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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Childhood</h4>
<iframe width="300" height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T0YytGseJ6M?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe>
<p>“Compared to the kids here – my daughter – I think we were so happy. We didn’t have any computers, no TV, no games. We were just happy to go outside and play soccer and badminton and make bunker and just be outdoors. And we were safe; our parents didn’t worry about us. So I think it was a lot easier than kids have right now these days here.”</p>
<p><em>Do you think it was better to grow up without internet and computers?</em></p>
<p>“Oh yeah, totally. Big time. I’m so anti-computer, anti-TV. No, no, no. I mean, we had so many adventures. We made up games and we didn’t kill our brain cells with watching TV and passive time. We had wooden blocks and games that we’d play without TV. They just come home from school, sit down, watch TV, [use] the internet. I don’t think they use their brain as much. I’m so glad that I grew up in Slovakia and I had that childhood. I would wish for my daughter to have the same experience, because it was a lot more fun, I think.”</p>
<h4>Uncle</h4>
<iframe width="300" height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y0IobscMch0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>“I remember we were seven years old and my uncle came and it was at Christmas. At that time, it was my uncle, my mom and her sister… So there was like 12 of us and we had 105 Christmas presents. I remember that because we were counting them, and during communism that was like ‘Wow.’ You would have like 30 presents. I remember that after we came from midnight mass, my mom and my uncle and we stayed up and he was telling us about America, how great it is and this and that. As a kid you are like, ‘Oh my gosh, you have bananas every day? You can have oranges? You can have this?’ It was euphoria.”</p>
<h4>Family Emigration</h4>
<iframe width="300" height="300" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mU5JWHfMVWU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>“My uncle immigrated in 1968 and my mom came to visit him when we were ten, stayed for a year and a half, and she really liked it and she came back home and told us ‘This is the place where I want to raise you up and it’s going to be a better life for you.’ And she was making plans how she was going to come back here again, so then when we were 16 she finally succeeded and she came here. She got married to a Czech with American citizenship, and that was the way she brought us here.”</p>
<h4>Language Skills</h4>
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<p>“I remember when I came and when the other immigrants came it was like a monopoly. If you want to work here – do construction, be a cleaning lady – you always have to go through Polish people. And Polish people, except two that I know, they are firm on speaking only Polish. They would not every learn Slovak or Czech. So we had no other choice but to speak their language.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Zuzana Lanc
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Zuzana Lanc was was born in Liptovský Mikuláš in central Slovakia and grew up in the nearby village of Liptovské Sliače. She and her twin sister, Brona, lived with their mother, Anna Vesela, and their grandparents. Zuzana speaks fondly of her childhood in Slovakia and says that she was ‘so happy,’ especially compared to children growing up in the United States today. She enjoyed Russian and Slovak classes in school and excelled at recitation and speaking competitions. In 1987, Brona’s mother moved to the United States and married Zdenek Vesely, an American citizen. Although the plan was for the girls to follow shortly after, it took well over one year for Brona and Zuzana to be allowed to leave the country. They arrived in the United States in October 1988 and settled in with their mother and stepfather, who now had their younger sister, Margret, in Aurora, Illinois.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Zuzana and Brona received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated. While in school, Zuzana worked at the deli at Kmart, a job which she says helped improve her English. Upon graduating, Zuzana worked a number of customer service jobs. She then moved into the IT field, working at Motorola and HP. She received a two-year degree from the College of DuPage.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Today Zuzana lives in Downers Grove, Illinois, with her daughter, Emilka. She speaks Slovak to her daughter and the two of them return each year to Slovakia to visit family. Zuzana, along with her extended family, keeps Slovak holiday traditions and loves to cook Slovak food. While she says that she is ‘so glad’ to have grown up in Slovakia, today she calls the United States home and is thankful for her mother to have made the decision to give her daughters a better life.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Child emigre
Cultural Traditions
Family life
Grelova
Liptovske Sliace
Liptovsky Mikulas
Western/Pop culture
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e9a91dda631d5775683df4da4c4ebdd0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Egypt</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IAIQSbpnRy4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“At the age of 12, my father was there working as a military expert as a translator. There was massive military aid from Russians and the Czech Republic to the Nasser’s regime in ’66 and ’67. Actually, we were there during the Six-Day War which was quite an experience. My mother missed it and she thought, after the bombing was done, she said ‘I heard some noise and I thought somebody was dusting the carpets,’ because we were in the center and it was with a surgical precision; the military targets were on the outskirts, so nothing happened in the center.</p><p>“That was the beautiful time where it was the last weeks before you are distracted by women and you already have the capacity to understand what’s going on. So we had school activities close to the pyramids and there was an Egyptology institute of Prague university [Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University], which is quite famous, so we were, as pupils of a Czech school, taken there and we had these afterschool activities walking these mastabas and around pyramids. So it was a formative experience.”</p><p><em>So there were enough Czechs there to have a Czech school?</em></p><p>“My guess is about close to 10,000. We had our school there and a couple of houses, our own school bus. And the Russians – I think it was a military secret; I’m glad to reveal it now – about 50 or 60,000. Quite massive.”</p><h4>Teenager</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KBY9jFXaCmc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was an active part in the Jazzová sekce [Jazz section] and we helped to organize concerts in Lucerna. I was not at the headquarters; I just went there and helped with some manual work. It was the first experience for me to meet other people. Meet other people who I could identify with, and they were in the jazz culture and that’s for me what for the previous generation could be the tramping tradition, because the jazz music was something that I identified with American culture, and films as well.”</p><h4>Move in 2011</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K-6YQETivXg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This is not an isolated world anymore; even if people think that it is, it’s not. And what’s happening in Europe will be here really, really soon. So we are in one world. That’s why I feel more like a citizen of the world, and I can imagine that I can live in some other place and it’s still one world. And that’s what I am enjoying most. I learned how to pack. First time in my life that was sincere packing, and I still did not unpack after the refurbishment. But once I’ve done that I can do that again. That’s one of the main differences. When I was in Europe I actually could not imagine ‘I am packing and there is flat which is empty,’ and I’m able to get all these formalities here, with the help of my wife, done. It’s nice because I felt stuck there and now I feel I can move.”</p><h4>Freedom</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XGcpTP-tBtQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I distinguish between internal freedom and the freedom of convenience – if you want to get a service or some good, you can find them easily and it works, which is what I would call an objective freedom, yes. If I want to have something done then I can find it. But the internal freedom… I’m not that really convinced that this is the case. It could be really easily confused that what I can buy, where I can go with what I can do. Now I realize that I enjoyed a substantial part of an internal freedom back in Europe. It’s kind of an open-ended issue for me.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vladimir Zeithaml
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Vladimir Zeithaml was born in Hradec Králové, a city in Bohemia, in 1955. Both his parents were natives of Hradec Králové, and when they moved to Prague for their jobs, Vladimir stayed with his grandparents for several years. He joined his parents in Prague at the age of six. Vladimir’s father was a military doctor while his mother was a nurse who later worked in the Ministry of Health. In the mid-1960s, Vladimir moved with his family to Egpyt where his father was working as a military translator. Vladimir says the several years that he spent there were ‘formative’ and ‘beautiful’ times.</p><p> </p><p>At his school in Prague, Vladimir studied English, which was unusual at the time. In high school he started working as a tour guide for foreign tourists and also became involved in Jazzová sekce, a state-sponsored cultural organization that was able to promote jazz and other Western-style music, mostly through the efforts of young people and jazz enthusiasts among higher-ups. Vladimir’s family owned a cottage in the Krkonoše mountains where he enjoyed cross-country skiing.</p><p> </p><p>Vladimir attended law school at Charles University and then spent one year performing mandatory military service. Following his military service, Vladimir started working for a law firm in Benešov. Living in Prague at the time of the Velvet Revolution, Vladimir witnessed first-hand the fall of communism, and worked as a guide and translator for an American reporter during that time. After living in London for under one year, Vladimir returned to Prague and continued to practice law. He also developed a hydroelectric plant with a partner, which is still a successful enterprise today.</p><p> </p><p>In 2002, Vladimir visited the United States for the first time. He moved to Washington state in 2011 following his marriage to his Czech-American wife. Vladimir says that he enjoys a certain freedom moving to the United States has given him, which is the feeling of being a citizen of the world and being able to move around freely.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Benesov
English language
Hradec Kralove
Jazzova
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Language</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X1H4l_DECtk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>The Explosive Group</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ucbaJpMvOs4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EhH-vI2K_w?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>First Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tc23tc_Lr9E?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.</p><p>“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.”</p><h4>Radio</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iLDWRo28B0c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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 ‘<em>Vážení krajané</em>’, you know, ‘Dear Countrymen – the Czech Bob Dylan.’ And then I came on. So, it was great!”</p><h4>Emigrants Cry</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7sMPEC9XxSM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Listen to Vladimir’s song ‘Emigrant’s Cry’</p><h4>Student</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3PPYiFC-DMk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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.”</p><h4>Return to Prague</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BQdSy03pG3s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“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?</p><p>“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.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vladimir Maule
Description
An account of the resource
<p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Alternative culture
Arrest
Branik
Child emigre
Education
Forced labor
Informants
Jiri Kolar
Refugee camp
school
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Summer Cottage</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uENN9F_-Ukk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“We spent basically every free time there. Every weekend, all the summers, except for little vacations when we’d go somewhere else, that’s where we would be. Always doing something. There wasn’t any weekend where there wouldn’t be any project going on or a little gardening.”</p><p><em>What sort of projects did you do? </em></p><p>“Where do I start? There’s been several. From the big ones – building a garage – to a little smaller one – building a sauna behind a garage, complete with a pool that you would jump in. Yeah, that was a big project. To smaller ones, just a smaller place where you’d store food for the winter. Going to get the wood. Gardening. Just everything around. Plus, in a <em>chalupa</em>, you usually don’t have running water, so you spend a lot of time going for water. Drinking water, not-drinking water, washing the dishes, warming up the water and all that stuff. We did have a toilet inside, I have to say.”</p><h4>Art School</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MyGwOWRYmVc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Of course I knew America existed. I’d seen some movies. I was lucky enough from the environment where I was and within the art community to be able to get music, and more than probably normal people would, so I was exposed to that. I had this idea of a dreamy place where everything is just so nice and everything works and everybody has everything they need. I think everybody had that [idea], and then you come here and it’s a different story. That didn’t necessarily pad desire to live here at that time, but I was fascinated by that. It was at that time where it was cool to be into it, especially music. I think that was a big influence.</p><p>“Some of these schools you get [into] through knowing people or famous people’s kids go there; that’s how it used to work. There were some of those around who had access to more Western things than any of us normal people, and so you’re exposed through them. That would be one way. In Havlíčkův Brod, I got to be friends with some of the bands that used to play at the time which was underground, and some of these people were involved. In Havlíčkův Brod all the underground was very active at the time, so I’d been getting <em>samizdat</em>, some of the books that were not available, through these people. I’d be seeing them, so we’d be talking about music or art or whatever was going on in the Western world, not being normally accessible.”</p><h4>Student Protests</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wNMLHENxhYo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was involved before. There were demonstrations before the big one started. There were places I’d been where I shouldn’t have been. It was actually not very safe to be going to these places because you could be expelled from school and there were usually posted names on a board who got caught or who got expelled because they were caught. I’d been to some of these and was always able to run fast enough to hide. And we lived in the center of Prague, so everything was really happening right there. Plus, living in the center of Prague was also a cool thing because you know all the little streets and all the houses where you can run in and hide, so that’s what we used to do.</p><p>“Then, after I returned, when the big revolution actually started, everybody got into the streets and the students were demonstrating and schools were starting to close and kids were participating. Being in a school as cool as mine, it meant being involved on a daily basis at that time. I believe they stopped regular classes. We basically stayed in school 24/7; I believe we stayed for a week and brought our sleeping bags. We’d form little committees or we were printing pictures or posters and we had people coming in and bringing us food. It was very interesting. We had even concerts; Marta Kubišová came and played in the school on the stairs, in a hallway. It was a very interesting experience, of course, in between going out and actually participating in the demonstrations. It was very cool to live through that.”</p><h4>Revolutionary Spirit</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s7SvlzC4XC8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“It was pretty clear that’s what it was. That’s what it was about. Yes, it was like ‘We’re done with this. It’s time to change it.’ We had enough of being censored, not being able to talk, not being able to gather. And all these things were just the big things, not to mention not being able to do what you wanted to do. Traveling was a huge thing for me especially because I would have loved to travel, but didn’t have the opportunity to go anywhere but the Eastern Bloc. So that was one big thing for – the borders being opened. But again, it came with the whole thing that you just don’t know what’s going to happen because you have the police involved, you have the army involved and you never know which way it’s going to be. But at that time it felt right to do that and you don’t think about the consequences. You just go at because everybody’s doing it. It’s cool. There is a reason why we are doing this. You want this.”</p><h4>Scene in the Streets</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dvmqnZIBhbI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For me, walking either to Wenceslas Square or Old City Square was the same distance. You would be able to cover both within a 15-minute walk. So either one, wherever there was more people and, at that time, you probably knew what was going on. It was already covered by media. There was what at the time was Hlas Ameriky [Voice of America]. There were some radios where you could get information, or other people did, and you just talked about it. The gatherings just started happening and, honestly, it was everywhere at that time. There was not necessarily one place where you would go. People just started going at it and the whole center would be covered with people. Most of it happened at Wencelsas Square, but then posters started being posted everywhere with this demonstration or that one, that time, and then it started with politicians and then the different parties started posting. I do remember the whole statue of Jan Hus at Old City Square was covered with posters. It almost was like ‘This really shouldn’t be happening. That’s a shame, because it’s kind of a cool thing. But then, it’s also really cool to have that.’ There were posters – really, literally, I couldn’t believe it – on the streets. Everybody was carrying something. Everybody had little stickers on or something indicating ‘Yeah, we’re with you kids.’ It was the students, mostly, who did that, so it was cool being part of that. But, again, I was in high school at the time and more of that decision-making happened at the college level with the students there. So being involved totally in the center, but being around at that time.”</p><h4>Change</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lbAOtEDVBVs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“There were all these new stores popping up. Everybody opening up their little own businesses. It would just be one or two people running a new business. There were a lot of construction companies that would start or architectural or – what I’d known – little furniture stores. There was a huge demand for these things, so yes; there was a huge boom in that, definitely. Not necessarily in other areas; I think that took longer. I’m thinking clothing or other supplies that didn’t necessarily take off right away. I’m sure people tried to open these stores too. There were tons of them opening and closing. Kind of what’s going on here these days!”</p><h4>Chicago</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CXk7Luxa7mg?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I think I was used to being very cultural. To doing things all the time and not necessarily even thinking what I was doing. It was the exposure to all these different things, living in the center – not necessarily even living in the center anymore when I started working. It probably comes with age as well. When you’re more around people who are not necessarily settled and doing things. It was just so much fun and there was a lot going on, and after I came here, all that just stopped. And not only because you don’t know anybody here; you’re still able to look around and find some people, or go to the Czech neighborhood and hang out with people there, but there was not that much culture going. It seemed that you need money to be doing things here. Which was something foreign to me. I didn’t have any money in Czech Republic and I was still doing all these things and now, suddenly, I’m supposed to be spending money on all these things to do cool things? So it was big. Not having my friends around, not having my family, not necessarily even being able to find a decent job, but not having all these cultural things or things to do after work.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Veronika Heblikova-Balingit
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Veronika Heblikova-Balingit was born in Havlíčkův Brod in southeastern Bohemia in 1973. She lived with her mother, Milena, a secretary; her stepfather who worked in construction; and her younger sister. She regularly visited her father who lived in Prague and worked as a sound engineer for public broadcaster Czechoslovak Television. Veronika spent many weekends and vacations at her family’s cottage in Slavníč. She was interested in art and participated in after school art programs. At the age of 14, Veronika moved to Prague to attend an art school where she studied furniture design. She was 16 in November 1989 at the onset of the Velvet Revolution and, although she was not in Prague during the major student demonstration on November 17, Veronika says that she had participated in earlier protests and continued to gather in the city with other students in the following weeks. In the summer of 1990, Veronika took advantage of the newly-opened borders and traveled throughout Europe. Upon graduating, she took a job as a sales assistant in a clothing store and also did freelance work creating posters and flyers. Later, she worked for a new architecture firm designing office layouts. Her father helped her to secure an apartment in the Černý Most area of the city, and she was able to rent out several rooms. Veronika also took private English lessons.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1994, at the suggestion of an American friend who was renting one of her rooms, Veronika and a friend traveled to the United States. She arrived in Chicago and quickly became involved in the Czech community there. Her first job was working at a carpet store, but she soon began waitressing and found a job at Klas, a Czech restaurant in the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Veronika married and decided to stay in the United States. She took English classes to improve her language skills and also received a certificate in computer graphics from the International Academy of Merchandising and Design. She was offered a job building web sites at Apartments.com. After the company changed hands several times, Veronika took a job at Bank of America editing the firm’s internal web site. She has been with the company for over 12 years and has had various job titles and responsibilities.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Veronika says that she tries to visit the Czech Republic once a year and loves that her teenage daughter is aware of her heritage and history. She hopes to send her daughter to school abroad and to spend more time in the Czech Republic as a result. Veronika is active in the Czech community in Chicago and volunteers her time and talents to the Chicago-Prague Sisters Cities organization.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Alternative culture
Arts
Havlickuv Brod
Kubisova
Marta
Post-1989 emigrant
school
Slavnic
Underground
Velvet Revolution
Western/Pop culture
Women workers
-
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fb671e0016b8d4fe6e9c7fbbafbb1093
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/il6zYksHXXk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“My father especially, was very careful not to – back then, you didn’t know who you could trust and if you mentioned something in front of your kids, then they go to school and they talk to their friends and you can get your parents in trouble that way – so he was very careful not to show his opinions one way or another, so I don’t know what his views were. But I can tell you he was one of the few people who transitioned successfully [following the Velvet Revolution], he remained in his position, actually improved. Not because he was a Communist, but because he was a very capable guy and fair to everybody and never really got involved with the Communists, so people weren’t after him trying to get his head. It worked out well for him, not expressing his opinions, publicly anyway.”</p><h4>Learning English</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8896_n7_zYQ?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At that point I got into music, and I was listening to a British heavy metal band, Iron Maiden – they were my gods – so what helped me was I wanted to know what they were singing about, so I translated all their lyrics, and that’s how I really got much better at English. They were using different words than you’d usually find in high school textbooks and my level of interest was obviously much higher, so that always came very easy.”</p><h4>Velvet Revolution</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HXiYffH9E_s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Well, we were there almost every day, but I was just in the crowd. I didn’t want to get involved, and not because I was against or for any of it, but I really didn’t know what was going on, and I’m the type of person that I’m not going to get involved unless I know what’s going on because what I don’t want to do is cause harm to somebody not knowing why. So I knew that I didn’t like communism and we wanted to get rid of that, but beyond that point, I really wasn’t going to get involved on a larger scale and get into the frontline, because it was unclear what the intentions were. And a lot of shady people come to the surface when something like that happens, because they recognize the opportunity to be in the spotlight or to better themselves, and people can quickly switch sides, and that’s what happened in a lot of cases back then. So I was just basically there to support, but as part of the masses and not in any sort of leading position.”</p><h4>Impressions of America</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z6GiLUYl08I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Oh, I loved it right away. It’s one of those weird things I cannot explain. I felt like I was away from home for 27 years. Right away I liked it and I wanted to stay. I love Americans. They’re the most wonderful people in the world. They’re very friendly, funny, easy-going. I like them much more than Europeans, that’s why I would not go back. So, I liked it right away. When I came here, I knew I wanted to live here.”</p><h4>Slovak in the U.S.</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/InvzoISJyNc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I always made a conscious effort to assimilate. I don’t want to stand out – it’s not that I don’t like to stand out – I don’t want to stand out as an immigrant. Because it always carries a little bit of a negative connotation, no matter what. You’re just not local, you’re not one of us, in a way. Although I’ve never felt that way, nobody ever made me feel that way. Americans are very open and liberal when it comes to that. After all, this country was established on those principles. I’m not afraid of telling people that I’m Slovak, it doesn’t bother me. But actually I feel much better when people tell me that ‘Oh you hardly have any accent.’ I like to hear that, not ‘Oh, are you from Slovakia? Where are you from?’ I don’t want people to pick up on that. Of course they do, but you know what I mean.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rasto Gallo
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Rasto Gallo was born in Lučenec, Slovakia in 1970. His father, Zdenko, was a bank manager, and his mother, Eva (an ethnic Hungarian), was a teacher. When Rasto was four years old, his father received a promotion and the family moved to Banská Bystrica. The Gallos had a piano in their home that Rasto enjoyed playing; he later took music lessons. He remembers skiing and hiking in the nearby mountains. Rasto attended<em>gymnázium</em> in Banská Bystrica where he began learning English. He says that he became interested in popular Western music, and that the only way to listen was from bootlegged cassette tapes because records were not readily available in Czechoslovakia at the time. Following <em>gymnázium</em>, Rasto enrolled at Matej Bel University (which was then a teacher’s college) to study music education. His first year there was marked by the Velvet Revolution. Rasto says he was out in the streets “almost every day” during these protests. He also says that the revolution had a “huge effect” on his life, as he was able to start studying English at university and was influenced by the Western culture that subsequently crossed the border. At university, Rasto became interested in jazz music and began playing the saxophone. He was admitted to study music at the conservatory in Bratislava, where he subsequently won a scholarship to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>In March 1997, Rasto arrived in Cleveland where he studied for one year at Cuyahoga Community College. He then received a scholarship from Cleveland State University, from which he graduated with a masters degree in music. In Cleveland, Rasto became involved with the Slovak community. He translated Jan Pankuch’s <em>History of Slovaks in Cleveland and Lakewood</em> into English, and assisted with the creation a cataloging system at the Slovak Institute. In 2000, he decided to stop pursing a professional music career and found employment at a residential real estate firm. In September 2007, he moved to Chicago, where he found a job selling commercial real estate.</p><p> </p><p>Rasto knew as soon as he arrived in America that he did not want to return to Slovakia to live. He tried several approaches to gaining American citizenship. He says he was able to gain permanent resident status in Canada because his translating skills were considered valuable; however, in 2000, he also entered the U.S. green card lottery, which he won. In 2006, Rasto became an American citizen, an event he calls “one of the best days of his life.” He has been back to Slovakia several times to visit family and friends. Today, Rasto lives in Chicago.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
American citizenship
Americanization
Banska Bystrica
Community Life
Education
English language
Lucenec
Post-1989 emigrant
Sense of identity
Translator/interpreter
Velvet Revolution
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Fascinated</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dUVD3cOI42s?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was always dreaming about being a cowboy. And I wanted to be in America, because my dad was always talking about being in America and he was singing songs… My dad played guitar and he was singing songs and we used to go out camping, sleeping under the sky and we’d go camping for a vacation and so I was always dreaming of America, and of course the romantic parts about cowboys and Indians, which we read about in the books of Karl May and others, about Winnetou and others – this was really intriguing me. I always wanted to be a cowboy. But because we were living in the town, there was no place to have a horse, and eventually when I got married and had children, we moved to southern Bohemia and I started working on a government farm (JZD) and that gave me a chance to actually purchase a horse, so we had a horse over there and for two years prior to my defection I was living my dream; I was riding a horse across the countryside.”</p><h4>Corral OK</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Bp7wGLxYyrs?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Tramping to us was really special, of course you know I was thinking about that when I came to America because the name ‘tramp’ in Czech was somebody who was noble, it was a noble name; it was somebody who was good, a right person, a true patriot, a person who knows nature and loves nature. Of course, in America, tramp is a degrading word, and I didn’t know that until we came over here but the tramping movement was very strong and very big, and like I said, my dad was involved in it, you know, since WWII pretty much. And then of course he lead us that way also.</p><p>“The OK Corral was a group which was my brother, myself and a friend of ours. Of course, we read about the battle of the OK Corral and the shoot out at the OK Corral – again that was a part of American history which we really ate up, which we admired and thought was very interesting. So, we named our group the OK Corral, of course we didn’t do it right, we named our group Corral OK, but that was all that we knew at the time. We didn’t speak English.”</p><h4>Herding</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sAcU9IFhK94?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“No actually it didn’t. It was totally different. The cattle – I was feeling sorry for the animals – because they were chained to the troughs all the time. They were not grazing outside. They grew up chained to the trough until they died. But of course when the calves were young and little, they were separated from their mothers and put in the one building, and when they came to a certain age they moved into different buildings, and when the cows became another age, when they were impregnated for the first time and started having milk, then they were moved to a different place where they were milked. So it wasn’t really the way I was picturing it – the romantic way. There was one time, there was one occasion, when some calves, actually some steer – it was steer – broke out and they ran out. And now somebody has to go and find them. That was my chance, I jumped on my horse and I ran across the countryside until I found them. And I was trying to push them back in, and it didn’t work because they were scared themselves, because they had never been outside. I was trying to push them back in and soon I realized that they were actually trying to follow me. When I was trying to push them they were trying to get behind me, so I ended up just trying to ride my horse back to the village and they actually came with me, they were actually following me all the way to the building. But it was the one occasion when I actually did some cattle herding.”</p><h4>Intercepted</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMJV4uo8k44?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We left that letter in our living room on the coffee table. And we were thinking that if we do defect, if we find a way, we’re going to call them and tell them to go to our apartment, because we gave them keys, and that way they’re going to find more. We didn’t want the government to hear our conversation, so we just told them ‘Go to our apartment and you’re going to find more.’ And if we don’t find a way across the border, we’re going to come back, burn the letter and it’s going to be done and over with. Well, unfortunately what happened is my wife – she had plants, and she was afraid the plants were going to die. So she put the plants in the bathtub and talked to our neighbor, because the apartment was set up that when you open the front door, you walk into the hallway, and when you are in the hallway, you can go into the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and a bedroom. So, she put all the plants in the bathtub, and we locked all the other inside doors and we told her ‘Can you water the plants twice a week’ or whatever they needed. She [my wife] said ‘You don’t need to go anywhere else, I put everything in the bathtub, and all the other doors are locked, so you don’t need to go anywhere else.’</p><p>“Well, the nosy neighbor came in, and she tried the inside keys from her apartment on our apartment doors and of course, they opened. So she walked in the living room and she saw the letter. And she had the news that nobody else had. She felt like a big shot – we were living in a small village – so now she’s walking through the village telling everybody ‘Don’t say anything, but the Vodenkas defected, they are going to America.’ Well, we hadn’t, we were probably just barely across the border. Of course, it came to our employer and our employer had to report it to the police. They immediately called the border crossing and said ‘Arrest these people, stop these people with this license plate, with these passports and with these names.’ Well, luckily for us, we were across the border in Hungary by then, so it didn’t stop us but, again, if we didn’t find our way and we just came back acting like nothing happened, we would have been arrested and sent to prison immediately, so…”</p><h4>Settling</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V5b0ojGRG5I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“We were not really seeking Czech people, and we also heard in the refugee camp, there were some people who had friends who had actually been sponsored to come to Boston, and they were telling – they were sending letters back to their friends back in Austria and they were saying ‘There’s a Czech community, you don’t even need to speak English over here. There are stores, owners of stores speak Czech, and in the church they speak Czech and in the houses and everywhere, they speak Czech.’ I was actually afraid that we were going to get sent to a place like that, because I wanted to be in America. Because I want to learn English, and the sooner, the better. I knew the sooner we spoke the language, the sooner we could get on with our lives.”</p><h4>NY City 1983</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6LZHndOFdxk?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Everybody’s changing their watch to the local time, everybody takes their watch and changes it to the local time. And I took my watch and I want to change it to the local time and I realize, I have the time on my watch already. For the last eight years, my brother one time figured out that in America (of course in America there are a different four zones, time zones, but we didn’t know it then) in America – because America to people who don’t know too much is New York City and pretty much the East Coast – so in America the time is six hours behind our homeland. So he and I changed our watches to the American time. For eight years we had that time on our watches. It kind of helped us get closer to America, because if you look at your watch and know that in America it is 7:00 in the morning, you kind of can picture what people are doing at that time. And if you know that it is 5:00 in the evening, you kind of know that people are coming home, eating dinner and you get a little bit closer a feeling. There were times actually when we celebrated our new years, and then we would wait until 6:00 in the morning in Czech time to celebrate the new year in America, New York City. And we’d celebrate a second new year coming six hours later. So while I was standing over there with those people I just automatically grabbed my watch and I wanted to change it to the time, and I had had that time on it for eight years. And again, I became really emotional because I realized that with my life I had finally caught… I had finally arrived at that right time in which I wanted to be all my life.”</p><h4>Writing a Book</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CnLzajeMbms?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Our American friends for 20 years were telling me ‘You need to write a book, you need to write a book. This is an interesting story, people in America need to hear that, they need to know how some people come over here.’ And this is recent also, this is not 100 years ago. People picture this stuff like it was happening decades or maybe even centuries ago. But it’s not, it’s 1983 and people go ‘Oh yeah! My second son was born’ or ‘I got my new job’ or ‘I graduated from high school then.’ So people can relate to it because it’s not a long time ago. And so people were telling me ‘You need to write a book.’ And for 20 years I was saying sure, sure, you know… how am I going to write a book when I don’t even speak proper English? So I was just ignoring it. I didn’t even want to talk about that, I was even getting tired when someone asked me where I was from. Because it was asking too much because of our accent. But then 9/11 came, and suddenly I felt and I was told it was my obligation to talk to people and tell this story. And the idea of the book was brewing in my head. And of course people were pushing us all the time, telling us that. It took 20 years before it actually crystallized, but about two and a half years ago, in the middle of 2007, I started writing that book. I had a helper with me – a lady friend of ours who was doing the grammatical corrections – and I started the book and finished it, so the book is written.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter Vodenka
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Peter Vodenka was born in Prague in August 1955, but raised in Mníšek pod Brdy where his father, Stanislav, worked as an industrial designer at an iron ore processing plant. Peter’s mother, Jarmila, worked in the same processing factory. In 1970, Peter moved to Prague to attend trade school, where he trained to become a plumber. He graduated in 1973 and remained in Prague, living in the city’s Vinohrady district. Unhappy with his job three years later, Peter moved back to Mníšek pod Brdy and quit plumbing to become a lumberjack. It was at this time that he met his future wife, Ludmila – the sister-in-law of one of his colleagues. The couple were married at Karlštejn Castle in 1978. A lover of nature and an avid ‘<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Tramping" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tramp</a>,’ Peter moved to rural southern Bohemia to work on a collective farm. It was there, in Hrejkovice, that he and Ludmila started raising their two children. Peter says he moved to southern Bohemia, among other reasons, so that he could have his own horse; he bought a mare and called it Nelly Gray, after an American song he had heard.</p><p> </p><p>Peter says that he has always been fascinated by America: while still living in Czechoslovakia he and his brother Stanislav owned a U.S. military Jeep dating from WWII, set their watches to reflect American Eastern Time and formed a horse-riding, tramping group called the Corral OK. In 1983, Peter decided to immigrate to America with his family. He drove with his wife and two children first to Hungary and then to Yugoslavia, where they left their car at the border and made their way into Austria by foot in the middle of the night. According to Peter, the crossing attracted the attention of patrolling Yugoslav border guards and the family was pursued. They made it, however, into Austria where one of Peter’s cousins, who had emigrated some months previously, picked them up and escorted them to Traiskirchen refugee camp. Peter and his family were there for three days until they were moved to Ramsau. In September 1983, the Vodenkas arrived in America. Peter and his family were sponsored by the First Lutheran Church in Beach, North Dakota, where they settled for a couple of years. Today, the Vodenkas live in Scandia, Minnesota. Peter regularly speaks publicly about coming to America and, in 2007, he wrote a book about his experiences called <em>Journey for Freedom</em>. Today, he runs a construction company and still enjoys outdoor pursuits, such as hunting in the Black Hills.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170612093725/http://www.journeyforfreedom.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peter’s website</a></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Border patrol
Family life
Karlstejn Castle
Mnisek pod Brdy
Refugee camp
Rural life
Tramping
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Early Memories</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C8Y2PaCZYz8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I remember spending some enjoyable time, at four or five years old, at a music school in Slovakia with a particular teacher who, for some reason, decided that I am worth investing his time into. So I, on occasion – as I have been told – I even ran away from home to go to music school. So when they couldn’t find me they went ‘Oh, he’s probably at the music school again.’ That is a memory other people have; I don’t quite recall it. I just remember that particular teacher, Mr. Fecura, who was a very nice and friendly person and who was one of my first contacts with music-making.”</p><h4>Religious Confusion</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1ZM2qZsamBY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“For obvious reasons my parents were too scared to be Jewish after what they’d been through. We lived with my paternal grandparents and they were very religious. They were almost Orthodox Jews, to an extent that was possible during communism, because there was no synagogue left in Humenné and not much kosher food available, if any. So they really tried and, on top of that, my parents maintained general Slovak cultural traditions, including [having] a Christmas tree and Easter, so it was quite confusing for me. Even when I went to school there was still religion taught – it was one of the last years – and so, Friday afternoon, a local Catholic priest arrived, looked at the grade one kids and saw me, and said ‘Oh, my son. You can go home.’ I was terribly upset because I wanted to take part in everything all the other kids did, but I wasn’t allowed to, and without any explanation. At home I wasn’t told why I was sent home, so I had no idea. Monday, again when we all got together, it was discussed: ‘Why was I sent home?’ Nobody knew; I didn’t know until one of my classmates came with an explanation and said ‘Oh, I know why it happened. Because his father is a communist.’</p><p>“So it was rather confusing and, the same way as I learned about the past of my parents, the same way I picked up information about our religious background, or whatever it was, and it was up to myself to figure out by reading and by putting things together that ‘Hey, it looks like we are Jewish, even with a Christmas tree and Easter eggs and everything. We probably are Jewish.’”</p><h4>Perks of a Child Musician</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kzwjnbS5pss?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“As a child you have many different interests, so there moments when it was quite difficult and overwhelming to cope with the fact that I had to spend four hours every day practicing piano at the age when all the other kids were running around outside and having fun. But somehow that fascination with music that I had since I can remember – plus the perks, in the form of skipping school once a week and being on my own for an entire day as at ten or eleven years old I was taking the train to Košice and going to the restaurant for lunch on my own – kept me going, because it was quite unusual and had a sense of adventure in it and a sense of being different and doing things other kids didn’t; and I was entering competitions and I was meeting great musicians who were on a very different level and I was competing with people that were much older. So that all played together to the extent that it wasn’t overly difficult to overcome that aversion that naturally developed after awhile when it became clear that there has to be time spent in order to get any further.</p><p>“I think my mother was quite ambitious for me and then I adopted that ambition as well, and once I entered the conservatory the fascination with all things musical I was able to do all the time was too strong to even think about a different career or a different direction in my life. It was just very straight and very clear to me that there is nothing else I want to do.”</p><h4>Oh, Canada</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u10H_lqat1o?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“Turned out that the best thing out of it was freedom to travel, which I used immediately, and I asked for permanent residency in seven different countries. I didn’t care where I would go, I just wanted where I didn’t want to be. Despite the fact that I was already a fairly prominent figure in Slovak music and had some success, it was so severely limited by people that would make an effort to consciously hurt me or my career, and I thought ‘This is not going to get any better.’ I was aware that at that time I had and exclusive contract with a recording label in Hong Kong [and] I knew that was taken care of for at least two years, financially, so I said to myself and my family ‘Let’s go somewhere. Whether it’s New Zealand or Australia or Holland or England or Germany or Canada or U.S.A…’ I applied to seven different countries, and Canada replied positively and first, so we went to Canada. I didn’t know anyone there; I just decided to go and be there, and it worked.”</p><h4>Lifelong Dream</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uNhzHhbAGDU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My grandmother’s cousin immigrated to the United States, I think, shortly after the War – or even during the War – I’m not sure, but they lived in Cleveland and, about once a year, she would send a package from America. The famous package from America: chewing gum, jeans, and, of course, being myself, I had special requests, which were scores. I wanted Gershwin’s scores because they were completely unattainable, like any American scores. So I was 14 when, in one of those famous packages, there were jeans made of stars and stripes – the American flag. Of course the first thing I did was wear it on the street. After ten minutes I was stopped by a policeman and sent home to change. I realized I can’t walk on the street, but I took it to school and I changed at school. So after ten minutes I was stopped by the director of the school and sent home too. That was my first American experience, and the other was West Side Story. When the movie arrived in Slovakia I went to see it eight times in one week. I was completed fascinated by it, and so on some unconscious level that was always my final destination, even if consciously I was aware that it’s just impossible.”</p>
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Title
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Peter Breiner
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Peter Breiner was born in Humenné, a city in eastern Slovakia, in 1957. His parents, Ernest and Edita, were both Holocaust survivors and his father also spent many years in a labor camp. His father managed several restaurants while his mother was a teacher. Peter and his younger brother and parents lived with his paternal grandparents, who attempted to maintain Orthodox Jewish traditions – a task which Peter says was not easy during the communist era. Peter began music lessons at a very young age and, by the time he was nine years old, he was taking the train to Košice once a week to study piano with a professor. Following his eighth grade year, Peter moved to Košice to study piano, composition and conducting at the conservatory. He continued his musical education at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. While at university, Peter worked as a train conductor and as a music producer for Czechoslovak Radio. Because he failed his Marxist-Leninist exam, says Peter, he was required to spend one extra year at university to repeat the class.</p><p> </p><p>Following his graduation, Peter began working as a freelance musician, performing, conducting and composing. He married and had a daughter. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Peter took the opportunity to travel. He says that he applied to seven countries for permanent residency; as he received permission from Canada straightaway, he and his family moved to Toronto in 1992. He visited New York for the first time when the American Ballet Theatre put on a performance of his works; later Peter applied for and received a green card. He moved to New York City in 2007 and, today, lives in close proximity to the house where Antonín Dvořák lived while in New York.</p><p> </p><p>Peter is a prolific and renowned musician. He has conducted nearly every major orchestra, and his arrangements and recordings are especially popular. Peter is currently working on a multimedia program based on his orchestral piece called ‘Slovak Dances, Naughty and Nice’. He is also a writer, authoring a column for a popular Slovak newspaper. Since his childhood, Peter has been an avid soccer player and plays in the city four times a week. Today he lives in Manhattan.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Arts
Dvorak
Education
Humenne
Jews
Kosice
Post-1989 emigrant
Religion
school
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
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<h4>Finding Music</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/37R-T3d4Mv0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“As a young child, I was into the domestic things that were available so it was fine. I didn’t feel deprived. But in the later years, in seventh, eighth grade, I was getting into bands from abroad and different styles of rock music and whatnot, and that was not available at all. We had to go Poland and buy bootlegged tapes and that sort of thing. I remember in seventh or eighth grade, when we would go on trips to Poland, I would buy certain tapes and then trade them with classmates in school, so we did do a lot of that.”</p><h4>New York 1990</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OanGi0KKu00?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“[My] first impression when I flew in was a little daunting and scary. At JFK Airport, the path through immigration at that time – I don’t know what it’s like these days – it was in the basement, underground, with literally thousands of people standing in line, and, after having traveled for basically two days straight, I was tired. Everything was dark and people were tense and tired around me. So those were the very first impressions.”</p><p><em>And when you saw New York City?</em></p><p>“When I got out of the airport, things very quickly got much better. We saw the sun, and we had pizza the first day in Brooklyn, which was quite delicious; right off the bat I was a fan. It was great. The first days, weeks, were sparkly and magical.”</p><h4>Two Restaurants</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/07UMOYZlvCM?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My love of food, having been brought up in a setting where a meal was always a cultural experience, both in my grandmother’s house and my parents’ apartment; my mom and dad were great cooks and there was a passion for cooking. Throughout graduate studies and thereafter, my other hobby or passion was design, interior design. I did some major apartment designs and renovations and actually built a house from scratch that I initially lived in, and then it became a bit of a business, so that was the other side of me doing things with my hands and loving to cook. So when the time was right, I did have, I guess, an epiphany that joined those two things, in my head at the time at least, and I decided that I will open a restaurant one day, when the time is right.</p><p>“She [Maria] had, aside from being an amazing cook and baker, run a hotel and restaurant in Slovakia after having graduated from college, so she was always in the hospitality business. After I finished my graduate school stuff and we were debating which direction to take our careers in, we very much wanted to start our own business. She had a degree in economics in Slovakia and when debating whether to get a job or do our own thing, we definitely wanted to do our own thing, so she pursued her hospitality studies further. She went to the Institute of Culinary Education where she got a diploma both as a chef and a restaurant manager. I designed my restaurants hands on and we collaborate on the menus, we run it, we don’t have managers; this is what we do. I think it was a very organic transition from doing what we love and having had experience in difference facets of it and doing it.”</p><h4>Balancing Backgrounds</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ya8zwTrvD7I?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I’d like to say that, as not the youngest person at the moment, but I consider myself an active adult, I’m always pleased when I see barriers being broken down between being Slovak and being American as well. I’m continuously proud when I encounter people who are from Slovakia and the region who get it. Who don’t base their entire existence on the fact that they are Slovak. Who live their lives as good people and are respectful of their background, their heritage, but get with the program of what it means to be an American. I think that’s the fine balance of investing your energy into things that are useful for people, for you, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Do good, concrete things, such as food, such as music, that may or may not be remembered, but I’m trying to contribute. Any time I can make a reference to the old world, I am very proud of doing it. And I’m very proud of living in a country that allows me to do it, and gives me the freedom and is not judgmental of any of it.”</p>
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Otto Zizak Jr.
Description
An account of the resource
<p> </p><p>Otto Zizak Jr. was born in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1976. Before immigrating, his father, <a href="/web/20170609111930/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otto-sr-zizak/">Otto</a>, worked as an engineer and on an agricultural cooperative while his mother, Božena, was an economist. Otto was a member of the Young Pioneer group and enjoyed sports and music. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Otto’s father left for the United States, and Otto and his mother joined him at the end of the school year. He says that although his first impressions of JFK Airport were ‘daunting,’ his impressions of life in the city improved significantly. The Žižáks settled in Brooklyn where Otto started high school. Otto attended the City University of New York (CUNY) and majored in psychology. He then began graduate classes in the same subject and worked for his parents while they were starting their own business. Otto was also interested in interior design and renovations and worked on several construction projects.</p><p> </p><p>On one of his return trips to Slovakia, Otto reconnected with an old schoolmate, Maria. She moved to the United States in 2002 and the pair married shortly thereafter. Drawing on Maria’s background in the hospitality industry and Otto’s experience in construction, in 2007 they opened Korzo, a restaurant in Brooklyn which incorporates the flavors of Slovakia and other European countries with local, seasonal ingredients. They have since opened a second location. Otto occasionally writes and records music, both in English and Slovak, and has had the opportunity to perform with well-known Slovak artists. Otto and Maria have three children who speak fluent Slovak and enjoy visiting Slovakia. Today, Otto’s family lives in New York City.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Americanization
Post-1989 emigrant
Restaurant/hotel industry
Sense of identity
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Father, Teacher</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ZIGaoRTVVY?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“It was the classroom, a small library, and an apartment or the rooms we lived in. I was four and five and my mother was probably wanting to get rid of me, so she sent me to school with my father. So I was sitting in the first row; I was four, five, six and, finally, when I was seven I was an official first grader. I already knew how to read, I already knew mathematics in the second, third and fourth grades, but it was a big moment. I was an official student.”</p><p><em>Do you remember your first backpack?</em></p><p>“Actually I didn’t have one, because I was just walked through one hallway and I was sitting in my classroom. So it was beautiful. Every lunchtime we took a break and, instead of having a sandwich or something, we just went into the kitchen and had hot soup and a real meal. I had a very beautiful time.”</p><h4>U.S.A. 1983</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pQ62PRKvvFw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“My aunt, my mother’s sister, was in America since WWII, because she married an American citizen, but an American citizen living in Czechoslovakia. His father, like my grandfather, was in America in the 1920s. There were no jobs; there was a big depression, so he came back to Czechoslovakia and he brought two young [sons]. Actually, John was an American citizen with a Slovak father and he came when he was maybe 13 years old. So she married him in Slovakia and after WWII they just went back to America. So I had this aunt and, actually, that’s the basic factor. She affected our life because she came to visit us, so she brought us our first Walkman, she brought us jeans, she brought us our first colored pictures and she told us what the life is like.”</p><h4>U.S. Work</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aPPwDLVLBSU?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I came back to Prague with a paper saying I can come back to America as an expert. They’re going to take me to work. I came like a big man with a smile – I know how naïve I was; I know it today and I knew it later – I took the paper, I took vacation the next two weeks, I spent my money because I was happy, happy, happy [thinking] I’m going to America, right? So I came to Poprad. After a week, I came to my company and the guy at the gate said ‘You cannot go in,’ and I had a good reputation and a good position in this company and I said ‘Why?’ ‘Because I have an order. The director said you cannot go in. You have to go and see him.’ I said ‘Ok’ and I came back and said ‘What’s going on? Hi, how are you?’ and he said ‘Otto, I have to tell you the truth. I have to fire you because they took me to the Communist Party central [committee] and they said ‘If you don’t fire this guy, we’ll fire you.’’ He said this in a friendly way and said ‘What can I do? I cannot fight them, you cannot fight them, so you’re fired.’”</p><p><em>Was it a shock for you?</em></p><p>“I think it was a shock. The shock for me was, I would say, the next year. The shock was that everybody knew in the city, except me, what’s going on here, because people were talking. And I was walking on the sidewalk and a guy who knew me and saw me a hundred meters away, he turned and he was going the other way to not meet me. So I was a black sheep.”</p><h4>Job Trouble</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sA8l1kWrAlI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“If you didn’t have a job for six weeks or something, they put you in jail. So I started to go after my friends. I had many friends; I was a successful man, right? And everybody said ‘No problem, of course we’ll take you to work.’ I came to work in the personnel department, those narrow-minded stupid communists’ kádrovanie [background checking] – and after I turned in the application, they said ‘No. No. No. No.’ So then in the next district I had a friend in the agricultural cooperative so he took me to work and he put me with four other workers to build certain buildings. Actually, I was the boss for these four guys with the shovels, so I didn’t have to have a shovel, but I had to get the materials and organize them.</p><p>“This was the worst time of my life, because at this time it was ’87, ’88 and the communist system was cruel and stupid. They were like wild animals. They put people into jail, they didn’t understand and I had to survive. This was very bad. Not only this, I had to travel over there [for work] and the guys said ‘How do you manage all this stuff because you have to spend more money on gas than you make?’ The basic thing was there was not a light at the end of the tunnel. For one or two years there was not a light. I always believed in myself; I knew that something had to happen, that I had to go and find this light. But this certain time was dark. So I said ‘Survive.’ Times like this you had no chance to do something.”</p><h4>First NY Job</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oc9My_egycA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I started my new career. Nobody welcomed me – it was actually not a good time in America because in the ‘90s the market was going down and everything; it was maybe worse than now – and they hired me in 16th Street over here as a metal factory worker. So I had to work bending metals, making those window guards and carrying metal gates. Actually, on this very sidewalk, every Friday they gave me a paycheck and here on the corner is an Atlas bank. It was the only bank who gave an account by the passport, so all of us immigrants opened accounts here. I had a 30-minute break – it was strict – and I had 30 minutes to run over here, to stand in the line and deposit my check, and run back and be back to work, all to have money in my account, so I didn’t have a chance eat every Friday. So that was my first [job, on this] sidewalk, and those are things I like, unpredictable, that now we have here a pretty good restaurant and we invested a lot of money into it, but I have a free beer for the rest of my life and free food.”</p><p><em>It’s a sweet poetic justice to be on the same sidewalk.</em><br />
“Yes.”</p><h4>Electrician</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1JZY_0ul1N4?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I found a job as an electrician, but I had good luck. It was the marine industry; I was working on vessels, on the big boats, cargo boats, Navy boats. And after five years, I became a good and valuable electrician in this field, so I opened my own company in this field and I started to work as a subcontractor for my mother company, and I started to get my own contracts. I had contracts with the city – I built a lot of projects in the city – and I got a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers which are something like Army, but they are Army civilians. They are federal agents; they have boats watching the harbors, so I was rebuilding boats; I was going on the water on small boats to fix stuff on the big boats. Actually, I was working in this harbor here, in front of the Statue of Liberty, [near the] Verrazano Bridge [New York Harbor], and this was like my water, my harbor, for years. I was working hard on those boats. And now my son bought a house on Staten Island, on this side of the water, and he has a window in his dining room which looks straight to the same water. If I’m over there sometimes and talking to his kids, I’ll say ‘You see guys, 15 or 20 years ago, I was working on all of those boats over there and now I am sitting here with you and looking at them.’ So that’s two things that are emotionally fantastic.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Otto Zizak Sr.
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Otto Zizak Sr. was born in Bodružal in northeastern Slovakia in 1950. Otto’s grandfather had moved to the United States in the early 1900s to earn some money; he then returned to Slovakia, bought properties and started a distillery. Otto’s father was an elementary school teacher in Nižný Orlík, the village where Otto and his two younger siblings grew up. Because of his job, Otto’s father was a member of the Communist Party. Otto attended high school in Svidník; he says this was the time when he realized ‘something was not right’ with the communist system. Otto began university immediately after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. He studied electrical engineering and, after graduating, completed his mandatory one year Army service.</p><p> </p><p>Otto’s first job was as a government clerk in charge of administering an energy program. Five years later, he was offered a job with an agriculture construction company. In 1974, Otto married his wife, Božena, and the couple lived in an apartment in Poprad. Their son, <a href="/web/20170609061702/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otto-zizak-jr/">Otto Jr.</a>, was born in 1976. In 1983, Otto visited his aunt in the United States for three weeks. He returned for another visit in 1986, this time for three months. Otto says that, during this trip, he had the intention of finding a business or company who would offer him a job and sponsor his immigration. When he returned to Slovakia with a letter of sponsorship and attempted to immigrate legally, he was fired from his job. Otto says that he had trouble finding employment until a friend gave him a job working with an agricultural cooperative.</p><p> </p><p>In January 1990, only a few months after the Velvet Revolution, Otto moved to the United States. His wife and son followed at the end of the school year. Otto’s first job was as a metal factory worker in Brooklyn. He then worked as a ship electrician and, five years later, started his own electrical contracting company. Otto is also the owner of Zizak Premium Spirits in Slovakia, which uses a natural, clean distilling process to produce traditional fruit brandies. Today, Otto is a real estate investor and electrical consultant. He lives in New York City with his wife.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
Bodruzal
Nizny Orlik
Post-1989 emigrant
school
Teachers
Western/Pop culture
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans
Subject
The topic of the resource
Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans was an oral history project launched by the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in 2009. The project captured and preserved the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who left their homeland during the Cold War and settled in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the second phase of the project, the NCSML recorded the stories of immigrants who came to the United States after the fall of communism in 1989 as well. By the conclusion of the project in August 2013, the NCSML had collected more than 300 oral histories. <br /><br />Both phases of the project were made possible by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. <br /><br />On the project’s website, you can read biographies of Czechs and Slovaks who began a new life in the United States, watch video clips from their interviews, and view photos and other archival materials they shared with us. <br /><br />Full length interviews are available for further research at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library. For more information, contact Dave Muhlena, Library Director, at dmuhlena@ncsml.org.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<h4>Growing Up</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vKNLvuN7LU0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" id="undefined"></iframe><p>“I was very lucky. My mother used to make dresses for me and everything so I used to have really nice things. Also, some people had friends or family abroad and the family sent them some dollars or marks or whatever, and they would buy so-called bony and they could buy things in Tuzex. We didn’t have this chance, but we would sometimes borrow a magazine and it was called Seventeen. I have a funny feeling it was an American magazine for teenagers. We would borrow it from these people and we would, with my mother, say ‘Oh look, this is a nice dress. Make me a dress like that.’ So it was nice. In this Tuzex – maybe this will be interesting to say – when I was a teenager, the coolest thing was to have blue jeans and you couldn’t get blue jeans here. You could get them in Tuzex or otherwise you didn’t, so it was a good that was very much in demand.”</p><h4>Gymnázium</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FEHy72T_Eec?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“This <em>gymnázium</em> was a very good one, but I remember I went through it like in a dream because I had a head full of the West. I was aware that we can’t travel, we can’t have things that we want. It was the ‘60s, the Beatles. You couldn’t get records and my head was full of it. And then of course when I fell in love, I was just looking out the window, and I don’t know how I managed to have good marks, quite honestly, but I did.”</p><h4>Cultural Fascinations</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wmedamxXpLc?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“I was very much into fashion and all this, so I was very much aware that you couldn’t get cosmetics. There was Twiggy, there was Brigitte Bardot. I had some pocket money and I would either use it to buy one good thing – I’ve always preferred to buy one good quality thing that just anything – or I would spend this money on buying pictures of film stars. I had this scrapbook of Brigitte Bardot – I still have it somewhere – and I would look at her and think ‘I wish I could buy these things. I wish I could wear them. She looks fabulous.’ Then, of course, there was Twiggy, and because I was so skinny I could identify with her because it wasn’t fashionable to be skinny. Then the Beatles, the music. The ‘60s here in Prague I think was a pretty open time. Jazz. My father liked jazz. So there were these cultural things which were seeping through and I was always upset that I couldn’t be part of it and that it was so closed.</p><p>“We couldn’t travel and we couldn’t say what you wanted to say. It was just terrible. I remember, actually, when I first visited Greece, I was sitting at the Acropolis and just looking at the sea and I remember I thought ‘This is just so beautiful. If I die now, I don’t mind.’ Because for me, it meant so much to be there and actually experience that beauty because I never thought this would happen.”</p><h4>New York City</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EaW4ifV5ffA?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“At first I was frightened; I was overwhelmed because it was just too much. The skyscrapers, the people, the noise. At the same time, it was wonderful, but I was scared. I remember I was staying at some Czech’s apartment in the Upper West Side and I decided I had to go to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. I went to through the park [Central Park] and I got to the museum and I thought ‘I wasn’t killed, thank God.’ Because you heard all those stories about Central Park, I thought ‘My God, it’s so dangerous,’ but of course then you realize it’s not. I found the people, people who didn’t even know me, they were so helpful. It was just so different. It took me, I would say, after I returned there with a green card – because I picked up the green card in London – it took me about six months when I got used to New York and I realized that it’s a city where you feel anything can happen. Any minute, anything. Anything good, anything bad. And it was an excitement that kept you on your feet, in a sense.”</p><h4>Relationships</h4><iframe title="YouTube video player" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G-TH5sM2Zdw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>“When I first came to New York and I lived there, I felt the ocean. I felt the distance between America and Europe; I really did. When I was in London, I didn’t seek the Czech community, but I did at first when I was in New York. There was this Czech girl who took care of me. I met her in the church somewhere in Astoria, so I was friendly with her and sometimes there used to be some veselka [social gathering], this sort of thing, so I used to meet other Czechs. But to be honest, very often I used to come back quite depressed. After a while I decided that I prefer to be with Americans. I mean, I’m sure there are lots of interesting Czechs there, but you don’t necessarily get to see them. Initially, it was an impulse because you feel so far away from home and really, at least I felt, that Europe was far. I felt a great distance.”</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Olga Prokop
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Olga Prokop was born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1949. Her father was an officer in the military and her mother stayed at home and raised Olga. Later, her mother would become the director of a nursery school and her father worked for Škoda. Olga’s family moved to České Budějovice when she was two and, a few years after that, to Prague where she started school. Olga says that when she was growing up, her head was ‘full of the West.’ She loved movie stars, music, and fashion, and especially enjoyed borrowing <em>Seventeen</em> magazines from friends. While at <em>gymnázium</em>, Olga says that she wanted to study medicine, but that she was offered a spot in the school of dentistry instead. By the time she was to enroll, however, Olga had decided to move to Britain to marry her high school sweetheart. She arrived in London in the summer of 1968, with her wedding planned for August 28. Her mother arrived on August 19 and, on August 21, they received word of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Olga says that the two did not receive word of her father for several days.</p><p> </p><p>Olga first visited the United States in the early 1980s, after she and her husband split up. A friend from New York City encouraged her to experience the city for herself and, after a three month visit, Olga realized she wanted to live there. Back in London, she went about obtaining a green card and a sponsor and returned to New York in 1988. She worked at several places before becoming a receptionist at a holding company; she held that job for eight years. Olga also studied English literature at Hunter College and earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1998, Olga moved back to Prague. She says that she considered returning to London, but felt that it would be hard to re-establish herself there. Indeed, she says that returning to Prague was a difficult adjustment as well, as she had trouble getting an apartment and reconnecting with her fellow Czechs. However, Olga says that amid the growing pains of the country with its relatively newfound freedom, she is happy to be back home.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NCSML Archive
1968
1968 emigrant/refugee
Americanization
Divorce
Fashion
gymnazium
marriage
Warsaw Pact invasion
Western/Pop culture