When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
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Vladimir Maule was born in Prague in January, 1952. His father (also called Vladimír) had been part-owner of Prague’s high-end Savoy Hotel until the Communist coup in 1948. Following the takeover, he was arrested and subsequently sent to work as a manual laborer in Pražské papírny, a paper factory. Vladimir’s mother, Yvona, worked as a part time typist at the state export company, Pragoexport. Vladimir grew up in the Prague district of Braník. In eighth grade, Vladimir says, he and a number of school friends formed a band called The Explosive Group, which performed cover versions of songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Vladimir says that this group, alongside the long hair sported by the band’s members, was not viewed favorably by Vladimir’s teachers. He does say, however, that The Explosive Group made him popular with girls.
When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, Vladimir’s parents decided to leave the country. Vladimir’s father, who was considerably older than Vladimir’s mother, was walking with crutches recovering from surgery and so decided to join the family at a later juncture. In October 1968, with faked exit permits that, Vladimir says, had cost the family savings, he and his mother traveled to Austria where they planned to apply for asylum in Canada. Vladimir, however, fell ill with scarlet fever, forcing him and his mother to return to Czechoslovakia. A couple of months later, Vladimir and his mother again found the money to purchase fake exit permits and travel to Austria. They spent around four months in Traiskirchen and Bad Kreuzen refugee camps before abandoning the idea of settling in Canada and opting to move to the United States. They arrived in Chicago on April 20, 1969. It was at around about this time that Czechoslovakia tightened its border controls, meaning that it would be another 14 years before Vladimir saw his father again.
Vladimir and his mother settled in the traditionally Czech neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago. After a short period spent working for Sears, Vladimir went back to school, first to the local Morton High School and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gained a four-year scholarship to study film. Today, Vladimir owns a film production company called Filmontage which, among other projects, produced a documentary about Czech artist Jiří Kolář shortly after the Velvet Revolution, including interviews with the newly-elected president of Czechoslovakia at the time, Václav Havel, and with the author Bohumil Hrabal. A keen pilot, Vladimir today lives in Naperville, Illinois, in a home which has space for his plane in the garage. He lives with his wife, Eva, and has two daughters.
“I took German but before you… when I went [to school] in the ‘60s… before you could take an elective language you had to do well in Russian. And if you wanted to be a cool kid, you would have As and Bs but you’d have a D in Russian because that was a sign of a little bit of a protest, you know. But if you had a D in Russian, then you couldn’t get in to the other languages. So I ended up having a C or something and just squeezing by, so they let me take some German and some English – I took English for five years. But that didn’t help much when we came to the States – that’s another story. Because, you know, you learned the British English and that was kind of harsh, you know.”
“In eighth grade we started a rock and roll band, of which I was the lead singer and guitarist. And of course we played The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was seen like not only blasphemy but an anti-communist gesture, you know. So… we always had a lot of troubles, because of the long hair and everything else… But somehow it all sort of worked out, we squeezed by, you know. We had good grades, sort of. But my mother was frequently summoned to school by the principal and told ‘Have your son have a haircut!’ And of course I would fight it, and so they would cut a little bit, you know – the usual trials and tribulations of growing up. But for me, being in the music band changed everything because… this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with girls. Because, you know, older girls were interested in me, which is a big thing to a young boy pre-puberty or just when puberty comes in. And we left the country when I was 16, almost 17, so my formative years – I still have the accent, when we came to the States was maybe just a little bit, a year, too late, where it never went away – but, in the school, my self confidence, being surrounded by these fans, was great! And all the politics at those moments went aside, yeah.
“Everybody listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe was only… they had signals so that you couldn’t listen to the news, but they would let it go for the music. So like from two to four everyday you could listen to music on Radio Free Europe. So we would record the music on reel to reel tape recorders, so then we could then learn the music by phonetics. But it was not that difficult, you could buy records, people had collections, it was available for those who were interested, you know. And the quality wasn’t very good, because it was recorded over recordings, you know, there was a lot of hisses and scratches, but you could still listen to The Rolling Stones. So you could do that, yeah.”
“Now, my dad was over six feet tall, he used to play soccer for Sparta, he was an athlete. Up until his late 70s when he passed away he had black hair, he never had grey hair. He was a good looking, good looking guy. And he walked upright, as opposed to… the people in our building signed a petition against his walking. They said ‘He’s walking too arrogant. He’s not saying hello to the neighbors.’ There was like a meeting of all these people who lived in this building, because every building had a caretaker… The caretaker was a member of the Party, they usually lived on the bottom floor. They were snooping around, they were the ones who knew… And this was the woman who made this official complaint that my dad comes home from work and… My dad worked 18 hour shifts, I mean, he worked like a slave to make money. So when he came home, it’s possible he didn’t say hello. But not because he didn’t like her, because he was dead beat tired. But he walked upright, so she thought that he was walking with his nose up. My dad was not. But that’s the kind of environment that we lived in. My dad, of course, when he had to come up and explain himself in front of these morons, you know. So he would never join that group on any level, let alone the Communist Party.”
“They said to my mom ‘Go and apply for a job at Western Electric – a company that makes telephones – on Cicero and Cermak Road, in Cicero basically. They’re hiring.’ They told me ‘Since you’re a guy, go to a steel company called Seaco, and the chances are you’ll get a job there, they’re hiring.’ So my mom took one bus, I had to take like four or five buses to get to this location. So my mom got in, got hired. I walk into this place. I knock on the door, there’s a man who says, again, ‘How have you been?’ If he said ‘How are you?’ I would have said ‘Fine.’ But that phrase ‘How’ve you been’ I’d never heard. So again, there is this exchange, I’m a total idiot, I can’t… He says ‘I have no work for you. Go away.’ Just then, somebody comes in and says ‘I need one guy for my department.’ And the guy says ‘I’ve got no one.’ He says ‘Well, what about this kid here?’ He says, ‘He’s an idiot.’ So he says to me ‘Hey kid, you speak English?’ And I say ‘Yes!’ And he said ‘Well, if he speaks English… So, what’s your name?’ And so, somehow it came out that I am Czech and he says ‘Well, I’m Czech. My name is Ferjencik!’ He never spoke Czech, you know, but he was very proud of his… He said ‘I’ll hire this kid.’ So I got the job.
“So, to this day I don’t know what I was doing, I was in charge of some… some… something, I don’t know. But the footnote to this story is that people would always say ‘Where do you work?’ And I’d say ‘Well, a company called CECO. A sheet metal company.’ Every Friday we would get checks, and outside would come a Brinks truck and you would cash the check and you would come home with cash. One Friday we missed this truck and so I brought the check home. And on the check it said Sears. I went to the wrong place, I took the wrong bus. I thought I was working at CECO, I was working at… So, a true moron you know, but I was hired, I was working for Sears. Then I went to school. I realized that manual labor was not for me.”
“We wanted to appeal to the younger crowd, the people like us. And we were very much influenced by Dadaism and Jára da Cimrman, and we poked serious fun at the establishment. We poked fun at how badly they spoke Czech. How they mixed the English language into the Czech language. And we were ruthless. And little by little the advertisers started to check out. We finally decided to temporarily go off the air. But while it lasted we had a great time. I composed a song called ‘Emigrant’s Cry’… It was introduced by Jan Novak who said ‘Vážení krajané’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”
Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’
“My teachers at the Art Institute… the teachers were pretty much always far left, understandably perhaps and all that stuff. But it bothered me that they would not… that they saw communism as something so distant, something on another planet. A thing that really doesn’t affect us, you know. And there was this residue of McCarthyism – ‘We know what… let’s not stir up another round, you know, look where that got us, you know, just paranoia.’ So, it was troublesome, because my views were pretty much to the right of center when I came. Because I wanted to go to Vietnam and fight the communists. I actually was eligible to be drafted that one year, there was a lottery and they filled the quota two numbers before mine came up. So I came very close, but my mom would not survive it. She would do something not to let me go but it never had to come to that. So, having my American friends being completely oblivious to anything that was happening in Europe was and is still troubling.”
“In 1992, my wife and I and our two daughters go back to Prague, and I’m telling them how I grew up, I’m telling them all the stories, you know. So we go, and we visit the place where I grew up – the apartment building. We walk inside, and in all of these buildings there’ll be like a little plaque on the wall with the names of all the people who live there. Our name was still there. Nobody, this is after communism, and nobody cared to change it. Other people came and went, but ours was never removed or replaced. So that was a freaky thing seeing our name. So then as we go up, I knock on the door and nobody opened so… But I tell my girls the story of when I was little, and I would go down into the cellar to fetch the coal or whatever, right? As you open the door, you walk in the cellar, but you would never see the back of the door, because it was of course this way, right?
“But as a little kid, for some reason, I looked on the back of this door. And there was a poster from the Nazis. It had, you know, the big swastika, and it said in the left column Czech and the right column German, something about not stealing property from this cellar. And finally it said ‘This offense is punishable by death!’ So, I’m telling them this story and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’ So, I take them into the cellar, we open the door and… it was still there! Semi-decayed, you know, barely clinging on, because any time anybody would open the door would go… there was no reason to ever… So that was a kind of interesting experience, you know, how little had changed in all these years.”
Viktor Solarik was born in Prague in 1961. He lived in the Smíchov district of the city with his parents (who were both chemists) and his older sister, Helena, who still lives in the family home in Prague. Viktor began elementary school in 1968, right after the Warsaw Pact invasion, which occurred in August of that year. He says that it was apparent that the Communist Party had an ‘arm in every organization,’ including sport activities and youth organizations. After graduating from high school, Viktor attended ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied architecture. An avid windsurfer, he asked permission to travel to Malta to represent Czechoslovakia in a global competition, but the dean of architecture refused to sign for him. Shortly after graduating from ČVUT, Viktor married his wife, Eva, whom he had known since high school, and they decided to emigrate. Viktor says that the pair had the full support of their families who, even though there was a chance they would encounter repercussions, felt fairly secure in their professional lives. They signed up for a tour going to Austria and Germany and, in August 1987, left the country. When the bus stopped in Munich, Viktor and Eva went to the police station where they claimed asylum. After two months in a refugee camp, Viktor found work with a surveyor and the couple were able to move into a small apartment while waiting for their paperwork to clear. They were granted immigration visas to the United States after 18 months and arrived in New York City in March 1989.
Viktor and Eva’s sponsors were friends of their parents who had emigrated in 1968 and lived in New Jersey. They stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks while looking for a job. Viktor was offered a position at the architectural firm Kaeyer, Parker and Garment in Mount Kisco, and the pair moved to Westchester County. In 1998, Viktor started his own firm (VKS Architects) which focuses on residential design and construction. Viktor and Eva have two daughters who are now in college. They both speak Czech and, when they were younger, spent summers with their grandparents and cousins in the Czech Republic. Viktor tries to visit his home country every year to spend time with family and friends. Today he lives in Carmel, New York, with his wife Eva.
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Viktor Solarik was born in Prague in 1961. He lived in the Smíchov district of the city with his parents (who were both chemists) and his older sister, Helena, who still lives in the family home in Prague. Viktor began elementary school in 1968, right after the Warsaw Pact invasion, which occurred in August of that year. He says that it was apparent that the Communist Party had an ‘arm in every organization,’ including sport activities and youth organizations. After graduating from high school, Viktor attended ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) where he studied architecture. An avid windsurfer, he asked permission to travel to Malta to represent Czechoslovakia in a global competition, but the dean of architecture refused to sign for him. Shortly after graduating from ČVUT, Viktor married his wife, Eva, whom he had known since high school, and they decided to emigrate. Viktor says that the pair had the full support of their families who, even though there was a chance they would encounter repercussions, felt fairly secure in their professional lives. They signed up for a tour going to Austria and Germany and, in August 1987, left the country. When the bus stopped in Munich, Viktor and Eva went to the police station where they claimed asylum. After two months in a refugee camp, Viktor found work with a surveyor and the couple were able to move into a small apartment while waiting for their paperwork to clear. They were granted immigration visas to the United States after 18 months and arrived in New York City in March 1989.
Viktor and Eva’s sponsors were friends of their parents who had emigrated in 1968 and lived in New Jersey. They stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks while looking for a job. Viktor was offered a position at the architectural firm Kaeyer, Parker and Garment in Mount Kisco, and the pair moved to Westchester County. In 1998, Viktor started his own firm (VKS Architects) which focuses on residential design and construction. Viktor and Eva have two daughters who are now in college. They both speak Czech and, when they were younger, spent summers with their grandparents and cousins in the Czech Republic. Viktor tries to visit his home country every year to spend time with family and friends. Today he lives in Carmel, New York, with his wife Eva.
“I guess, as a kid, one doesn’t necessarily see all of the suppressiveness of the regime, but one example I can give you is that in 1968, when I was about to go to first grade, of course in August 1968, the Russians and the Warsaw Pact army marched in and it was obviously very stressful. Tanks everywhere, soldiers everywhere, nobody knew what was happening. My father, with a stoic calm, told me ‘Well, I went to school when the Nazis were here and so you go to school when there’s another occupation. So just keep your mouth [shut], don’t tell anybody what we talk about at home, don’t make any contacts with people that you don’t know, and be very careful.’ For a seven-year old kid, that’s kind of a harsh lesson to learn.”
“That was one thing I can tell you about the presence of the regime, or the omnipresence of the regime. As an athlete, I wanted to go to the Academic World Championship in windsurfing in Malta in the Mediterranean. I think it was probably the early ‘80s, ’83 or ’84. So I went to the dean of the faculty and I asked him to sign my paper so I could travel abroad to represent the socialist Czechoslovakia in the Academic World Championship, which I thought was great for the country – and of course I would have enjoyed it very much. And he wouldn’t sign the paper. He thought that it was not appropriate for me to travel abroad. One thing I remember that he said [was] ‘Well, do you want to be an architect or do you want to be an athlete?’ but I saw it as curbing my freedom to decide what I wanted to be. Why was it his decision to decide what I wanted to be? And I could have been either, I guess, or both. But who was he to tell me what I wanted to be? But he didn’t give me the opportunity to do that.”
“We experienced Chernobyl in 1985 and we didn’t know about it for I don’t know how many days after it happened; after the press was forced to admit that something happened. They were denying [it]. Of course, it was all over the world, everybody was talking about it. If you listened to Radio Free Europe or any other station from abroad, it was discussed or talked about it, and the official line was nothing happened. When you find out things like that, how do you feel about living in a state that is hiding such important facts from you and expects you to just accept it on face value?”
How did you experience Chernobyl?
“I think it was late spring in 1985 and I was in a windsurfing camp, because I was on the official Czechoslovak national team, and we were at a lake in western Bohemia – Nechranice, near Chomutov – and so we were practicing and surfing and having a good time, actually. It was beautiful weather; it was clear days and very nice weather, and then we heard this rumor about the nuclear disaster, but nobody could verify anything, so I don’t know how much radiation we received or not. When we came back to Prague, and of course rumors spread very quickly, we found out that this horrible thing happened and there was a discussion about prevailing winds and which way they blew, and whether it was north across Poland and Sweden and back down to Czechoslovakia, or how much radiation was possibly in the air. Nobody knew anything. There was no testing to be checked. It was very upsetting. You feel like you’re being nuked and you don’t even know about it.”
“They encouraged us. We told them that we were planning on leaving and we asked them sort of for their approval. We asked them how they felt it was going to affect their lives, because they’ll be staying behind. In my case, I was also concerned for my sister who had a job. She was young and starting out in her position and the concern was that if she had a brother who emigrated, it would have an effect on her ability to get jobs or work where she was working. But she felt that she had a good enough position to stay where she was and her work would not be greatly affected. My parents didn’t feel that that would affect them tremendously. My wife had the same discussion with her parents. Of course they said how sorely they would miss her, and both of us, but they would certainly encourage us to seek a better life elsewhere.”
“In the early ‘80s, Solidarity in Poland was gaining a lot of interest and was becoming well-known as an opposition, but it seemed to be moving in small steps. Then, in ’85, I went to the Soviet Union and Gorbachev was then president, and there were some signs of glasnost, they called it, and certain liberties that were allowed to people much more than the Stalinist tight regime allowed before. It felt like it might loosen up a little bit, but it never felt like the whole thing is going to collapse. Of course by the time in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, we were already here and we were watching it in disbelief. It was something we could never envision or imagine. We were in Berlin not long before that, before we escaped, and you couldn’t even get close to the wall on the Eastern German side. There were police everywhere; there was no-man’s land, all these barbed wires. Everything was so well protected that one could never imagine that it could come down so fast. Unbelievable.”
“Here, everybody has an immigrant story. Everybody’s grandmother or grandfather or great-great-grandparents came from some place, and so everybody relates to the immigration story. I think the story can be told a million times and every time it’s slightly different, but every time it’s the story of people coming here, looking for new life, and then making it better for themselves. I think on a certain level it makes this country better because people have the spirit to succeed and do something better and something with their lives.”
Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
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Viera Noy was born in Zemianske Sady, a small village in western Slovakia, in 1947, where her father, Rudolf, was a director of agriculture while her mother, Margita, was a homemaker who cared for Viera and her older sister Marta. When Viera’s father earned a promotion, the family moved to Borovce near Piešt’any, where Viera began elementary school.
Because of their Jewish background, Viera’s parents had been in hiding during WWII; their other family members were killed in the Holocaust. Viera says her parents were the sole survivors of the War. According to Viera, it was not easy to attend school as a Jewish child in communist Czechoslovakia. She explains that she was treated unfairly by her classmates and often by her teachers.
She attended high school in Piešt’any and, upon graduating, completed a degree in physical therapy in Bratislava. Viera’s first job was as a physical therapist researching rheumatism at a spa in Piešt’any. She started in August 1968, shortly before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. It was then that she began making plans to leave the country. In November of that year, Viera and her sister Marta received visas to attend a wedding in Austria. In Vienna, they connected with the international organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which provided accommodations and assistance with the immigration process. Viera says that she had the option of immediately immigrating to Israel (because both she and her sister practiced licensed professions), but that she wanted the ‘adventure’ of moving to the United States. She spent three months in Vienna where she worked in a boutique popular with Slovak tourists on Mariahilferstrasse. She moved to Rome when the HIAS building in Vienna was attacked, and thousands of emigrants were relocated to Italy.
On March 6, 1969, Viera and her sister flew to New York City. Viera says that HIAS provided them with intensive English language classes, accommodation and food. Viera’s first job was in a jewelry factory but, through a family friend, she soon found a job working for Dr. Hans Kraus as a physical therapist. Dr. Kraus was a well-known physician, and Viera says that the selection procedure she went through before getting the job was rigorous. In his office, she came in contact with many famous and influential people and used those contacts to aid her fellow émigrés, helping them find jobs and process immigration paperwork.
After becoming an American citizen in 1976, Viera began returning to Czechoslovakia on a yearly basis to visit her parents and friends. When she got married in Tel Aviv in 1984, Viera wanted her parents to be at the wedding, but says that Czechoslovakia and Israel did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Viera and her husband have two children who speak fluent Slovak and Hebrew, as they spent summers when they were younger in Slovakia and Israel. Today, Viera lives with her family in Larchmont, New York.
“There was no rabbi or synagogue to really practice the religion. My parents were Holocaust survivors. They didn’t go to any concentration camp, but they survived in hiding and they were afraid to practice, but we always knew from people that we are Jews because kids in school made fun of us and even the teacher would not favor us, knowing that we were Jewish.”
How did you take it?
“Up until 12 years old, not terribly bad, but when I was 12 years old, all the children went to religious school on Wednesdays, and around Easter time, I think, the subject was the Jews drink Christian blood during Easter, and all of the sudden my best girlfriend didn’t want to sit with me, nobody wanted to walk to and from school with me, because I was the only Jewish kid – and my sister, but we were two classes apart, so we had different schedules. So it was very difficult, because at 12 years old you want to have a girlfriend. We used to walk and do things together – on the bicycle, after school we had fun things to do – and all of the sudden I’m all by myself. Nobody wanted to associate with me. Until high school, and then I went to Piešt’any for high school and things were a little different.
“In the first grade when our teacher was giving us our school certificate, she asked every student where they were going for summer vacation. Since my name started with ‘N,’ I heard the words ‘grandma, grandpa, cousin, aunt.’ I never heard these words at home, so when I came home I asked my mom ‘How come I’m not going for vacation to some relatives?’ So my mom was crying and said ‘Oh, we don’t have any relatives.’ But then she found some family in Nitra – friends – it was also a Jewish family that had no children, and they became our aunt and uncle, so we used to go there practically regularly for summer vacation to Nitra.”
“I really did believe in it until the invasion of Czechoslovakia because I think my parents kind of taught us to believe in communism, knowing that this is the only system you can live in. I think they believed in communism out of fear. I really believed that this is the best because you don’t have any other literature and you’re really not connected with the world, so you really believe that this is what it is and the Russians are the best, and American imperialism is the worst and they’re enslaving people or hurting people and they’re really not good for people, and how wonderful we have a life in a communist country. So I really did believe it until it was the invasion. I was shocked. I was just finished with physical therapy school, worked for a couple months, and one morning you have Russian tanks in the city and you say ‘How could that be? They were such people?’ and ‘Why did they do that to us?’ I was just so unhappy.”
“We had a choice to go to Israel the next day due to our professions. My sister was a biochemist, I was a physical therapist, and they looked for professional people and the agency was right there in Vienna. But [I wanted] some kind of adventure. I just wanted to come to America. And they wanted to send us to California because New York was full of Czechoslovak refugees who had a lot of family here since WWII, or before WWII, so they had preference, and somehow they kind of squeezed the two of us to bring us to New York, so we came to New York.”
“In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the job I had as a physical therapist was a place where a lot of influential people came – politicians, economists, artists – so I was able to provide jobs and accommodations for almost everybody. Even the legal papers, the senators, ambassadors. All different people. But even people I didn’t know would ask me. My parents were even scared that somebody was going to arrest them because somebody would knock on the door and bring a present for my father: ‘Oh your daughter in New York let my son stay for two weeks or found him a job.’ My parents didn’t even know who these people are. Yeah, always.”
“I had to phone my parents to get them to Vienna and from Vienna to fly to Israel, but I cannot tell this on the phone because Czechoslovakia and Israel had no communication; they didn’t have any contact at the time. This was 1984. So I told my parents on the phone ‘Come to Vienna. We are changing the wedding to Vienna.’ So my parents were hysterical and came to Vienna. They said ‘Where is Eli? Where is my sister?’ so I had to whisper and say ‘They went to Israel.’ So my parents almost fainted at the bus station where I met them. Because also this rabbi got me all these connections. His daughter was married in Vienna to the Minister of Finance, and I needed a visa for my parents to fly from Vienna to Tel Aviv, out of the passport. They cannot come back to Czechoslovakia with an Israeli stamp in a passport. He also told me to be careful who to contact. ‘Vienna is full of Czechoslovak spies and your parents are going to be followed all the time.’ We needed to get to the embassy which is a little bit on the outskirts of Vienna, and not to be followed. But we got to the embassy and they already knew everything about us. They issued [a visa] on tissue paper for my parents to go to enter Israel and exit Israel. But they needed another visa to enter Austria again because they had already used it used. Everything needed to be out of the passport, so all this was issued. We happily went to Tel Aviv and quickly got married. My sister was there, her husband was there, and so we got married in Tel Aviv.”
Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
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Vera Plesek was born in Vrchovina, northern Bohemia, in 1949. Her father, Petr, died when she was four, leaving her mother, Františka, to raise her and her brother on her own. Vera’s mother held strong anti-communist views and because of this, as well as for reasons of her health, she refused to work. In the early 1950s, Vera’s mother was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing the communist government, though was granted a pardon after the death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953, before she was sent to jail. Vera started school in Vrchovina, but was bullied so badly because of her mother’s behavior that she was moved to a larger school in Nová Paka after two years.
When she was 15, Vera left school and started to work at a road equipment factory called Silniční stroje a zařízení Heřmanice Nová Paka, in a job which she says she ‘loved’. Among other duties, Vera worked as a crane operator, welder and upholsterer. She left the factory at the beginning of 1969 when a disagreement with her mother led her to look for a new home. She started working as a dishwasher in a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn which offered employees room and board. After one week of washing dishes, she wrote to a Czech-American family friend, Jimmy Valesh in New Albin, Iowa, asking whether she could come and visit him there. Vera left Czechoslovakia legally on September 9, 1969. When she took a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one month later and did not return, she was handed a nine-month sentence in absentia for leaving Czechoslovakia. Vera has lived in Cedar Rapids ever since. For more than 30 years, she worked in the radiology department of St. Luke’s Hospital. She also wrote a regular column for the Czech-American newspaper Hlasatel for over a quarter of a century. She became an American citizen in 1976. Vera currently lives in Cedar Rapids with her third husband, Brian, and works as an artist.
“She was very lonesome, ‘til her dying day she was looking for those two children the Germans took away from her. So she went to fortune tellers and every which way to find out if they were still alive. So that was kind of a sad story. She died in ’68 right before the Russian invasion, which was nice too because she praised the communists for freeing her from the concentration camp. So she was really a very communist-oriented person, which my mother wasn’t, so there was friction with those two, you know. Because, my aunt from Lidice, she thought it was the top of her life that they came and she got to go home from the concentration camp. That’s why she praised them and she didn’t live long enough to see when they came and tried to take the country or took the country over again.”
“It was hurting us as kids, because I think most of, the whole village was communist – maybe they didn’t believe in it all the way, but they were – just for them to exist, you know. And then there was us, and we weren’t. So, I started school in Vrchovina, that was five years, but in the second grade I had such a hard time with kids, you know, chasing me down the street and throwing rocks at me, that for the third year I went to Nová Paka to school. [My mother] asked for them to transfer me to this big school and there were like four kids in the class whose parents were not communist. And we were okay already, nobody was pointing their finger at us like they did in that little village, you know. So, needless to say I didn’t have much love for that little village! Somebody once wondered ‘how could you leave all your friends?’ At the big town of Nová Paka, which was 15,000 people, you could get lost already a little bit, especially in the school. That was a lot better for me, I felt more safe, even if it was a half-hour walk, you know, instead of going to our little school.”
“I went to work, they had like a general strike for an hour, you know. I didn’t want to participate in it – you are just hurting yourselves, you know, if you are not going to work for an hour, you are not hurting the Russians, you’ll just have more and more work. And then one evening I went, it was late, around 9:00 or 10:00, I walked home from some movie or something, and there come the trucks, you know. I said ‘hmm, now what will happen?’ They stopped, all of them, and so this big guy comes out and starts talking to me. Well, at the time I spoke very good Russian and so I wasn’t about to lie. No, no, I was chicken. There were like a hundred of them. So they were asking for roads, you know, they showed the map and I told them they were going the right direction, you know. I wasn’t going to say ‘go this way, come back and wipe this village off the map!’”
“It was just so emotional, so exciting for me. I said ‘I cannot live without this. This is it!’ I sang and sang and everybody was so happy, you know. I said ‘I want to live like this again’. And my husband, well, he got kind of frustrated, because the lady we stayed with said ‘I will translate everything for him’, but, well, she didn’t. Everybody was laughing and smiling and telling jokes and singing songs and he just sat there, you know. And so he got drinking a little more than he should and at like 6:00, 5:00, in the morning he wanted to drive back to Cedar Rapids because he didn’t want to be there anymore. But by the next day he settled down. In the middle of Moravian Day when there were 60 people on the stage dancing Cardas, he was out there sleeping, and I said ‘Okay, so, this doesn’t work’.
“And, we came back home, and I could not talk, I could not do anything. I just sat there, on the couch, and I said ‘This is it, I want to live in Chicago. I want to be Czech again’. Because it was like 90% of my body just came to life.”
“With my mother I think it was like three years before she finally mellowed out enough to write me a decent letter – something nice, you know. But I met her, she came to Austria, she came on the train in 1982. And she started arguing with me just where she quit 15 years before that. I said ‘Mother! How do I know why I did what I did when I was 17 when I am 33 now!’ I don’t know why I did what I did at that time, you know? She just went on and on. She took pride in it that we didn’t get along.”
“The trouble with communism was that when they got in there, they locked up people and threw out the people who were ambitious and knew something, okay? Because if you do your own business, you know, it’s a 25-hours-a-day job, not just 24. You have to constantly, forever think about it, you know, and invent different processes for making some things. And they got rid of these people who were capable of this thinking, you know. That was the trouble, they locked them up and they put somebody who didn’t know a thing about it – they made him a boss, you know. It doesn’t work that way. There has to be somebody who knows how to do it, you know. You’re not going to explain to me how to make this, because you don’t know anything about it, and you’re going to be my boss? So what am I going to think of you?
“This was the worst mistake of communism, that they did this. Because after that they didn’t have capable people. And the ones to whom they said ‘You can’t go to school’… Like I said, with myself, it was my mother who said ‘I don’t want you to go to school’, it wasn’t the government, you know. Because I’m sure, since we were so poor, I probably could have gone to school. But mother insisted it cost money. At the time it didn’t! You know, that was all free!”
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
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Susan Lucak was born in Teplice in northwestern Bohemia in 1955. Her parents, who were originally from the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, had moved to Teplice when her father Mirolslav became the conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra. When Susan and her older sister were in school, Susan’s mother Jiřina went to work as an after-school teacher. Susan says that her parents had decided to leave Czechoslovakia shortly after the Communist coup in February 1948, but that they had to remain in the country when their plans fell through. In 1967, Susan’s family moved to Prague when her father got a job as the director of a music school there. She says that the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 21, 1968, once again led her parents to the decision to leave the country. In 1969, Susan’s family applied for travel permits to Yugoslavia; she says they were lucky to receive permission to travel through Austria, as one of Susan’s father’s students was performing at the Salzburg Music Festival. They left Czechoslovakia on April 17, 1969, and made their way to Vienna where they lived for over three months while awaiting permission to immigrate to the United States.
On July 25, 1969, Susan and her family arrived in New York City. They were given a room in a hotel in Manhattan and Susan’s parents both found work in a watch factory. Two months later, the family moved to an apartment in Queens and Susan began ninth grade. Susan’s parents lost their jobs two weeks before their first Christmas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, her mother began working on an assembly line for electrical switches (a job that she held for over 20 years) and her father found a job as a clerk on Wall Street. He later taught piano lessons and also wrote and published music compositions. Susan says that it took her a couple years to become comfortable with the English language – a length of time that was frustrating for her. When she was 16, she began selling coffee and lunches in an office on Wall Street in order to save money for college. She attended Barnard College and majored in biology, and then enrolled at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Susan has spent the majority of her professional career as a gastroenterologist with Columbia University. She received her American citizenship in 1975 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Susan and her family began attending picnics and bazaars put on by the Czech community. She was a member of the Czech dance group, Klub Mládeže. Susan has been a member of the Dvorak American Heritage Association since the group was founded and is the current president of the organization. She also serves as a vice-president for the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA). Susan has two children and says that her daughter in particular has a great affinity for Czech culture. Although she loves returning to the Czech Republic for visits, Susan is very happy to be living in Manhattan.
“My father, when he was a conductor of the Northern Czech Symphony Orchestra, he had to be present at the Communist meetings that were held in, let’s say, Teplice, and these Communist meetings were very long and in the beginning of the meetings, the orchestra that father conducted played the Czechoslovak national anthem, the Russian national anthem, and then the song ‘Internationale’, and those pieces of music were played at the beginning of those meetings and they were played at the end of the meetings and so the orchestra had to sit there for hours and hours and listen to these discussions that were endless. After some time, my father suggested that perhaps they could get a recording instead of the orchestra being there for so many hours, and what they told my father was that if he did not like doing that, then he may as well pack up and then go and work in coal mines. So he obviously retracted that and continued to sit at these meetings.
“Then there were things that happened in the school where he was a director where people were advanced based upon not their abilities necessarily, but based upon whether they belonged to the Communist Party and so on. So he always felt that in music, one cannot advance people based upon their participation in a party, and so there were certain frustrations that I think that he experienced because he was always interested in having a good quality school and good quality music teachers, and that wasn’t always possible. So I remember him speaking about that.”
“Approximately a week after the invasion, my father and I walked from Nusle to Václavské Náměstí [Wenceslas Square] and things had sort of somehow calmed down a little bit. There was less shooting and we were speaking with the Russian soldiers. People spoke Russian pretty well because it was a language everybody had to learn in school. All of the sudden, the soldiers started to shoot at us, so my father and I hit the ground and we crawled to a nearby street and all the doors to the buildings were closed because people were frightened, so my father and I, we crawled about a block and a half and made a turn and kind of disappeared from the scene on Václavské Náměstí. Then we walked quickly and ran back home. So it was a very, very scary time.”
Those were warning shots?
“They were warning shots. Nobody, to my knowledge, was killed during that time. But they were just sort of very arbitrary about shooting, and it was frightening.”
“The way this kind of worked out was that my father had a student that wanted to perform at the Salzburg Music Festival. So he said that he wanted to go to negotiate the details of the concert, and we wanted to go on vacation, as a family, to Yugoslavia. He applied for permission to go through Austria and stay there for four days, and we didn’t necessarily expect that we were going to get permission as a family to leave and do that, because we could have been told ‘Oh, don’t go through Austria. As a family, go through Hungary,’ and then for my father to go alone and negotiate the concert in Austria. But somehow, for reasons that we still do not understand until today, we got the permission to go for four days to Austria. So on April 17, 1969, we drove down to the southern border and we couldn’t see the signs because the snow was sticking to the signs and so we got lost and I think my father was a little nervous. Then we got through to the Czech-Austrian border and the officials at the border, they kind of had a sense that we were escaping and they made us come out of the car. They searched through, even under the hood of the car, and they searched through everything, and the only thing that we had that would have been suspicious were English textbooks. Because we knew we wanted to come to the United States or go to an English-speaking country and we were not sure that we would be able to find textbooks. So somehow, my father took these textbooks, and we were nervous about that. Why would we have been taking English textbooks to Austria? But they didn’t find the textbooks. My father had sort of hidden them, so they didn’t find the textbooks.
“Then finally when we drove through, which was around 5:00 in the morning on April 18, we then went through the Austrian part of the border, and there the Austrians just basically saluted us, they looked at our papers and then they allowed us to come in, and once we got across the border, we just stopped the car and we just sat and couldn’t believe that we had gotten across the Iron Curtain and that we were in a free country and that we escaped the oppressive communist country. And yet at the same time, I think that there was also a sense of sadness of leaving your homeland, with the idea that we would never be able to return. We thought that this was a step where we would never return to Czechoslovakia because we never thought that communism would ever not be there.”
“I did not go to school. I told my parents that I didn’t want to go to school because we came in April and I felt it was towards the end of the school year and I did not want to start learning German, and so I started studying English on my own using these textbooks that we brought from Czechoslovakia. So I used them during the day and then in the evening when my parents and sister came home, I would give them the textbooks so they would learn them and then I was sort of taking care of other things. So my job in a way – they were working as gardeners – and my job was to kind of take care of the paperwork that was necessary to immigrate to the United States. So my father would write down for me where to go and what to say, and then I would go and actually take care of the paperwork that was required for us to immigrate to the United States.”
“I remember the very first Sunday we went to Central Park thinking that we were going to a park the way one would go in Europe, and we were dressed in our best clothes. I remember I was wearing this white blouse with a navy blue skirt and matching shoes, and expecting that we will be strolling in Central Park. And what we were seeing was this wild scene that you kind of see in the movie Hair, by Milos Forman, where people were barely dressed. Men were topless and wearing no shirts and wearing minimal clothing and jeans with bell-bottoms, and women were not wearing bras and they were very open with one another in terms of expressing their affection publicly. And I was 14 years old and I just didn’t even know where to look, and it was all very embarrassing.”
“It was very hard that first Christmas. We were happy to be in the United States, certainly, but there was a certain harsh reality where my parents had no job. So we bought a Christmas tree for one dollar and we bought very simple decorations. We obviously had no money to buy any presents, but that was kind of not really that important to, and we sat around the Christmas tree. I have to say that we were happy to be in the United States, we were happy to be in a country which was democratic and we had freedoms, but there was also a certain harshness about being in a country and not having a job and having somewhat of an uncertain future.”
“I kind of felt that when I came here at the age of 13 that I, in a sense, lost my childhood because of the responsibility of learning English and trying to make it here. I kind of felt a certain responsibility to my parents for making this step, and I felt that I obviously wanted to succeed in the United States and so I felt that I needed to take advantage of opportunities that were presenting here that I would not have had in Czechoslovakia. So there was a certain kind of heaviness that I felt even at the age of 13 and 14, and I felt that I really needed to succeed in a way for my family, as well as for myself. I worked pretty hard and I have to say that I was a little disappointed in myself after six months of working pretty hard and studying and feeling that I wasn’t speaking the language fluently. It took about two years before I felt comfortable with the language.”
“I became a Dvořák lover when I came to the United States in 1969 and everything was very unfamiliar and the only thing that reminded me of home and Czechoslovakia was Dvořák’s music. I knew it rather well because music was always around my house and, also, I always went with my father, with my parents, to concerts in Czechoslovakia. So when we came here, the only thing that I heard that reminded me of home was Dvořák’s music, and it always sort of warmed my heart. So when his house, where Dvořák lived, on East 17th Street was threatened to be destroyed, I felt that I wanted to get involved and see if we could save the house or somehow honor Antonín Dvořák here in New York City in a way that made it very special for me. I felt a special connection that he was somebody who came from my homeland who had lived here in New York City, and I felt that he deserved to be honored here and so that’s how I got involved in the Dvorak American Heritage Association here in New York.”
Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
]]>Peter Palecek was born in Prague in 1940. Prior to WWII, his father Václav was president of the National Union of Czechoslovak Students and served as secretary general of the Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce. With the outbreak of war, Peter’s father escaped to Britain, where he became a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Click for more about Peter’s father, General Václav Paleček.
As a result of her husband’s activism, Peter’s mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to an internment camp at Svatobořice for the remainder of the War. Peter was taken in by a family friend, lived on a farm in Krucemburk, and returned home shortly before the end of the War, where he was reunited with his parents in May 1945. After the War, Peter’s father was named chief of the Czechoslovak Military Mission in Berlin. Following the Communist coup in 1948, he was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 1957, his sentence was reduced and, with poor health impacted by years of work in uranium mines, he returned to his family.
Peter attended Catholic school in Prague 6 until 1949, when he says the school was closed and the teachers and priests there were arrested. After elementary school, Peter attended a secretarial school for one year, and then transferred to Nerudovo gymnázium, from which he graduated in 1957. Peter worked for two years at a ČKD transformer plant and then, with the help of his father, enrolled in ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering. During his second year there, he was elected as a student trade union representative. Upon graduation, Peter began working at ZPA as an installation and start-up technician. A keen sportsman (he loved skiing and orienteering), Peter was named a master of sports in high-altitude tourism in 1964. It was also at this time that he met his future wife, Hana. He began studying for a master’s degree at VŠE (University of Economics in Prague) and, in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, decided to continue his studies abroad. He was admitted to a two-year MBA program at Stanford University and, in September 1969, traveled from Prague to the United States. Peter says he was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia in the midst of his studies. He decided to stay in the United States and complete his degree. Hana, whom he had married the previous year, spent the next nine months attempting to join him. She arrived in California in the summer of 1970. The pair became proud American citizens in 1977.
Peter’s first job after graduation was with Philip Morris in New York City; the work required him to make multiple visits to Toronto and Montreal. In 1973, after the birth of their first son, David, the Paleceks moved with Philip Morris to Switzerland. They returned to California in 1975 and bought their current house in Atherton in 1979. Peter worked as senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute from that time until 1986. Peter and Hana had two more sons, Misha and Tom, both born at Stanford and dual citizens of the United States and the Czech Republic. In May 1990, Peter was hired by Tomas Bat’a of Toronto to work on the re-establishment of Bat’a as a private company in Czechoslovakia. In 1995 Peter joined Arthur D. Little of Boston as managing director of their Prague office. He retired in Prague in 2002 and returned with his wife Hana to Atherton, California.
“I know that when my father was active and established, in London, November 17 as International Students’ Day, the Gestapo of course knew what happened. When he came to the U.S. in ’43, the Gestapo knew exactly that my father came on the invitation of American organizations and [First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s when the Gestapo came to our apartment in Podolí and arrested my mother, and my mother was taken for two years to Svatobořice concentration camp. When my father was even more active, my mother was destined for a gas chamber; she was put in a special group. At that time in Prague, my godfather who really helped to care for me, Dr. Fedor Tykač from Ljubljana, he was a lawyer and he produced divorce papers and he presented the divorce papers to the Gestapo within a few days, and my mother was literally taken from the train and that saved her life. Of course, my father, when he came back in ’45 from London, he didn’t know about that, he said. So they had one more short wedding. My father didn’t know they were divorced and that divorce saved the life of my mother.”
“I don’t remember anything when I was five years or younger, but when I was five, there was an American plane shot down very close in a field [at Krucemburk], and we boys went to look over there. I was scared like hell. And then when I came to Prague in May, we believed it would be the end of the War, so we walked over Palackého most [Palacký Bridge] and I remember the big holes from bombings going through the bridge and you could see down to the water. My grandma took me to my house; we already carried American, French, and British flags, and the Germans were shooting from the roofs [of Palackého naměstí] at us so we had to hide in a couple of houses with my grandma until dark, and then we continued for a few blocks to our house at Podskalská 8. Then, about one week before the end of the War, the Americans bombed Železniční most, because that was the last [railroad] track for Germans moving out of Prague, waiting for Russian tanks to come and maybe kill them. But it was a cluster bombing from 10,000 feet, so the bombs never hit Železniční most; it hit right at our apartment. Our apartment was at Podskalská 8 druhé patro [second floor]. It came right to druhé patro [the second floor]; I was with my grandma down in the basement, so it took them five or six hours to dig us out. We were just in the rubble. These are my first memories. Shot [American] plane in Krucemburk, holes in the bridge, bombing, and houses on fire in Prague.”
“I remember from that visit, we were in a trailer [at Tabor L in Ostrov by Karlovy Vary] and there were about 20 partitions for 20 people. Each partitioning was about eight feet wide, and you could see barely through the wooden barrier; you could see your father barely through it. We had a 20-minute visit, 15-minute, and it was minute number five when I looked in another cube, and there was a mother with a one- or two-year old child and she gave him an apple to pass over the barrier to his father. Then the guard with the machine gun behind us, he jumped in and smashed the boy’s hand and the apple was flying, and he just yelled ‘Finished! Visits are finished. Everybody goes home.’ So that was a five-minute visit during his nine years.”
“One week before my graduation from high school [Nerudovo gymnázium], a letter came from the Ministry of Education – to my knowledge – for four people. One was me, and the Ministry requested that I be evicted and would not graduate. In my case, I was so grateful to the principal. The principal said ‘No, Peter is going to graduate.’ I graduated, and he [Principal Dr. Radoslav Pacholík] was immediately retired. He lost his job. I was very grateful. I learned about it, that he was very firm, and I just thanked him and he said ‘Anyway, I would probably retire next year or in two years, and this is a lot of BS what happens in our country.’”
“With collective farming, farmers did nothing but went to Prague and went to nightclubs. So the soldiers and schoolchildren had to go and do hops [during the harvesting season]. So let’s say I went for two weeks to do the hops brigade. Very hard work; it’s very hard on your fingers, and I just couldn’t manage and it was so stupid. I must say, I showed my economic or business principles over there. I paid the girls – we were supposed to make two věrtels. Věrtel is a measure for hops – a big basket [about 6.7 gallons] – was called a věrtel. And we were supposed to do two a day so we could pay for our accommodation and food. And there were girls making six or seven and making money, so I paid her a little bit more, and she did my two věrtels and I was able to read or whatever or go for a hike. The second was potato brigades when the school went for one week to harvest potatoes. Harvesting sugarcane. High school guys did it.”
“I was one of 12 members of the trade union representing 22,000 students. All the others were professors and teachers – a lot of them Communist Party members. I was in Terezín [on a two-month military training exercise] after my second year. Suddenly, a big Tatra comes for me in the middle of August to Terezín. ‘Peter, we have an extraordinary meeting.’ I said ‘Are you kidding? In the middle of August, I have to go to Prague?’ Of course they had all the papers and the military released me. I go red carpet to Prague; I go to our meeting. We go through mundane, routine stuff. I said ‘We don’t have to do this meeting in the middle of August.’ Then they said ‘Oh, we have one more last point. There are two professors who are really bad. They use American textbooks. They are too pro-American. We don’t need this happen; these guys have to be retired today, August 16. Think about it.’ We had five minutes to discuss it. I said ‘These are the best professors; we learn the best from them. Kids love them. I cannot go for it.’ And of course there was an open vote. ‘Who is for? Eleven. Who is against? Peter. Why are you against it Peter?’ I said ‘I am representing 22,000 students. We love these guys, and you just told me at the last moment. You couldn’t even tell me one or two hours before what I am coming for.’ Well, these were experts from the university. Guess what, I didn’t get my car back to Terezín; I had to take a slow train back to my military unit. That was it, and the next year I was out of it.’”
Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.
Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.
]]>Paulina Porizkova was born in Olomouc in 1965 and grew up in the Moravian town of Prostějov. Her parents, Anna and Jiří, left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion and settled in Sweden. Paulina remained with her maternal grandparents in Prostějov and says that her time with them was ‘delightful.’ Paulina’s parents, meanwhile, were attempting to reunite their family and gained attention in Sweden for their actions. After three years had gone by, they planned to ‘kidnap’ Paulina after flying into Czechoslovakia with the help of Swedish pilots. On her way to Prostějov, Paulina’s mother (who was traveling on a fake passport) was detained for speeding and arrested when her identity was revealed. Because she was several months pregnant, Paulina’s mother was released to her parents’ house and remained under house arrest. Paulina says that her father, who had remained in Sweden, had managed to keep their case in the media, which put pressure on the Czechoslovak government. In 1973, Paulina, her mother, and her brother were allowed to leave the country.
Paulina says that her parents divorced shortly after returning to Sweden and her mother worked as a midwife. Because they were not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, Paulina’s family would travel to an Eastern bloc country each year to meet up with her relatives who remained behind. At age 15, Paulina signed with Elite Models and moved to Paris by herself to begin her modeling career. By 1983, Paulina had become ‘very in demand’ in the United States and moved to New York to continue her career. She says that her first impressions of New York were less than favorable and that she did not become ‘settled’ there until she met her husband, Rick Ocasek, and decided to stay permanently.
Paulina’s first trip back to Czechoslovakia was in 1991, after the fall of communism. She has returned several times for visits, although much of her family is now in the United States, including her mother and brother. Paulina has made a point to continue Czech traditions and celebrate Czech holidays. Her sons, Jonathan and Oliver, are connected to their Czech heritage, and her younger son especially enjoys Czech history and culture. After a successful modeling and acting career, Paulina has turned to writing in recent years. She has written a children’s book and a novel and produces a column for the Huffington Post. Today, Paulina lives in Manhattan with her husband and sons.
“My childhood was delightful. It was wonderful, even though my parents left to go to Sweden and they left me behind with my maternal grandmother, and that happened when I was three years old and that happened during the Russian invasion in 1968. So my parents got on a motorcycle and they escaped across the border to Austria, like many other people were doing at the time, and I suppose this was quite a dangerous trip so they didn’t want to take a three year old on a motorcycle between them, so they left me with my grandmother. I wasn’t going to see them again, my mother for three years and my father for six years.
“During this time I lived with my grandmother and, I think even before my parents left I was [part of] the old Czech family where grandma takes care of the grandchildren and the aunt takes care of you. You know, it takes a village to raise a family, so we were always either at grandmother’s house or in the country with our great-aunts, so I didn’t feel the loss of my parents too much because I was really used to my grandmother. I also had my other set of grandparents that lived two streets away – my paternal grandparents that were lovely and that I spent a lot of time with as well – so I was a very protected and happy child that felt no deprivation at that time. I do remember babička going and waiting in line for milk for me from 4:00 in the morning and all that. When I speak about my childhood here in America, people are sort of slightly horrified: ‘Really? You didn’t have a bathtub until you were eight years old?’ We had a toilet inside our house, but we didn’t have a bathtub for a long time, and my grandmother cooked on a coal stove; there was no central heating. It was very much turn of the century living.”
“We were taught a lot of Russian propaganda, a lot of Russian songs. We left when I was in third grade, just at the end of third grade, but already by that time I had won a contest in which I recited a Russian poem; I won a Russian pen that never worked. My aspiration of my life was to be a Pioneer and to go and see Lenin’s grave. I thought that was just… That was it. That would have been it for my life. Fortunately that didn’t happen.”
You really felt that you wanted to do this?
“Yes, yes. It was very real to me. The Russians were our best friends. Everything Russian was… It was like a protective older brother. Things red were very good. The sickle and the star were symbols of goodness. Lenin was like a nice old uncle that you wanted to hang out with. I was a child; I believed all this stuff. You didn’t know any better. I was completely indoctrinated. I was a little communist from head to toe.”
“They were sent a letter, somehow, from the Czech government saying that since they had abandoned me, I should be adopted to a suitable Czech family for the proper communist upbringing unless they returned to claim me – which was a bit of a problem since if they returned to claim me they would be put in jail since they were criminals for leaving in the first place, and if they didn’t then I was going to be taken away from my grandmother and given to somebody else, so this was not a good situation in any way. At this point, they had become sort of celebrities in Sweden and they put together this plan, I think with some Swedish journalists that were going to have rights to the story and pictures and they were going to do a documentary and all this stuff, and so they got together two Swedish adventure pilots that were going to fly a plane into the Czech Republic. One of the pilots’ wives sort of looked like my mother, so my mother took her passport, and she had a wig and she glasses to look like this lady. So they decided they were going to fly into Czechoslovakia. They were going to fly into Brno, which was the closest big city to where I lived, they were going to get a car, and they were going to drive to Prostějov; they were going to kidnap me on my from school; they weren’t going to tell anybody, grandparents or anybody, because the grandparents might try to stop them or delay them or something. This was very important that it was all happening very quickly. They were going to kidnap me on my way to or from school, take me to the airport and leave. That was the plan and, like all well-laid plans, it didn’t quite work out that way.
“What happened was they landed fine in Brno, they rented a car, and they were driving on the highway from Brno to Prostějov, and they got caught for speeding. So they were taken to a police station; they started getting interrogated; things weren’t looking right – maybe they’re not who they claim they are, and there was also maybe a question of a possible anonymous letter that had reached the Czechoslovakian police or authorities that said my mother was coming to the country in order to kidnap me. I’m not too sure about this part of the story and I think my parents aren’t either, but I remember it mentioned that it could have been a possibility because it was very quick they way they sort of nabbed them in the car, brought them to the police station and all of the sudden started bringing in my mother’s friends: ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ And most of my mother’s friends looked at my mother and said ‘Never seen her before,’ which screwed them in the long run, but good for them as people. And then of course there’s that one odd uncle that’s like ‘Anna, what are you doing back?!’ So they all got put in jail.”
“Then my mother was under house arrest for a year or more, possibly the entire time she was in the Czech Republic. I’m not sure. I do remember we had police renting an apartment across the street with guys hanging out the windows with binoculars, taking the names of everybody that walked into our house. My mother didn’t have any friends at first for a long time because nobody dared to visit her; they would all lose their jobs. My father this whole time is in Sweden, fueling the fire in Sweden [playing] the devastated father: ‘Oh my god, my wife, my children.’ It worked out well that way; he was stoking the fires in Sweden and my mother was trapped in the Czech Republic with me, and now my baby brother. That took three years of nothing happening. It was sort of a stand-off. My mother there in the house, always being watched, my father over in Sweden, and the Swedes were just going at it. There were journalists coming to the Czech Republic. Of course this is all very illegal, so it had to be very hush-hush that there were Swedish journalists coming over and they would take all these pictures of us.
“For three years, my father kept fighting his battle over there in Sweden, and the Swedes were on-board. God bless all of them; the entire nation of Sweden. I owe it all to them really because the people kept writing letters; the Swedish hockey team wouldn’t play the Czechs in the Olympics because of us. The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was supposed to make a state visit and refused to make a state visit because of us. You know, we were cause célèbre. After three years, I guess the Czechs just went ‘This is more trouble than it’s worth. Passports here. Bye. Don’t come back. You’re no longer Czech; we want nothing to do with you.’ They actually kicked us out.”
“I wasn’t allowed to go back to Czechoslovakia. When we got kicked out, in ’73, we got kicked out. We were not allowed in ever. As long as the communists were in power, that was completely off-limits to us. This means the woman that brought me up, really, was my babička and I wasn’t allowed to see her because now it was the situation that we were in Sweden and, to me, what felt like my real family was in Czechoslovakia and we had no way of seeing each other. Those were some very, very bad years for me, some very sad years, because I felt like I was taken away from my home and I wanted to go back. I’d much rather have been in the Czech Republic because I didn’t know. So, about once a year, my mother would save up enough money and we would go to Poland or Yugoslavia or Romania or Hungary, one of the communist countries, and my relatives would go there, like my mother’s sister and my cousins, my grandmother, and we would meet up with them. For a week or two we would have a holiday together in one of the communist countries to get to see each other.”
“First of all, it wasn’t very pretty. But I was not shown the pretty parts. I was stuck somewhere in Midtown on 56th Street, just concrete buildings all around, all the people. Everything was so rushed and so money-oriented. If you lived in Paris and you don’t know where to go in New York, the food wasn’t overwhelmingly good. To me, it was anti-culture. Nobody cared about books here; nobody cared about classical music; nobody cared about art. It was all money. It just felt like it was not a world that made any sense to me. But of course, being young and arrogant, I just didn’t really want to explore it. I took it at face value of what I saw when I was here, I was having a terrible time, and I thought ‘This place sucks. I can’t wait to get back to Paris.’ So later on, when I started considering actually moving here because of the money – because I wasn’t modeling to get pictures out of it; I was modeling to make money and the proposition was just undownturnable – I started searching out the different areas. The ones that wouldn’t be so what I thought New York was, but that I thought would feel right for me. And I did, of course. New York is a city of all cities. It has a little bit of everything. You can find Tokyo here; you can find France.”
“When you live in a country, when you plant your roots in a country, it’s really about that. It’s about roots. It’s about soaking up the nourishment of your environment. This is children’s songs, children’s stories, pop culture going on around you, and when you move as an adult, as a fully-formed person, to another country to settle, you’re missing all this roots stuff. You’re missing all this basic stuff that everybody else grew up with, all these references that you don’t have. So I got my Czech ones, then I moved to Sweden and I had to re-root my roots and go to the Swedish ones, and then I had to do it in France and then I had to do it in America. Because I did it so early, I think I was conscious that this is what you have to do to live in that country. You can’t just live on the country. You can’t just sit on the surface of a country and pretend you live there. You have to learn everything from the beginning, and I’m the richer person for it, actually having learned four different countries from the ground up. It gets a little confusing sometimes.”
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
]]>Otakara Safertal was born in Kladno, central Bohemia, in 1947. For a number of years, Otakara lived with her grandparents in the village of Velké Přítočno, as both her parents worked in Prague. Her father, Lubomir, was in charge of a bakery, while her mother, Miroslava, managed a small patisserie and also helped at the bakery. Otakara remembers frequent visits from her parents. She attended kindergarten in Velké Přítočno, but upon starting first grade, she joined her parents and sister, Ivana, in Prague. As a young girl, Otakara remembers participating in Sokol and religious classes which were eventually discontinued. She excelled at badminton and as a teenager travelled throughout Czechoslovakia to play. After finishing school, Otakara applied to economics school in Prague; she says she was rejected because she ‘didn’t have a very good background.’ After one year training to be a salesperson in a drugstore, Otakara was accepted to economics school. She graduated in 1967 and began working for Czechoslovak State Airlines (CSA) as a ground hostess. She married her husband, Frank Safertal, that same year. Otakara remembers the Prague Spring, saying that the mood of the country changed and that in particular, the ‘youth was very excited about the future of the country.’ At that time, Otakara and her husband were part of a theatre group that performed poetry and plays around the city.
Otakara was working an overnight shift at the airport during the Soviet-led invasion on August 21, 1968. Three days later, she received a visa from the Austrian embassy and, with her husband, left Czechoslovakia on August 31. In Vienna, the Safertals stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks before an infestation at the camp forced them to find a private apartment for the remainder of their stay. On October 4, Otakara boarded a plane for Canada. She says that the Canadian government at that time was very accommodating to Czechs and Slovaks, expediting the immigration process, providing English language classes, and offering job placement assistance. For ten years, Otakara managed the data processing department at the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) in Toronto. She stopped working after her two daughters were born, but later started her own business doing bookkeeping for small companies. Frank’s job in telecommunications led to the family spending time in Saudi Arabia and Calgary, and in 1997, Otakara and Frank moved to the Washington, D.C. area. Otakara has maintained a connection to her Czech culture, primarily through the theatre groups she has been involved in. She started a Czech preschool in Calgary for her grandchildren, and is also an active member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Science (SVU). She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband.
“I remember at one point in time, he wanted to import some Jewish cookies and things that were used for Sabbath and so on from Slovakia, and he did, and he got into trouble selling it, because it was not something on the government list. It was a constant struggle – him trying to improve the business and the government saying ‘These are the regulations and you can’t do that.’”
“The warning signs were there, but I think that people were just optimistic and didn’t want to accept the fact that the Russians would invade. I think that people were ready; their dreams were just great and I don’t think that the people really wanted a drastic change. They just wanted to live in a country that would be more free, and people would be able to travel, which in 1967 it was already happening. Just before the invasion in July, that was the first we left the country to Austria. It was sort of a family holiday. My parents and my husband, we went to Austria and came back. We were looking forward to going back [home], we had no reservations, and it was just a time that everybody was very hopeful, and all of the sudden it just crashed. People’s dreams crashed.”
“At that time, it was Prime Minister Trudeau who was the Canadian prime minister and he, on the intervention of the Czech emigrants, there was a special status for the Czech emigrants, that they could basically leave immediately. He gave us a special status. We went through the immigration process, but they expedited it. So we came to Austria at the end of August, and on October 4th, we were already on a plane to go to Canada.”
“It was the government that basically was taking care of us, the Canadian government. They had an excellent plan how to integrate us, and we were going to school for six months, either to improve or to learn English. For me, it was improving because I spoke English, but for my husband he had to start from scratch. They opened a school, it was called Brooklin High School and we used to go to school from midnight until about 3:00 in the morning. There were about 500 of us in the school, and it was an excellent program, and after six months, almost everybody was able to start looking for a job.”
“We also got involved with some of the people that came and started a new theatre group, and we were part of the theatre group for about 15 years. That theatre group in Toronto still continues. It’s in the 40th year of existence, and it was just an opportunity for us to stay close with our countrymen and promote Czech culture in the city. We put on about four or five plays a year, and it was a good outlet for people to gather friends and also to give something to the community.”
“I took my two daughters, and it was very emotional. I was very happy to see the family, but I was also very anxious to leave because I felt that I was not sure whether they would shut the doors for me and I would not be able to go back. I loved my life outside and did intend to stay in Czech Republic, so I had nightmares when I was there that I won’t be able to go back. It was mixed feelings – feelings that I was glad to see the family, but also a feeling that I did not belong there.”
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.
]]>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 Seventeen magazines from friends. While at gymnázium, 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.
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.
“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.”
“This gymnázium 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.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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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 gymnázium 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.
“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…
“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.”
“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].
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”