Miro Medek
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
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George Mesko
<p>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).</p><p> </p><p>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 <em>The Silent Conspiracy</em> (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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p>
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
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