Upon graduating from gymnázium in 1946, Alex spent one month as a tour guide with a group of French students. That fall, he began studying medicine at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist coup in February 1948, Alex was arrested, but soon released. In 1949, he was expelled from school during a time when the Communist Party undertook a massive review of university students. Alex believes that his expulsion was a result of an incident several months earlier when he was ordered to report to a labor camp, but was able to get a note from a doctor stating that he was not able to do so. In June 1949, Alex and a friend secured jobs at a farm cooperative in the Šumava region with the intention of leaving the country if the opportunity arose. Only a few days after arriving, Alex crossed the border into Germany. He was sent to a processing camp in Amberg, and then to a refugee camp at Ludwigsburg.
In November 1950, Alex’s brother (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1947 and made his way to South America) sponsored him to come to Venezuela. His brother helped him to find his first job as a diesel mechanic in a cement factory. In 1953, Alex moved to Maracaibo and began working as a salesman for a large import company. He met his German-born wife, Katja, in 1957. In December 1958, Alex moved to New York City. Katja, who had returned to Germany, received a visa shortly thereafter. The couple married and settled in Queens. Alex’s first job in the United States was as head waiter at the Golden Door restaurant. In 1961, he worked for one year as a manager for an export agency which saw him traveling through Central and South America for all but two weeks out of the year. In 1964 Alex bought his own export company. He later bought a company that imported steel into the United States. After the fall of communism in his homeland, Alex began working for Pfizer as a liaison between the company and private buyers in Czechoslovakia.
Over the years, Alex was an active member of the Czech community in New York. He was president of the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, an organization that sponsored skiing competitions and tennis matches. Alex was also instrumental in the revival of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, which acts as an umbrella organization for a number of Czech and Slovak heritage groups, and served as president of the association. He lived in Bronxville, New York, with his wife until his death in late 2012.
]]>Alex Cech was born in Kolín in Central Bohemia in 1927. His father Alois was the head of the Board of Civil Engineering in Kolín, while his mother Karolina stayed home and raised Alex and his older brother Vojen. Although there was little entertainment and he often went hungry, Alex says that the years during WWII were a ‘beautiful time’ as he developed very close relationships with his classmates. Alex was also involved in underground activities during the War, which involved sabotaging train tracks and highways used by the Nazi soldiers. He was detained for a short time by the Gestapo because of these activities.
Upon graduating from gymnázium in 1946, Alex spent one month as a tour guide with a group of French students. That fall, he began studying medicine at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist coup in February 1948, Alex was arrested, but soon released. In 1949, he was expelled from school during a time when the Communist Party undertook a massive review of university students. Alex believes that his expulsion was a result of an incident several months earlier when he was ordered to report to a labor camp, but was able to get a note from a doctor stating that he was not able to do so. In June 1949, Alex and a friend secured jobs at a farm cooperative in the Šumava region with the intention of leaving the country if the opportunity arose. Only a few days after arriving, Alex crossed the border into Germany. He was sent to a processing camp in Amberg, and then to a refugee camp at Ludwigsburg.
In November 1950, Alex’s brother (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1947 and made his way to South America) sponsored him to come to Venezuela. His brother helped him to find his first job as a diesel mechanic in a cement factory. In 1953, Alex moved to Maracaibo and began working as a salesman for a large import company. He met his German-born wife, Katja, in 1957. In December 1958, Alex moved to New York City. Katja, who had returned to Germany, received a visa shortly thereafter. The couple married and settled in Queens. Alex’s first job in the United States was as head waiter at the Golden Door restaurant. In 1961, he worked for one year as a manager for an export agency which saw him traveling through Central and South America for all but two weeks out of the year. In 1964 Alex bought his own export company. He later bought a company that imported steel into the United States. After the fall of communism in his homeland, Alex began working for Pfizer as a liaison between the company and private buyers in Czechoslovakia.
Over the years, Alex was an active member of the Czech community in New York. He was president of the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, an organization that sponsored skiing competitions and tennis matches. Alex was also instrumental in the revival of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, which acts as an umbrella organization for a number of Czech and Slovak heritage groups, and served as president of the association. He lived in Bronxville, New York, with his wife until his death in late 2012.
“For us, it was the most beautiful time, the War. It’s crazy, you know. Unfortunately, my father was [taken by] the Gestapo several times and my brother was in the Gestapo [headquarters], but they let them go so our family was not really hurt. For the rest of us like me, it was the most beautiful time because we had a beautiful friendship. All the time I was going to the gymnázium and our class was going together and we had a very, very close friendship. The reason for that was, you see, there was nothing else to do. Nobody was going for vacation anymore and we didn’t have money to do anything and we didn’t have money to buy anything and we didn’t have money to eat. But for that reason, everybody was sitting home and we were meeting each other every day and we were very close to each other and we had a very close friendship. Naturally, for everybody who lived through that and was fortunate enough that they didn’t have big problems with the family, it was a beautiful time which I never had after, because once it was all over, you could go dancing here and dancing there. During the War, we couldn’t dance, for example. It was forbidden by the Germans. Dancing was forbidden. We were dancing, but we got a permit for the dancing school. But the only place we could dance was the dancing school in the fall. About two months, once weekly, we had a dancing school, but there was no dancing any other place. It was against the law. Naturally, too many parties. We were having parties as much as we could, but there was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, so everything was very restricted. It was crazy.
“I have very bad memories which I will never forget. Several times, I came to the pantry and I was hungry. In the afternoon, I came home off the bus and I would like to eat something, so I went to the pantry and I was looking all around and there was absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even bread. Nothing!”
What did you do?
“Nothing. What could you do? You didn’t eat. My father lost weight and I lost weight. When it was over, I was weighing about 65 kilos. But we had a very beautiful social life.”
“We used to sabotage. For example, we used to put sand in the wheels of the trains and all kind of nonsense like that.”
You and your friends?
“Yeah, you know, you couldn’t have a very big group because they would crack it very fast because the Gestapo was very efficient and when it started getting large, they could always get you. So you could operate only in very small numbers. So there are only three guys, let’s say, and nobody else. Nobody knows about you and you don’t know about anybody else. So they would have to catch one of the three to crack you. But why should they catch you again? Because if you go during the evening or in the night to someplace in the railroad station and you fill the wheels with sand or stones or who knows. They couldn’t watch everything. So we were doing all kinds of nonsense like that. We would put rope over the road, over the highway, because nobody was driving but the Germans. Nobody had gas; nobody had a car, so if somebody was driving on the highway, it must have been Germans. So we would suspend the cable over the road and they would cut the heads off when you hit it.
“But on the other side, it was very dangerous because, as the Germans naturally do, they just took a hundred people and they killed them. Never mind who did it or didn’t do it, and under that condition it was very difficult to do something because people hated that you were in the underground. Because they were blaming you that the Germans were killing them. So you could never get too much collaboration from the population because the punishment was so severe.”
“Once you finish high school, the horizon opens up around you, in front of you, and there is no limit to what you can do. As long as you can remember, you are going to school in the morning and coming home in the afternoon and now, all of the sudden, you are sitting there and you can do whatever you like to do. Which is depressing in a way, because I was with my friends since grammar school, so we were together for some 12 or 15 years sitting in the same class, and all of the sudden it was all forgotten. Everybody went different ways. I had a little problem with it, so my father arranged for me that I went as a guide with a French group of university students which were visiting the Czech Republic, and then spent the whole month with them guiding them through Czechoslovakia – which was very interesting, because in a month I learned perfect French. What I was trying to learn in gymnázium for five years and never learned. I couldn’t say oui. So in one month I was basically perfect in French which was remarkable. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much opportunity to speak French ever after, so most everything I have forgotten, but at that time it was very nice.
“So we were traveling through all of Czech Republic. I took them to Krkonoše and we walked to the Riesengebirge, and it was very nice. It was unbelievable; it was something that I never witnessed ever after, which happened after the second World War. Because foreigners were sort of heroes and they were very well accepted and invited. Myself with my group, we sort of separated from the main group and five of us went on our own just traveling. Where ever we came, we didn’t have to pay. In the train for example. When we entered the train, the conductor would in the moment find out we are Frenchman, so he would take us to first class and say ‘Ok, sit down’ or if there was not first class, he would excuse himself and say he was sorry, there is only second class because this is a local train and they don’t have first class. I remember, my guys, we were in Prague, naturally as all young people are – we were at that time 20 years old – interested in the night life. So I took them to Lucerna, which was at that time, the largest, the biggest, and the most known nightclub and naturally, my guys, they have on shorts. They were not dressed. They had rucksacks, all of them, and that’s how they were coming. So I took them with the shorts to Lucerna and the head waiter, in the moment he found out we are French, no problem. We got the best table in the place. Unbelievable.”
“In March ’49, they decided they will make a so-called prověrky [review] that everybody has to come to the commission and has to be accepted to stay in the university. At that time, they expelled 50,000 university students and I was one of them.”
On what basis?
“No basis. You have an appointment when you have to go. It was in the fyzický ústav [physics institute] so I had to go there. So I enter into the room and there were three guys sitting there, all of them with beards, and they asked my name. So I told them my name, they looked in some papers, and told me ‘You are expelled from the university’ and that was it.”
Do you have any idea why?
“I got a dekret [decree] from the Ministry of the Interior and they sent me a dekret that said I have to go to forced labor for three years. I received that in ’48 in about November, after they let me go from jail. So two weeks later I received the dekret – that’s what it used to be called – and that I have to go in about two weeks or three weeks and register in the concentration camp in the uranium mines. So I was supposed to go there, but that time, they did it to about 35 of my friends in Kolín. Everybody who was sort of going over the evidence, so all of us they consigned to that concentration camp. But that was the end of ’48 and they were not so well in control, so actually what I did, was I went immediately to the doctor – Kaiser was his name – and showed him that I have to go to the jail and he said ‘No, you are not able to go to the jail’ so he gave me a dekret that I am not able to go in jail. So I didn’t go and I just sent in a copy of that and that was it. But it wasn’t it, naturally.”
“It was the best place in New York. Kennedy – the president – that was the only place he ate in New York, Le Voisin, with his wife and his sister-in-law and the count. They were eating at Le Voisin. Everybody. I knew everybody. That was the place where you can see everybody. The King of Spain used to be my customer. Only, at the time, he was not the king. He was studying here at the military academy and, to my pleasure, he was always bringing a different girl each time he came there. But he was very good, very nice. Dali. With him I was very friendly because naturally I spoke [Spanish] with Dali and his señora. Anybody. You name it, I met them. Gregory Peck and Kennedy – the other one – Robert, he was always coming there with three or five kids. I didn’t like him. He never sat at the table. He had five kids sitting there and he was going from table to table. He was always running for something, I guess, because he was going from table to table, talking, because they are all known people there, so I guess he knew all of them. I always had a problem with it because I didn’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“So all of the sudden I was president of the Bohemian Benevolent [and Literary] Association [BBLA] which basically didn’t exist because there were the old associations of the ČSA and now the only association was the Sportsmen – the only living association – and myself as the president. Now I naturally decided that I have to do something about the BBLA, to get rid of the old associations which do not exist and get new guys. So the Rada svobodného Československa (Council of Free Czechoslovakia), which was Horák, immediately asked if they could join and I said ‘Ok, why not’ so he brought $2,000 and Rada svobodného Československa was a new member. Papánek came after me and invited me for lunch and said ‘Doctor, what about letting us join the BBLA?’ and the SVU, that was at that time Dr. Pekáček, Dostal and Pekáček. Pekáček came to me and said ‘Pane doktore, could we join the BBLA?’ I said ‘Why not?’ So within about ten days, all of the sudden, we had all the living associations, about seven of them, join the BBLA and so all of this is what I call the founding of the BBLA because the old stuff basically disappeared and now I was the president and I got the new organizations in and that was the new life.”
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
]]>Barbara Reinfeld was born in Prague in 1935. Her father, Miloslav, was a journalist who had also worked as a parliamentary stenographer for the National Socialist (or Beneš) Party. Her mother, Zdislava, who studied in the United States for two years, taught English and physical education before Barbara and her older brother, Erazim, were born. In 1941, Barbara’s father was arrested for resistance activity and sent to Pankrác prison for one year. He was then sent to Mauthausen concentration camp for the remainder of the War. Barbara’s mother was taken to Terezín in 1944. While both of her parents were imprisoned, Barbara lived with her mother’s brother in Prague. Barbara’s parents survived Nazi detention and returned to Prague at the end of the War. In 1947, Barbara’s father, who was active in the YMCA, was sent to the United States on a goodwill mission. Soon after he returned, the Communist coup occurred and Barbara’s parents decided to leave the country. In March 1948, the family traveled to Kvilda in southern Bohemia where they met a guide and other escapees. They crossed into Germany on foot and were sent to Regensburg refugee camp. Barbara’s father, with his connections through the YMCA, secured an apartment for the family in Munich where they stayed for almost one year while waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States.
In August 1949, Barbara and her family sailed to New York City. They were greeted by their sponsor, Mr. Sibley, whom Barbara’s father had met while on his mission to the United States. For a few months, Barbara’s family lived on a farm owned by Mr. Sibley in upstate New York. In 1950, Barbara’s father got a job with Radio Free Europe and they moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Barbara attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn and then Carleton College in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Barbara’s parents moved to Munich where her father continued his work with Radio Free Europe and her mother became a librarian. Barbara received her master’s degree in history from Columbia University and began studying for her doctorate. She married and had two children. Barbara returned to Czechoslovakia twice in the 1960s. She finished her dissertation on the Czech writer and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský and received her doctorate in Czech history from Columbia in 1979. Barbara taught history at the New York Institute of Technology and Hofstra University for over 25 years. In 2007, she took a group of students from Hofstra to Prague where they took classes and experienced the culture. Barbara has been a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In her retirement, she volunteers at local landmarks and is looking forward to traveling to her home country once again. Today, Barbara lives in Carle Place, New York, with her husband, Bob.
“What I remember about school is that the first day of schooling, my official first school experience, was that we had to Heil Hitler when we first started the school day. So these teachers who are all Czech patriots would always do it funny. They wouldn’t do it right, and then the principal would walk down the hall and if he saw a teacher doing it wrong, they could be reprimanded. But they’d do that as a gesture of anti-Nazi [sentiment].”
And the principal was a Nazi?
“No, no, just a Czech that was concerned that a Nazi might be looking over or some inspector would come and see this. The other thing we did was we had to learn German, so as a point of patriotism we made sure we didn’t do well. So I could have very good German, but I don’t because of this. We’d come back with a C [grade] and the parents would say ‘Great! You’re doing great.’”
“My mother, at the end of the War, came back first, and I was living with an uncle of mine. I was so happy to see her; I said I wanted to go home immediately, so we went out on the street and we hailed a truck, and this truck took us home and I was so happy. It had to be one of the happiest days of my life. And then from that point on, everyday my mother would go to meet the transports to see if my father was on a transport coming back from Mauthausen, and for days and days she came back with nothing, so I kind of thought ‘Well, that may be it,’ but then one day she found him.”
“My father, in 1947, came to the States on a mission connected with the YMCA, because he was involved with the Y. He went back [to Czechoslovakia] thinking he had done his mission which was to explain to the Americans that Czechoslovakia was going to be the bridge between the two, between East and West. So it might be communist, but it wouldn’t be anti-American, because the Czech communists were different. Bad idea, but at that time he was operating on that idea.”
Did they believe him?
“Well, some people did because Czechoslovakia had been liberated by both, Russians and the Americans, so on that basis there was this thought that it could be the bridge between East and West. And my father believed it at the time. So he made a tour; it was two months or so. And he thought the tour went well as far as getting the idea across, that Czechoslovakia was not part of the Soviet bloc.”
“My father, I think, was very conscious of the fact that he wouldn’t survive another concentration camp or another prison. My mother was aware of that as well. So no, he did not hesitate at all, because other people were already getting arrested. And, actually, when he was being interrogated by the communists, it just happened that this guy came in and he said ‘Oh, you’re here’ and my father said ‘Yes, I was asked to appear at some hearing’ and this guy said ‘You come see me after you’re finished at [a] room’ in this office building. So my father went there and this guy said ‘You remember me?’ and my father said ‘Of course I remember you.’ It turned out that he had been in Mauthausen with my father but he was a big communist now and he told my father ‘Get out as quick as you can,’ so we did. But even if that hadn’t happened, I think he would have gone, because my father felt so strongly that he couldn’t survive another thing like that.”
Well that’s very kind of the communist.
“See the reason he did that is that my father had been very good to him in the camp. He would always give him an extra roll or whatever because he liked him as a human being. He was always very cooperative and very kind. He was a nice guy.”
“There was always that fear that we would get them in trouble, so we never wrote, and I think at some point they must have found out where we were, but there was no contact. Except one time. One time, the uncle that I used to live with during the War – he was a doctor – he did get out for a conference in Munich and my parents were in Munich. He wrote them, or they were somehow able to communicate and he said ‘Is there anything you want that you left behind?’ Even though we hadn’t told anybody, my mother did tell him that we were going to leave, and he said ‘If there’s anything you really want, bring it to our house and we’ll keep it for you.’ So when my parents asked if there was anything we really wanted to have if we ever came back, I decided to pack up my glass menagerie and it was taken to my uncle’s house, where I lived during the War. Then in the early ‘70s he was able to get out of the country to go to a medical conference and he was able to go to Munich. Somehow he was able to communicate with my parents and he asked ‘Is there anything I can bring?’ They said ‘Bring Barbara’s menagerie if you can’ and he did. So this is extremely precious. And now I’ve added to it a little bit since, and now my grandsons adore this menagerie and they’re so good. They just kneel and look and study and gaze at these wonderful blown-glass figurines.”
So these are examples of Czech glass.
“Exactly. Well, now there’s some other things in there now, but mostly they’re Czech blown glass.”
“The general atmosphere, even though it was hopeful, seemed grim to me and the conversations sounded like conversations I remembered after the War, like ‘This person’s coming back from prison;’ ‘This person’s being arrested by the communists;’ ‘This person’s being somehow mistreated.’ It sounded so similar that I decided I wouldn’t go back until things really changed. Then it looked like things were going to change, for the better obviously, but that got completely nixed by the Soviets, so then it was another 20 years. I didn’t go back until 1990 and then I started going back a lot. And then in 2007, I had a wonderful swan song of my career. I took 20 Hofstra students to Prague. I was the director of the whole program.”
What was the program?
“Hofstra University in Prague. They got credit for history, art, architecture… We had about five or six courses, they could choose three and they got nine credits, and we also did a trip to Auschwitz. It was wonderful. These kids were so wonderful. I was so proud of them. They were great.”
Upon arrival in the United States, Barbara attended classes at St. Teresa’s College in Kansas, while her family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1950, she gained a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas. She moved to St. Paul upon the death of her father some two years later, and started taking classes at the University of Minnesota in the evenings after work. After a short stint in New York City (where she met her husband Vaclav Skypala), Barbara moved to Chicago with her family in 1953. Her first job in the city was as an administrative assistant at the Container Cooperation of America. In Chicago, Barbara and Vaclav raised two children, Christine and Madeleine. Barbara gained a master’s degree in theology and began to work with the Archdiocese of Chicago, specializing in religious education. Now widowed, Barbara lives in Elmwood Park, Illinois. She enjoys traveling to Europe and has recently visited Tibet and China, but she says that Elmwood Park is now her home.
]]>Barbara Skypala was born in Ružomberok, Slovakia, in 1930. She lived there until the age of eight, when she says the family was expelled from Slovakia due to her father’s Czech nationality. The Pellers spent WWII in Brno, where her father worked as a district attorney and her mother made money embroidering. Barbara says she knew the War was coming to an end thanks to the BBC and because ethnic Germans started to leave town before Soviet troops arrived. She remembers stray animals on the street at that time and says her family came to inherit a canary when it flew in through their window and into an open cage they had hanging in the house. The Peller family left Czechoslovakia in April 1948 when a warrant was issued for Barbara’s father’s arrest. They took a bus to Znojmo and crossed the border into Austria, where Barbara says her family was ‘smuggled’ into the American zone with false papers provided by locals. She spent time in St. Johann im Pongau refugee camp near Salzburg before being sent to boarding school in Switzerland with her sister, which she says she disliked, as she was used to much more ‘emancipation.’ Barbara came to America in the fall of 1949.
Upon arrival in the United States, Barbara attended classes at St. Teresa’s College in Kansas, while her family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1950, she gained a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas. She moved to St. Paul upon the death of her father some two years later, and started taking classes at the University of Minnesota in the evenings after work. After a short stint in New York City (where she met her husband Vaclav Skypala), Barbara moved to Chicago with her family in 1953. Her first job in the city was as an administrative assistant at the Container Cooperation of America. In Chicago, Barbara and Vaclav raised two children, Christine and Madeleine. Barbara gained a master’s degree in theology and began to work with the Archdiocese of Chicago, specializing in religious education. Now widowed, Barbara lives in Elmwood Park, Illinois. She enjoys traveling to Europe and has recently visited Tibet and China, but she says that Elmwood Park is now her home.
“I am from the pre-communist generation, and there is a huge difference… I feel it even here in the Czech church. We are so different from the ones who were raised under the Communist regime.”
How different?
“Well, it’s different because when we had an enemy; it was someone German speaking in a gray uniform. But with the communists, it could be anybody; your neighbor, your family. You did not have the sense of ‘us’ being in the right. I mean you may have felt it… I really thought it was destructive to the soul of the people. You had to be forever on the watch. It was also that way, I mean, I remember the War very clearly; I was a teenager and I was 15 years old when the War ended, you knew where your safety was. I don’t think the generation that was raised under communism (I mean people my age or a little older who stayed) they did not have that security. They had to learn how to float between all the negatives and all of that.”
“Well, one thing is, we were fairly well sheltered in that we had strong family units. Secondly, I was in a gymnázium, I was in a secondary school. We had brave, imaginative teachers. I did not have history in school, but my mom got history books, and every day I would have to sit by the table and read for an hour, we allowed for that. There was bombing, and the city was burning, and I think there was snow outside. But by golly, on Friday, we went to dancing lessons! There were the gentlemen, and there were the ladies, and you learned how to dance because, we learned that not doing things and giving up would be giving in. And dong things stubbornly… My first formal [ball gown] was cut from three different dresses. We never gave up and I think that was the strength. And even as youngsters, we picked it up.”
“We didn’t have any plan. We needed to leave to save our lives. So when we came, the Austrians hid us in a jail when we crossed because there were agents that would come and kidnap people. In Vienna, my sister and I could not speak to each other in Czech; we spoke German because people were kidnapped. This was the beginning; this was a question of pride for the regime. So, we were brought to Vienna, and there, again, gave us false papers to get into the American zone because we were in the middle of the Russian Zone. They hid us in a jail and they transported us.”
“The first thing when we came to a camp, someone came from the village, said they heard there was a little child. So they took my sister to school. Nobody asked, and they gave her free lunch. It was kind of funny, she came home to the camp and she said “Mom! Guess what! I get a free lunch, I am considered poor!” My mother cried for three days and my sister thought it was just peachy! They only took families. They had the openings so they took us. They were so well organized; Of course they refused to go to Tito, that’s why they remained in exile. They were so well organized, that we had services in Sunday, and they had the army cook who was horrible, but we ate, and we were warm. And someone from the village sent skis to me. We went skiing believe it or not. I mean they were kind of rinky-dink skis, but they were good to us. And of course it was so beautiful. St. Johann is just down the stream and down the valley from where Silent Night was composed. So it’s that kind of a thing. On Christmas, they had the whole orchestra, and you came to church. And there were skis in the snow banks all around.”
“Well the first thing of course was, watching out of the train. And, I come from the Tatras, and around Brno. It was hills and trees, and here I went through this plain. Here and there I would see black people working in the fields. It was different. My family was wonderful, but what I missed most was the age of the buildings. Everything seemed so rinky-dink. Not in a bad sense, just so temporary. The first Sunday, I was loaded into the car, and we went to Independence [Missouri]. And when we came to Independence, we parked the car, and we started walking. And we came to this house, and there was a presidential flag, and an American flag, and one U.S. marine. We walked right up there and nobody stopped us. Here he [Harry S. Truman] was at home. Now that impressed me. You know, being used to castles, and moats, and fences. That impressed me. We went in, and me and Willy, (my father’s friend, Willy and Gilda) took a picture of me with the marine, and nobody stopped us, he just stood there. And then we left, so that was kind of cool. I don’t think that would happen today anymore.”
Bruno crossed into Germany with two friends near Klenčí pod Čerchovem, western Bohemia, on October 20, 1951. His group was escorted by German police to the town of Cham, where they spent several nights in prison. Bruno and his friends were subsequently sent to Straubing for five days and then on to Valka Lager refugee camp near Nuremburg. Bruno remembers the bedbugs in particular at Valka Lager camp and says of the whole experience: ‘You have no idea how bad that was.’ After almost immigrating to Brazil in 1952, Bruno decided to join the U.S. Army. He served between 1952 and 1957, completing basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then traveling to Austria, where he was stationed as a member of the 516th Signal Company. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957, Bruno settled in Cleveland, where he knew some people from his time in German refugee camps. He became an American citizen the following year. Bruno met his future wife Zdenka Necasek on a trip to Czechoslovakia to see his family in 1972. The pair spent a couple of weeks together before deciding they would marry and that Zdenka would come to live in Cleveland. Preparations for their wedding were complicated when Zdenka was refused an exit visa to visit Bruno in the United States, and Bruno was repeatedly refused permission to enter Czechoslovakia. In the end, the process took four years and the pair were married by proxy, with Zdenka’s lawyer standing in for Bruno at the wedding service. Today, Bruno and Zdenka have two children, who both speak Czech. Bruno is now retired from a career in telecommunications and lives with Zdenka in Seven Hills, Ohio.
]]>Bruno Necasek was born in Semily, northern Bohemia, in July 1932. Both of his parents, Marie and Karel, worked as laborers in textile factories in the region. His parents got divorced when Bruno was still very young, and he was assigned to his father’s care, which he says was somewhat unusual at that period. During WWII, Bruno’s father left home to work in Vrchlabí, and so his paternal grandmother took charge of raising him and ‘making ends meet.’ Growing up, Bruno says his home had no electricity, and he remembers completing his homework by carbide lamp-light and making battery-powered radios to listen to at home. In 1949, Bruno moved to Liberec to study at the town’s textile school, where he says he got into trouble for hanging pictures of former Presidents Masaryk and Beneš on his dorm room wall. Upon graduation two years later, he began working as a statistician in a cotton mill, where, among other duties, he was involved in working on the mill’s five year plan. He emigrated in October 1951 when his supervisor at work warned him that, on account of his ‘political unreliability,’ he may be sent to a mine should his employers find someone else to fill his position.
Bruno crossed into Germany with two friends near Klenčí pod Čerchovem, western Bohemia, on October 20, 1951. His group was escorted by German police to the town of Cham, where they spent several nights in prison. Bruno and his friends were subsequently sent to Straubing for five days and then on to Valka Lager refugee camp near Nuremburg. Bruno remembers the bedbugs in particular at Valka Lager camp and says of the whole experience: ‘You have no idea how bad that was.’ After almost immigrating to Brazil in 1952, Bruno decided to join the U.S. Army. He served between 1952 and 1957, completing basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and then traveling to Austria, where he was stationed as a member of the 516th Signal Company. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957, Bruno settled in Cleveland, where he knew some people from his time in German refugee camps. He became an American citizen the following year. Bruno met his future wife Zdenka Necasek on a trip to Czechoslovakia to see his family in 1972. The pair spent a couple of weeks together before deciding they would marry and that Zdenka would come to live in Cleveland. Preparations for their wedding were complicated when Zdenka was refused an exit visa to visit Bruno in the United States, and Bruno was repeatedly refused permission to enter Czechoslovakia. In the end, the process took four years and the pair were married by proxy, with Zdenka’s lawyer standing in for Bruno at the wedding service. Today, Bruno and Zdenka have two children, who both speak Czech. Bruno is now retired from a career in telecommunications and lives with Zdenka in Seven Hills, Ohio.
“You know, I always had a knack for it because I built… we called them crystal sets, I guess they had them here too. The place where I grew up, we didn’t have electricity, so crystal doesn’t require electricity. And I built my own battery – you can take a beer bottle and wind a piece of string around it dipped in, it had to be dipped in alcohol, and you burnt it off, after you burn it off you have to pour cold water on it and snap it, and that thing would be perfect, so that’s how I made my own batteries. And from there I could power something a little more powerful than a crystal radio, but yeah, I always monkeyed around with this, it was my forte, so to say, my cup of tea.”
“I do remember bananas before the War came. And I didn’t see bananas again until I got to Germany in 1951. The first thing I bought there was bananas, honest to god! Because I remembered the taste, I remembered what they looked like, but we couldn’t buy them. They were not available during the War and after the War either. So, six years after the War I ended up in Germany and I still remembered the bananas from 1938, before the War.”
“Domažlice is about three or four stops from the border, but we figured that that was what they call the border zone. And we figured we didn’t want to risk it because in order to get in the border zone you had to have a special permit, okay? This is before the border was fortified, the border zone in some places would be pretty wide. In some places it was narrower, but then when they fortified the border, meaning they put the barbed wire fence there and plowed the fields, then they didn’t care, they could let you go up to the border or pretty close. But up til that time, no they wouldn’t. So, in ’51 we were pretty lucky, they didn’t have the barbed wire fence up, they had a guard with a dog, that would be one guard and one dog, but we were lucky that the wind was coming from Germany to us, so the dog didn’t sniff us. Every once in a while they would leave the place, we were sitting there about two hours, right on the border before we crossed. Because then, I think it was about 1:00, 12 or 1:00, I’m not sure which, he left his area of patrol, so to say, where they went through the motions of changing the guard, so right behind their backs we went down, it was just downhill, you know. So we were in Germany.
“But even there, because we had heard stories that sometimes that sometimes they put the border ahead of it or that the Germans would return the escapees back to the Czechs, you know. So we were looking through the paper that was there on the road and it was German. Okay, so we’re in Germany, we knew that. But the Germans when they interviewed us – and that interview, mind you, that took a long time – I remember from, it was dark already when we left the police station. But they were nice, they offered us cigarettes and they fed us, and the guy took us to the restaurant for supper. He had a rifle, and I couldn’t speak German, not that well, but my buddy spoke almost perfect German. Anyway, the guy says ‘You’re not going to go anyplace are you? I would have to shoot.’ ‘No, we’re not.’ So, he put the rifle in the corner, you know, and just sat down with us.”
“The bedbugs, one guy could lie amongst them and they wouldn’t bother him – that was Lukeš, with the glass eye – the other one, Fišera, he would scratch himself so bad he had open sores. And I tell you, they know where to attack, like where your meat is soft over here. My ears in the morning would be like this, except I didn’t scratch myself as much as he did. And we had tepláky, which is like a sweat suit, sweats – we’d tie it here, tie this, and powder our faces and hands with DDT powder. Well yeah, that’s the only thing there was. And bedbugs, it didn’t bother them, they must have been used to it.”
“Well that was funny too, we would talk sometimes on the phone and all of a sudden you could tell the volume going down and… nothing! And letters, there was a couple of letters that got out of the country by a person who was leaving, okay, those letters you could write what you want, otherwise you had to be careful what you wrote.”
With the outbreak of WWII, the clothing factory was seized by the Nazis and handed to an ethnic German called Hollmann. Charles’ great-grandfather Gustav was sent to Terezín and later, it is thought, to Treblinka camp in Poland, from which he did not return. Charles’ father Rudolph, who was also Jewish, fled Czechoslovakia in 1940 and made it to Palestine, where he joined the British Army, and eventually fought as part of the British Army’s Czechoslovak Division. In 1944, Charles’ mother was taken away to a forced labor camp for wives of Jewish men and Charles himself went into hiding. He spent the rest of the War hiding in a closet in a farm belonging to the Tůma family not far from Kojetice. Charles says he was told that this was because his father was fighting the Nazis; it was only as an adult that he was told it was because he was three-quarters Jewish. Charles was reunited with his mother and father in the summer of 1945; he says, however, 15 other members of his family did not return.
The Heller family moved to Prague shortly after the War so that Charles could attend school in the capital. In 1948, the clothing factory the family owned in Kojetice was nationalized and one floor of their apartment building they owned in Prague was turned into the local Communist Party headquarters. The family decided to leave and planned their escape to coincide with the funeral of Jan Masaryk, held in the capital in March 1948. They crossed the border by foot at night into the American zone of Germany near Rossbach (a town in West Bohemia today known as Hranice). Charles and his family spent one year and a half in refugee camps in Germany (including Schwabach and Ludwigsburg) before coming to America in May 1949. They settled in Morristown, New Jersey, and Charles’ father again got involved in the clothing business, starting as a pattern cutter and rising to a top management position at McGregor Sportswear. Charles attended Morristown High School and then Oklahoma State University on a basketball scholarship. An engineer by profession, Charles moved to Maryland to work for Bell Labs in the 1960s and has remained in the ‘Old Line State’ ever since. In recent years he has become involved in venture capitalism and conducts seminars for new managers, both in the Czech Republic and the United States. Charles published a book of his memoirs recently, and he lives in Arnold, Maryland, with his wife Sue.
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]]>Charles Heller was born in Prague in 1936. His father, Rudolph, was the owner of a clothing manufacturing firm in Kojetice near Prague, which had been started by Charles’ great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Gustav Neumann. Charles’ mother, Ilona, had been born in Vienna and raised in Kojetice – a devout Catholic in what was otherwise a Jewish family. Charles also attended Catholic church in his youth.
With the outbreak of WWII, the clothing factory was seized by the Nazis and handed to an ethnic German called Hollmann. Charles’ great-grandfather Gustav was sent to Terezín and later, it is thought, to Treblinka camp in Poland, from which he did not return. Charles’ father Rudolph, who was also Jewish, fled Czechoslovakia in 1940 and made it to Palestine, where he joined the British Army, and eventually fought as part of the British Army’s Czechoslovak Division. In 1944, Charles’ mother was taken away to a forced labor camp for wives of Jewish men and Charles himself went into hiding. He spent the rest of the War hiding in a closet in a farm belonging to the Tůma family not far from Kojetice. Charles says he was told that this was because his father was fighting the Nazis; it was only as an adult that he was told it was because he was three-quarters Jewish. Charles was reunited with his mother and father in the summer of 1945; he says, however, 15 other members of his family did not return.
The Heller family moved to Prague shortly after the War so that Charles could attend school in the capital. In 1948, the clothing factory the family owned in Kojetice was nationalized and one floor of their apartment building they owned in Prague was turned into the local Communist Party headquarters. The family decided to leave and planned their escape to coincide with the funeral of Jan Masaryk, held in the capital in March 1948. They crossed the border by foot at night into the American zone of Germany near Rossbach (a town in West Bohemia today known as Hranice). Charles and his family spent one year and a half in refugee camps in Germany (including Schwabach and Ludwigsburg) before coming to America in May 1949. They settled in Morristown, New Jersey, and Charles’ father again got involved in the clothing business, starting as a pattern cutter and rising to a top management position at McGregor Sportswear. Charles attended Morristown High School and then Oklahoma State University on a basketball scholarship. An engineer by profession, Charles moved to Maryland to work for Bell Labs in the 1960s and has remained in the ‘Old Line State’ ever since. In recent years he has become involved in venture capitalism and conducts seminars for new managers, both in the Czech Republic and the United States. Charles published a book of his memoirs recently, and he lives in Arnold, Maryland, with his wife Sue.
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“I was there all the time playing hide and seek among the stacks of cloth. And with my friends, playing cowboys and Indians and everything else, yeah. But it started out as a very small store, by my great-grandfather, around 1910 or so, and he actually ran a general store, and then clothing store, and he was the first man in the country to import Singer sewing machines. And he hired three ladies in the area to start sewing for him, and eventually grew it into the largest company of its type, for that type of clothing, in Central Europe.”
“My mother finally told me one day that my father was fighting against the Germans. That’s all I knew, in fact, that became my mantra because all the slights that took place during the War – I wasn’t allowed to go to school, eventually I had to be hidden, my mother hid me on a farm when she was taken away to a slave labor camp for Christian wives of Jewish men, and so she hid me, she hid me away – and I always wanted to know why, why were we being picked out, you know, having to suffer, and me not being about to go to school, not being able to play with my friends for all those years, having to hide out? And the answer always was ‘Because your father is fighting against the Germans.’ And I thought, to me, I was so proud of that that it didn’t bother me that all these things were happening to me. I was never told the real truth, I never found out the real truth until really not too many years ago, when I was an adult. I didn’t know that all these things were really happening because I was actually three quarters Jewish.”
“In 1944, the Germans started taking away women who were, and who had been, married to Jewish men. And they had a camp, a slave labor camp, in Prague. And in that camp they manufactured windshields for German fighter airplanes. So my mother was taken to that camp. And before she left she hid me with some friends, actually farmers, that we had been living with after the Germans expelled us from our home. And they in the meantime had lost their farm, because the Germans had taken their farm away from them, and they became farmhands on a big farm in the same village. So I lived with them and they actually hid me in a closet. And I’d come out occasionally at night and as the War came to an end I started coming out more and more because it was obvious that the Germans were going to lose the War and a lot of people were losing their fear of the Germans.”
“Every radio that you saw during the War in Czechoslovakia – or in the Protectorate, there was no Czechoslovakia – had a paper tag on the front, attached to one of the buttons, which meant that it had been inspected and checked and gutted, gutted such that it could not get any international broadcasts. And every Czech was smart enough, almost every Czech was smart enough, to be able to fix it. They had this little bug, it had a name – I can’t remember what it was called, this little thing that they made – it was like a two-dollar item that you would buy at Radio Shack today, that they stuck in the radio so that they could all listen. And everybody listened to the BBC, in Czech. And every night at a particular time, I can’t remember, it was like 8:00 or 9:00, there was a broadcast, and it would start out with Beethoven’s symphony. It went ‘boom boom boom, boom!’ – it would start out like that, and it would say, the first two words would be ‘vola Londyn,’ – ‘London is calling.’ And I would, at first I would sneak behind the door and I would listen to these broadcasts, because it was the only truth we got about what was going on in the War. Because otherwise it was all propaganda and the Germans were always winning, whether it was on the Russian front or, you know, anywhere else. But this was the true story about the War – so that’s how I knew. Eventually, after about a year or so, they knew that I had been listening, so they just let me sit in the room with them each evening. So that’s how I knew what was going on in the War, and you know, even though I was a kid I could comprehend it, pretty well.”
“A farmer came riding up on a horse-drawn wagon, and told us to pile in with our three suitcases and a bundle of blankets that I was carrying. [He] took us out to his farm, and told us to sit tight until midnight. They fed us dinner and we sat there just watching the clock and midnight came, the farmer says ‘Okay, it’s time to go,’ and the next thing I heard was my father screaming at the farmer. The farmer had stolen one of our suitcases, and that was about one third of all of the belongings we had in the world at that point. The guy stole one of the suitcases. So, my father gave up, because the guy just wouldn’t admit that he had stolen it, even though we came into his house with three suitcases but now we went out with two. So my mother carried a suitcase, my father carried a suitcase and I carried a bundle of blankets which turned out had jewelry inside, which I wasn’t aware of. I was carrying the biggest asset we owned. And the farmer took us to the edge of the woods at the back of his farm and he said, because it was a beautiful night, it was a clear, clear night, but it was dark – there was no moon, but stars – this was in [March] of 1948, and the farmer says to us ‘That’s the direction to the US zone of Germany, just keep walking in that direction and, in about three hours, if they don’t shoot you first, that’s where you’ll end up.’”
“Very deliberately no. They wanted to put as much space between themselves and the immigrant community as possible, because – they had friends who were immigrants, I don’t mean to say that they completely forgot all their friends, they had friends in New York, we’d go and visit them over the weekend and so forth – but, they also saw in these immigrants what they didn’t want to be: people who are always complaining about how difficult things are in America, and how wonderful things would have been if we had stayed, and you know, all the things that they, that they didn’t do. They wanted to have nothing to do with the immigrant community – I mean outside of going to a Czech restaurant in New York, because the one thing that all three of us missed more than anything else was Czech food!”
“One thing that was drummed into me by my parents, from the moment we arrived here, was ‘Forget everything that happened to you on the other side of the ocean. Remember nothing. We’re starting a new life.’ And they really believed that I did, you know, and I guess, I think that I believed that I did, somehow, subconsciously. I never talked to my friends; you know, when people would ask ‘Where are you from?’ I would say ‘Oh, I’m from Czechoslovakia,’ but that was it, I would never give them any details, I would never say ‘Well, you know, during the War, I was one of the hidden children.’ None of that stuff, I never discussed it with anybody, or people would say – because I’d played soccer before soccer was very popular here and I was much better than anybody else they’d say ‘Where did you learn to play soccer like that?’ ‘Oh, in Czechoslovakia.’ But that was the extent of any conversation I would have, because I was bound and determined, by God, I was an American – as far as I was concerned, that never even happened. So, I didn’t pay any attention until 1968. When Prague Spring came, it was like a different world, I suddenly, suddenly I felt like I was a Czech. I started listening on… I had this transatlantic Zenith radio, shortwave, and I started listening to Radio Prague. And I heard all these beautiful things, and I heard Dubček speak, you know. All of a sudden, I felt like I was both an American and a Czech. Not for very long. And then after the invasion I put the curtain down again.”
Dagmar stayed at Bonegilla refugee camp for one month – a time that she calls ‘a beautiful vacation.’ She found a job at a bakery and took a room in a house with her fellow Czech émigrés. In 1950, Dagmar married Miroslav Kostal. The pair bought their own pastry shop in a suburb of Melbourne and, shortly after, had their first son, Michael. Eight years later, the Kostals moved to the United States with the idea of going into business with Miroslav’s uncle. In 1959, they sailed to San Francisco and drove to New York while stopping at landmarks throughout the country. After a short time in New York and New Jersey, Dagmar and her family moved to the Chicago suburb of Berwyn where they had friends and had enjoyed the large Czech community while passing through. Dagmar and Miroslav again bought a pastry shop which they owned and operated for a number of years. They were active in the Chicago Czech community. Dagmar says that the family spoke Czech at home and both her sons (their younger son Martin was born in the United States) went to Czech school. Dagmar is a dual citizen of the United States and the Czech Republic and says that despite more than 50 years in the United States, her ‘heart is completely Czech.
]]>Dagmar Kostal was born in Klatovy (in southwestern Bohemia) in 1925 and grew up in nearby Sušice. Her parents, Karel and Marie, owned a bakery in town. Dagmar attended elementary school in Sušice, but after fifth grade was sent to a school in Hartmanice, a town close to the German border. When the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938 and Hartmanice (as part of the Sudetenland) was annexed to Germany, Dagmar returned home and finished her schooling there. She then went to school in Písek to learn the baking trade. Following the War, Dagmar apprenticed in Prague, where she also took English classes at Charles University. In 1946, Dagmar continued her training in Basel, Switzerland. When this was complete, she found a job in a pastry shop in Neuchatel where she met and befriended other Czechs. She says that her father urged her to stay abroad, as he was anticipating a communist takeover. When the coup occurred in February 1948, Dagmar knew that she would not be able to return to Czechoslovakia and turned to the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO helped her immigrate to Australia in 1949 where she, after a 38-day boat trip, arrived in Melbourne.
Dagmar stayed at Bonegilla refugee camp for one month – a time that she calls ‘a beautiful vacation.’ She found a job at a bakery and took a room in a house with her fellow Czech émigrés. In 1950, Dagmar married Miroslav Kostal. The pair bought their own pastry shop in a suburb of Melbourne and, shortly after, had their first son, Michael. Eight years later, the Kostals moved to the United States with the idea of going into business with Miroslav’s uncle. In 1959, they sailed to San Francisco and drove to New York while stopping at landmarks throughout the country. After a short time in New York and New Jersey, Dagmar and her family moved to the Chicago suburb of Berwyn where they had friends and had enjoyed the large Czech community while passing through. Dagmar and Miroslav again bought a pastry shop which they owned and operated for a number of years. They were active in the Chicago Czech community. Dagmar says that the family spoke Czech at home and both her sons (their younger son Martin was born in the United States) went to Czech school. Dagmar is a dual citizen of the United States and the Czech Republic and says that despite more than 50 years in the United States, her ‘heart is completely Czech.
“I remember that the Germans came to my house a few times looking for some revolvers or some guns, trying to catch something that could make problems. It worked out all those years pretty good, thank god. We had the pastry shop, so I never knew what it meant to be hungry after all. For example, I walked with my friend home, and her father was working at the match factory. She opened the door and she was yelling, ‘Mom, I’m hungry!’ I thought ‘How does that feel?’ because I really didn’t ever have to feel that, until later when I was on my own.
“I had a curfew at 8:00 at night no matter what, so I had to be home. I had friends coming, actually even relatives from Prague, because they couldn’t go to their places in Šumava, so they stayed in Sušice and we had good times, because there was a couple of cousins and they’d bring their friends. I had four cousins in Sušice, so we all ganged up together and it was ok. We just had to be careful about what we were doing.”
“We boarded a boat in Bremerhaven in Germany and [the ship] used to be a military boat before. It took us 38 days to go from there, through the Suez Canal – I should say Gibraltar first – the Suez Canal, and then we finally made it to Melbourne, Australia, and they had a strike so we couldn’t get off the boat. But anyway, we had a good time on the boat. There was about 18 Czech people, guys and women, and everybody had some little duties and I was an assistant to a doctor who was from Podkarpatská [Sub-Carpathian] Russia and he studied in Prague, so he spoke perfect Czech. And he helped us on the boat; we were able to go to the bridge, and the time passed okay. The sea was pretty nice to us; it wasn’t really too bad.
“So we came to Melbourne, finally made it out, and the Czech people who came already, who came before us, [saying] ‘Is there any Czech on the boat?’ and this and that. So they took us to Bonegilla which was another camp and we stayed a month. I had a month of a beautiful vacation. Beautiful weather; there were guys who rented horses so we went horseback riding; we had bicycles we could go around on; there was a lake we could go swim in; and they cooked for us! Can you imagine?”
“We made Czech pastries, Czech kolačky and Czech turnovers. Czech this and Czech that and Czech cookies and Czech rye bread, and it was said that it was a very good bread. So we had a good recipe for it, I guess. I didn’t know how to make bread. My younger son, he would sit in the proof box, watching the bread rise, and when the oven was cleaned up, he would take a rest in there. He would lay down on one of the floors.
“Cermak Road in the main street in Berwyn and we were close to the crossing of Oak Park – it was like the center of town almost. There were about seven Czech bakeries at the time, and there were different Czech stores, like a furniture store and a clothing store [called] Pivoňka’s, and different things like that. A lot of people spoke Czech in the stores, but they spoke Czech like the Franz Josef Czech was which different. Then came the younger generation, younger emigration. We were not in the store anymore, but we still kept up with all that.”
Dagmar Rus was born in Prague in 1929, an only child to parents Antonín and Emílie. Her father was an assistant director at the Post and Telegraph Ministry, while her mother stayed home to raise Dagmar. Dagmar says that she had a large, close extended family and regularly saw her grandparents and other relatives. She loved going to Sokol and attended a high school for girls called rodinná škola [family school]. After graduating, she found work as a draftswoman for TESLA. Dagmar has particularly strong WWII memories of the Prague Uprising and the liberation of the city by Russian troops.
Dagmar’s husband, whom she married in 1949, had flown with the Czechoslovak squadron of the RAF during WWII. In March 1950, he, along with other ex-RAF pilots who now worked for the Czechoslovak State Airlines (ČSA) and were concerned for their future in the communist state, planned an escape which saw three planes take off from Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava and land at the American air base in Erding, Germany. Dagmar, who was with her husband on the plane leaving from Bratislava, says that the journey was well-planned and fairly uneventful.
They stayed in Germany for a few weeks and then moved to London where their first son, Tom, was born in September. In November 1951, the family moved to Toronto where Dagmar became active in Sokol. Her younger son, Michael, was born in 1952. After eight years in Canada, Dagmar and her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in search of, according to Dagmar, ‘a better life.’ She bought a dress shop in San Francisco and ran it for several years. Dagmar married her second husband, Rudolf Rus (also a Czechoslovak émigré) in 1965. She says that the pair had a ‘busy life’ and ‘grouped up with [other] Czechs.’ Dagmar returned to Czechoslovakia several times after her escape. Today she lives in San Mateo, California.
“We were a big family. Both my parents had lots of siblings and we were a very, very close family, so everybody had birthdays and, in Europe you celebrate name days, so we usually got together. And because it was such a large family it was always fun. I remember when my grandmother, my mom’s mom, had a birthday or whatever, all of us kids stood in line and everybody had to say a rhyme and hand her a bouquet of flowers. My other grandma, my dad’s mom, she absolutely insisted that we come to see her once a week, and that was usually Wednesday, so she always had some little pastry or something. I had a beautiful, beautiful childhood. Everybody loved everybody, and we were very, very close with all my cousins and aunts and uncles.”
“There were three planes; one from Bratislava, one from Moravská Ostrava and one from Brno. Most of the crew was RAF. I got to the bus which takes you to the airport. When we got there – of course this I found out later on – they were already searching with the radar for the two planes from [Ostrava sic.] and Brno. They were out of radar contact and we were the last ones to take off. On our plane was the wife of the American ambassador to Prague and a few people, some of them who didn’t want to be found. My husband told me ‘We didn’t even warm up the engine. We had to take off right away because we didn’t want to be caught on the ground.’ So, without warming up the engines, they just took off. We had to fly about an hour and a half over the Russian zone which was very dangerous at that time. So then he told me that they asked the Americans to give us an escort. We were very high so that we would be out of the radar, but still they asked for an escort so they wouldn’t shoot us down. So that was cool.
“I was okay. I was a little… when you are 20, you don’t know fear. It was funny; on the plane in front of me, there were a bunch of guys from Bratislava and they liked to eat klobásy (sausages) and have slivovice [brandy]. So they said ‘Oh miss, come join us. Have a drink with us. Have fun!’ I said ‘No, no. Thank you.’ They were having a great time. As we were closing – we ended up in Erding – they said ‘Oh, this doesn’t look like Prague’s airport. Where are we?’ And then they saw ‘Oh look, there are planes all around us with a white star!’ and those were the escort planes. But it was cool with them; they didn’t cause any problems. However, when we landed, there was one guy who pulled out his pistol and he went to the cabin where the crew was. Luckily, they locked themselves in because they anticipated this. So they locked themselves in the cabin because he was going to shoot them because they took us to the wrong place, because there were all these MP and Jeeps and American soldiers. It was the American zone where we ended up.”
“My father was demoted. They shoved him down, and they were interrogated. They took my mom to one room and him to the other room and they were interrogating him [about] what they knew. Luckily they didn’t know anything so it was good, but they still kept bothering them a lot. So they suffered. Not only because of his demotion from the job, but also psychologically because it was hard for them. I was the only child so they didn’t have anybody, even though they had oodles of nephews and nieces, but still… If your child leaves, it’s another story. But I kept corresponding with them.”
“Not only physical. It was cultural. We had a busy, busy life here. We had a beautiful Sokol hall on Page Street in San Francisco. It was a great big hall and we put on shows. There was a guy, he’s long gone now, but he was the orchestrator of all these shows. For instance, on New Year’s Eve, we were dancing can-can one year; the next day we were doing hula. Plays, we put on plays. It was very active. Very active. And we took trips together to lakes north. We always kind of grouped up with the Czechs, so it was good.”
Doris attended a teacher’s institute and taught kindergarten for one year before marrying John Drost in 1940. Doris and John had two children, Rudy and George. After the Communist coup in 1948, John left the country and Doris and Rudy followed a few months later, leaving George with John’s mother. With help from a guide, Doris crossed the border into Austria and then made her way to Vienna where she joined her husband. The family made plans to move to the United States once they were reunited with George. While in Austria, they lived in Kranebitten, a suburb of Innsbruck, where John found a job. With the help of a family friend and John’s sister, George rejoined the family in January 1950. The Drosts arrived in New York City in July of that year and settled in Chicago, where their sponsor, Ravenswood Presbyterian Church, was located.
Doris says they were helped by many people when they first arrived and worked very hard to carve out a life in the United States. Doris cleaned houses and John worked in a factory before becoming a caretaker at a church and attending law school at night. He eventually opened his own law practice, and Doris became the lunch manager at Woolworth’s. The family was active in the Czech community, and both boys learned to speak Czech. Doris visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1990, an experience she describes as ‘very disappointing’ because of the condition of Brno. Doris lived in Arlington Heights, Illinois, until her death in August 2016.
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Doris Drost was born in Olomouc, central Moravia, in 1920. Her parents had met in Poland during WWI, as her mother Jana was from there, and her father Vojtěch was a Czechoslovak legionnaire stationed in the country. Doris grew up in Rohatec where her father was the vice president of a chocolate factory; she attended elementary school there until fourth grade, and then transferred to a larger school in Hodonín. Doris moved with her family to Brno a few years later when her father found a new job, and so she finished her schooling there. She remembers spending a few summers in Poland with her grandparents and being very active in Sokol.
Doris attended a teacher’s institute and taught kindergarten for one year before marrying John Drost in 1940. Doris and John had two children, Rudy and George. After the Communist coup in 1948, John left the country and Doris and Rudy followed a few months later, leaving George with John’s mother. With help from a guide, Doris crossed the border into Austria and then made her way to Vienna where she joined her husband. The family made plans to move to the United States once they were reunited with George. While in Austria, they lived in Kranebitten, a suburb of Innsbruck, where John found a job. With the help of a family friend and John’s sister, George rejoined the family in January 1950. The Drosts arrived in New York City in July of that year and settled in Chicago, where their sponsor, Ravenswood Presbyterian Church, was located.
Doris says they were helped by many people when they first arrived and worked very hard to carve out a life in the United States. Doris cleaned houses and John worked in a factory before becoming a caretaker at a church and attending law school at night. He eventually opened his own law practice, and Doris became the lunch manager at Woolworth’s. The family was active in the Czech community, and both boys learned to speak Czech. Doris visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1990, an experience she describes as ‘very disappointing’ because of the condition of Brno. Doris lived in Arlington Heights, Illinois, until her death in August 2016.
“[Forces were] bombing Brno very heavily, so we moved to a little village and it was full of German soldiers. We never had any problems with them, very disciplined. But it was the opposite with the Russians, completely opposite.”
“So we went to a garden restaurant. They’d been celebrating, dancing, and I sat down and I think he ordered some wine or whatever. And then he said ‘Come and dance,’ and I said ‘What are you, crazy?’ He said ‘Come and dance,’ so we’re dancing, then I looked around and the Russians came there. And they come with their machine guns and they looked at the people. He [my guide] said ‘Now be nice, smile at me.’ I said ok, I don’t know what he’s talking about. He said ‘Don’t be so stiff.’ He said they were checking people that were close to the border, so they kind of knew who doesn’t belong there or whatever. So fortunately they didn’t think, but they picked up a few people, so that’s why he said ‘Let’s dance,’ we had been sitting, and we went with the crowd. But we made it to Vienna.”
“Just what I’m listening and learning. I’m getting a little better at spelling now, after so many years. I wanted to learn, and thank god we moved on the north side [of Chicago]; if we had been on the south side – Berwyn, Cicero – maybe I would still not speak English, I don’t know. But we had a few friends and I wanted to learn. And they told me, which was kind of helpful, they told me ‘Doris, don’t worry if you put the horses behind the wagon, just so the people understand you, keep talking.’ So I’m talking.”
“American people are very giving people. Sometimes I think they are very idyllic people. I think they should be a little more tough and not always helping, helping. Let the people help themselves. But that’s what I mean, they are very idealistic. You don’t see that in so many countries – wherever you go, the people are first thinking about themselves and the Americans, they always want to help somebody. That’s my experience, what I have experienced.”
Dusan Schejbal was born in Prague in 1934. He spent most of his childhood, however, in Moravia – in Brno and then the village of Vranov during WWII. His father, Josef, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Air Force who fled to Britain to become an RAF pilot following the Nazi invasion. Dusan’s mother, Dobruška, meanwhile, was sent to a Nazi internment camp in Svatobořice between 1941 and 1943. Dusan and his mother spent the final years of the War together in Vranov, hiding in the woods, says Dusan, during the last few days of the conflict. They were reunited with Dusan’s father upon liberation in Prague in May 1945.
Dusan’s father had risen to prominence in the RAF during the War, achieving the rank of group captain and receiving an honorary award for his service from King George VI. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia in 1945, he became the commander of České Budějovice airfield. In 1947, he was appointed Czechoslovak military attaché to the United States and moved to Washington, D.C. to serve alongside Ambassador Juraj Slávik. Dusan and his mother followed in 1948.
Following the Communist takeover in 1948, Josef resigned from his post and the family moved to the suburbs of Maryland. Dusan says his father took a job as a gas station attendant, while his mother went to work as a sales lady at Garfinckel’s department store. Dusan attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville and then the University of Maryland, where he majored in history and studied Russian as a minor. In 1957, Dusan was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent two years in Zweibruecken, Germany. Upon his return, he worked for the IRS and the Navy as a civilian employee. He married in 1962 and has three children. Today, Dusan lives in University Park, Maryland, with his wife, Krista. The pair travel extensively and Dusan says he still audits Russian classes at the University of Maryland.
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Dusan Schejbal was born in Prague in 1934. He spent most of his childhood, however, in Moravia – in Brno and then the village of Vranov during WWII. His father, Josef, was an officer in the Czechoslovak Air Force who fled to Britain to become an RAF pilot following the Nazi invasion. Dusan’s mother, Dobruška, meanwhile, was sent to a Nazi internment camp in Svatobořice between 1941 and 1943. Dusan and his mother spent the final years of the War together in Vranov, hiding in the woods, says Dusan, during the last few days of the conflict. They were reunited with Dusan’s father upon liberation in Prague in May 1945.
Dusan’s father had risen to prominence in the RAF during the War, achieving the rank of group captain and receiving an honorary award for his service from King George VI. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia in 1945, he became the commander of České Budějovice airfield. In 1947, he was appointed Czechoslovak military attaché to the United States and moved to Washington, D.C. to serve alongside Ambassador Juraj Slávik. Dusan and his mother followed in 1948.
Following the Communist takeover in 1948, Josef resigned from his post and the family moved to the suburbs of Maryland. Dusan says his father took a job as a gas station attendant, while his mother went to work as a sales lady at Garfinckel’s department store. Dusan attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville and then the University of Maryland, where he majored in history and studied Russian as a minor. In 1957, Dusan was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent two years in Zweibruecken, Germany. Upon his return, he worked for the IRS and the Navy as a civilian employee. He married in 1962 and has three children. Today, Dusan lives in University Park, Maryland, with his wife, Krista. The pair travel extensively and Dusan says he still audits Russian classes at the University of Maryland.
“When the Germans came looking for my dad, mother told them that he was on a business trip to Prague and that he was going to return shortly. So for about a week, we had two Gestapo men staying in our apartment 24 hours a day, waiting for my father’s return. We had a large apartment but we had no heat except in the kitchen there was a large belly stove, so we all basically stayed in the kitchen – the Gestapo men, my mom and I, except when we went to bed. Now they really didn’t bother me except one who I think enjoyed seeing me cry, and when I cried, he’d get angry and he threatened to make me kneel on thumb tacks. Now, it wasn’t until my mom died in ’78 that I found through my wife that one of the Gestapo men raped my mother.
“Mother actually pressed charges, and the trail went all the way to court, to the High Court in Vienna, and the man was found guilty. And I believe he was sent to the eastern front. I think it was a very brave thing of mom to do and I was very proud of her because, had she lost, the consequences would have been very dire.”
“I had a lot of bad memories during the War, but I also had some good memories. And my favorite memories were Christmas time in Brno. Before Christmas, there’s a tradition – we call it Mikuláš, anděl a čert, it’s Saint Nick, an angel and a devil [that] come calling on the children. And of course, Saint Nick would be dressed in a priestly robe with a high hat and a staff. The angel would be dressed in white, and the devil was all in black; his face was black and he carried a potato sack or something, and chains. And you could hear him coming because he rattled his chains and made a lot of noise and, of course, that would petrify me! And when they came in the apartment the devil would say ‘Well, I understand you were bad and you’ve got to be punished,’ and sometimes he would pull out a lump of coal or a carrot. And the angel always played interference and said ‘No, no, no, no!’ And Saint Nick would pull out some sweets, bonbons, and all was forgiven and it was good for another year.
“And then the Czechs, the Czechoslovaks – the Christmas Eve meals always consist of, usually consist of fish and potato salad. That was a favorite food on Christmas Eve. And my mother would, a few days before Christmas Eve, she would go and get a, buy a fish, which was a carp. And she had to go early because if you wait too late then there would be nothing left. And she would bring it alive, wrapped in a wet newspaper. Then she would place it in a tub full of water, because there was no refrigeration or anything, and there the fish would stay for several days until Christmas Eve. And that was, I think, my favorite. I watched that fish for I think hours and hours – because it was a big fish, you know, imagine it floating in the tub and I was right next to it. I just loved it!”
“When we arrived in Washington, I remember, I think it was the very first day in Washington, D.C. My father went to work and then it was just my mother, the domestic lady and I in the house and then, all of a sudden, we heard sirens. So we all went down to the basement waiting for the all clear. We were puzzled that Americans still had air raids when the War is long over. Well, after a while, we crept up, because we didn’t get the all clear, but we went up and later we found out that they were the fire engines. I never… in Europe they don’t use [such] sirens.”
“When I arrived, the town was still split in half; there was the Saarland which was controlled by the French and then of course the other side which was controlled by the Americans. The town was like in a little valley and one side there was the Americans and the other side were the Germans, the third side there were the French and the fourth side were the Canadians. And I remember the Canadians… there was an Air Force base. And the Canadians of course had an ice rink there and played hockey, and we would go and watch the hockey games. And the Canadians tend to be quite rough and they would play mostly German teams and the Germans didn’t like that very well! They always would cry ‘Fuj! Fuj!’ when the Canadians played rough.
“When I arrived, my sergeant said ‘Well, you’re the teletype operator’ and I had never seen a teletype in my life. I was taught by I think the WAGs, the women [who] were about in another town called Pirmasens. The other teletypists taught me how to work the teletype. I became quite good at it and I became the operator for the base. That was fun duty, I must say. It was some of the best times of my life. We had quite a lot of money in those days, and after hours we didn’t have that much responsibility once we were on our own and I did a lot of traveling. I made sure… We had a, a friend of mine and I, we owned a ’49 Volkswagen, and we traveled whenever we got a chance. We went through the Alps, we… all the way to Denmark, we had to two big jerry cans in the back full of gasoline (which now that I think about it was rather stupid!) We made it all the way to Denmark never buying gas.”
“I remember dad was telling me one time that he was in the Olympics. I think it was in Amsterdam, before the War, I’m not sure when exactly. I remember he was in five events. I think it was like a military thing, it was horseback riding, pistol shooting, swimming, I imagine running and something else, I don’t know what the events were. But I never sort of paid much attention to it – so I mentioned it to my son-in-law one day and sure enough, he looked it up and gave me the website. I sent… I’m not sure where the headquarters is, but they sent me a lot of information about my dad! Where he placed, how many points he got, they even said that he fell off his horse! So it was just wonderful! I still have it, it was great!”
In April 1949, Eda’s future wife Alice (whom he had met in Prague while she was at business school) escaped from Czechoslovakia. He spent the next several months attempting to join her. On October 14, Eda crossed the border into Germany with 12 other people. He was sent to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he was reunited with Alice. They soon married and had their first child, Alice. In early 1951, Eda joined the ranks of Radio Free Europe as a writer on the Czechoslovak desk and moved to Munich. In June 1952, the Vedrals received visas for the United States and arrived in Chicago. Eda says that they were helped by the Czech community there and he quickly found a job in a steel factory, which only lasted a short time. He then started working on the assembly line at Hotpoint, making washing machines and dryers. The Vedrals moved to Cicero, Illinois, and Eda and Alice had seven more children. Eda says that he made a point to speak to his children only in Czech; today, most of them still speak the language fluently. Eda also became very active in expatriate tramping circles. He has been the ‘sheriff’ of a group called Dálava for many years and has traveled to places like Canada, the Czech Republic, and the American West for tramping get-togethers.
Eda became an American citizen in 1965; he says that he waited so long because he believed he would be returning to Czechoslovakia to live. In 1972, he made his first trip back to visit his mother in Písek. His father, whom Eda had not seen since he left the country, died shortly before his visit. Eda says he feels at home in both countries and, if not for his children living in the United States, would consider returning to the Czech Republic to live. Now retired, he lives in Cicero with his wife Alice.
]]>Eda Vedral was born in České Budějovice in 1927. His mother, Ludmila, was a teacher and his father, also named Eduard, was a journalist. When Eda was six, the Vedrals moved to Mladá Boleslav where his father worked as writer and editor for the local newspaper. Eda says that the year before he graduated from gymnázium, his class was sent to dig trenches for the German war effort. Since Eda had knee problems, he was sent back to Mladá Boleslav and became a firefighter to provide assistance in case of a bombing. At the end of WWII and in light of his training as a fireman, Eda took part in watching over and transporting Nazi prisoners. In the summer of 1945, Eda’s father again changed jobs and became a political writer for a newspaper in Liberec. Eda graduated from gymnázium there in 1946 and began studying journalism at Charles University in Prague. After the Communist coup in 1948, Eda switched his course of studies to law; he says he was eventually kicked out of university in 1949 because of his father’s political background. Back in Liberec, his uncle helped him to find a job as an accountant in a factory. He was fired three months later, but soon became an accountant for Liberec’s municipal services [komunální služby města Liberec].
In April 1949, Eda’s future wife Alice (whom he had met in Prague while she was at business school) escaped from Czechoslovakia. He spent the next several months attempting to join her. On October 14, Eda crossed the border into Germany with 12 other people. He was sent to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he was reunited with Alice. They soon married and had their first child, Alice. In early 1951, Eda joined the ranks of Radio Free Europe as a writer on the Czechoslovak desk and moved to Munich. In June 1952, the Vedrals received visas for the United States and arrived in Chicago. Eda says that they were helped by the Czech community there and he quickly found a job in a steel factory, which only lasted a short time. He then started working on the assembly line at Hotpoint, making washing machines and dryers. The Vedrals moved to Cicero, Illinois, and Eda and Alice had seven more children. Eda says that he made a point to speak to his children only in Czech; today, most of them still speak the language fluently. Eda also became very active in expatriate tramping circles. He has been the ‘sheriff’ of a group called Dálava for many years and has traveled to places like Canada, the Czech Republic, and the American West for tramping get-togethers.
Eda became an American citizen in 1965; he says that he waited so long because he believed he would be returning to Czechoslovakia to live. In 1972, he made his first trip back to visit his mother in Písek. His father, whom Eda had not seen since he left the country, died shortly before his visit. Eda says he feels at home in both countries and, if not for his children living in the United States, would consider returning to the Czech Republic to live. Now retired, he lives in Cicero with his wife Alice.
“I remember that, yes, for sure. We remember the Nazi occupation for sure. Even as kids, we know how the situation is, we understand it. Even if we were young kids, it didn’t bother us much, but we knew it was a really serious thing, especially after the Heydrich assassination and so on. ‘Keep your mouth shut and be careful.’”
“The end of the War came, so we, who were working for the firefighters, we got this stuff [weapons], and we started taking the Germans together, something like that, so I had a machine gun.”
So, were you rounding up Germans at the end of the War?
“Well, they wanted some of those prisoners, they have to move them to other cities for example. So we have to accompany them, watch them, or watch them at the barracks in Mladá Boleslav, so that’s why we had to have guns. And I had it at home, and my brother almost killed me.”
Did you use this gun? Were you shooting people?
“Well, I started to. Once, one of the prisoners tried to escape and I saw him. Now, you are a young man, you never had something, and he’s an old soldier, he knows what to do. I didn’t shoot him, exactly, I shot over his head. It was nothing funny, I tell you. Now I make a little fun out of it, but at that time it was nothing funny.”
“Some of those people [from RFE] went through those camps, Czech camps, looking for editor-writers and so on. I had luck – it was luck – they thought I was my father, because [we have the] same name, and the guy was from Mladá Boleslav, he knew my father. He knew me personally, so he said ‘Hey, this is it.’ He said ‘You have to go to Munich and have an interview.’ So I went over there, I interviewed in English, he spoke a little bit of Czech, this English guy. ‘Ok, dobrý.’
“I was an editor-writer for announcements in between [pieces], continuity. You have to find out what the guy wrote about, say it in two sentences, and they put it between programming. So the people in Czech Republic will know ‘Hey, tomorrow will be this,’ because they don’t want to listen to it eight hours a day; it’s dangerous. But if you are interested in this program – that was my job, to tell them what the program practically is.”
“Tramps are practically wild Scouts. The Scouting organization is organized. Tramps, not. Everybody knows about everybody or what’s going on, but you have no organization. That’s why the Nazis and Communists could ruin up Scouts or other organizations, but they couldn’t ruin up tramping. So most people going with the tramps enjoyed themselves or covered what they were doing, because nobody could catch them, even the Communists. And when they sometimes went over there and beat the people, they wondered ‘How come there are so many people here? How come you know there’s something here?’ Nobody had to send anything because everybody knew from Czechoslovakia, from the First Republic, every Sunday, every second Sunday in April, we’re going there. But otherwise, it’s like Scouting. But it’s wild because there’s no organization. You can change it, you can switch it, you can close it up, you can start a new one. There can be one man, there can be two, there can be thirty. Nothing’s written either. But you love nature. The real tramps, they really love nature and enjoy it. And clean up after themselves.”
(Video courtesy of Studio Na Koleni, Chicago)