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389b5ea98980feb69253e1a98e093da2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>History Lessons</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LcTnKiNtHQk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>My grandpa basically taught me about civilization or taught me history lessons because my parents wouldn’t dare to tell me anything.</p><p> </p><p></p><h4>Design School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bRsq_AD5ulo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“One interesting point when I was studying design and I worked as a night-shift monotype operator, I had to sign paperwork that [said] whatever I type, I wouldn’t share that information with anybody else. So I was a fairly sarcastic young guy, 20 years old; what do I care? So I signed the paperwork and I was just chuckling like ‘What is this all about?’ And I’ll never forget, and I’m always telling my clientele now, how silly it was and what a joy it is to live in a free society. For instance, in September, because the production of all magazines took a long time – six weeks, eight weeks –</p><p>It had to be done that way, ‘Mr. so-and-so, <em>Soudruh </em>[Comrade] Novák, won 98 or 99.2 percent of the vote, blah blah blah,’ and it was all bull because it couldn’t possibly happen, and that’s the only way production was done. Magazines were printed and everybody was happy. And it was all fake. It was all a big joke.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oKPojc9vQoU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I first forged a letter to the Socialist Youth. The letter was from the director of the school on behalf of Jiří Barta, because I was such a good boy and I participated in some exhibition on behalf of the Communist Party, and as a reward I was rewarded to go to Amsterdam for a field trip and to go to museums and gather information for the school. Signed by the director. I had the stamp; I had a perfect letterhead; everything was just the way the school was communicating.</p><p>I gave it to a guy from the Socialist Youth. He didn’t understand how I had gotten this permit from the director but, hey this is signed. He didn’t question it, and then it was like a snowball. Nobody checked anything and from the Socialist Youth, they said okay. It went here, they said okay. It went to the army, they said okay. From there, it went to the Communist Party and they said okay. And I was waiting and waiting and it was already like three months and I was thinking ‘Well, either I’m going to get a passport and so-called <em>devizový příslib</em> [permit to withdraw foreign currency] from the bank or police will show up by my door.’ Well, I was called and I don’t remember exactly what office it was, but they gave me a passport and they gave me a <em>doložka</em> for ten days in Amsterdam.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rp2Sz19ittU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I went through several shocks. In 1968, it started so well.</p><p>when all of the sudden everyone was carrying flags and people were all together and ‘We are in it together.’ That was the feeling I had in spring 1968. There was even a movement of collecting gold to come up with a treasury for the Czech Republic. People were donating money, because we felt that something really nice is going to happen and we will have democracy and this nonsense will end. Well, it ended on August 21. So that was kind of shocking to me, and I definitely</p><p>made up my mind that I’m leaving the country. At home we had maps and we had globes, and I’d look at the globe and here’s Europe and I looked at Czechoslovakia and I said ‘Okay, what’s on the other side’ and I turned it around and [said] ‘Oh, not bad. California.’ And I said ‘That’s exactly where I want to end up. As far away from this nonsense.’ And another reason was that I wanted to change cultures. I didn’t want to be a neighbor. I didn’t want to be in the neighborhood of Czechoslovakia. I wanted to completely forget, like it didn’t exist, because when I was leaving, I believed that I’ll never ever be able to go back, because I always told people, ‘Hey, those guys? They don’t have a chance. Unless something happens in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia is finished for generations.’ Well I was wrong. Anyway, that would explain why I’m living in California.”</p><h4>Proud to be Czech</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dwjOCe2Qnfs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>If anything, it makes you richer. It makes you a little different. Even now, and I am always taking advantage of it because I have an accent, people like it. People like that there is something different. Sometimes I’ll tell them ‘Hey, I was born in L.A.; it’s all fake.’ There is something about heritage that people should keep it. Again, you have nothing to lose. You are only adding to your culture.”</p><h4>Visiting Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UH3lZS1oKtk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We try to go to the Czech Republic several times a year and it’s great. What they did in Prague is a miracle. I remember Prague – again, it’s nostalgic – it’s a town that at any given time was black and white. There was no color; it was all doom and gloom; it was Franz Kafka.</p><p>Now you go there and I take pictures even of their sidewalks because their sidewalks are a mosaic of white marble. I want to do a book of their sidewalks and compare it San Francisco because, boy, this town could get a lesson. It’s pretty amazing what they did in the Czech Republic. I’m very happy.”</p>
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Title
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Jerry Barta
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="alignleft wp-image-1706 size-full" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170906235201im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/jerry-barta-bw.png" alt="jerry-barta-bw" width="226" height="272" /></p><p>Jerry Barta was born in Prague in 1950. He grew up in the Dejvice district of the city with his parents and two brothers. His mother Dagmar worked as an accountant while his father Josef held a number of jobs, including as a cartographer and a teacher. Jerry says his family’s food supply was augmented by produce and meat sent by his grandparents, who lived in the country. After Jerry finished high school, he hoped to study architecture but he says that he did not have the background or connections to be admitted to any programs. He instead trained to become a typographer. Although a serious motorcycle accident interrupted his studies, Jerry finished a program for industrial design and packaging. While studying, he worked nights as a typesetter. After graduating, he began working as a graphic designer and became a teaching assistant at the Václav Hollar Art School. Jerry says that he had been hoping to leave the country since the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. In 1974, after several years of being denied a travel visa, he decided to take a ‘calculated risk’ and forged a letter from the director of the school where he was working stating that he was being sent to Amsterdam as a reward for participating in a state art exhibition. Because of this forged letter, Jerry received a travel visa and money for ten days in Amsterdam, and he left the country in the fall of 1974.</p><p> </p><p>Jerry and his then-fiancé (who was also able to obtain a visa) stayed with friends in Amsterdam for several months before traveling to Germany where they applied for asylum and began the process of moving to the United States. The couple were sent to Zirndorf refugee camp for two months and then lived in an apartment while awaiting their paperwork. They arrived in Los Angeles in September 1975 and stayed with Jerry’s distant relatives. Jerry found a job in a print shop but, several weeks later, decided to move to the San Francisco area after a cousin invited him for a visit. He worked as a typographer for a small printing company and eventually became manager of the firm. In 1985, Jerry opened his own studio called Master Type in San Francisco and today owns the company Pacific Digital Image. He (with his wife and daughter) returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time just a few months before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989; now, Jerry says he visits as often as possible. He lives in Danville, California, with his wife.</p>
Creator
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National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
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NCSML Archive
1968
Arts
Cultural Traditions
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Sense of identity
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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a7dcddf3022112749f278083edee4d80
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Boy Scout</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hybyyIWuyGY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“After the War yes, both my brother and I were very avid Boy Scouts, and I would say that the Boy Scout aspect in my growing until 1948, ’50 actually, was perhaps one of the most important influences on my life. Both the ideals and… of course, the Boy Scout movement in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia was different than here. It was – in the United States it is a sort of organization of the fathers more than of the boys – in Czechoslovakia, the parents were completely excluded from it. And so the young children would have total autonomy. And I happened to be very fortunate, because my brother was older, I always would have friends that were about four years older or something, and so they were carrying me like a little puppy with them and I benefitted enormously and so I was actually more involved with the older children.</p><p>“In 1948, when the Communists took power, that was one of the first organizations that they were trying to eliminate. They didn’t close it overnight, but they made many limitations and eventually they did close it. And, at that time, my father, who was getting old and had only about four years to retirement, determined very smartly that it was time to move the family away from Liberec.</p><p>“They did make in Liberec a major trial with the Boy Scouts. They were all jailed and the Boy Scout group of ours was disbanded and that was very unfortunate, but I was not part of it, because we were already away from the city.”</p><h4>Tradition</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YdD7U17mWeY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Although people today like to speak about how horrible it was under the communists and how persecuted they were, often they are exaggerating also. And I was… I must say that, religion was not that persecuted. We were, I was, having my first communion when I was 14 years old at the highest communist time in 1951. I should add when I said that though, that after the communion, which was a beautiful May day in Aš, we came out of the church and the – I don’t want to say priest, I’m not sure what word I should use for the evangelic – pastor was jailed, right away. There were police who brought him to the car and took him away and then they said that he did something criminal, which is probably not true but…So, it was bad, but we were able to have our communion fine and we were going to the church and throughout the whole regime – actually when I was at high school later on in Čáslav, that was the most difficult time of communist rule – there people could voluntarily take Catholic religion in high school, so we all turned into Catholics then and did go to the Catholic lessons just to demonstrate that we were not going to be taking everything as was at that time necessary.”</p><h4>Soviet Dogma</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8CIZub-KvCY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were some – the Russian scientists Michurin or Olga Lepeshinskaya – they were complete crooks, they were claiming they can make life from useless material and all that which was nonsense. But Stalin supported it and it was a dogma that was to be accepted in Czechoslovakia also. So people like this Ferdinand Herčík or Soudek – these people that were teaching me – did have to pay lip-service to it as much as during the War we had to in the schools greet [the teacher] with ‘Heil Hitler!’ But we all somehow, the Czechs learned how to… what is right and what is not, and we were able to read what is correct and what is not.”</p><h4>Blocked Science</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3UniOtaAfF8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“The university that I was going to was the place where the first greatest geneticist Gregor Mendel, who today is considered to be the father of genetics, had been. His teaching was completely forbidden, it was considered by the communists… it was called ‘the reactionary Mendel-Morgan theories.’ Because Stalin didn’t want heritage to be important. They wanted that indoctrination was more important than genetics. So Mendel, whom we all know about, was forbidden at that time. But you know everybody was paying a little bit lip-service, and nobody really took it seriously.”</p><h4>America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1rjw0FD_bX8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was born and I knew that I was going to the United States, without any communists or anybody else. In fact, my wife’s father was at one point showing movies in this little village that they were living in. And he gave us a private performance of Kazan’s movie <em>America, America</em> – I don’t know if you saw that movie, which is about a little Turkish boy who has it in his fate to go to America and he goes through all sorts of things and he would kill, he would betray his wife to get the money for [his boat] and everything too, and he eventually gets to America and is happy there. And when we went through that movie I told my father-in-law, I said ‘Father you see? The same way I’m going to America with Mila.’ And he was very upset of course, naturally, we already had two little children. But I said that, so I felt.</p><p>“But it was also a very natural thing in my work that, at the time what I was working on, I could not do in the Czech Republic, then I couldn’t even do it in Germany anymore, so I went for this Cleveland Clinic in order to be able to continue with my own work. So in order to continue and keep myself in my profession, it is somewhat like with sportspeople – if you want to be a good tennis player you have to play, and so I had to be in those institutions doing those experiments and this, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.</p><p>“And the other thing was of course the aspect of the Russians, and with the invasion we really expected that the Russians are really going to impose their… Russify Czechoslovakia. And then, of course, we did expect the same thing in Germany.”</p><h4>Family</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2OZOTGyeFpo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I saved enough that we would have a vacation together, bought a Chevy Impala convertible for 500 bucks, went to Earl Scheib where they sprayed any color you want for $27.79 – so I painted it gold, to make an impression on my wife and children, and we made a rendezvous in Denver. My wife was flying from Frankfurt with the kids for eight hours, I think, via New York. And I was driving the Chevy Impala convertible for three days to get to Denver at the same hour, which was quite nice. And then we made six weeks’ vacation, I had four weeks and then I made some lectures in the congresses in Kansas City and in New Hampshire. And so we put it into, we incorporated it into the vacation and we made a figure of eight through the United States – coast to coast – in six weeks. It was many, many thousand miles. And this sealed it, that when we came to Kennedy Airport then, the kids said ‘We are not going to some stupid Germany, we are going to stay here!’”</p><h4>Considered German</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/anxZYqWx5FQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“They considered them German, so their American school-mates called them ‘Krauts,’ and they were even fighting them occasionally, so we had to tell them that they are not German. And on the other hand, there were a lot of Germans here in the community who thought that we were genuine German and they came to us and offered us all sorts of help, and they were very nice people and we have a lot of friendships. And after all we were, at that time, more than one hour driving distance from Chicago, so we didn’t have any communication with the Czech community. Only several years later, we started to go to the Czech places like Cicero and Berwyn, we discovered the Czech bakeries, but we really were not searching for it.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John Jaroslav Kyncl
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Jaroslav Kyncl was born in Prague on August 16, 1936. He spent his early childhood in the northern Bohemian town of Liberec, where his father, Jan Kynčl, was the president of the local branch of Živnostenská banka. In 1939, following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, the family was thrown out of Liberec and moved to Německý Brod (nowadays Havlíčkův Brod), where the Kynčls spent the duration of the War. They returned to Liberec in 1945, but moved away again three years later following the Communist coup, when Jaroslav’s father ‘bartered’ his post at the bank in Liberec for a more modest position out of the spotlight in Aš. Jaroslav attended secondary school in Aš, Cheb and then Čáslav before beginning his studies at Masaryk University in Brno in 1954. In 1961, Jaroslav moved to Prague, where he started his pharmacological research, developing new drugs in collaboration with the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the company SPOFA. In this same year he married his wife, <a href="/web/20170609132740/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/mila-kyncl/">Mila Kyncl</a>.</p><p> </p><p>In May 1968, Jaroslav was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to deliver some lectures on the work that he was doing. He was urged by one of his hosts, Dr. Hans Heller – himself a Czech émigré – to ‘put his papers in order’ in the event that Soviet troops were to invade Czechoslovakia and put a halt to the Prague Spring. Dr. Kyncl, his wife and two children duly left Czechoslovakia for Austria a week after the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. The family spent a brief period as refugees in Vienna before Jaroslav was offered an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.</p><p> </p><p>In 1971, Jaroslav came to America alone, to accept a research position at the Cleveland Clinic. Upon securing a job one year later at Abbott Laboratories in Lake Bluff, Illinois, Jaroslav moved to the Chicago area with his family, where he has lived ever since. Among other professional accomplishments, he is credited with inventing the drug Hytrin, the first medicine to treat BPH (a frequent and serious prostate condition). An art enthusiast, Jaroslav focuses on archiving and promoting the work of Czech exile artists in particular. To this end, he has made a documentary about the late poet and artist Jiří Kolář and operates a small non-commercial exhibition space, called Gallery 500ft².</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arts
Caslav
Education
Healthcare professionals
Jiri Kolar
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Zivnostenka banka
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bbf4977e269f90891414ff77d32b2c37
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Livestock</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sGcnAb1jyrY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe>
<p>“My daddy got one horse which was carrying soldiers for years during WWII. And because my village was situated only seven kilometers (that was four and a half or five miles) from an airport, the horse was trained that once there was an airplane in the air, [it] would run into the ditch and lay down, you know, not to get hurt. So my daddy tried to use the horse for agricultural work and I remember that the horse was carrying I think hay or something, and then an airplane came so he just pulled everything into the ditch and we experienced this kind of funny disaster. So the horse was, for agricultural work, absolutely worthless, because every time an airplane was in the air, he was just running away. It was funny.”</p>
<h4>Military Doctor</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hxzWtIu6yII?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>“At the time, the Army was looking for new doctors in the Czech Republic, and the Czechs were a little bit unfamiliar with Slovak conditions so they didn’t care [about Ladislav’s background] – and there was a parity, there was 25 percent Slovaks, 75 percent Czechs who had to get ready to be a military doctor. So I fitted into that 25 percent, and so I moved to the Czech Republic and I studied medical school to be a military doctor until 1968, when we found out that to serve the Communist Army… We became again newly occupied by the Russian forces… So we somehow – many of us – only 12 from the entire group of 120 students, only 12 stayed as military doctors, the rest of us transferred to medical school. I was almost done, I was ready to go into the fifth year of medical school, and so I finished in Charles University in Prague, not far from Hradec Králové, which was a city with a medical school preparing doctors for the military.”</p>
<h4>Diploma</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U-phNJC_6y0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>“I have a diploma in Marxism-Leninism. I was vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department so, as one of the top positioned physicians, I had to be well educated in politics. So Marxism – the philosophy and economy and whatever else comes… I had to go and take a state exam at the state board, and I have a diploma in political sciences now.”<br /><strong><br /></strong><em>Can you tell me about studying for that? Was that in a night school where you had to go and study Marxism and Leninism?</em></p>
<p>“Yes, it was a night school, it was like continuous education. But the basic stuff, even in medical school, from when I started in 1964 ‘til 1968, we had except from medical classes, we had to take always… first it was history of Marxism and Leninism, so it was first and second year at medical schools. We took classes and then the exam eventually. Then it was political economy – I think that was in the second year. Then it was… I forget, but in 1968, everything ended. Eventually it was implemented again in the ‘70s – during Husák’s era – but I was out of school by that time.”</p>
<h4>Medical Studies</h4>
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<p>“I think that medicine was the only science that was not too influenced or penetrated by those dangerous, stupid ideas because even big communist shots needed occasionally doctors. Teachers, my wife was a teacher, [they had] trouble, because they had to teach and preach different kinds of stupid ideas, but in medicine it was not… If it came to it in medicine – to real pain, to a real appendix – there is not too much politics. So we were a little bit saved from this propaganda. Our field was always a little bit out of this big oppression or pressure.”</p>
<h4>Spy</h4>
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<p>“So, until the last minute I was pretending I was going to work for them; I was going to take this position to be trained in September in Jevany, close to Prague (it was a big training center for espionage.) But it was May and he [the StB agent in contact with Ladislav] said, ‘You know, our general in Prague – he trusts you, but he still has some kind of problems, I don’t know what. You have to show some proof that you are going to work for us, not against us.’ I said ‘Okay, what do you want?’ They said ‘We want you to go to Yugoslavia for vacation and prove that you are coming back. We are going to watch you.’ So I applied for vacation in Yugoslavia, I got dinars, the money (it was not easy to get them.) So I was about to leave for vacation and everything was okay. After my return I was supposed to start my training in espionage and then pretend to emigrate and… like I said…</p>
<p>“I got a visa, my daughter got a visa, and my son. But we didn’t get approval for my wife from the school. I went up there and said ‘Okay, but the papers were here – we have to travel tomorrow and I have no papers for my wife! I remember everything was okay so, she can go, his [her boss’s] approval was done, but the papers are not here!’ The director of the school was already vacationing and the vice-chairman said ‘Okay, I remember it was okay,’ and so he wrote me by hand another permission so that she could travel. It was his big mistake – poor guy – he lost his job after that.”</p>
<h4>Vienna</h4>
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<p>“[Our] experiences in Austria with the American Embassy, how they were handling political refugees, it was another horror; I don’t like to talk about it. This was one very sad part of my story. Those people in the American Embassy in Vienna – that was just a very bad impression. But I had applied for a visa here and I couldn’t do anything. I eventually changed my mind, I said okay – because in the meantime communism crashed down – I said ‘Okay, I’m going to live in Austria,’ because I had enough friends up there or whatever, the local people. But they said ‘Sorry, we cannot do anything, you applied for America.’ And America was behaving… Especially during the time when communism was crashing down, they said ‘Okay, you have no more political reasons to go to America.’ We were waiting 20 months and then communism crashed down. You have no political reasons… but I had no house, I had nothing, they took everything. And not only that, but this kind of so-called democracy, one week old, I’ve experienced in 1968. Democracy lasted six months, they came back, and who were the first in Siberia? Those guys who enjoyed the so-called democracy! So I said ‘No, no. I’m not going to go back.’”</p>
<h4>No Return to Slovakia</h4>
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<p>“Okay, there are several factors, people probably don’t talk about it. There’s the age factor; you don’t want to jump back and forth, back and forth, first. Secondly, coming back up there – it’s a little bit superficial, but the neighbors… ‘Hah! Fedorko is back here! He thought America was going to welcome him!’ So to prove this? No, I would not come back. Many of my neighbors when communism fell and I was fighting for my house, to get it back, everybody was telling me ‘What do you want it for? You’re in America! You don’t need your house back!’ So they were even mad with me that somebody had stolen my house, and I was fighting for it to get it back. So, you don’t want to live amongst those people again. Another factor was that my kids were in the middle of education here. You cannot just go back – they have to finish somewhere. They were in Slovakia in <em>gymnázium</em>, Austria in<em>gymnázium</em>, here… three times in <em>gymnázium</em>! So that’s something unusual. And then the age factor – let’s say it this way: in this area where I am right now, if I get a heart attack or I get a stroke, within a couple of minutes I am in the hospital, my family will bring me, and I know they are going to save me here. We know our potential, there’s no doubt about it: the level of medical services is the highest in the world here, right here in this Cleveland area.”</p>
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Title
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Ladislav Fedorko
Description
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<p>Ladislav Fedorko was born in <span class="aCOpRe"><span>Spišské</span></span> Tomášovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1946. His father, Jozef, worked as an engineer on the railroad passing through the town (which linked Prague to the Soviet Union), while his mother, Žofia, stayed at home raising Ladislav and his brothers. The family kept a number of animals and produced a lot of their own food, says Ladislav. Growing up, Ladislav says he wanted to become a forest engineer, but when his application to university was rejected, he decided to become a military doctor, as he knew such individuals were in demand and this gave him the chance to obtain a degree in science. Ladislav started his medical studies in 1964 in Hradec Králové. He studied there until Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, after which he quit the Army and transferred to the Prague campus of Charles University to finish his degree as a civilian medic.</p>
<p>Upon graduation, Ladislav worked for one year in Karlovy Vary before marrying and accepting a job in Levoča, not far from where he was raised. Ladislav enjoyed a deal of professional success at the hospital, becoming the vice-chairman of the head and neck surgery department. In 1986, he decided to visit the United States as a tourist with his wife. During this visit, he met some of his cousins who lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the first time. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav says the secret police took an interest in the fact that one of his relatives was working for GE. In 1988, Ladislav says he was approached by an StB agent who told him that the secret police would fake his escape from Czechoslovakia and that he should move to Connecticut to infiltrate GE. Ladislav and his family fled Czechoslovakia shortly before his faked escape was due to take place in September 1988.</p>
<p>The Fedorko family spent 22 months in Austria, in the course of which communism fell in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav says his family did not want to return as they no longer had a home, and all of their belongings had already been seized and redistributed. He found it difficult to work with the American Embassy in Vienna, which he says insisted there was no longer any political reason for him to seek asylum in the United States. Eventually though, in 1990, the Fedorkos did receive U.S. visas and settled in Youngstown, where they remained for the next seven years. Ladislav says it was a slightly more active Slovak community which attracted his family to Cleveland, among other things. He now works as a family doctor in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, and lives with his wife in nearby Strongsville. The couple have two children.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Education
gymnazium
Healthcare professionals
Hradec Kralove
Levoca
Marxism
Military service
Secret police
Spisska Tomasovce
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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4f230680b0a0a61d01ec4737afc94dbd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Work & Success</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jD5XL5R9FQo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“You have to check the blueprint for them, talk with them, you have to order materials all the time – order windows, doors, ceilings, and everything – and in advance you have to order trucks and cranes. And everything was too much pressure. Communist members didn’t like this kind of job because of all this responsibility. But they checked my job all the time because you know you cannot be against the government. And when I went one step up and had the 41 guys, this was really too much of a headache for them, because you have to have the knowledge and bricklayers – they can fool you, they can do something on purpose and you can be in trouble. And this knowledge I had from the base, because I was a bricklayer, then a foreman, then a supervisor. They don’t like this kind of stuff, they like easy jobs. But I still had to be careful, I could not be over the line and say something that was bad against the government, because you can stop in the office one day and have no chair and have no desk. They can say you have to go back and be a brick layer. But I was not afraid, because I finished up at my desk at 3:00 and then I always worked a second job as a bricklayer because I needed extra money.”</p><h4>Jail & Mother-in-Laws</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hp8FpGMoQbk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She was living at this time 20 miles from Liberec and one day she received a paper saying ‘can we talk to you?’ And what happened was she told a neighbor ‘can you watch my children?’ My wife, she was four years old and her brother was six. ‘Can you watch them?’ she said, ‘I’m leaving the city at eight o’clock and I’ll be back on the bus at four o’clock’. And she was back four years later. What happened was they charged her with talking with someone who crossed the border, the judge said ‘you are a traitor. I’ll give you 25 years’. She was in Rakovník, the city of Rakovník. They made tiles, which was a very rough time, they did everything – the ceramic tiles, they even made them in the factory at this time, which was the 1950s, and they even put them on the train. With her in jail were a lot of famous ladies, like movie stars who did something against the government, but, who she said were really the best in there with them were the prostitutes. They were living with them, of course, because they put everyone in the one room. But she had respect for them because if the political prisoners messed up something, the prostitutes – they took the blame, because they knew somebody else could be more punished. So a lot of those ladies said ‘I did it!’ because they knew the prisoners in there against the government would be treated worse and that’s why they took this stuff on and said ‘I did it’, and they were not punished.”<br /></p><h4>Liberation</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CUADGKGZ_SU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We had some history books in the school always, and on the front of the history books was a tank, a Russian tank, with a flower and it said ‘we liberated you’. And I found out in 1968, which was the Prague Spring, I bought every week a Slovakian magazine called Expres, and they started to put a lot of stuff in, and I found out the southwest of our country was liberated by General Patton! For 23 years I never knew it because, why? My father told me just this stuff about the Communists, but my mum, she was so scared she never… she knew it, but she was so scared I could talk and she would be punished! That’s why I had to find out when I was 23 years old, in 1968 I found out our country was liberated by General Patton! That’s why when I came to the United States I saw the General Patton movie about five times!”<br /></p><h4>Liverec Invasion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_45gA55tY1Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I saw the blood and everything, I had a motorcycle, I drove home and I visited my mother in law and said ‘What do we do now? The situation is bad.’ She said, ‘You know what, go buy the main things’ – like milk, bread and this stuff, we had to support ourselves because nobody knew what would happen. So I went to the grocery store for this stuff and when I stood in the line I heard a gunshot and a lot of noise. And after I went back to the city (I brought the groceries home and said ‘Can you stay with my daughter?’), and I came back to the downtown, and what had happened was that they were still going the wrong way. Streetcars have steel tracks on the ground, and a tank had slipped on these and there was an underpass, where you walk under a building. There was a pillar and the tank had hit this pillar and the whole section fell down. And a lot of guys standing under this were killed. But we saw how people can really use their hands, they started pulling the bricks out and pulling people out. And the tank started moving out, the idiot who was leader of the tank said ‘Move out!’ And people said ‘Stay! Stay!’ because behind were the emergency ambulances. They said ‘Stop!’ and they almost killed a nurse and people there were mad. And they guy used a gun and shot in the air and said ‘Move, move, move!’ He was so scared too, and he started moving the tank finally out and there was big damage. And at this place there was another nine people killed. We had, they said, about 16-18 people killed and a lot of people injured.”<br /></p><h4>Child Left Behind</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Wu6m_XKAk0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At this time she was 14 and a half, and I even told her… I said ‘Honey, I’ll tell you one thing very serious – we are going to the United States, if the situation there is a little bit better, we’ll stay over there. But don’t listen to the people around – we haven’t forgotten you. You won’t be forgotten. We care about you. Stay here, we’ll do everything that we can to move you over there.’ She says ‘Okay Dad, okay, I trust you.’ And two years later, when I received a green card, I visited the Czech Embassy in Washington and it was Mr. Safka or whatever, he smelt of alcohol. But we visited him, we showed him the green card. They said ‘Write down everything about your daughter’. And we wrote where she went to kindergarten, when she was six and a half what kind of school she went to. They checked our papers and Mr. Safka said, because we asked him how long she can be over there, what kind of chance we have to see her, and he said ‘We signed the Helsinki Agreement, and when we talk about putting families together, we have to stick with that.’ We were really pretty surprised because really six months later we saw our daughter.</p><p>“Those two years were very tough. Mostly for my wife because she said ‘Did we do wrong, did we do right?’ And I said ‘No, no! It’s the United States and I think this is good we have to just be tough. But we have to look to the future, we have to look to the future!’ It was a tough two years, but, you know, everything is a risk and we are here.”</p><h4>Cleveland Spy</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dz04muEvgeM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When [Joe] was in 1987 at the police station, they told him, ‘We’ll treat you very nicely and fairly, but tell us where you go – two days there, three days here, and everything – but we’ll give you some advice, we don’t want any problems.’ He says, ‘I won’t give you any problems’, and the guy who was in charge, some major or someone in some pretty nice position, says ‘Mr. Joe Kocab, we know about you very well, more than you think!’ He says ‘What? I haven’t said anything!’ The major says ‘You know what? You want to hear something? Come on over here.’ He says ‘Come on, follow me into this room’. He went to another room and he pushed the button and his speech was on the tape! This was 1987, the speech was made two years before. The major said ‘Whose voice is this?’ Joe said ‘That’s my voice; I had a speech ’85 or ’86 in the Czech Hall.’ And the major told him ‘Your speech is not for the Communist government, it is against us. Watch yourself, we don’t need problems, that’s why we know about you more than you think.’</p><p>“When Joe Kocab told us, our people here, what’s going on, we told the ambassador and Martin [Palouš] ‘Can you do us a favor, can you find out – somebody from our Czech environs has to be a black sheep who taped this stuff! Somebody amongst us had to have taped it, because it was all Czech people here at the speech. Somebody had to make the tape and donate the tape to the Czech Republic, to the Communists! Can you find out who is the guy, because he can’t be with us any more! Because we cannot do this to the United States government, especially with this Reagan stuff, you know, we owe them, with the FBI, the CIA, we can’t play this sort of trick.’ And they told us; ‘Oh, we have a problem, they are destroying all of the documentation that they can.’ This was a big shock for us, because we thought, finally, they cannot punish somebody, but we can punish somebody who worked with them. Because we thought this would be our duty to punish somebody who worked with them, because this was terrible, what they did. But we still don’t know, who was the guy!”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ludvik Barta
Description
An account of the resource
<p><img class="wp-image-2516 size-full alignleft" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ludvik-barta-SQ.png" alt="" width="240" height="240" /></p><p>Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a translator during WWII. Ludvik’s father became a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but changed his views completely in the early 1950s in light of the high-profile political trials taking place at the time. Shortly before his father’s death, when Ludvik was 12, he says his father urged him never to join the Communist Party. Later on in life, Ludvik followed this advice.</p><p> </p><p>When Ludvik was 17, he went to the local technical school to train to be a bricklayer. After two years he put his studies on hold to do his military service. Just before leaving for military training in Turnov, Ludvik married his wife Lenka in June 1964. The couple soon had a daughter, also named Lenka. Upon return from military service, Ludvik became a successful builder, and constructed the family’s own apartment. In August 1968, his wife Lenka finally had a chance to visit her father – who had left Czechoslovakia in 1948 – in his new home in Cleveland. When Lenka returned home, shortly after the Soviet-led invasion, the family decided to move to the United States. However, while arrangements were being made, the Czechoslovak government changed its passport requirements, which nullified the family’s existing travel documents. It subsequently took Ludvik and his wife 11 years to come to the United States. When they did, they had to leave their daughter behind. Two years later, having established residency in the United States, Ludvik and Lenka petitioned the Czechoslovak government to allow their daughter to come to America. The family was reunited in 1981.</p><p> </p><p>Today, the Bartas still live in the Cleveland area and are owners of ‘Hubcap Heaven’ – an emporium of wheel covers for automobiles.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815/http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=117360&catid=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Ludvik’s star appearance on WKYC’s program ‘What Works’</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
emigrant
Family life
Forced labor
Military service
Prague Spring
Prison
refugee
Sudeten Germans
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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ef1f0b0232e2ad8bcb7b267fb7f5ee6d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Hoped to Study Medicine</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wyywNI23BC4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to study medicine so, when I was 14, they take you to this group of people and they listen to what you want to be, and then they determine what you will be, really. So when I got my turn, they asked me what I wanted to be and I said ‘I want to be a doctor.’ They sort of chuckled because, at that time, those were professions for children of the communists. So they were listening to me and I really was fascinated by medicine, because I found some medical books in the [paper] and I read them too. So it was fascinating to me, but they laughed at me and they said ‘Well, ok. You have a choice. You can be a cook, butcher, bricklayer or coal miner.’ I couldn’t understand why, because friends of mine who were not doing well in school were getting better jobs. So I said ‘What else can I do?’ ‘This is it. Make your choice.’ Oh, I came home and I cried. My father said ‘Do the best from the worst. Take the cook job.’ So when I was 14, I went to Karlovy Vary to the trade school and, since I didn’t want to take money from the family, I used to go to the railroad station – there were two, one upper and one lower, in Karlovy Vary. It’s still there; I was there last week. So I went to the railroad station at 14 and unloaded the train at night. It was very crucial for my survival, but also it was very hard.”</p><h4>Political Economy 101</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xcMZWRWAKN0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Political economy consisted of mainly brainwashing. How great everything from the Soviet Union is and we have to accept it, and how bad everything from the West is. How corrupt and rotten the West is and what a bright story is what Russia is offering us. I remember, after the War, there used to be food rationing coming in, UNRA, military rationing from the United States, and they were giving it to the people. Of course, they were saying that it’s Russian, from Russia. Wheat from the United States, which came as help from the West, the signs were blacked out and it said ‘CCCP’ in the Russian alphabet, which meant Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. So it was that, blatantly lying about things.</p><p>“I’m an open-minded man. I always wanted to research everything, regardless of what happened to our family, what happened to me. I still wanted to find out and know things about enemies, about friends, it doesn’t matter; you want to know the most about it. So in 1966, I actually went to Russia to see what it is all about. It was a very interesting experience. Loved the people, but I found out that it was way behind Czechoslovakia. I found out that Czechoslovakia was called by Russians ‘little America,’ and I thought ‘We live like peasants there. We are all rubbed in the face about how great things are in Russia and now I see this.’ It was a very fascinating experience as well to which I sort of said ‘Ok, well now I know.’ I was always open to not believing what they fed us about the Western countries and didn’t believe what they told us about Russia. I wanted to find the truth.”</p><h4>No Money Motives</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aKukYwQIaCw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Economics was the last thing why I would leave, because I know how to tighten my belt from my childhood, and economics were not any reason why I would leave. It was the political reason and, also, I saw that people were getting worse. Spiritual life non-existent, hateful attitude toward people with religious beliefs, even then the racial problem was here. There was lots of hate among people and dishonesty. Everybody who worked somewhere didn’t work for the money; you had the job, but you didn’t work. People used to take a few hours to go shopping or go for a beer or do things like that. If you knew the Prague of my years, every third building had a scaffold which was standing by the building for eight years and no work was done on it. The scaffolding was there to protect the pedestrians, so that work was not done. People had no place to live. In one apartment, there were two families living. One small apartment, two-room apartment, and you had two generations living there.”</p><h4>Reluctant to Leave</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L49Z9nKgsN4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I didn’t want to escape but then, in ’69, ’70, it got really tight. In ’68 it was easy to leave the country and I didn’t, because I don’t think anybody every wants to leave their home. In ’68, the people who had some connections or who were just looking for adventures – it was easy to leave – they left. But I didn’t want to leave my house. My life was here, all my friends were here and I had no reason to leave. I thought ‘I’ll fight the thing.’ If it got easier in ’68, a little freedom, I thought ‘Of course it has to get better.’ Of course, it didn’t. And in ’70, it got really nasty; I got interrogated twice and so I decided it’s time to leave.”</p><h4>1st Impressions</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G17ZU-WI578?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was amazed with the openness of the people in the United States. I was amazed that you see different races around the street and nobody is arguing and looking nastily at each other; although, this time was Black Panther time in San Francisco. But, still, I didn’t see any racial tension. Lots of Chinese, Filipino, Mexicans. It was just amazing to talk them and… To me, everybody spoke beautiful English because I didn’t speak any. But I picked up some Tagalog from the Filipinos and, because of the Latin language, I picked up very quickly some Spanish. I was able to read Mexican papers that the Mexican guys brought in. I was absolutely amazed at how people were friendly, open and willing to help. Suddenly the threat that I felt with going to a country that was so bad-mouthed by the communists kept disappearing. Even though I didn’t speak English I met only friendliness and willingness to help.</p><p>“I was depressed that I didn’t progress with my English as fast as I could because I learned it a long way. It took four years of my life, because for four years I studied from Shakespeare, translating Shakespeare, and when you keep talking in Elizabethan English to foreigners who spoke limited English, it was sort of funny. Now I think it was funny. Even Herb Caen, when he heard the story later on, he wrote it in his San Francisco Chronicle column about this ‘silly Mark Zejdl who thought that he will exist in San Francisco with Elizabethan English,’ to great envy of friends, then, because everybody who meant something wanted to be named in Herb Caen’s column.”</p>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Mark Zejdl
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Mark Zejdl was born in Petrovice, a village outside Prague, in 1943. His parents owned a butcher shop in Prague; however, Mark lived with his grandparents in Petrovice until he started school due to unrest in the capital brought on by WWII and the Communist coup. Mark has vague memories of the end of the War and also recalls helping his grandmother with daily farm responsibilities. Mark’s father’s business was nationalized after the Communist coup, and he and his family moved to northern Bohemia near Bílina when he was sent to work in the coal mines there. Mark says that he was a very good student who loved to read and hoped to study medicine; however, after ninth grade, he was not allowed to pursue this field and instead went to a training school in Karlovy Vary to become a cook. While there he worked at the train station and began taking night classes in microbiology and chemistry. After finishing his training, Mark moved to Prague where he continued his higher education and applied for medical school. He was not accepted, and completed two years of mandatory military service. Mark found a job as an economist in the food industry and was fired when he refused to join the Communist Party. In 1968, Mark was living close to Czech Radio on Vinohradská třída and was active in the streets during the Warsaw Pact invasion.</p><p> </p><p>In 1970, Mark says that things got ‘really tight’ in Czechoslovakia and he decided to leave. He had secured a job in Frankfurt as a cook, but returned to Prague once to visit his family. On the way back to Frankfurt, Mark was asked to step off the train; however, he says that he was forgotten about in some commotion, ran away from the train and crossed the border into West Germany on foot. Mark spent time in Munich and Berlin working as a chef before deciding to go to the United States on the recommendation of some friends. He arrived in San Francisco in 1971 and soon found a job in the Fairmont Hotel. Mark worked in the kitchen and the front of house in several hotels and restaurants and eventually opened his own seafood restaurant called The Seagull in the Sunset District. He opened a few other establishments and also worked in real estate. Mark says that he was ‘impressed’ by the United States and the willingness of Americans to assist him.</p><p> </p><p>After Mark’s first visit back to the Czech Republic in 1999 he and his wife, Brenda, returned for visits every year. When he retired, and because he had business interests there, the couple decided to move to Prague. He holds dual citizenship and, while he is enjoying his time in Prague, Mark believes he will return to the United States.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Bilina
Education
English language
Restaurant/hotel industry
school
Vinohradska trida
Warsaw Pact invasion
World War II
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8ad23be06bd7d89348e2ef92182a40a4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Bratislava</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aFg197JHeO4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was growing up in a suburb of Bratislava. Pretty interesting, because back then people had to struggle to get a place to live. My dad was working for a construction company, and somehow managed to get them to build him or to allocate him a three-room apartment. It’s not the same as a three-bedroom apartment, it’s three rooms, but it was great because it was on the outskirts of Bratislava. We had lots of fun there by the Danube. When the Russians invaded the country in 1968, there were tanks around our house. There were some wheat fields just across the street, so they dug themselves in, they made some trenches. Unfortunately the wheat field never came back after that so it turned into a garbage dump. Eventually my dad built a house at the other end of the town, so we moved there.”</p><h4>Engineering</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GG2KrirBljI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents were not from the politically favored class. Quite the opposite. So that limited them essentially to jobs as engineers. Engineers were always needed even though you may not have been politically favored, but the country always was willing to tolerate engineers. Of course, you couldn’t say much or do much, but at least you had a chance to get the education and practice that job. So, that was fair enough, so essentially everybody in my family is engineers – my mom was a chemical engineer, my dad was a mechanical engineer, my older brother graduated in engineering, and I got my engineering degree and my younger brother.”</p><h4>Western Lifestyle</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DYJc1vL4_vk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My parents put us – the two of us, the older two – in a school that taught German, that had some German classes. It was kind of tolerated. The German language was one of the de facto street languages in Bratislava, at least from previous years. So there were a lot of native German speakers in Bratislava in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I went to school. And through this education, it really opened a door. Through the Austrian radio, through the Austrian television which was across the border which broadcast all the way to Bratislava, we could receive coverage, so I listened to Austrian radio all the time and the TV, that was maybe not so good, but still. So we got enough exposure to what then we thought was Western culture – nowadays you look at Austria where it’s a socialist country, but still – a lot more western than Czechoslovakia was at the time.”</p><p>“Then when I was a teenager, my dad had opportunities to get me jobs at international trade shows in Slovakia, working for Western companies who came there to exhibit their products, because there was some foreign trade between the West and communist countries. So these companies came to Czechoslovakia, they had a booth, they needed somebody who can translate, who can speak the language and help them out.”</p><h4>Leaving the Country</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/42Oouqt6upA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was 23, in 1983 – it was one year from graduating from technical university in Bratislava – I got myself a two week trip to Italy through a travel agency, which, for people living in Czechoslovakia, these things were fundamentally possible. Even though they were expensive, very limited, very bare bones and you couldn’t get them too often, but they were fundamentally possible. If you were an East German, then this would be completely off limits to you, but different countries there had different levels of freedom, different degrees of freedom for citizens. The former Yugoslavia were pretty liberal, Hungary was fairly liberal in terms of movement, East Germany was completely restricted, and Czechoslovakia was somewhere in between. So I took this two week trip to Italy and just never returned. I spent six months in Italy living in Rome with a Catholic priest attached to a Slovak bishop who was there, was part of the Vatican. Essentially their mission was to help refugees – at that time there was a lot of refugees in the refugee camp south of Rome – so I was helping them out visiting the refugees. So I spent six months there until I got my immigration papers to Canada.”</p><h4>Return to Czechoslovakia</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/96mStBnbZa0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“First time we went there was literally a few weeks after the revolution, and I could not even believe when my dad said ‘Come back, come and visit. It’s no problem’ because when I had defected it was some kind of criminal offense by the laws of Czechoslovakia of that time, which eventually got deleted. [I said] ‘Technically the police are looking for me there, so it would be especially kind of stupid to go there, right?’ ‘No, don’t worry. It’s completely different, nobody cares. It’s completely free, everything changed.’ It was really, really hard to believe.”</p><p>“The lasting memory of that trip – apart from the fact that everything was dirt cheap because the dollar had such great buying power at that time. But the lasting memory of that trip was that Slovaks were so relaxed, and Czechs for that matter too. But people in that country were just so relaxed, so at ease. Now, I must say, that was then, and I’ve been to Slovakia several times since, and this easiness more or less is gone. I don’t see it there anymore. No doubt, it’s far, far better than it was under communism, far, far better, no doubt. But I’m just saying that there was that one period where people were just so happy, so helpful, so friendly to each other.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Matt Carnogursky
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Matt Carnogursky was born in Bratislava in 1960. His mother Isabella had a job as a chemical engineer and his father Ivan was a mechanical engineer working for a construction company. After the fall of communism, Ivan served in the Slovak parliament and held jobs concerning the business and economic development of the country. Matt’s uncle, Ján Čarnogurský, was a fairly well-known lawyer and political dissident who held the post of Prime Minister of Slovakia from 1991 to 1992.</p><p> </p><p>Matt grew up in a suburb of Bratislava and, of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he remembers Soviet tanks stationed across the street from his family’s apartment building. He attended a school that offered German language classes, and Matt says that these language skills introduced him to Western culture and piqued his interest in the idea of eventually leaving Czechoslovakia. He says he was also exposed to Western life when he worked at international trade shows (showcasing construction equipment) in Bratislava as a translator and assistant. Matt studied engineering at technical university in Bratislava, but in 1983, one year before graduating, he left the country when he was able to take a trip to Italy. Matt stayed in Rome for six months working with refugees, and then received immigration papers for Canada, where an uncle who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 lived.</p><p> </p><p>Matt finished his engineering degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and was subsequently hired at SPAR Aerospace; he worked there for ten years. Matt married his wife Gaby in 1991, and they have five children together. He and his family have lived all over the world, including Nigeria, Southern California, and Budapest. In 2003, the Carnogurskys lived in Plavecký štvrtok, a town outside Bratislava, for six months. Matt says this was a wonderful experience for his children and allowed them to spend time with their grandparents. In 2009, the family moved to Northern Virginia where they currently live. They also recently expanded their family by adopting three children from Haiti in early 2010. Matt says that even though he has been in so many cultures and environments, he considers himself American and is happy to be here.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
Americanization
Education
Engineers
German language
Plavecky stvrtok
Tours
Velvet Revolution
Warsaw Pact invasion
-
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06325280fb313c13ba3750942c7f31ec
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Devoted</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mgYHJpfQnwc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe>
<p>“In 1948, when the communists finally took over in Czechoslovakia, people were not accepting it very well, they didn’t want it. Because first of all, people were losing their own property, they didn’t own anything. And my father thought everything belongs to everybody – you couldn’t be having more than I do, or I shouldn’t be having more than you do – we all should have the same. And his own sisters, who lived in a different village, Dubovany, by Piešťany, his own sisters didn’t want to accept that people have to leave their property or something and let Communists run it. And he went over there to talk to his sisters to sign, they had some farmland. My aunt had a small amount of farmland, and my other aunt, and he didn’t feel that they should own that – they should all own it and all together work. So he was very, very strict about it, he would talk and say ‘No, you have to agree, it’s going to be a better life for you, I guarantee you’.</p>
<p>“He had really good ideas, and those ideas which I heard, which he told me, I liked them, because I felt yeah, everybody should… there shouldn’t be hungry people, there shouldn’t be poor people, everybody should have a little piece of something, everybody should have free school, free health program. And that’s what communists promised. So that’s how he believed it.</p>
<p>“Until, I believe, after we left, in the late seventies – he died in 1976. After 1968, it was that Prague Spring and everything, and things were changing. And he went outside, in the city, in Bratislava, and he sees these big shots, these communist leaders talking and being rich, suddenly they were rich, loaded with money and he would say – later on I found out, he never said anything to me, because we were over here – ‘Now something is wrong! Because this is not how I wanted. I wanted to have everything equal, this is not equal.’”</p>
<h4>Communist</h4>
<iframe height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/du2HjQwkEBM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>“It was a small village, farmland, there were about 300 population, that’s it. And that teacher who was working with me – her name was Rosie, Ružena, Rosie – she got me involved with the people. We had a drama club, we had the kids involved in pionieri, that was kids… I was a Pioneer when I was in sixth or fifth grade or something! And sväzáci, that was a teenagers’ club, they wore blue shirts, so we were involved with them. With the drama club we put on some play, that was a teacher’s job in the farmland or villages, the teacher has to do that. And because of that, somebody came up with the idea of ‘Why don’t you become a Communist?’ So that woman, that Rosie said ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want to be!’ She was single, 36 years old, she didn’t want to be. I wanted to be because, I think it was something I wanted to prove to my father, or I wanted him to be proud of me or whatever. I thought that he would be proud.</p>
<p>“And when I told him I was asked to be a Communist Party member, first you are on a waiting list for about a year, and then you are promoted, a full-blown… He looked at me and he says to me ‘Wait a minute! Do you want to go because you believe it, or do you just want to go because you think it’s not time to do it?’ I said ‘No, I want to believe it.’ He said ‘Alright then, you have to live by that!’</p>
<p>“So, I lived by that except one thing: I never claimed that I don’t believe in God. That was my private thing. When somebody asked me the question ‘How are you doing with your view on God and religion?’ I said ‘I’m still working on it.’ That was my answer. That was the only thing that I kept with me, I always believed in God. Because I thought, that has nothing to do with it, communism and God. God is taking care of even communist people.”</p>
<h4>Radio Free</h4>
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<p>“I know my husband one time brought some radio, it was about midnight, we were listening to something, but we called it propaganda. I didn’t believe that. I said ‘Yeah, they tell you anything they want to.’ We say in Slovak ‘keď vtáčka lapajú, pekne mu spievajú’ – did you ever hear that? ‘If you want to catch the bird then sing to him.’ So I thought, this is a nice, nice, speech, but that’s not my idea… When my husband brought up the idea of leaving Czechoslovakia, I said to him ‘You know what, why don’t you go, because I know some people, older people, men went to the United States and made money and then supported their wives, sent for their wives. Why don’t you go?’ And he says ‘Well, I think I have some place a marriage license, and on the marriage license you’re in my name. So, that makes no sense, me going without you. We all go, or nobody goes.’”</p>
<h4>Army</h4>
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<p>“My father, because he had contact with everything, he knew what was going on. He said to my husband, ‘You know what, probably you are going to be called to service, because Cuba is happening, and a lot of soldiers are being called and sent to protect the country. Probably you are going to be called too.’ And my husband says ‘Dad, why me? I already did my… I am not like a regular soldier!’ And my father says ‘Well, it can happen.’ We got home and about 10:00 in the evening somebody knocked on the door, a man, in a uniform, and he says to my husband ‘You have to report at the airport tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning.’ And that’s when reality hit me. I had a two year-old daughter, and he left in the morning, he went to the airport, and then, at the end of the day I didn’t hear from him, and it wasn’t like here where everybody has phones. We didn’t have a phone, I was living with my mother in law, she didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a phone. So, the following day, I went to a phone booth, and I called the army reserve or somebody, and I asked about my husband, and they said to me ‘Oh, you know what, súdružka, you don’t have to worry about it, but we can’t tell you where he is, it’s a secret.’ And I didn’t know anything. So, a week went by, I didn’t know anything, and then about maybe ten days later, he called me and he said that he is in Trenčín – I don’t know how many miles it is from Bratislava – he’s in Trenčín, he’s with the army, he is safe, and he is working as a driver. He was driving some big surgeon or big shot in the army, driving him from one place to another. That’s about it. And I said ‘Are you coming to visit or something?’ And he said ‘No, I can’t even talk to you for long, I have ten minutes only.’”</p>
<h4>1968 Invasion</h4>
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<p>“It was a beautiful day and I took my kids to play outside. We had an apartment building with a little kind of playground; there was a sandbox, trees and a line for hanging your laundry. And I used to, in those days, I used to wash diapers by hand, we didn’t have disposable ones, it wasn’t that good a time like now. So I took those diapers and I hung them on a line and my youngest one was in a stroller sleeping, his afternoon nap. And a helicopter was flying. I was in the building already, and then I heard people, I went on the balcony and I saw people on the other balcony screaming ‘Take the children in! Take the children in!’ So, the helicopter was shooting, I don’t know at whom. So I ran downstairs, a couple of people helped me get the kids inside, and then we find in a couple of diapers holes. I wish I saved those diapers those days!</p>
<p>“I’m sure they were not shooting at the children, probably because it was the center of the city, probably some commotion was going on on one of those streets and one little bullet got lost or something. So I had another reason, I’m not going stay here, I’m moving out of here, I’m going to live with grandma. Because I thought in a village, it’s nice and quiet, what is the city offering you? Nothing!</p>
<p>“Then, later on that afternoon, my husband – I sent him to get the bread, he came home without bread – he says ‘The stores are empty, no bread!’ I said ‘I need milk for my youngest one.’ Over there for babies, you need a prescription for baby milk, you can’t buy it just like that. And it’s also only in drugstores or pharmacies, they were equipped with the milk for babies. So I said, ‘I’m going to get milk for Lubo,’ so I went down the street, I lined up in front of the pharmacy, I’m standing in line, and they say to me ‘We need a birth certificate, we are not giving you this milk, because anybody can come with a prescription. And we have a shortage, look at the shelves, they are empty.’ So I went back home, walked about ten minutes, meantime helicopters were flying and shooting, we were hiding in one house, in a building, we ran. The whole street, everybody ran into the building. They were shooting, nobody got hurt. I got home, I got the birth certificate, I went back to the pharmacy. No more milk.”</p>
<h4>Departure</h4>
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<p>“In 1969, when we left Slovakia, it was secret, nobody knew about it, not even my father, because my father would call the police and lock us up. He wouldn’t allow it – he said it later on. He said if he knew we wanted to leave, he would have taken precautions so that we won’t leave, even if we went to jail. Yes, he was very upset. Because he was a devoted communist, and he thought he had raised me the same way, and how can I leave my country?</p>
<p>“And he wrote us letters, kind of mean letters, and in those letters he said ‘I don’t think you have an idea what is waiting for you, life out of your country is very hard. I remember my life, it wasn’t easy, and it’s not going to be easy for you, especially because you have four children.’ And ‘Why did you do that? Did I raise you the wrong way, or did I make a mistake raising you? You left this country, you left your family! You shouldn’t do that.’ And he was very upset, and my husband wrote him a letter and apologized to him for me, saying he shouldn’t be mad at me, because it was not me who was doing that, it was my husband who wanted to leave, and I just followed him because I was his wife. So I don’t think my father ever made peace with me leaving.”</p>
<h4>English</h4>
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<p>“The language was really tough, my husband went to Berlitz, so he picked up quick, he was talking all day. The kids, they didn’t have problems at all. My daughter, she was a fourth grader when we left Czechoslovakia, when we got over here they put her in second grade, because they said that’s where she should pick up English. About three months later, she went to the principal, that was a nun, and she said to her ‘I think I speak good enough English, I want to go to fourth grade.’ And they transferred her to fourth grade. So she picked up really good, she didn’t have problems, my boys didn’t have problems. My problem was I didn’t want to talk to anybody, when we were living in that town house, I would go outside, my kids were playing and the next door neighbor would talk to me, I turned I went inside because I didn’t understand her. So, I watched TV, there were soaps, and I would watch them and I said ‘Every day it’s the same people!’ I didn’t understand what was said, I didn’t understand when is the story and when is the advertising, the commercials! I didn’t know, I couldn’t.</p>
<p>“Then my kids were watching a lot of kids’ shows and I would watch with them. And you know what show? Sesame Street! Sesame Street helped me… I watched Big Bird ‘one, two…’ and that’s how I learned English from the TV.”</p>
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Title
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Melania Rakytiak
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Melania Rakytiak was born in Paris in March 1936. Her father was a Slovak laborer at a furniture factory while her mother, also Slovak, was a maid in the home of a wealthy French family. Melania’s mother died when she was only 10 months old. Her aunt came to Paris and married Melania’s father. In 1941, the family moved back to Šúrovce, Slovakia, where Melania’s brother was born. In 1945, the family moved to Bratislava, and Melania’s father, Valent, took a job at the city harbor, on the Danube River. All his life, Melania’s father was a fervent communist and, come the takeover in 1948, he became active in politics, says Melania. He worked for Bratislava Region with secret documents and conducting political screenings on county employees. Meanwhile, Melania enrolled in Bratislava’s Stredná pedagogická škola and trained to be a teacher. Upon graduation, she went to work in an orphanage before being placed in a two-teacher rural school in Čierna Voda, not far from Bratislava. It was here in 1956 that Melania herself became a member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Melania married her husband, Fedor Rakytiak, in 1957. She says they had three weddings – a civil ceremony, a Catholic service and a wedding in a Lutheran church. The couple had four children. In 1969, Melania’s husband and brother, Ivan, devised a plan together to immigrate to Canada. Melania says she was strongly opposed but suspected her husband would relent at the last moment. He did not, and on April 30, 1969, Melania, Fedor and their four children went to Austria, on the premise of visiting an aunt. They spent the whole of May at Traiskirchen refugee camp before moving to Bad Kreuzen, where they lived for a further two months. Melania says Canada was not accepting refugees at this time, and so the family decided to apply to the United States. They arrived in Cleveland in August 1969. At first, Melania says the family was greatly supported by Joe Kocab and Karlin Hall. Melania worked as a cleaner before she and her husband purchased a dry cleaning business, which they ran until 1981. In 1989, Fedor was diagnosed with lung cancer and died the following year. Melania lives close to her children and grandchildren in Parma, Ohio, and, as an avid cook, she is working to collate a family cookbook of Slovak recipes.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Catholicism
Catholics
Cierna Voda
Communist coup
Communist Party members
Divorce
Education
Family life
local
Lutherans
marriage
Marxism
Politics
Prague Spring
Refugee camp
school
Strecanska
Stredna pedagogicka skola
Surovce
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
Women workers
World War II
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a40efed19b43096db4e0b84259ade82f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3i6pZyDnwE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It was the part of Prague that had domkáři. Those were associations of house owners, and they were quite virulently anti-communist. By the ‘50s, the most vocal people obviously were gone, exiled, sent to prison, and unknown, so it was a kind of underground rumble. But it was obvious people knew about it. People would pay attention to who was talking to whom, and so it was rather instructive to any little kid because, in spite of the propaganda, we knew that there was a sea of discontent, and so I grew up with this. Part of that part of Prague [Hloubětín] was the communist worker’s movement who agreed with the communists, and they would mainly meet in the local pub; in fact, in Předni Hloubětín there were one or two pubs for three streets, and they were well-populated in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening, three times as much. And those people, they would perhaps never put up with discussion about the fault of communists. And if you went into the big Hloubětín, just perhaps a 10 or 15 minute walk away, there you could hear that rumble. People, the underground, discontent, because people who owned the houses, very often what would happen would be that they would lose part of their house and the communists would just quite simply put some family into part of their building or part of their little house, and they wouldn’t ask for any permission essentially and so now you had to share quarters – your own in your own home – with somebody you didn’t know. And then, kind of an evil scheme that was hatched in some of the communist planning minds was to make sídliště – the housing development – and part of it, they destroyed those rodinné domky – family houses – and they would just take away the gardens and put a huge, monstrous panelák [prefabricated high-rise] and so the houses suddenly found themselves without a garden, standing in the middle of the development and they didn’t like it either. So obviously, there was a lot of discontent with which I grew up.”</p><h4>Education Lacking</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BJugMUJOXTI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Humanistic sciences or history or even language – it was pitiful. It was absolutely pitiful. If I learned anything, it is because my father inherited filled bookcases from his parents and I essentially would read a book or two a day, perhaps four during the weekend. And also, my mom refused to get television, which means we didn’t have television and if you didn’t play volleyball with your friends, there was nothing to do but read, or raid grandma’s garden and eat her radishes, or eat the radishes and read, and so that was how I spent my childhood.</p><p>“Sciences, however, perhaps because many well-meaning educators exited and/or retreated in to the fields of science – and that was also my plan – the sciences were well-taught. We had many idealistic teachers and we knew that they were ideologically flawed, if judged by the communist measuring stick, and we loved them even more for that. We really had good scientific preparation.</p><p>“But humanistic subjects, boy was it pitiful. It was worse than if they didn’t teach us anything because factually it was not correct and the interpretation and even ways how to study were completely wrong. I didn’t know how to do research because essentially we were told to parrot what we were told, and even the parroting could have been potentially quite lethal, because the official policy was changing. They changed the official policy that we learned by heart and it wasn’t good anymore suddenly, so the first day of our school year, we would get glue and empty pages and we would actually slap empty pages of paper onto a page which we were supposed to erase from the memory of communist humanity. And we did it. We of course read through it very carefully before we did it.”</p><h4>Reasons for Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6w-6iLDsINk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“By the time I was 19, suddenly I realized that there was a huge depth, a cavern, ready for exploration for me to find out what I was a product of, and I had the opportunity. Then came August 21 [1968] and I went to Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and, because at that time I was good-looking, there was a photo of me which appeared on the front page of Paris Match and in Europe in several Western publications, and obviously I wasn’t anonymous. I met the person who was overseeing the teachers in the school where I was studying, and suddenly she perked up as a communist. She made sure that I knew that she noticed me and so at that time suddenly I realized ‘I want to get out. I want to get out and I need to get out.’</p><p>“There were two reasons. One was they wouldn’t let me continue at school, and of course I knew that it was somewhere some farming cooperative that I would have to go to; and/or that I wouldn’t have a chance to grow intellectually and understand what was happening to my whole nation. To the literature, to the music, to the film. To the people, to their relationships. And because we were all raised with this admiration of the national reawakening – národní probuzení – I really felt defensive of whatever was Czech, whatever was Czech culture. The survival of the nation was… we were fed the worries of the survival of the nation, and suddenly I realized that communists were perhaps enemies of the survival of the nation, as far as highly educated, cultured, and democratically-cultured nation. So that was the moment when I decided I had to leave.”</p><h4>Twice to Vienna</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oE9PcNrMh2Y?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There was a friend who actually was British who had a car. He came to Prague before the occupation and he gave me a ride to Vienna, and I left with him. It was rather interesting and memorable – and there was another person in the car. We were in the car and there was one Russian tank in front of us and one Russian tank behind us, and I was just thinking ‘Do they have good brakes behind us?’ because there was no space if their brakes failed for us to escape the accident.</p><p>“We made it to Vienna and then from Vienna we started to get all kinds of rather optimistic news: students went on strike, professors were supporting students very often, and on and on. I was really homesick and I felt I needed to perhaps go back and reconnect with my friends, and the reconnection really didn’t happen. People were scared. The few people I knew who were straight, they were gone. Nobody knew where they went. They were gone to the West, and so I just then packed up once again and I left. I was able to leave – that was a completely crazy thing. An elderly gentleman provided me with a handwritten letter in which – he was Czech – in which he certified, or wrote, supposedly as a doctor, that my fiancé was dying in a Viennese hospital, and so I went for a výjezdní doložka [exit permit] which I got, and then I flew to Vienna. As I was coming through the airport, there was the guy who opened the list of people [who were not supposed to be allowed out of the country], there were names and names and names, and he goes [down the list] and he stops and I was there – I swear I was there – and he puts his finger by that line and he wishes me good luck. I had výjezdní doložka for four days. To me, it was a message.”</p><h4>Involved</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t7APo4Twqu4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I realized that culture is not only what we get from our parents; it’s this collective construct. We get something from them, we take it, we transform it, we add to it, we subtract from it whatever is not needed, is not usable, and we hand that new thing that we have lived, whether it was everyday existence and/or literature, music, visual arts, we hand it on to our children. And that culture depends on broad, democratic participation. If you don’t have broad participation, you cannot have the exclusive top, because the exclusive top depends on this growth towards the top of the pyramid, and I realized that if we don’t get engaged in this participation, we impoverish ourselves, we impoverish our neighbors, and we impoverish that part of the Czech culture that is living outside which is part of the diaspora. It’s my kind of quiet fight for the rights of the Czech diaspora to exist and be part of Czech culture, and so I tried also to communicate the achievements of this Czech diaspora to the kernel of the Czech culture, which happens to be in the Czech lands, and to motivate them into the re-acceptance of that part of their history. But not only that, to rebuild the bridge between the American Czech-ness, which was in so many ways instrumental and defining for the existence of modern Czechoslovakia, and build new bridges which would allow Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech lands after ’89, to reach once again the global community. Because after all, we can be the stepping stone.”</p><h4>American Citizenship</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oBt6ykSk5x0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was really wonderful. It was in Kansas City and during the ceremony of citizenship, the judge was reading the background of the people who applied for citizenship, just two or three sentences, and introduced each one of us. There was a Chinese guy and he says ‘Nuclear physics.’ Then he goes ‘Doctor from India.’ Then he comes to me and says ‘Czech linguist, PhD.’ And he says ‘We are gaining so much. Thank you for wanting to be American citizens.’ In addition to it, there were about 40 families who adopted Korean kids, and they were all girls in ruffles. They were all fidgeting; they were tiny, perhaps two years, three years old, sitting on the laps of their parents. The parents shedding tears and kissing them. Obviously they had been raising them for two or three years; they were their children. So it was a really happy occasion. All those happy, absolutely melting, parents and the few of us who were welcomed and thanked for willing to be American citizens and adding our value to the American nation. It was such an emotional thing.”</p>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Mila Saskova-Pierce
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Mila Saskova-Pierce was born in Prague in 1948. Her mother, Miluše, was a high school literature teacher while her father, Vladimír, worked in a factory. She was raised in the Hloubětín district of the city along with her brother and her cousin, whom her parents adopted. After attending<em>gymnázium</em>, Mila applied to Charles University, but says that her application was rejected because she applied for a course of study that was no longer available. She worked for one year, first at the municipal incinerator and then for the national funeral home. Mila’s second application to Charles University to study medical biochemistry was accepted and she began her studies in 1967. It was at this time, according to Mila, that she really began questioning the system and interacting with dissidents. During the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, a photograph of Mila protesting on Wenceslas Square was published in several Western publications – an event which she says ended her anonymity and threatened her future. Within a few days of the invasion, Mila left Czechoslovakia for Vienna, but returned to Prague that October. When she realized that the situation was not going to get better, she left the country once more. After a short stay in Vienna, Mila moved to Belgium. There she studied Slavic and Russian languages and journalism for one year at the University of Liège before transferring to the Free University of Brussels. She graduated in 1975 and completed a one-year program in language philosophy at the University of Leuven.</p><p> </p><p>In 1976, Mila moved to the United States to begin a doctoral program in linguistics at the University of Kansas. She met her future husband, Layne Pierce, in the university library when they discovered both spoke Czech (he had studied the language in college). Mila and Layne married in 1977 and have two daughters. After finishing her PhD, Mila taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for two years. Since 1989, Mila has been a professor of Czech and Russian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mila is active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language. She is also involved in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. Mila believes that Czech-American culture is integral to the wider Czech culture and she hopes to ‘build a bridge’ between the two. Today Mila lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
American citizenship
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Czech language
Education
gymnazium
Hloubetin
Miluse Saskova
Russian studies/speaker
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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02cff9204521eeb7a77c19d4c9e519cf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Multilingual Home</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bYX-lIkfFkI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We were speaking Slovak and Hungarian equally. My mum spoke Hungarian to us and my father spoke Slovak to us, and my grandmother spoke German to us, so it seemed like chaos for outsiders, because not everybody had that, but a lot of families in Košice spoke Hungarian and Slovak because that was… So when I was asked ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ I would say ‘Oh, my mother tongue is Hungarian and my father tongue is Slovak and my grandmother tongue is German. It was actually Schwaebisch, so she taught us how to write in that. I forgot all my German as I learned English though.”</p><h4>Gulag</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NP6ogMP5cnc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“See, my uncle was in Siberia, my mother’s youngest brother was in Siberia for eight years, and I remember when he came home in 1954. And that was, I mean, that was horrendous and I listened to him for hours and hours on end of how they were treated in Siberia. He left as a 17 year old, they took him from the street as a 17 year old, and he came back in 1954, I remember him, I’ll never forget, and he looked like an old man. He had grey hair as a twenty-some year old. So, it was a very painful thing in the family to discuss because you couldn’t discuss it, you couldn’t discuss it, because he was so scared, having lived through it. Not until we were older, when I went back [in 1978] did I talk to him and he was telling us stories that were… just pretty awful.</p><p>“He was a 17 year old what was called Levente. They were training with – this is the story I was told – they were training with wooden guns, and the Russians took them, took these, it was an organization of young boys that were not army trained yet, because they were too young. And he was in the archipelago, in Siberia for eight years in captivity. And they let a few of them go and said ‘Here, go,’ and just his trip from Siberia with no means, with one long coat and a bag, you know, getting on trains illegally, and being thrown out of trains… because they were free to go, but they had no means of getting there.”</p><h4>Secret Photos</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/16R98y_F9KE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It had to have been like ’58 or… ’58-ish. And my father and my mother went for a walk to the park and didn’t come back, like, for hours. And because our aunt lived with us, we weren’t left alone, but we were waiting and waiting and saying ‘Where are they?’ And then my aunt came in and my grandfather came in and you know, they were kind of calming us down and said ‘Well mummy and dad are not coming home’. Well, they were arrested in the park in Košice, my father was taking pictures of my mother. It was a nice spring day – spring or fall day – I know it was. And he had a camera from Germany, a little, tiny, 36mm, you which… we had the big Flexaret 6 x 9. And this was this little new camera which his friend Laco, who was then the head architect, brought from Germany, from East Germany, I’m pretty sure. And it had the kinofilm, the 35mm.</p><p>“So he obviously used it, tried to take pictures of my mother whom he obviously loved and thought she was hot. So they arrested them for taking pictures, and later on we found out what happened, but they were not home for like three days. And I mean, within this time, there were these police officers, they were in civil clothing, and raided our apartment. And they took every camera we had, which was this big Flexaret and another 8mm movie camera, because my father loved doing that. They took all of that, all the film, all the negatives, everything that was in the cabinet, they took everything. Because they were spying? I don’t know…</p><p>“Well it turned out that they arrested them until they cleared all the films and all the, you know, camera equipment that they weren’t spies and all the pictures on it obviously got destroyed, because they didn’t get them back. So the film from that little camera, however, they pulled that out, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Oh, it was color film too, imagine that, in the ’50s. And they brought out to my dad a 6 x 9 film and said ‘What are these –xs here?’ And he said ‘That is not from my camera! What are you, crazy? This is from a big one, right, it won’t even fit in that!’ Boom! So they got beaten. And my father had bruises and my mother had, you know… they were not allowed to talk. They were sitting together and they were not allowed to talk. And they were jailed for three days, to find out that they were spies, they had nothing on them, obviously. But here was the thing; he was taking pictures in an area that was secret. He said ‘What is secret about this?’ Because there were no signs saying ‘you may not’, you know how you have signs saying ‘No photography’ or something. Nothing was marked. It was unmarked but he should have known that down that park, at the end of the park, in the middle of the park, was the police station. And that was the secret. I don’t think they ever found out what was secret.”</p><h4>Russian</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mtOosxOjciw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I was graduating gymnázium, that was 1968 – June 4, 1968 – the day that Bobby Kennedy got shot, I remember hearing that on the news when I was walking in for my exam. And what had happened in 1968, In January of ’68, you know, The Prague Spring, Russian became non-mandatory to take as an exam in maturita [the school leaver’s certificate].</p><p>“So we had Slovak, Russian, history… oh, and Latin, and then a selective, so I took German as a selective. Well, then Russian became non-mandatory and I said ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to graduate? That’s all I know!’ So, I took it as a selective. And I thought, well, there’ll be a bunch of us. No one. No one in the whole gymnázium graduated in Russian as an elective. I was so embarrassed, because there was so much animosity towards Russian. But I did not carry the animosity to the language, because I loved the language, you know, Pushkin and Dostoevsky and all that, I used to read it in Russian. So I loved it, I loved the language. And I loved Hungarian, so the animosities that were, such as they were – I was not affected by them, if you will. A lot of people tried to forget the language, intentionally, they worked on it. And it worked – after a few years, they did forget.”</p><h4>Leaving</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_QJpKBjWBpQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“She also told me not to tell anyone, just one close friend, and so all my closest 30 friends came to say goodbye to the train station. But, what I may add, everybody was so loose about this, everybody was so bitter about what had happened, everybody was just so upset that even on the borders people knew we were not coming back but they were like ‘Good luck, have a good life.’ That was what they said. But my worst memories were prior to leaving when I knew we were leaving. You know, we were in towns and there were all these tanks and shootings, because we had a curfew, like at 6:00 or 7:00, I’m not sure what it was. But there were all these tanks, and in Kosice with all these tanks the cobblestones, I mean they were all ripped up from the tanks, horrible, horrible, horrible. Rude, the soldiers were pretty rude to us, because we were talking, saying ‘What are you doing here?’ Some of them didn’t even know they were not in their own country, some had children in the tanks. Yeah – because the Russians were taken from wherever they were, they were called in to ‘save Slovakia, or Czechoslovakia, from capitalism’. So they came to save us. It was horrible, it was horrible.”</p><h4>Sokol Washington</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Iv75nXESRuY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was the women’s, I was the náčelníčka [leader] of the women’s group. We created a Czechoslovak school with a couple of friends and we were teaching, a couple of women were teaching Slovak and Czech to our American children, and I was teaching gymnastics. And I think it was once a week, we dragged our kids there to learn Slovak. But I mean all my kids speak Slovak, but it’s spoken, so they learned to write and read and they hated going there because who wants to go to school after school? But they learned some, and we had these events where they were dancing. There was a very active lady by the name of Lucia Maruska Levandis, very talented, she was making kroje, so we made those for the kids. I mean I helped her, she made most of it. The events that were organized for children, they were like Mikulášska and they were Sokol and SVU and all the organizations so… We were pretty active in all of those.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Monica Rokus
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Monica Rokus was born in Košice, eastern Slovakia, in January 1950. Her father, Jan, worked as an architect for the firm Stavoprojekt and then for the city of Košice, as the assistant to the municipal architect. Monica’s mother, Eudoxia, meanwhile stayed at home raising her and her older brother, Paul. At home the family spoke Hungarian and Slovak. Monica attended the Slovak-language Kováčska Street <em>gymnázium</em> and, as a keen gymnast, competed with the club Lokomotiva Košice in her spare time. Upon graduation in 1968, she had plans to study in Bratislava at Comenius University’s Sports Faculty.</p><p> </p><p>In late August of that year, however, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, prompting Monica’s father to flee the country and make plans for the rest of his family to resettle with him in America. The Gabrinys had already considered emigrating to the United States in 1967, but had returned to Košice on what Monica says was her insistence in particular. This time, Monica’s father left for Yugoslavia with a friend and told the rest of the family to wait for a signal before boarding a train bound for Novi Sad. When that signal came in early September, Monica traveled with her mother and brother to join her father in Yugoslavia. The family then contacted a friend in Alexandria, Virginia – Dr. Laszlo Csatary – who helped them come to America in October 1968. Dr. Csatary helped Monica’s father secure a job at a Washington, D.C. architecture firm.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Monica’s first job in the U.S. was at a kindergarten run by an acquaintance of Dr. Csatary. She stayed there for nearly one year before one of her father’s colleagues saw her drawings pinned up at home and helped her find a job at a graphics studio. In 1970 Monica also signed up as a foreign student at Georgetown University. She married another Slovak émigré and the couple had three children, who learned Slovak at home and through language classes at Sokol Washington. Today, Monica continues to work as a graphic designer and volunteers her services to the local chapter of Sokol and the Slovak Embassy.</p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Arrest
Community Life
Cultural Traditions
Gabrinyova
gymnazium
Hungarian language
Kosice
Kovacska Street
Mikulasska
Political prisoner
Russian studies/speaker
Slovak Language
Teachers
Warsaw Pact invasion
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edb42f7afcea5968a253d2386cebaa40
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Growing Up</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vKNLvuN7LU0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was very lucky. My mother used to make dresses for me and everything so I used to have really nice things. Also, some people had friends or family abroad and the family sent them some dollars or marks or whatever, and they would buy so-called bony and they could buy things in Tuzex. We didn’t have this chance, but we would sometimes borrow a magazine and it was called Seventeen. I have a funny feeling it was an American magazine for teenagers. We would borrow it from these people and we would, with my mother, say ‘Oh look, this is a nice dress. Make me a dress like that.’ So it was nice. In this Tuzex – maybe this will be interesting to say – when I was a teenager, the coolest thing was to have blue jeans and you couldn’t get blue jeans here. You could get them in Tuzex or otherwise you didn’t, so it was a good that was very much in demand.”</p><h4>Gymnázium</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FEHy72T_Eec?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This <em>gymnázium</em> was a very good one, but I remember I went through it like in a dream because I had a head full of the West. I was aware that we can’t travel, we can’t have things that we want. It was the ‘60s, the Beatles. You couldn’t get records and my head was full of it. And then of course when I fell in love, I was just looking out the window, and I don’t know how I managed to have good marks, quite honestly, but I did.”</p><h4>Cultural Fascinations</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wmedamxXpLc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was very much into fashion and all this, so I was very much aware that you couldn’t get cosmetics. There was Twiggy, there was Brigitte Bardot. I had some pocket money and I would either use it to buy one good thing – I’ve always preferred to buy one good quality thing that just anything – or I would spend this money on buying pictures of film stars. I had this scrapbook of Brigitte Bardot – I still have it somewhere – and I would look at her and think ‘I wish I could buy these things. I wish I could wear them. She looks fabulous.’ Then, of course, there was Twiggy, and because I was so skinny I could identify with her because it wasn’t fashionable to be skinny. Then the Beatles, the music. The ‘60s here in Prague I think was a pretty open time. Jazz. My father liked jazz. So there were these cultural things which were seeping through and I was always upset that I couldn’t be part of it and that it was so closed.</p><p>“We couldn’t travel and we couldn’t say what you wanted to say. It was just terrible. I remember, actually, when I first visited Greece, I was sitting at the Acropolis and just looking at the sea and I remember I thought ‘This is just so beautiful. If I die now, I don’t mind.’ Because for me, it meant so much to be there and actually experience that beauty because I never thought this would happen.”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EaW4ifV5ffA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At first I was frightened; I was overwhelmed because it was just too much. The skyscrapers, the people, the noise. At the same time, it was wonderful, but I was scared. I remember I was staying at some Czech’s apartment in the Upper West Side and I decided I had to go to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. I went to through the park [Central Park] and I got to the museum and I thought ‘I wasn’t killed, thank God.’ Because you heard all those stories about Central Park, I thought ‘My God, it’s so dangerous,’ but of course then you realize it’s not. I found the people, people who didn’t even know me, they were so helpful. It was just so different. It took me, I would say, after I returned there with a green card – because I picked up the green card in London – it took me about six months when I got used to New York and I realized that it’s a city where you feel anything can happen. Any minute, anything. Anything good, anything bad. And it was an excitement that kept you on your feet, in a sense.”</p><h4>Relationships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G-TH5sM2Zdw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I first came to New York and I lived there, I felt the ocean. I felt the distance between America and Europe; I really did. When I was in London, I didn’t seek the Czech community, but I did at first when I was in New York. There was this Czech girl who took care of me. I met her in the church somewhere in Astoria, so I was friendly with her and sometimes there used to be some veselka [social gathering], this sort of thing, so I used to meet other Czechs. But to be honest, very often I used to come back quite depressed. After a while I decided that I prefer to be with Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are lots of interesting Czechs there, but you don’t necessarily get to see them. Initially, it was an impulse because you feel so far away from home and really, at least I felt, that Europe was far. I felt a great distance.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Olga Prokop
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Olga Prokop was born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1949. Her father was an officer in the military and her mother stayed at home and raised Olga. Later, her mother would become the director of a nursery school and her father worked for Škoda. Olga’s family moved to České Budějovice when she was two and, a few years after that, to Prague where she started school. Olga says that when she was growing up, her head was ‘full of the West.’ She loved movie stars, music, and fashion, and especially enjoyed borrowing <em>Seventeen</em> magazines from friends. While at <em>gymnázium</em>, Olga says that she wanted to study medicine, but that she was offered a spot in the school of dentistry instead. By the time she was to enroll, however, Olga had decided to move to Britain to marry her high school sweetheart. She arrived in London in the summer of 1968, with her wedding planned for August 28. Her mother arrived on August 19 and, on August 21, they received word of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Olga says that the two did not receive word of her father for several days.</p><p> </p><p>Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Americanization
Divorce
Fashion
gymnazium
marriage
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture