At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
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Miro Medek was born in Prague in 1944, but moved with his family to Vrútky in northern Slovakia when he was two years old. His father, also named Miroslav, was a mechanical engineer while his mother, Marie, a former factory worker, stayed home with Miro and his sister Irena. Miro says the political situation in Czechoslovakia led to tensions between his parents, as his father leaned towards more capitalist ideas and his mother supported the Communist Party; however, he says that his mother eventually became disillusioned with the Communist regime. When Miro was a teenager, his father was arrested for ‘reintroducing capitalist enterprise’ and sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mines for one year.
At school, Miro was an avid volleyball player and was named to the roster of the Slovak national youth team. Upon graduation from technical high school in Zvolen, Miro was invited to attend university to study physical education, but decided to take a job as a draftsman at a railroad depot. He served in the Czechoslovak Army for two years, and then began studying political economy at the College of Economics in Bratislava in 1965. Miro also received a graduate degree in business management and postgraduate degree in systems engineering. While he was at university, Miro witnessed the liberalization that would eventually mark the Prague Spring in 1968 and says that, because of this, it was a great time for him to be studying his disciplines as they had access to information and teaching styles from the West. Miro also spent some time abroad in 1968, hitch-hiking through western Europe. He was in Yugoslavia during the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of that year, and although he considered staying out of the country, he decided to return to Czechoslovakia to finish his studies. He subsequently spent the next ten years attempting to get visas to travel abroad.
Miro graduated from university at the top of his class, but says he had trouble finding a job. He worked as a bricklayer for five months before one of his professors secured him a position in the IT department of Slovnaft, an oil refinery in Bratislava. Eventually, he joined a newly formed Institute for Systems Engineering. In 1978, Miro was able to obtain travel visas for himself, his wife, and their two children for a vacation in Yugoslavia; while there, he applied for travel visas to Greece. The Medeks stayed in a refugee camp in Greece for close to one year as, even though Miro’s father (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the U.S.) was sponsoring them, they had left the country with no documentation. The Medeks arrived in Washington, D.C. in April 1979. One week later, Miro’s wife gave birth to their third child. Due to his professional experience, Miro was working as a systems engineer within two weeks of arriving. He first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, right after the fall of communism, an event which he says he ‘didn’t believe… would happen in my lifetime.’ Today, Miro is retired and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia.
“I played guitar. When I was about 14, I went to work for a summer in a cinderblock factory. It was hard work, but I made some money and bought my guitar. That’s also a time when I met a lot of people. You look, it’s a cinderblock factory, but everybody was an ex-professor, ex-teacher, ex-accountant, because they lost their job and the only thing they could do was doing manual labor. So that was another thought, ‘Now hold on just a minute, this is not right.”
“My father was always kind of enterprising, and what happened is he was a mechanical engineer taking care of construction machinery. At that point in time, there was a problem. They had a high rate of breakage, and he came up with an invention how to grease and maintain those things. And he was talking to everybody ‘Please start doing this,’ even going to the Ministry somewhere in Prague, but nobody wanted to do it. So he decided ‘Ok, I’m going to do it on my own.’ And he did. Except eventually, he was jailed and sentenced for reintroducing capitalist enterprise. So he spent I think about a year in jail in Jáchymov, in those uranium mines. And he was so good of an engineer that even when he was in jail he tried to make things better, ‘How can you do this better?’ So, as a matter of fact, they even let him out early for good behavior.”
“I went through college and then graduate school in a very good time. I started in ’65. In a couple of years, the Prague Spring started, and you could see it in schools. Suddenly it was open. They taught pretty much a more Western style. I got my undergraduate degree in political economy, graduate degree in business management, and postgraduate in systems engineering, and those were all things they pretty much taught Western style management, and I knew more about the stock market than people in the U.S., and systems engineering as a discipline – it was more related to what I did when I finished university – it was not so well-known even in the U.S. It started to be taught some ten years later, kind of building big systems and things like that. So that’s why I’m saying that it was a good time; because at the same time, the Prague Spring started at that time. There were a lot of new ideas.”
“We were very much in touch with what was going on, and I knew some people who signed it and things like that. But what was happening – I guess it was happening at every company – everybody had an interview and was asked ‘Sign this document that you do not agree with it Charter 77.’ I had a problem, so again I opened my mouth, and I eventually signed it, but I put ‘Signed under duress’ or something like that. That was an additional reason they were kind of saying ‘Well, you’re not going anywhere in your career.’ We had copies distributed. We had a copy of it; it was an underground copy, but yeah, we had it.”
“We were trying to go [to America] on – I don’t know what kind of visa it is – but reunion of family, because my father was already in the U.S. and he was a naturalized citizen at the time. But we needed my birth certificate and all the kids’ certificates to be able to prove that I’m his son and these are really my kids and we didn’t know that, we didn’t have anything. My family sent us photocopies; that was not good enough, it had to be originals. Finally, my family sent it through somebody who went to Greece. Well, the scumbag asked for a lot of money for doing that, but never delivered. My father started threatening that he’s going to put Interpol on it. Eventually, we got the documentation that we needed, but it took close to a year. Other people sometimes left after four months and were on the way to the U.S. or Australia. We’d been there for a year.”
“Those were not easy times, because when we moved in, we didn’t have anything. You wanted to cook dinner, we don’t have a pan, we don’t have any plates and things. So everything you had to buy. We came really with a pair of t-shirts and jeans for each of us. So you had to buy from scratch and start from scratch. Friends of my father gave us some tables. We bought a mattress to sleep on and stuff like that, but it took time until you set yourself up. We didn’t have anything.”
“We went to a few meetings with people, and I didn’t like one aspect of it. You had generations of immigrants – some people came during WWII, some people came after ’48 when it changed, then some people came in between, and then ’68 was another move, and then we came in ’78. Now what I didn’t like much was that people living in the U.S. were trying to tell me how it is, when I just came from there and knew. Their view was totally skewed because they – well, we didn’t like what was happening either – but they knew, ‘We know everything and this is what it should be like,’ and it was more like they were angry at the system, and I didn’t want to deal with that much. Especially, I didn’t want to talk so bad about the country back home, because then I would be talking bad about my family who is still there, about my friends who are still there, so I kind of avoided that for that reason.”
Upon graduation shortly after the War, George began his studies in Bratislava at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University, where he remained for six years. He has written a book about the atmosphere he remembers at the medical school in the early 1950s, entitled The Silent Conspiracy (published in both Slovak and English). Following university, George returned to Košice to work at the city’s children’s hospital. This job was followed by stints at the children’s hospital in Sliač and then back in Bratislava. In 1960, George married his wife, Judith; the couple had both a civil ceremony and a church wedding in secret in Budapest, he says. At the time of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, George was on holiday in Yugoslavia with his wife and two children. In light of the invasion, the family decided not to go home.
A leading cardiologist, George accepted an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship in Tübingen, where he and his family subsequently stayed for ten months. In 1969, the Meskos came to Boston, when George was offered a position at Harvard Medical School. Twenty years later, George set up the Heart to Heart Foundation with other members of the Slovak-American Cultural Center – an institution based in New York City. The fund sponsored, among other things, study visits for Slovak healthcare professionals abroad. George retired in 1996. He now lives in McLean, Virginia, and devotes much of his time to writing, primarily about 20th-century Slovak history.
]]>George Mesko was born in Košice in March 1928. His father worked as a senior official on the Košice-Bohumín Railway, while his mother stayed at home and looked after George and his older sisters. With the signing of the First Vienna Arbitration in 1938, the Mesko family found itself living in Hungary as Košice was handed over to Regent Miklós Horthy. The family made plans to move to Vrútky, Slovakia, where they had relatives, but George’s father had a stroke and so the family remained in Košice for the duration of the War. In 1944, George and the other 16-year-old males in Košice were summoned to Germany to man the country’s understaffed factories. George did not end up going as he suffered a serious allergic reaction shortly before being dispatched, which his mother then used as a reason to send him to Slovakia to convalesce with relatives (and therefore avoid enlistment).
Upon graduation shortly after the War, George began his studies in Bratislava at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University, where he remained for six years. He has written a book about the atmosphere he remembers at the medical school in the early 1950s, entitled The Silent Conspiracy (published in both Slovak and English). Following university, George returned to Košice to work at the city’s children’s hospital. This job was followed by stints at the children’s hospital in Sliač and then back in Bratislava. In 1960, George married his wife, Judith; the couple had both a civil ceremony and a church wedding in secret in Budapest, he says. At the time of the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, George was on holiday in Yugoslavia with his wife and two children. In light of the invasion, the family decided not to go home.
A leading cardiologist, George accepted an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship in Tübingen, where he and his family subsequently stayed for ten months. In 1969, the Meskos came to Boston, when George was offered a position at Harvard Medical School. Twenty years later, George set up the Heart to Heart Foundation with other members of the Slovak-American Cultural Center – an institution based in New York City. The fund sponsored, among other things, study visits for Slovak healthcare professionals abroad. George retired in 1996. He now lives in McLean, Virginia, and devotes much of his time to writing, primarily about 20th-century Slovak history.
“Then came the Viennese Arbitrage, you know, and then Košice on November 11, I think, fell to Hungary – and we were packing to go to Slovakia, you know, as [we were] of Slovakian origin. But my father had a stroke, you know. And he was paralyzed for one and a half years. So we went nowhere. We had to switch allegiance or whatever, and we stayed in Hungary until 1945 – that means in Košice, you know. Because this is not the only… many towns changed state; it was Austro-Hungary before, then it was Czechoslovakia, then it was Hungary and then again back Czechoslovakia. And the citizens stayed there, because that was there home.”
“I don’t know, you know we were, at that time when the screws were kind of tightened up with food… and like many of my professors at school were taken to the army. Then the two high schools were connected because there were not enough professors, you know. So the fourth year and the fifth year of the high school – especially the fifth year – was kind of shaky. And then 1944 – then it was tough, you know. Then it was tough.”
“I had a very good position at the children’s hospital in Bratislava and so… but then we went for vacation, to Yugoslavia, you know. And after we finished vacation we came to Belgrade on August 19, 1968 with two small children – daughter two, son five. And the 20th or 21st, we were ready to go home. And we were living with a friend and he went to the market to buy some fruit for the kids, and suddenly all the microphones in the city of Belgrade were sounding ‘Invasion, invasion, invasion, blah, blah, blah’ and we did not know what is going on! Well, my friend told me ‘Well, you go nowhere – the Soviet Army, the Warsaw-Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. My God! We didn’t have any money! Just for gasoline! But, when I was in Bratislava, I was teaching cardiology to Yugoslav doctors from Belgrade… Náhoda [coincidence]… And so I went after them and they told me, you know, ‘Listen, we need you.’ The Party and the union had a meeting. ‘We’ll give you a monthly payment ahead and you will start to work with machines.’ And I really did. I did diagnostics and whatever.
“But, you know, there were tremendous demonstrations in Belgrade. The Yugoslavs were fantastic. There were a couple of thousand, I don’t know, 50,000 Slovaks and Czechs in that area because people were coming up from the sea, you know, going home. This was the end of August, the end of vacation. They gave gasoline to people, food, lodging, you know, everything – hat down! They were extremely helpful. And, the funny thing is, I went to a demonstration with my wife and there was half of the Czechoslovak government! Šik was there, Hájek was there – I don’t know who else, you know, all on a balcony all, and we were all chanting, you know!”
“That was the so-called kádrovanie, you know the sort of political… x-ray, you know, who you really are. But the funny thing is, they didn’t find out who you really are. I was lucky that my father was dead. If my father was not dead, I am out of medical school. You know, that’s what your origins are – you know, your belief, your religion – this is what counts. If you were not on their side, on the left side then, that’s it.”
“Well I was married… we just celebrated, with my wife, our 50th anniversary. I was married in Banská Bystrica and they knew in Sliač that I was a Catholic, so they were snooping [to find out] when I am going to go to church. And so in November we went, with my wife, to a congress in Budapest, you know, and I had there an aunt of second, third degree, and she arranged that we were married in church, in secret, in Budapest, where the altar boys were our witnesses. And our son was baptized in secret in Banská Štiavnica, you know, in a small town in Southern Slovakia – a beautiful little town – and our daughter was baptized in Modrý kostolík in Bratislava, it was kind of not a big deal. But they were all baptized.
“You just go to some kind of remote town where nobody knows. And we went to the church, we knocked on the priest’s door, and I told him that we have a two month-old son and that we would like to baptize him. And the priest had his sister there as a housekeeper, and so she was the godmother, and he baptized him, so that’s how. And I think he wrote a certificate or something like that, you know.”
“It started with a bouquet of flowers. You know, I go here to my cardiologist. He is paid, but on Christmas, he got a bottle of Bordeaux. But I am not corrupting him, I just express my gratitude. But this kind of gratitude which was in
Košice a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of wine… when a babka [old woman] came from, I don’t know, Palárikovo or whatever, so she gave you a chicken. But this was not there to corrupt you, but to be thankful to the doc. But it degenerated. That’s where the problem is, you know? And when in Bratislava somebody needs a bypass, before the euro, I have a Canadian friend and he paid 30,000 koruny, you know, extra. But this started under Communists – you know – I should correct [that]… it degenerated under the Communists. That’s how I would look at it.”