Antonin Kratochvil
<p>Antonin Kratochvil was born in Lovosice in northern Bohemia in 1947. His father, Jaroslav, owned a photography studio there, while his mother, Bedřiška, stayed home to raise Antonin and his two older sisters. Following the Communist coup in 1948, Antonin’s father’s business was nationalized and his equipment seized. The family was sent to a cooperative in Vinoř where Antonin’s mother worked in the fields and his father in a factory. In 1953, the family moved to the Karlín neighborhood of Prague. Antonin attended school, which he says consisted of ‘indoctrination’ and ‘lies,’ while his father provided books and literature for Antonin to learn from a different perspective. Antonin often assisted his father with his work as a photographer. He was also interested in sports and tramping. After completing ninth grade, Antonin knew he would not be able to continue to higher education because of his bourgeois background, and he trained as a builder.</p><p> </p><p>In 1967, Antonin secured a passport by signing up for a tour to Egypt with a youth organization. Although he did not go on that trip, he used his passport to travel to Yugoslavia. After an unsuccessful first attempt, Antonin crossed the border to Austria in the fall. He was in Traiskirchen refugee camp for a short time and then went to Sweden where he was assigned to work in a boat yard. He soon started his own business dealing in the black market and spent six months in jail in Sweden before returning to Traiskirchen. He next made his way to France and then to Amsterdam. He received a scholarship to attend art school and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art photography. In 1972, Antonin moved to the United States. He settled in California where he worked for the <em>L.A. Times</em> and became the assistant art director for the <em>L.A. Times</em> magazine. He also opened a studio where he shot album covers and publicity photos for musicians. Antonin moved to New York where he focused on photojournalism and earned accolades for his photographs and stories on events such as the 1979 revolution in Iran and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He also covered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia for <em>Mother Jones</em>. Antonin has won many awards for his work and has published five books, including <em>Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe</em>, which documents life under communism. Antonin recently moved back to Prague with his wife.</p>
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Antonin Varga
<p>Antonin Varga was born in Šternberk, Moravia, in 1966. His mother was a waitress and his father worked in a number of different jobs, notably as a butcher and waiter, and then as a guard. Antonin says that, prior to his birth, his father had spent one year in prison for attempting to emigrate. Antonin grew up with an older sister, Ludmila, and a younger brother, Roman. From an early age, Antonin says his dream was to become a DJ. In the 1980s he would record music he was lent onto Polish cassette tapes, and says he played parties and special events in villages close by.</p><p> </p><p>Antonin came to the United States in 1997. He says he had wanted to travel for a long time, but had never had the money to do so. He came to America with two of his former colleagues after receiving severance pay from his employer. Antonin says the plan was to stay in the United States for one year before returning home. He quickly began to enjoy living in Chicago, however, and came to know many expatriate Czechs in the city. Antonin says he soon found DJ-ing jobs at Klas Czech Restaurant and Café Prague, and played in a band. At around about this time, Antonin says he felt that Czech and Slovak cultural life in Chicago underwent something of a revival. Today, Antonin says he can make a living playing music in Chicago in a way that he would not be able to in the Czech Republic. For this reason, he has no plans to return to Europe. Antonin adds that he has ‘no regrets’ about his decision to move to the United States, although he says he still feels totally Czech and ‘not at all American’ after 15 years in the country. He continues to DJ in Czech restaurants in Chicago three nights a week. Today, Antonin lives in Chicago with a collection of over 3000 CDs.</p>
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Bohuslav Rychlik
<p> </p><p>Bohuslav Rychlik was born in Krnov, Moravia, in 1950. His parents, Bohuslav and Františka, had moved to Krnov after WWII, because their home in Pustiměř had been destroyed by Americans who were bombing a nearby airport. Under the communist regime, Bob’s father lost his job as a senior office clerk and began working as a laborer, while his mother stayed home and raised Bob and his two sisters. Bob’s father, who died when he was 10, was a keen musician who played piano and violin and passed his talents on to his children. Bob was taught piano first by his sister and later in music school, and taught himself to play the guitar. Although he was fond of filmmaking, Bob says that he had ‘no chance’ to pursue this interest, and that he went to a technical high school in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm to prepare for a career in electronics. After high school, Bob says he decided not to attend university, as he did not want his mother to sacrifice anymore for his education. He got a job at the TESLA factory in Rožnov where he held several different positions before leaving the country.</p><p> </p><p>In August 1983, Bob and his wife, <a href="/web/20170710094829/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/vilma-rychlik/">Vilma</a>, decided to leave Czechoslovakia with their two young sons when they had the opportunity to vacation in Split, Yugoslavia. While there, Bob tried to buy tickets for a day trip to Italy, but says he was denied because his passport was valid only for Yugoslavia. They traveled to Belgrade where they learned about the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office. After an interview and a 6-week wait, Bob and his family were given papers allowing them to leave Yugoslavia and enter Austria. They spent about seven months in refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Ramsau before receiving permission to move to the United States. Bob and his family arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 17, 1984. Having learned English at school, Bob says he was able to find work fairly quickly, while his wife took English classes at a community college. The Rychliks became American citizens in the spring of 1990.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Bob says that he is very proud of his sons, who were both valedictorians at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and earned full scholarships to college. He continues to play music, and more recently has focused on the <em>fujara</em>, a large, flutelike, traditional Slovak instrument. Bob engineered the first <em>fujara</em> workshop in the United States, which he held at his home, and included participants from several different countries. He frequently performs around the Washington, D.C. area and, in 2010, Bob presented a lecture at the Library of Congress for the American Musical Instrumental Society. He has returned to the Czech Republic several times and currently lives in Mount Airy, Maryland, with his wife, Vilma.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170710094829/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y5fonktBzQ" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bob’s lecture on the fujara at the Library of Congress, 2010</a></p>
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Frank Safertal
<p>Frank Safertal was born in the Holešovice district of Prague in 1942. His father, also named František, had been arrested shortly before Frank’s birth because of his participation in an underground resistance group. Frank’s father was sent to a labor camp in Krems an der Donau in Austria for the remainder of WWII and only saw his son for the first time after the War ended in 1945. During the War, Frank and his mother, Milena, lived with her parents in Holešovice. Upon returning home, František became a manager of a dental sales company, but when the business was nationalized in 1948, the family moved to Jablonec nad Nisou in northern Bohemia where he became the quality control manager of a factory. Four years later, the family returned to Prague. Frank says that his father was passionate about sports and passed the hobby on to him. From a young age, he skied and played tennis and soccer. Influenced by one of his teachers, Frank became interested in music and learned to play piano. After grade school, Frank attended an industrial school, and then enrolled at the University of Economics, Prague (VŠE) for industrial engineering. He says that his time at university was ‘eye-opening,’ both intellectually and politically, and that he began to realize ‘how bad the regime was.’ Frank started a jazz band at this time, and was jailed for advertising dances. He says he was also influenced by Western artists in Prague (such as Gene Deitch and Allen Ginsburg), from whom he heard about life in the United States. Frank graduated from university in 1966 and served one year in the military near the German border in Klatovy. In 1967, he began working as a computer engineer at ‘the nationalized IBM.’ The same year, he met and married his wife, <a href="/web/20170710095022/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/otakara-safertal/">Otakara Safertal</a>.</p><p> </p><p>Although Frank had been thinking about spending some time abroad, he says that, following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, the decision to emigrate was ‘very quick.’ He and Otakara received exit permits and, ten days after the invasion, took the train to Vienna. Frank was encouraged to stay in Austria and even interviewed for a job at IBM, but ultimately, he and Otakara decided to move to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in October 1968, where Frank began taking English classes and became in involved in the Czech theatre group Nové Divadlo with his wife. While working for Hughes Network Systems, Frank lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and Prague for three years (following the Velvet Revolution). In 1998, his employer transferred him to Maryland. While living in the Washington, D.C. area, Frank has been active in the Czech community. He served as the secretary-general of Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) for six years and helped organize numerous congresses. Today, he is a consultant for the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife.</p>
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Gabriel Levicky
<p>Gabriel Levicky was born in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, in 1948. His parents, Hungarian-speaking Slovak Jews, both survived concentration camps during WWII; his mother was in Auschwitz and his father in Sachsenhausen. Gabriel says that they were not forthcoming with their experiences of the Holocaust. Gabriel’s father, a member of the Communist Party, was the director of the <em>Dom kultúry</em> (municipal cultural center) in Humenné. Gabriel says his teenage years were heavily influenced by Western culture, most notably music and literature. He was in a band called The Towers and subscribed to <em>Svetová literatúra</em>, a periodical devoted to world literature. Gabriel’s lifestyle and his involvement in the hippie movement in Czechoslovakia led to conflicts with his father; following his schooling, he left home and traveled around the country.</p><p> </p><p>Gabriel was traveling from Žilina to Humenné when he heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. On arriving in Humenné, he had an altercation with Soviet soldiers; the next day, he participated in protests against the invasion. Soon after the invasion, Gabriel says, a friend warned him that the secret police were looking for him, and he decided to leave the country. Using a friend’s passport, he crossed the border, made his way to Vienna, and then went to Israel. One year later, he returned to Czechoslovakia as part of an amnesty granted to those who left following the invasion in 1968. Gabriel moved to Bratislava and held a series of jobs including editor for the publishing house Obzor, mailman, and technical assistant in an art gallery. He was involved in the underground cultural movement, drew cartoons and wrote poetry.</p><p> </p><p>His anti-establishment activities were noticed by authorities and he says he was constantly harassed and interrogated by the secret police. The situation deteriorated further when he signed Charter 77. He says he decided to leave for a second time in 1979 when the ŠtB asked him for money. Gabriel and a co-worker left the country with little money and no food or water. He says the two-week journey to Italy, which took them through Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, was a ‘miracle,’ as they were helped by several strangers along the way. Gabriel hitchhiked to Rome where he stayed for several months while waiting for papers to immigrate to the United States.</p><p> </p><p>In July 1979, Gabriel arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived with an aunt for a short time before moving to New York City and then settling in San Francisco. In 1996, Gabriel worked in Prague as deputy editor-in-chief for the Czech newspaper <em>Mosty</em>. When he returned to the U.S., he settled in New York where he still lives today. Gabriel is a translator, tour guide, and cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of poetry.</p>
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George Grosman
<p>George Grosman was born in Prague in 1953. During WWII, his father, Ladislav, was drafted into the Slovak army and then sent to a forced labor camp because he was Jewish. His mother, Edith, who was also Jewish, spent most of the War in Auschwitz. After the War, George’s parents moved to Prague where Edith worked as a biology researcher and Ladislav found work in the publishing industry as an editor and writer. George’s father became well-known after writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film <em>The Shop on Main Street</em> [<em>Obchod na korze</em>]. George has early memories of walking the streets of Prague with his nanny and spending his summers in the country. He attended three different schools in Prague where he enjoyed history, grammar, and the humanities. However, George’s main interests lay in music. At the age of nine, he began learning classical guitar, and one of his teachers introduced him to more popular music. George spent many weekends and summers at Dobříš Castle, which was owned by the Czechoslovak Writers Union of which his father was a member. In 1967, it was there that George joined his first band.</p><p> </p><p><img class="alignright wp-image-3418" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609083637im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Handler-14.jpg" alt="George performing" width="500" height="583" /></p><p>After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, George’s family made plans to leave the country. George himself forged a letter from his grandfather living in Israel requesting that the family come to visit him. They were able to secure exit visas, and left Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1968. After about a month in Vienna, George and his family arrived in Tel Aviv in October 1968. Although at first George had a difficult time adjusting to life in Israel, he says he eventually learned both Hebrew and English, made some good friends, and got involved with local musicians. George studied English literature and linguistics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and spent a short stint in the Israeli army.</p><p> </p><p>In 1977, George moved to London to continue his education. He was there for three years and remembers it as “the best time of his life.” In 1980, George secured a position as a teaching assistant for Slavic languages at the University of Toronto. He got married and had two daughters, and eventually became involved in the Czech community there, specifically joining Nové Divadlo [New Theatre]. In 1989, he moved to Reykjavík, Iceland, for a few years, and recalls hearing about the Velvet Revolution there, listening to a short-wave radio. George first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1991, and says that he was able to enter the country at the same border crossing he had used to leave 23 years earlier. Today, George is a professional musician. He frequently performs for Czech audiences throughout North America. He splits his time between Toronto, Canada, and Orlando, Florida.</p>
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George Suchanek
<p> </p><p>George Suchanek was born in Prague in 1940. His mother, Milada, immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was six years old. After she finished her education, the family returned to Prague where they bought property and started a business. George’s father, Josef, originally from Velký Osek, a village in Central Bohemia, trained to be an auto mechanic and moved to Prague to open his own repair shop. He eventually became a skilled airplane mechanic. George has one older brother, also called Josef.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After graduating from primary school, George says that only three professions were available to him: bricklayer, miner, or steelworker. However, a well-placed friend of the family was able to help him enroll in culinary school. After four years of school, George served in the military for two years and then, as he had trouble finding a good job, again went to school for two more years. George joined an orchestra after his stint in the army and, in order to be able to work and perform, he took a job as a cook in a printing factory. While on a work brigade with the youth organization ČSM (of which he was not a member), George and his peers saved a large warehouse from burning down. As a result, the workers were awarded a tourist trip to Austria. George arrived in Austria in June 1965. Although he says it was never his intention to leave Czechoslovakia, at the end of the trip George left the group and made his way to the police station where he claimed asylum. He was sent to Traiskirchen refugee camp. While living in Austria, George saw an advertisement for a job at Vašata, a Czech restaurant in New York City. He was accepted as a cook and, in November 1965, traveled to the United States.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In New York, George worked in several restaurants. After a few years he moved to Los Angeles where he worked at the Ambassador Hotel; George was working in the kitchen the night Robert Kennedy was assassinated. George returned to New York and received his American citizenship. He started his own construction company and also built and ran several restaurants, the last of which was Zlata Praha, in Queens. George also acted as a manager and promoter for Czechoslovak entertainers performing in the United States and Canada. He organized several tours and concerts for Karel Gott, among others. Today George lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.</p>
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Jan Kocvara
<p>Jan Kocvara was born in 1946 in Trnava, Slovakia. His father (also called Ján) was a tailor who published a book on tailoring and taught at an apprentice school. After the Communist coup, he was forced to stop teaching and writing and began making clothes at a state enterprise. Jan’s mother, Emelia, had been a homemaker, but she began working under the Communist regime. Jan and his siblings were cared for by their grandmother while their parents were working. Although he was a better-than-average student, Jan says he was not allowed to enter high school until he had completed one year as a chef’s apprentice.</p><p> </p><p>Later, Jan attended teacher’s college, where he studied Slovak and English. During the Prague Spring, Jan says he found himself ‘able to travel,’ and participated in a study-abroad program in Wales. His stay there was extended from three to five weeks as a result of the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. Upon graduation, Jan says he had no problem finding teaching work because he was one of the first graduates with a qualification for teaching English.</p><p> </p><p>Jan married in 1971 and had two sons, Ondrej and Matej. He says it was a series of events which led him to leave Czechoslovakia with his family in 1979. He and his wife were unhappy with the ideas their children were being taught in school. During the period of Normalization, Jan says that he himself was ‘encouraged to leave’ his teaching position. As a teacher, he was not granted permission to leave the country; however, once he became a waiter he was allowed to travel abroad. At first, Jan was granted permission to travel alone, but after some bartering with a well-connected family acquaintance, his whole family were issued exit visas. They took a train to West Germany and then to London where they lived for five years. Because of his language expertise, Jan got a job with BBC Radio where he was an on-air broadcaster of news and sports. He decided to move to the United States with his family when he began to feel unsafe, amid a number of attacks on radio employees. Jan applied for a job at Voice of America, and after waiting two years for his papers to clear, he and his family moved to the Washington, D.C., area. At Voice of America, Jan translated and broadcast news reports, some of which involved interviewing other Czechoslovak émigrés.</p><p> </p><p>Upon arriving in both London and Washington, he immediately joined the local Sokol and other Slovak émigré groups. Because of the effect his broadcasting work had on other Czechs and Slovaks, and the success of his family, Jan says he ‘did not escape in vain.’ Jan has been back to visit Slovakia twice since he left. Today, he lives in McLean, Virginia, and teaches Slovak language classes at the Foreign Service Institute.</p>
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Lucia Maruska
<p>Lucia Maruska was born in Cífer, a small village not far from Trnava, Slovakia, in 1953. Her father, Alfred, was an accountant at a poultry farm in the village, while her mother, Lydia, was a production manager in the knitting factory there. When Lucia was four, the family moved to Bratislava so that her father could take a job as a comptroller in the city’s municipal services bureau. Lucia says that she and her younger brother, Rastislav, continued to spend every summer in Cífer with her grandparents. Lucia’s father escaped from communist Czechoslovakia when she was nine years old. She says he did so in part because of the bigotry he faced (as he was Jewish), but primarily because her mother persuaded him to go, as she wanted the family to have better economic opportunities and to travel, ‘and we were being prevented from doing that.’ Lucia’s father first went to Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz, before being sponsored by relatives to come to the United States. He started out in Detroit before moving to Los Angeles.</p><p> </p><p>Following her father’s escape, Lucia’s mother tried to find a means for the rest of the family to emigrate legally. She expected the Czechoslovak government to let her and her children leave once her husband was gone. She applied for passports, however, on numerous occasions – unsuccessfully. As a child, Lucia says she remembers making trips to Prague to sit on the steps of the presidential palace, as her mother insisted that leader Antonín Novotný would at some juncture come out and then the family would be able to reason with him. After four years of legal attempts to leave the country, Lucia’s mother devised another strategy; she rented an apartment in another town (Brno) and applied immediately for a holiday to Bulgaria. The family was granted permission to travel and left straight away, in the fall of 1967. Instead of traveling to Bulgaria, the family disembarked from their train in Yugoslavia and made their way to the Italian border. When they attempted to walk across the border to Italy, they were caught by border guards armed with machine guns and dogs. But, as the border guards and local police had never encountered a woman and children attempting an escape (men were continually caught at that crossing), they did not know how to handle the situation. The police let them go and instructed them to return immediately to Czechoslovakia. Lucia’s family did board a train bound for Czechoslovakia, but which passed through Austria en route. The family entered Austria and then asked for political asylum. Lucia says she spent just over one month in Vienna before coming to the United States in November 1967.</p><p> </p><p>In the United States, Lucia entered public school in Hollywood, California. Upon graduation, she enrolled at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), received her degree in fashion design, and continued on to gain her bachelor’s degree in art history from Hunter College. In New York, Lucia became involved in Slovak and Czech organizations such as the folk dance group Limbora. Having completed college, she moved back to Los Angeles to work, and eventually took a job in Atlanta, where she met her husband, George Levendis. She moved with him to the Washington, D.C. area in 1983. The couple has two children, Marissa and William. Upon the birth of her children, Lucia became involved in American Sokol Washington, D.C. She says it was very important to her that her children learned the Slovak language and became familiar with Slovak culture. She taught folklore classes for children at the Sokol School so that children, including her own, ‘were exposed to their heritage and traditions.’ Recently, she started teaching again, bring folklore to the school’s new generation of children. She returns to Slovakia frequently because, she says, it was important for her that both of her children knew not only their heritage, but also met their Slovak and Czech family and got to know the country, including the traditional family home of Cífer.</p>
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Ludmila Sujanova
<p>Ludmila Sujanova was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1972. Her mother, Zlata, worked for a steel company and her father, Vilém, was a manager of manufacturing equipment at a food production company. She has one younger sister. Some of Ludmila’s earliest and strongest memories center around food – she recalls living above a market and standing in line for certain goods like milk and fruit. She also has fond memories of gardening at her family’s <em>chata</em> [summer cottage] outside of Košice where they grew much of their own food. Ludmila says that she was interested in dressmaking from a young age and, after eighth grade, enrolled in a high school in Svidník that focused on fashion design where she lived in a dorm. After graduating in 1991, Ludmila worked at a ski resort for a few months before landing a job as a salesperson in a shop that sold sewing goods and accessories. She worked there for over two years and says that the private business did well in those years following the fall of communism. She also took English lessons at this time and was hoping to travel to the West – something that she had been looking forward to since the Velvet Revolution.</p><p> </p><p>In 1994, one of Ludmila’s friends helped her to get a job as an au pair outside London. After one year in Britain, Ludmila applied to an agency that staffed foreign students at camps in the United States. She was placed at a camp in Connecticut and, in May 1995, flew to New York City. Following her stint at camp, Ludmila moved to Brooklyn where she first worked in a restaurant. After a few jobs as an au pair in Connecticut and New Jersey, she returned to New York and worked as a seamstress in a fashion studio in the garment district of Manhattan. Ludmila then moved to Florida where she took classes at a local community college and worked for a country club. She returned to Slovakia for a visit in 2000. In 2003, Ludmila moved to the Washington, D.C. area where she continued to take classes in interior design and began working at the Container Store. Today, she works in sales and visual merchandising for the company. Ludmila received her American citizenship in 2006, an event which she says was ‘a very big deal.’ That same year, she began a social meet-up group to connect with her fellow Slovaks; she says that through this group she has created her ‘own little family…in D.C.’ Ludmila lives in Germantown, Maryland.</p>
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