed his father into the legal profession, obtaining his law degree from DePaul Law School. He is now an attorney at Drost, Kivlahan, McMahon & O’Connor LLC. George is a previous head of the Bohemian Lawyers Association of Chicago and, between 2000 and 2005, was appointed honorary consul of the Czech Republic for Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. He is a current director of American Friends of the Czech Republic and the Council of Higher Education (Matice Vyššího Vzdělání) and is an avid collector of Czech art. Today, he lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
“Things I remember are things kids remember when they are two or three years old, you know, looking for toys, when the housekeeper would remove her teeth and make herself look like a witch and try to scare me, and then make me relieved when she put her teeth back into her mouth. But it was those kinds of little childish games, and then, of course, when I was reunited with my parents, I remember being reunited with them, and it was almost like being with strangers. We settled in a small gasthaus near Innsbruck, in Kranebitten, and waited to get final approval to go to Bremerhaven to eventually take a boat to America.”
“We had other options, two – two options that I was told of. One was Australia and one was the UK. And my father, in his explanation of it, thought that the Australian experience was too austere, because it was almost a biblical indenture where you would be in unpopulated areas helping to redevelop them and after five or ten years you would be basically removed from any covenance of promises that you had to stay in the outback. In England, although England was an attractive place, my father felt that because of the class system immigrants wouldn’t succeed in the English system, and he felt that there would be too many bars to access opportunity in the UK.”
“Mother cleaned houses, and she took me with her. I think I remember she was being paid $5 to clean a house, and she would do one a day, or possibly two, and I learned how to ride on the public transportation. And my father’s jobs were at first in a meat factory where he would be cleaning meat-cutting equipment and then eventually he made it to another manufacturing job which was at the Hammond Organ Company, which no longer exists, and he would make pieces for organs, piecework. And I remember him saying that when he was working there some of his colleagues that he was working with [said] ‘John, you’re working too fast. You shouldn’t work as hard because you are making us look like we’re bad.’ But that gave me a sense of the type of ambition that my father had to quickly better himself. But sort of the breakthrough moment was when my dad took a position as the church administrator for St Paul’s which is now the United Church of Christ at Fullerton and Orchard. And again that was a very helpful congregation where my father received encouragement from church leaders to continue his legal career and attend night school at the John Marshall Law School.”
“It gave me a… it connected me back with my Czech roots in a way I felt comfortable. I liked the idea of having a title to be the sort of official Czech person in the region, and having the ability to start to introduce Czech visitors – dignitaries from prime ministers to presidents, senators, ambassadors – to Chicago and to help them, at least from my experience what I think might be helpful in creating better Czech-American relations. Those were the good things. What I didn’t like was that there was too much… I’ll call it ‘stempeling.’ The Czechs are wonderful for bureaucratic design, and I don’t know if it was inherited from the Austro-Hungarian Empire but it is overly bureaucratic and overly protective to [the point that it] really minimizes the purposes that are trying to be achieved.”
“No, this is sort of stunning. This was again an amazing event. My father couldn’t believe it, we couldn’t believe it, we thought it was a dream – der Lebenstraum, you know? It didn’t seem real – a Fellini movie, Kafkaesque – it was not to be believed, because we had 43 years of this Communist regime and totalitarianism. Even during the time of Dubček in 1968, my father was very distrustful of that, ‘He’s still a communist.’ So… But I think that history will prove that he was more than, that he was an enlightened socialist.”
Igor Mikolaska was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia in 1978 and grew up nearby in Nové Mesto nad Váhom. His father, also named Igor, worked for a company that made air conditioners until the business was privatized following the fall of communism. He now works for an insurance company. Igor’s mother, Helena, worked as a government lawyer specializing in land disputes. Igor attended elementary school and technical high school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where he studied English for four years. He played competitive volleyball with the national junior team and traveled throughout Slovakia for tournaments.
Although he considered playing volleyball professionally, Igor decided to study English at university in Trenčín and says that six months of intensive study greatly improved his language skills. In 1999, Igor traveled to the United States for the first time to work at a summer day camp in Fox Lake, Illinois. He settled in Chicago permanently in 2004. Igor received a bachelor’s degree in management and a master’s degree in human resources, both from Roosevelt University. While studying, he met fellow Slovaks and saw there was a need for an organization to promote activities for young Slovak émigrés. He founded Slovak USA, an organization which has put on concerts, film festivals, holiday parties, folk festivals, and other activities. Igor says that he now has to turn down some of the artists approaching him, due to the number of interested groups. He has plans to open a Slovak and Czech cultural center in Chicago. Additionally, Igor works a reporter for Slovak newspaper Pravdacovering the Chicago Blackhawks.
Igor says that he was proud to receive his American citizenship in 2008, as he feels at home in the U.S. and is happy to contribute to American society. He frequently travels back to Slovakia, both to visit friends and family and to scout talent for events. He lives in Chicago.
The website for Igor’s organization, Slovak USA
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Igor Mikolaska was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia in 1978 and grew up nearby in Nové Mesto nad Váhom. His father, also named Igor, worked for a company that made air conditioners until the business was privatized following the fall of communism. He now works for an insurance company. Igor’s mother, Helena, worked as a government lawyer specializing in land disputes. Igor attended elementary school and technical high school in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, where he studied English for four years. He played competitive volleyball with the national junior team and traveled throughout Slovakia for tournaments.
Although he considered playing volleyball professionally, Igor decided to study English at university in Trenčín and says that six months of intensive study greatly improved his language skills. In 1999, Igor traveled to the United States for the first time to work at a summer day camp in Fox Lake, Illinois. He settled in Chicago permanently in 2004. Igor received a bachelor’s degree in management and a master’s degree in human resources, both from Roosevelt University. While studying, he met fellow Slovaks and saw there was a need for an organization to promote activities for young Slovak émigrés. He founded Slovak USA, an organization which has put on concerts, film festivals, holiday parties, folk festivals, and other activities. Igor says that he now has to turn down some of the artists approaching him, due to the number of interested groups. He has plans to open a Slovak and Czech cultural center in Chicago. Additionally, Igor works a reporter for Slovak newspaper Pravdacovering the Chicago Blackhawks.
Igor says that he was proud to receive his American citizenship in 2008, as he feels at home in the U.S. and is happy to contribute to American society. He frequently travels back to Slovakia, both to visit friends and family and to scout talent for events. He lives in Chicago.
The website for Igor’s organization, Slovak USA
“I was ten at the time, and all I remember is basically I got to the school and I greet the teacher the same way –čest’ práci [hello; literally ‘honor to work’] – and she said ‘No more of this stuff. Now just say ‘Good day.’ I was like ‘Okay,’ but it still took me a month until I basically switched.”
Did any of your classes change? Did any of your textbooks change?
“The only thing that changed was the requirement to learn Russian. Suddenly we are able to learn German, so the first minute I learned that, I dropped Russian language – which I only studied for one year anyway – and I studied German for three years.”
“So basically when I was finishing my MBA studies, I met a few Slovaks, and there was nothing – I felt – there was nothing to do for young people. So I decided, ‘Well, why don’t I just create something,’ and that’s what I did. I created an organization called Slovak USA and we have this website www.slovakchicago.org and what we do is mainly focus on the cultural and educational activities that connect and unite the Slovak community around Chicago. Once you leave your home country, you miss certain aspects of it, so it was really great to meet other Slovaks and Czechs and share the same interests. We have the same problems and we can connect and help each other.”
“Once you grow up somewhere else and you basically go live somewhere else, I think you’ll be kind of living on both sides of the fence for the rest of your life, so it’s kind of difficult to decide where to jump. Sometimes I feel I am home only when I am on the airplane or the ocean; that way I am nowhere.”
“Just recently we [Slovak USA] started to cooperate with the Czech Consulate in Chicago, and we help each other with advertising for concerts, which is very helpful. Trying to bring more the Czech-Slovak community together, especially for the events because I don’t really think we are that much different, especially here in Chicago. Maybe people in Slovakia and Czech Republic think so, but I think here we are very close and united. It’s a similar language, similar habits. Maybe I think we are different when we live back there in Europe, but we come here and we see we are pretty much the same; and that probably includes the Polish people.”
Which is maybe different from previous generations.
“Oh absolutely. They’re very nationalistic, so they actually wanted to work only within their community and I think that’s changing right now.”
In 1991, Irena traveled to Austria as an interpreter for friends who were looking for work and was offered a job herself as an au pair. Upon arriving home, she decided not to continue her studies and returned to teaching. Shortly thereafter, Irena moved to Chicago with plans to learn English and see the country. Instead of staying one year as originally planned, Irena found a job in a restaurant and stayed for two years. She returned to the Czech Republic, where she was joined by her American fiancé Kevin. The couple lived in Prague for almost one year, were married in Nymburk, and then moved back to Chicago where Irena decided to return to school. She received an associate’s degree from the College of DuPage, a B.A. in German and Spanish from DePaul University, and an M.A. in Spanish literature from the University of Chicago. Irena credits her husband and her professors for encouraging her in her studies. Irena has been teaching Spanish at the University of Chicago for ten years. She also teaches Czech language classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the T.G. Masaryk Czech School in Cicero, Illinois. She currently lives in Chicago.
]]>Irena Cajkova was born in Městec Králové and grew up with her parents and older brother and sister in the town of Nymburk located about 30 miles east of Prague. Irena’s parents both worked for the railroad industry (her father was a railroad engineer and her mother worked in a factory) and, as a result, the family traveled for free and took frequent trips to Bulgaria and other Eastern Bloc countries. Irena recalls listening to Voice of America with her father nightly and being told to keep their activities a secret. She attended a brand-new elementary school in Nymburk and, although she wanted to be a seamstress and attend trade school, her parents sent her to a business high school in nearby Poděbrady where she enjoyed grammar and language classes. After graduating, Irena taught elementary school for one year and then began studying elementary education at Charles University in Prague. Shortly after the start of classes, Irena participated in the student protest on November 17, 1989 that marked the beginning of the Velvet Revolution.
In 1991, Irena traveled to Austria as an interpreter for friends who were looking for work and was offered a job herself as an au pair. Upon arriving home, she decided not to continue her studies and returned to teaching. Shortly thereafter, Irena moved to Chicago with plans to learn English and see the country. Instead of staying one year as originally planned, Irena found a job in a restaurant and stayed for two years. She returned to the Czech Republic, where she was joined by her American fiancé Kevin. The couple lived in Prague for almost one year, were married in Nymburk, and then moved back to Chicago where Irena decided to return to school. She received an associate’s degree from the College of DuPage, a B.A. in German and Spanish from DePaul University, and an M.A. in Spanish literature from the University of Chicago. Irena credits her husband and her professors for encouraging her in her studies. Irena has been teaching Spanish at the University of Chicago for ten years. She also teaches Czech language classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the T.G. Masaryk Czech School in Cicero, Illinois. She currently lives in Chicago.
“My parents, my brother, and my sister, we all shared a three plus one apartment. Three plus one meant a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. So, one bedroom for my parents, one bedroom for my sister, my brother, and myself, and I think that is sort of the cause of my enjoying my space and not really being good about sharing my space, because I always had to share it. I actually remember that as a child – this is going to sound ridiculous – but as a child, I actually often played at the toilet, because it was a small room, about one by one square meter, and I would just close the toilet and that was my little desk, and I would draw and do whatever projects there because I think I always felt the need for my own space. So yes, it was a little bit crowded in the apartment, I would say.”
“My father was always very much anti-the regime. He was not in any kind of resistance group; I think it had to do partially because we did live in an insignificant place. But he would always, every evening at 9:00, I remember him tuning to the Voice of America – I think a lot of parents did it, but they wouldn’t tell their kids. I remember since I was very little, and it’s something that I do now value a lot, is that whenever he was listening to Voice of America, he never sent me away from the room. I remember from six or seven years old being told that what they do is not allowed; if I say that my dad listens to this radio station or that he reads the newspapers he reads, that they will get in trouble and I don’t want my parents to get in trouble because I might end up in an orphanage if they would go to jail or something like that. They trained me in what was the official version and then what was the truth. So I think that from very early on, I did learn to read between lines, and I learned not to trust any kind of government, not to trust any kind of institution, always question.”
“Shortly after starting school – maybe a month of classes, a month and a half of classes – I was approached by one of my classmates who sort of knew about or sensed my political views. He said ‘Hey listen, on Friday afternoon, there is going to be this little gathering’ – it was November 17 – ‘there is going to be a gathering of college students on Albertov in Prague and you should come.’ And I came, and I had absolutely no idea that that would be the beginning of the Velvet Revolution. So I was fortunate enough to be there, to gather with everybody, with all the students in Albertov and then just walk down to the National Boulevard [Národni třída] where we were stopped by the police. It was fascinating. Looking back now it was fascinating; I mean, it was kind of freaky being there, but I think even then it was more fascinating than freaky. You just kind of didn’t know what was going on. I went with a friend and then I remember we just separated. Everybody kind of ran for their own life. So I went home that night to Nymburk. I took the train home for the weekend, and when I returned to school on Monday, the student organizers already started the student strike and that’s basically what led to the change of the system. It was nice to be a part of a revolution.”
“I wasn’t really into reading a book, memorizing the information, going to meet with the teacher and being questioned on the information that I read and asked, basically, to repeat that information without being asked about my opinion. We were not trained to have an opinion and that was actually something that was the most difficult aspect when I started studying in the U.S., that all of the sudden they wanted to know what I think, and I struggled with that a little bit. Not because I wouldn’t think, but just because before that nobody wanted to know what I think. Who am I to think something about something? You repeat what the authority says and your opinion in insignificant until, or unless, you become an authority. So that was a big shock and surprise when I started going to school here, but of course, it was also the reason why I enjoyed my studies in this country so much, and why I went on with my associates degree and then bachelors degree and then masters degree and ended up teaching college myself.”
“It was when I decided that I would stay here. Not that I didn’t like working in a restaurant, but I think I was always looking at it as something temporary. I knew that I didn’t want to be a waitress for the rest of my life, so I knew that going to school was the only other way to do something different. Also, to maybe become more American. To fit better in society. To not just be the Czech in America doing Czech things within the Czech community. I guess I wanted to participate more in American society more than the Czech community in America.
“After I married my husband Kevin, he very much encouraged me. He was the one who sent me to school. I didn’t feel ready. I thought my English still wasn’t good enough to go to college and he basically said ‘No, you have to go to college,’ and so I started at the College of DuPage. So after I got an associate degree, I went on to DePaul University to get my B.A. and I thought that’s where I’m ending, but it was the professors that I had at DePaul – with whom I’m actually good friends – my Spanish and German professors, because I did continue with languages, the kind of comments they would write on my papers when they returned the paper graded, they wouldn’t really write comments about the paper, as much as I remember my German teacher, the only comment one time she put on my paper was ‘You have to do a PhD in literature.’ So that was when I started thinking ‘Oh maybe I am actually smart enough to do this.’ I was very insecure. Like I said, college was never a topic of conversation at home. It wasn’t there for me, it was not in the cards. At least that’s how I felt. And it was these professors who made it clear that I do have the intellectual capacity to do this, but who sort of also didn’t really suggest. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, would you like to go to college?’ No, the approach was ‘This is what you are doing. This is what you have to do.’ So, that’s what I did.”
“I enjoy being with the kids. It allows me, in a way, to be a kid myself. Also, the beauty of teaching the Czech language to children who are partially Czech, but they are Americans already. English is their first language; English is the language they think in. Whenever we have a break, they switch to English immediately. That is their natural way of communication. Teaching them the language, not only do I find it extremely important just for the future of these kids, whether they get credit for it when they are in college or just the fact that they can go to the Czech Republic – maybe they can go to college there and they won’t be limited by not knowing the language. Also, just the fact that they can communicate with their grandparents. So I find that very important.
“But also, I think it’s not just that I would be giving something to them, I’m getting a lot back in return. In a way, it makes me appreciate more my culture – the Czech culture. It makes me also perceive the Czech language differently. Sometimes through the errors the children make, you become aware of some subtleties in the language that otherwise you wouldn’t have thought of. So I’m getting a lot back from it, too.”
Jan attended gymnázium in Strážnice and then studied in the Mathematics and Physics Faculty at Charles University. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1988 and served one year in the military as a guard. Jan says that he learned English while listening to the radio and reading during this time. He began his doctoral studies at Charles University in the fall of 1989, and witnessed the beginning of the Velvet Revolution from his office at the university. Jan completed his dissertation – which he wrote in English – and spent one year at Southern Illinois University doing research. He returned to Prague after accepting a position at Charles University, but again returned to the United States one year later. Jan spent five months at Jackson State University in Mississippi before moving to Los Angeles for a post-doctoral fellowship with Arieh Warshel, 2013 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at University of Southern California.
Today Jan is a chemistry professor at Loyola University Chicago. Although he plans to stay in the United States for his career, Jan says that he still feels more Czech than American and returns to the Czech Republic every summer with his children.
]]>Jan Florian was born in Hodonín in 1964 and grew up in the Moravian town of Strážnice. His mother was an accountant and his father worked as an electrical repairman. Jan’s father also built a greenhouse on their property and made extra money by growing and selling vegetables. Although his earliest memory is of watching the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 on television, Jan recalls a happy childhood and says that he had a certain freedom that his children don’t have growing up in the United States today.
Jan attended gymnázium in Strážnice and then studied in the Mathematics and Physics Faculty at Charles University. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1988 and served one year in the military as a guard. Jan says that he learned English while listening to the radio and reading during this time. He began his doctoral studies at Charles University in the fall of 1989, and witnessed the beginning of the Velvet Revolution from his office at the university. Jan completed his dissertation – which he wrote in English – and spent one year at Southern Illinois University doing research. He returned to Prague after accepting a position at Charles University, but again returned to the United States one year later. Jan spent five months at Jackson State University in Mississippi before moving to Los Angeles for a post-doctoral fellowship with Arieh Warshel, 2013 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at University of Southern California.
Today Jan is a chemistry professor at Loyola University Chicago. Although he plans to stay in the United States for his career, Jan says that he still feels more Czech than American and returns to the Czech Republic every summer with his children.
“I got to appreciate the role that my grandma had for the whole family. I will do a little detour because it relates to immigration as well. Her whole family left for America in 1910, something like that. At the time, she was 12 years old. She was left alone in the country. Both parents left with other children who were younger than her and left her to take care of her own grandma who was, at the time, sick and couldn’t travel to America. So a 12 year old child, left on her in 1910 to care for her grandma. They told her they would come back for her and bring them both to America when they settled. They did settle, but the First World War came up so that was not really possible. And then after the War she married and she didn’t want to go to America, and [her] grandma died, and when they were eventually planning to go to America Hitler came and, when Hitler was gone, the Communists came. So she never made it to join the family in America. But she had great credit so I still have some relatives in Michigan and sometimes visit them, and they appreciate her role.”
“I would like to mention that life in Czechoslovakia in the early ‘70s, for a child, you couldn’t have anything better. It was very sweet. You could go anywhere as a child, especially in a small city like Strážnice: 6,000 people, two elementary schools, two churches, a high school. On one side you have vineyards and little hills; on the other side you have the Morava River with some sandy beaches and twists and turns in the river. So the setting is very nice, and I think I had a very good childhood over there. It’s not that people would be immigrating to America because they were suffering at the time in the Czech Republic, especially children. I mean, [they] had a better life, on average, than children in the United States.
“I walked to school. Everybody walked to school there; no school buses. My children now spend a half hour to go to school and another half hour going back from school. Waiting for the bus will take you another half hour, so it’s one and a half hours of your life lost every day because they are forbidden to do any[thing] fun on the bus, and everything is so absolutely serious. So my life was longer, in that sense. The freedom to not need parents to actually live was also important. I didn’t need parents to drive me to chess club. I didn’t need parents to drive me to go fishing. I just picked up the rod and went fishing, or just walked to play the accordion or play chess as I liked. And they didn’t pay anything for these services because they were provided for free by the people who had nothing else to do in that country, because money was of no value. People were doing things for others because they had nothing else to do, in some cases, and some of them are nice and just used their time wisely. So in terms of education, childhood… Could you have anything better than that?”
“In August ’88 there was the 20th anniversary of the Russian occupation in [August sic.] ’68. So we had special emergencies. We woke up early in the morning, a lot of practice, and we had to have special double-guarding of all the weapon warehouses, because they were afraid that people would come take the weapons and actually do some resistance. So I was in charge of guarding this weapon warehouse and I was leading a group of, let’s say, 12 people, and they were the soldiers who were not there to listen to the outpost – their only task was to do this guarding. They were dangerous and there was no way that they would actually listen to me. I had this little gun; they had the big guns. So I knew it was just hopeless – sometimes you saw them shooting deer in the night and it was absolutely impossible to tell them they could not do it; they could shoot you! These people did not have any obstacles. When they got drunk, they did whatever they wanted, and I didn’t want to be shot. So I just took off my boots, put myself on the bed – we were forbidden to sleep; we were supposed to be guarding – I said ‘Do whatever you want.’ It worked. The warehouse didn’t get stolen. When they control came, [the soldiers] actually woke me up. They said ‘Wake up! Wake up, there is the control here. You have to go greet them.’ Sometimes they got the warning call from the headquarters that the control is coming to check me, so I had more time to actually put my boots on, and I survived it, but I can tell you there was a lot of stress there.”
“I wanted to get at the border of the knowledge. That’s what I wanted to do. I thought ‘No I don’t need to be the best; I just want to be where there is a boundary between the knowledge and no knowledge.’ Once you happen to be on the boundary, your options are infinite. Then after I am there, I will [figure out] what to do, but first let me get there. So that was my goal, and when you are in the Czech Republic you don’t have access to the literature, you don’t have access to the journals [and] you don’t have access to the people, so you cannot get to the border of the knowledge; you get to somewhere where the knowledge was 20 years ago.”
“When the revolution came, the borders opened and then we could travel for free because everybody was offering these poor, Eastern Europeans an ability to see the West. I immediately got a short-term internship in Trieste, Italy, at the International Center for Theoretical Physics there. So I got the chance to stay there for a couple weeks, so the first time I got on the train, the summer of ’90, to Italy, my eyes opened. I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t somehow get the cheap ticket for the date when the hotel started, so I went two days ahead. I came to Trieste and had nowhere to sleep and no money to actually go to the hotel, so I went to the park. There’s a beautiful park, and I climbed over the fence because it was closed, and it’s on the shore of the sea. And the Czech Republic does not have the sea, so sleeping there in this Italian park on the first night in the West under the skies and hearing the sea… It was absolutely reverberating, giving you shivers along the spine. This is something monumental in your life and even for the society.”
“The first impression was like going to hell, literally, because you are coming on Highway 10 across the desert, and that’s kind of on the hill. Then you have all this going down, a long slope going down to Los Angeles, and we were coming in the evening and you see all these millions of lights of the huge city all in front of you, and you go down the hill. So it was like red and yellow down there, all the cars going 70 miles an hour on a six-lane freeway, and I have an old car which barely drives, cannot brake, and I don’t know where to go – I just need to keep the pace with them. This kind of horror [was like] going to hell. It was quite tough, this driving experience to the big city.”
Upon graduating, Jana says that she had trouble finding employment and worked a series of temporary jobs. She worked for a construction firm for one year under the auspices of starting a company magazine; however, she says that she did very little actual work as she was given the job by a friend and the company did not actually have money for the project. She then found a job at a publishing house translating Czech language books into English. She quit her position when she was offered promotion with the stipulation that she join the Communist Party. With the help of her uncle, Jana began teaching at a language school. She married Jiří Fraňek, a journalist, and had two children, Jakub and Ruth. Jana says that although many of her friends signed Charter 77, she declined because of the effect she believed it would have on her husband’s job. Instead, she helped the cause by translating various documents relating to the Charter into English, including the Charter itself. Jana says that her dissident activities and refusal to join the Communist Party led to conflict with the headmistress of the language school at which she taught. She was questioned by the secret police, and eventually resigned. She then began working as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was in this position during the Velvet Revolution, when both she and her 15 year old son worked as interpreters for foreign journalists. In more recent years, Jana has accompanied Czech politicians such as Václav Havel and Václav Klaus on foreign visits to English-speaking countries, where she has been their interpreter. She lives in Prague.
]]>Jana Fraňková was born in Prague just after WWII in 1946. Her Slovak-Jewish mother had been in hiding in southern Bohemia during the War, and her cousin (who lived with Jana and her mother) had spent two years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Jana says that she did not learn of her Jewish heritage until she went to school, as her mother did not bring up the subject. Jana’s mother, who joined the Communist Party, worked in telecommunications for the government. As a result, Jana says that her home had the first television set in the neighborhood. As a young girl, Jana was active in sports and joined a competitive gymnastics club. She attended gymnázium and became interested in philosophy and politics; she began studying philosophy and English literature at Charles University. Jana says that the time of the Prague Spring was very exciting and that she and her friends ‘all believed in it.’ While working as an au pair in Britain during the summer of 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Her mother convinced her to stay in Britain where she landed an interview at Oxford University and was admitted to Saint Hilda’s College. She received permission from the Czechoslovak government to commence studies there, and graduated with a degree in philosophy and English. Jana returned to Czechoslovakia after three years and finished her degree at Charles University.
Upon graduating, Jana says that she had trouble finding employment and worked a series of temporary jobs. She worked for a construction firm for one year under the auspices of starting a company magazine; however, she says that she did very little actual work as she was given the job by a friend and the company did not actually have money for the project. She then found a job at a publishing house translating Czech language books into English. She quit her position when she was offered promotion with the stipulation that she join the Communist Party. With the help of her uncle, Jana began teaching at a language school. She married Jiří Fraňek, a journalist, and had two children, Jakub and Ruth. Jana says that although many of her friends signed Charter 77, she declined because of the effect she believed it would have on her husband’s job. Instead, she helped the cause by translating various documents relating to the Charter into English, including the Charter itself. Jana says that her dissident activities and refusal to join the Communist Party led to conflict with the headmistress of the language school at which she taught. She was questioned by the secret police, and eventually resigned. She then began working as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was in this position during the Velvet Revolution, when both she and her 15 year old son worked as interpreters for foreign journalists. In more recent years, Jana has accompanied Czech politicians such as Václav Havel and Václav Klaus on foreign visits to English-speaking countries, where she has been their interpreter. She lives in Prague.
“She was telling me that she lived there. They didn’t tell me we were Jews for a long time, because Jewish parents just didn’t usually tell their children because they were afraid; they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But she was telling me about the people and, actually, I knew them because we used to go to their place during the summer holidays, so they became like a part of our family – family that we didn’t have anymore because very, very few members of the family survived, and most of those who survived left not only this country, but Europe. They just wanted to be away from Europe, so they went to Canada, to Israel, to Australia. But I knew these people and I thought my mom had a beautiful time because she was telling me only about lovely things.
“My cousin was actually telling me about the concentration camp and only much, much later I found out that I was probably the only person she told, and I suppose she told only me because she thought I didn’t understand – I was little. I knew the word ‘camp’ for summer camps, because bigger children spoke about summer camps, so I thought she went to one of these. And when she was telling me about things that happened, I thought they were games. It was only later, when I went to school and I started hearing about Jews and about concentration camps, I realized what happened, and I realized we were Jews. Even though I didn’t know what it meant, I knew it meant something strange, but that was about all.”
“Imagine something that you really believe in is happening. You are 21. You feel that you, just by going into the street and signing various petitions, can change something. Can you imagine something more exciting? It was fabulous. And we all believed in it. Even though, I remember my mother and her friends talking and sort of worrying that it wouldn’t work which, in the end, it didn’t. But for us it was incredibly exciting. And it was very difficult then to stay in England, especially at the beginning, to stay in England, when you felt that you ought to come and help the country – we didn’t know at that time we actually couldn’t help the country.”
“In the end, I got stuck here. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t know what it would feel like, getting suddenly stuck. So I finished school, then I couldn’t find a job whatsoever for three years. And at that time there was a law that anyone who was not in school anymore and who was not a married woman had to work. It was an obligation, and if you didn’t work and they found you out, they would charge you with ‘leading a parasitical way of life.’ I don’t know who I would be a parasite to but… So I had to take various odd jobs on temporary contracts.
“Then, a nice good Commie, who was a friend of my mom, was a director of a big firm that built roads, gave me a job. It was the most terrible year of my life because I didn’t have anything to do there. I had to come there every day, spend eight and a half hours there, and there was no job. So I used to help people in other departments. They had to think that I was preparing something like the company magazine, which he told me ‘Look, we really don’t have money for that magazine; we’re not going to produce it, but you are here to get it going.’ So I had to pretend.”
“Charter 77 came. At the time of Charter 77, I was on maternity leave with my daughter, and lots of my friends were involved and they said ‘Come and sign it.’ I said ‘Look, if it were only my own decision, I would immediately. But my husband – and the father of my children – is a journalist. He would lose his job. I can’t do it. We are in it together.’ So in the end, we agreed that I would do the work for the Charter, but would not be a signatory. So I did lots of translations. I translated the Charter; I translated various texts that went abroad.”
“This IOJ had a lovely house which they used for these purposes. So I come there and the students asked me ‘What’s happening?’ And I said ‘Well, history is happening here. The regime is obviously getting dismantled.’ They said ‘Tell us, what’s going on?’ So I told them about hundreds of thousands of people in Prague and they said ‘What should we do?’ I said ‘I can’t tell you what to do, but if I were a journalist and I was at a place where history is in the making, for God’s sake, I wouldn’t sit in a classroom being lectured by the representatives of the regime that is going down the drain!’ They said ‘Do you think so?’ I said ‘Look, so many journalists are trying to get to Prague, trying to gather pictures, trying to gather news. You are here.’ Most of them already worked; they were active journalists – young ones. Okay, the next day I come there, because I had to come there and they said ‘You know, something’s happened. The students just didn’t come to class.’ I said ‘Oh dear. What could have happened to them? I hope they didn’t run into problems.’ ‘Well, we don’t know, but fortunately it’s the end [of the seminar]. Do you think we should report them?’ I said ‘Let it be. They’re probably curious.’ In the evening they rang me up and said ‘The IOJ is going, of course, to pay for the interpreters as agreed in the contract, but we’re afraid we won’t need you anymore.’ So I was paid for going to the demonstrations by the IOJ, and the students all followed my advice. So I thought it was good that I actually managed my last-moment revenge.”
“It was always very difficult to explain – let’s say in the ‘70s or even the ‘60s – to explain to Western Europeans what it is to live in a ‘socialist’ country. Because on one hand, they expected entering almost a prison when they came here, and then they were shocked that people lived normal lives, because they didn’t see underneath. The power the regime exerted on the people was much more subtle. It was through allowing you to go to school, or to study at university or not, to get this or that job, to travel somewhere or not, and that’s not what the visitors see. They can’t see this. And this was difficult to understand for Western Europeans, not to speak about Americans. It must be very difficult to understand for the Americans. It was just life that was seemingly normal, but only seemingly.”
In 1999, Jozef enrolled in a molecular biology doctoral program at Charles University in Prague and his research focused on childhood leukemia. During this time he attended several conferences in the United States; his first trip was in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Through contacts he made at conferences, Jozef applied for and was given a research position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One year later, he transferred to his current position at the University of Chicago. Jozef says that he has two homes, one in Chicago and one in Slovakia, but that he finds it easy imagining his future in the United States.
]]>Jozef Madzo was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in 1976. He says that he had a ‘really nice childhood’ and enjoyed spending weekends with his family at their cabin in Slanec, a small town outside of Košice. Jozef was active in a karate club and computer programming club, and showed an affinity for science from a young age. He was in eighth grade at the time of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which he says resulted in numerous name changes for the schools he attended. After graduating fromgymnázium, Jozef studied biology at Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika [Pavol Jozef Šafárik University] in Košice. Summers he spent working in construction. He recalls one particularly fun summer during which he worked in the Czech Republic picking hops.
In 1999, Jozef enrolled in a molecular biology doctoral program at Charles University in Prague and his research focused on childhood leukemia. During this time he attended several conferences in the United States; his first trip was in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Through contacts he made at conferences, Jozef applied for and was given a research position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One year later, he transferred to his current position at the University of Chicago. Jozef says that he has two homes, one in Chicago and one in Slovakia, but that he finds it easy imagining his future in the United States.
“I was 14, so at that age you start forming ideas about the world, and we felt that there is something wrong with all the things they are telling us, and communism fell and it was like ‘Oh yeah, so this is what that is.’ We had been told that the communist system is the best system ever, but you can see that people emigrated from communism to Western Europe, but it never happened the other way. So we were like ‘There’s something wrong. Why all these people from Germany don’t come here and all people from Slovakia are trying to escape to Austria and Germany?’ We were like ‘Ok, maybe that’s not all true that this is the best system ever.”
“It was fun to learn new stuff. I was interested in biology, so I enjoyed it. It was a really good social life with your colleagues and classmates because you studied a lot together and after that, when passed the exam, you had fun together, and after that you study again. Because I studied biology, we used to have a lot of field trips and field classes, so it was kind of nice to get out of the city and still be in school, but be in the field.”
“There was no need to learn the Czech language. Of course, growing up in Czechoslovakia, there is mutual understanding, so I could understand everything. I just kept speaking Slovak because I would rather speak normal Slovak than broken Czech if they can understand me, and there was no problem. My thesis, I wrote in Slovak because I could have written it in broken Czech or decent Slovak, so I chose decent Slovak. There were some official documents that had to be written in Czech; of course I was using Czech in these official grand reports or emails, but for day to day work I used Slovak.”
“It was really interesting. The first time I visited the U.S. it was in late fall/early winter of 2001, so it was right after the attack on the World Trade Center. It was really chaotic because they had really chaotic security, and it was during the anthrax attack so everybody was freaking out about anthrax. They made us walk through sponges soaked with a lot of chemicals. They almost took all our clothes off. They went through all of our luggage. It took us forever. We almost missed connections; everything was late. So it was really chaotic. But when I was in the U.S. again, it was really interesting, because at the time, people were really patriotic everywhere with the American flag and ‘God Bless the U.S.’ So I thought that this was the U.S., but no, it was just a response to the terrorist attack.
“I remember really enjoying my time there in the U.S. because it was Florida, and coming from Prague (it was December) there was already snow, and I came to Florida and it was really nice weather. So I enjoyed that and thought ‘Oh, this is a perfect country to live.”
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.
]]>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.
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.
“My mother was never able to join the Communist Party because, even though she was leftist, she was suspected by the Czech communists of being a U.S. informer, which was a very awkward situation because she was in fact suspected by the U.S. government also of being a leftist-leaning communist – not suspect – they knew she was a leftist-leaning communist. So she was caught kind of in a catch-22. But because of her own beliefs, and I think because, interestingly enough, I think that the American communists were in some ways the most fervent, but the most naïve at the same time. And also I think because she had given up a lot. She left her home in the United States and as she went through the 1950s in communist Czechoslovakia she also had to give up her U.S. citizenship under duress, and so she, at that point, had to make the decision that she would possibly never return here, and I think in making that decision, she kind of went wholeheartedly for her beliefs over her country.
“Whereas my father was in a different situation because he was at home. So whatever happened there, there was nowhere else to go. There was no possible fallback position; this was the ultimate position and he chose to be much more of a dissident, in a way, than my mother because my mother couldn’t give up the hope. I think communism became almost like a religion to her. She really couldn’t give it up. And so we were brought up in this slightly bipolar household. Not completely, because my mother was very intelligent and of course she understood the subtleties, but she would always be genuinely questioning ‘If you are being so critical, are you actually trying to do things that would improve things?’ Whereas my father was much more cynical in the Czech way and he really, I think, stopped believing after 1968.”
“Because I was at school and I had opportunity to do some interpreting, I did that, but of course that got me into further trouble – not really trouble, but further conflict – with the regime. The communist government always worried about the people that were on the forefront of the contact between the West and the East and of course they were the people they could either use or abuse, or different things could happen in those situations. There were not that many of those people and they tried it with everyone, I assume. So they kind of came to me. A secret policeman showed up one day. The first time it happened I was completely in shock because I didn’t even understand what was happening. I was working at a summer job in a little chicken rotisserie place off of Wenceslas Square and I got this job interpreting for a European basketball championship where some amateur American team was going to come in and I was going to be an interpreter for them, but also for everybody else. And this guy comes into this store where I was working with the chickens and he basically said ‘Look, I am from the secret police and I need to talk to you after you finish work today. So I tried to think about what would be the best thing for me to do and I thought ‘Ok, I’ll just be quiet and I’ll say that I’m willing to listen but I’m not willing to say anything right now.’ They tried to be kind of jovial, which was also very strange, and we went to this little café called The Mouse and it was right near the place where I was working, and I remember sitting there in this t-shirt and the sweat running down my arms but I didn’t want to let on, so I kept trying to smile and be polite but not say anything.
“That was the first encounter, but I had several more of them because they would come after me asking me would I work with them? Would I just tell them; they didn’t want anything really bad; they just wanted basic information, where people were and when they were coming and going and things like that. And I said ‘Look, I don’t really feel comfortable. I would prefer not to do this, this is not something I want to do.’ And then they would always start saying, ‘Well, we know that your father is in a precarious job at the State Pedagogical Publishing House and we know that your brother is trying to get into the school of architecture and we can help…or not.’ So it became very difficult.”
“We were living in this house that was called ‘The Hotel House’ [hotelový dům] I guess, and it was basically a building that was designed and built for foreigners to live in. That of course meant that it was thoroughly bugged. It had a doorman downstairs. There were no phones in any of the apartments that had an outside line; there was only a buzzer downstairs to the door and to the doorman, and the doorman had the only phone. It wasn’t even a public pay phone; it was just a phone. There was a public pay phone in the vestibule, but you could only call locally. For example, if my in-laws were calling from the United States, they had to call the downstairs of thehotelový dům and the doorman, who spoke no English – which I always marvel at how they were watching us if these people didn’t speak a foreign language; they spoke a little German, I think – and that person would buzz you upstairs to say you had a phone call and you had to go downstairs eight floors to get the phone. Of course, ‘yes’ in Czech is ano and for short people say ano, no, no, no, and so the doorman would get on the phone and he would say, ‘Yes, Stephen Garrow, ano, no, no, no’ and the Americans thought they were saying ‘No,’ so they hung up. So by the time you got downstairs they would have hung up. It was like a comedy of errors.”
“There was a lot of rather humiliating paperwork. Some of it was just paperwork and some of it was stupid paperwork, like the government required that you make a list of all your possessions that you take out and you tell them how much they were worth when you purchased them and how much they are worth now, and that included everything including your underwear and all personal items. And they sent somebody to examine that and to close your suitcases for you and to seal them, and you couldn’t leave the country with those suitcases unless they were still sealed. For example, when we were leaving, I was pregnant and some of our friends gave us baby clothes and I couldn’t take that with me because they said I had no baby so I couldn’t bring the clothing. It was all really a kind of harassment I suppose.
“We drove out of the country through southern Bohemia and into Austria. That was a little bit weird. It was difficult. Everything seemed so finite at the time. It’s very hard to even think about it now because it is so different now and it is so easy to go back and forth and there isn’t any sense that something can be so finite. There was a gate – I don’t know what it’s called in English. It’s like what they used to have at the railroad crossing; they used to be made out of poles and they would just go down – and that’s what they had the border and it would close and you drove out and you felt like I just left everything I knew behind me. There was no easy way to go back and that was very difficult. You had to apply for paperwork with the same idiots that you just got paperwork to get out from, and that was the toughest time, I think, for me.”
“I have to say that there are some things I look at today with hindsight and I think to myself that we had certain privileges that we didn’t understand. We were completely shielded from a media culture. We were taught to question almost every message that we received from the outside which, while exhausting to live like that, it can also be very rewarding and I think it breeds a greater curiosity about the world around you. It was also easier somehow to become more involved because there was a greater cause; there seemed to be a greater need. It was like, ‘Ok, if we don’t get rid of this government, nobody will.’ Or, ‘If we don’t get rid of it or if we don’t vote with our feet and leave, it will not happen.’ Whereas here, when I look at my daughter’s generation and I think how relatively few of those young people that I knew were involved politically, compared to my generation. I always question what are all the benefits? It’s a much more complex situation. It becomes a much more complex situation.”
“The transition was not easy. It was such a time of trying to figure out how do you make a new government with people who were very educated and everything, but who were not necessarily prepared for these jobs. It was an interesting time to be around. I remember, for example, one of the people that I interpreted for, when Lithuania became its own country, separating from the Soviet Union which actually happened while we were, in Czechoslovakia, running up towards our first free elections in June of 1990, and they elected the first president and his name was Vytautas Landsbergis, and he was a musicologist and he was like Havel who was a playwright, and he was not necessarily being groomed for years to be president; he was a dissident musicologist. He came to Prague and you were talking to these people who still had one foot in a different world and one foot about to step on the world stage. It was very emotionally charged in a way. You were kind of operating on this raw energy, and I knew many of these people because they were friends of my family or friends of friends of my family, and we knew them from this underground, dissident environment where we were in the opposition, and all of the sudden the opposition becomes the ruling party. It’s a little difficult, and not everybody can make that transition.
“I will never forget that one of the smartest people who I think is in that group has never really emerged to be any great political figure in Czechoslovakia, Jan Urban, and I remember very early on thinking ‘Why didn’t he run for president?’ I was working with my friend Peter Green and we were together having a beer with Jan Urban and a couple other people, and somebody said to Urban ‘Why aren’t you running’ for something, and he said ‘I don’t do well in those jobs. I think I have a disposition to the opposition and I don’t feel like I can change.’ So it was very interesting.”
“My dream was always to work in the arts. I originally thought that I really wanted to work in the theatre. That I wanted to combine my ability to speak both languages and be a translator but, specifically, also a dramaturg who adapts texts for the theatre. That avenue, it became clear, was not available to me in Czechoslovakia, and when I got to the States, I really didn’t pursue it further because I needed to make a living and I became interested in finding out how I could best do that. The easiest way for me, it seemed, was to find a connection through my ability to speak another language or understand the communist world and the United States and speak two languages that gave me the greatest earning power and the most interesting jobs.”
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 gymnázium. Later Lubomir attended gymnáziums 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.
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.
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.
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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 gymnázium. Later Lubomir attended gymnáziums 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.
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.
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.
“I did not really like school too much at that particular time of my life. And part of the reason was that in our educational system, pupils were told what to think, what to say and how to say it – all in the atmosphere of fear, which, you can imagine, is quite detrimental to authentic learning. The teachers were, in my opinion and in the opinion of many, excessively authoritarian. Education served as a powerful instrument of oppression in the hands of those who, through the process of social engineering, wanted to bring ‘heaven to earth.’ Our individuality was suppressed; uniformity was expected. I think it was during these early years I subconsciously began to abhor all of forms of oppression and all kinds of domination and I began to rebel against the system.”
“When I grew up I thought I would never be able to visit non-socialist countries even though the Austrian border was not too far from where I used to live. But when I was a junior at high school, an unprecedented event took place in the world which directly impacted my future life. In 1989, as you know, communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, and I joined hands with thousands of other students in a peaceful march for freedom. And I especially and still quite vividly remember participating in the general strike that took place on November 27, 1989, in the city of Žilina, where I lived at that particular time.”
“I came with a single purpose in mind, namely, to learn and adequately prepare myself for what I believed was God’s call on my life. Ten years later, I received a post-graduate degree in theology from Harvard University. In order for me to pursue my education in the United States and at the same time provide for my family, I worked. And I worked as a librarian, landscaper, custodian, translator, security guard, teaching assistant, instructor and a minister in two churches in New England, and probably some other jobs I have done that I have forgotten. One can also think about the hundreds of hours I studied immigration law in order to find ways to remain in this country legally. I can think of traveling over six hundred times from Smithfield, Rhode Island, to Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue my education. One can speak about a battle with serious illness and various disappointments that I had to overcome on this rather adventurous journey. So it has not always been easy but I believe it has been a worthy endeavor, and I consider my decision to leave for the United States in 1995 to be one of the best and most important decisions of my life.”