Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
]]>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.
Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.
In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.
Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.
“Everything flourished; there were important people writing for the newspaper; there was an interest in literature; there was Masaryk – whom I later edited. His picture was in every classroom. And people still lived together, whether they were Jewish or German or Czech or Hungarian or whatever. They still had a model which later got lost, unfortunately.”
“I had the full gymnázium and I couldn’t study because the Czech universities were closed. Also, half-Jews were excluded from all studies so I couldn’t even try; there was nothing I could do. I took some private lessons in French, I think, and Russian. Otherwise I read a lot, sitting in Charles Square [Karlovo náměstí] on a bench which I revisit very often when I am back in Prague.”
“I said to myself ‘I am lucky’ but, on the other hand, I didn’t feel guilty about it and I tried to help my mother. We went to the park very often – not to Karlovo [náměstí]; it was too close and everybody knew her, but some park on Vinohrady – and she put her bag on the side where she had the star and I walked with her with nothing, so we were ‘normal’ people, as it were.”
“I had one friend, as it were, who was educated in Heidelberg by a Jewish friend himself and came to Prague with ideas about Brecht and The Threepenny Opera and the left theatre, and didn’t know with whom to speak. I was the lonely guy who could speak to him about [it]. We were singing the Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera]. But that was the exception and I must tell you that we sat in a place having our beer and talking about these things and he mostly did not wear his uniform because he had his civilian clothes in our place, hidden. When he came – he was on the Letiště Ruzyně [Ruzyně Airport] and he listened of course to all the broadcasts including the BBC – he brought the new news, then changed to civilian clothes and we went to the next hospoda [pub] where we of course talked in German; he couldn’t speak Czech.
“Three weeks after the victory, I went to a bookshop and the owner said ‘You were talking German. I’m calling the police.’ I said ‘Yes, I was talking German to an anti-fascist German soldier.’ ‘No, no. You were talking German. I have to tell the police.’ Fortunately, I had my identity card at that time which said ‘Prisoner in so-and-so [labor camp]’ and so I showed it and he said ‘Well, I must have made a mistake.’ He did make a mistake. But you could see that it was not easy, even if you tried later, to survive, because people remembered.”
“I emigrated in the year ’49 because I wanted to run away in ’48 and it didn’t work. And what prompted the decision were two things. First of all, I had little future in the Czech academia because I had written a dissertation on Franz Kafka in England. That was not particularly a class-conscious topic to write about for the future. B, my then girlfriend, later wife and [children’s] mother, worked for the British Czechoslovak Society in Prague – she was the secretary – and she was constantly haunted by the Czech secret police who wanted her to give all the news: who is going where, who telephoned, who didn’t telephone. So we decided it’s untenable and we are going. Our first attempt failed.
“The second time it worked. From Klatovy, there was a taxi who was supposed to take us closer to the border. We paid a lot. My girlfriend sold her furniture and it cost us 30,000 crowns, I think. The idea was the contacts were Czech Boy Scouts who knew the region. We were sitting in this taxicab driving us from Klatovy towards the mountains and the driver suddenly said we have to get out because the secret police is behind us. There is a police car chasing us. So we had to get out, whether it was true or not. We were a whole group. We were two of us and then a group of three students. So there were five. Well, he threw us out in the middle of the night, close to the border but not there. We didn’t exactly know where it was. Also, I had to give up much of my luggage because it was too heavy to carry. All I had left was one little piece of luggage and a rucksack.
“Then the whole group decided ‘We have to go this way. This is the south; this must be the border,’ and then we heard some voices and we said ‘We have to explore this’ and we sent out a patrol to find out. They were Bavarian workers in the forest, and they took us over and delivered us to the next village where were promptly arrested by the German border police and handed over to the American CIC.”
“I was absolutely free [to report as I wished]. Everyday there were editorial meetings, with Pavel Tigrid presiding, where somebody reported what the Czech broadcasts or Czech newspapers said, what we have to answer, and what our daily portion of polemics would be, and that was the only prescriptive part – the topics. What you said about it was absolutely your affair.”
How well informed did you feel you were at Radio Free Europe about things happening in Czechoslovakia? Was there a good line of communication between Czechoslovakia and Munich?
“There was a particular service that listened to the Czech broadcast, read all the Czech newspapers, and published a summary every day or every week or so. So I think that we were very well [informed]. We didn’t know what the underground was thinking, probably, but we knew what the official line was and we answered the official line. The difficulty was that they didn’t want the people to hear us, so that had machines which made it impossible, with the exception of one line, because they themselves wanted to hear what Radio Free Europe said. So we informed our esteemed listeners in Czechoslovakia to listen on that particular line.”
“I started out by writing these Prague books for my American students, I think. Because in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was this change, American students went to Prague very often, settled there, said ‘This is the new Paris,’ and came back with the message ‘Prague is Kafka and Havel.’ And I told myself, ‘Well, Prague is more than Kafka and Havel.’ I read Kafka and I respect Havel to no end, but Prague history is much more complicated and these students should know something about that, and that’s why I started to write these things. It’s the clash between Catholicism and the Hussites; it’s Dobrovský and the Czech Enlightenment; it’s a Czech mysticism up to Otakar Březina. So a lot of things. And people should know about it.”
The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.
In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.
]]>Paul Burik was born in the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice in 1954. His father, Nicholas, was a doctor, while his mother, Vlasta, worked as a pharmacist. When Paul was still a toddler, the family moved to Prešov, in eastern Slovakia, which was where Paul’s father (who was ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn) had grown up. After nearly six years, however, the family moved back to Bohemia, first to Prčice and then Sedlčany, where Paul’s father worked as the chief surgeon in the local hospital. When Paul was still a teenager, his mother died of a terminal disease. His father worked long hours so Paul says he grew up fairly independently. In 1967 his father traveled to the United States to visit his brother (Paul’s uncle Alex) who had immigrated to Cleveland shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Paul says his father spoke with a number of American doctors during his visit to the States, but decided to return to Czechoslovakia because, at the time, ‘things were good there.’ Following the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, however, Paul’s father suggested to him that the pair resettle in America. Paul says he looked forward to the ‘adventure’ of emigrating and agreed with his father’s suggestion.
The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.
In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.
“I had to take piano lessons, you know, the parents insisted. And the teacher, the piano teacher, was an old boy scout. That was, of course, that was outlawed. But he had these models of cabins and the little scout things, and so we would spend half the time playing piano, and half the time playing with the scout things. So, my piano is not that good.”
“We had a sort of… Sokol was outlawed, but he [my father] was teaching a little gymnastics class that I and about a dozen boys, we would go into the old Sokol Hall and he made arrangements, he would teach us the stuff, you know, gymnastics: parallel bars, high bar, rings, floor exercises, the sort of typical stuff that the Sokols do – for several years. And I think he always believed in exercise and the whole notion of ‘in a healthy body is a healthy spirit.’ So he was doing it a little bit for himself, because he always liked to exercise and stuff, but at the same time, he put up with a dozen other kids too.”
“We had this meeting on the steps of our house, I was coming down in the morning and he was coming up, he proposed that we go and try to go to the United States, and it’s going to be challenging, but we should go. And of course, I was a 13 year old, for me it was just a big adventure. So I said yes, let’s go. And so that day he went to the hospital to do his rounds and work, and I packed whatever I deemed important, some clothing and a sleeping bag. It was kind of interesting because I still have the sleeping bag; I still have it in the car in case we get stranded in the snow. But it is amazing how that one item was sort of like the security blanket, like a little boy’s nene blanket, because we didn’t know where we were going to be. We could be sleeping on the floor of a gym some place or some kind of a camp. So we were dragging this sleeping blanket all around across the continent.”
“You need to understand that especially as a young boy like that, anything Western, anything forbidden, was idolized. Anything Western was idolized. If somebody gave us chewing gum, because it was from America it was like the hottest thing. So, when we said ‘let’s go to America,’ it was like this great adventure. To me as a young teenager, it was like, why not? Let’s do it – I didn’t have to worry about all those legalities and technicalities and potential… I knew there was danger, I knew that there was danger, that if things don’t work out it could be sort of nasty at least for him [my dad.] I was a child but… So it was sort of a quick decision, sometimes you just have to make those snap decisions.”
“Ironically, travel was complicated because the locals changed the signs. And so if you followed the road signs, you would end up in the wrong place. You really had to go by knowledge of the local area or by map. But if you came to an intersection and it said ‘Prague, this way,’ it would probably point you to the wrong place.”
“Well actually, he [Alex] was more active in the Ukrainian or the Rusyn community, so my first years until college, I was really not involved with the Czech community at all or very little. If anything, there was a Carpatho-Rusyn ski club and he was an officer and we did a lot of traveling, a lot of skiing in the wintertime. And so I was more involved in that culture. It was not until I already was married and had children, and I was taking my daughter to a gymnastics class, and there was a fellow reading a paper, a Czech paper, Nový svět. And so I said, ‘Well, he’s got to be Czech or Slovak or something,’ and he was my age, and so when the opportunity came I said hello to him, ‘Dobrý večer’ [Good evening] or something like that. And he turned out to be a local dentist, Stan Pechan, who is Slovak, Czech – he covers both areas, much like me, and we started talking and he introduced me to, he took me to a meeting of what was then the Krajanský výbor, which now is really defunct, but at the time it was the Czech and Slovak committee for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.”
“One of my colleagues at work, at Cleveland City Hall, approached me one time and said ‘Hey, you are Czech, you know there’s a Czech Cultural Garden and it’s orphaned and you know, somebody should take care of it.’ And I said. ‘What garden?’ I had no clue about the gardens. And he said ‘Come on, I’ll take you there at lunch time.’ So, we did, we took a ride to East Boulevard and MLK and drove through the gardens and saw the Czech garden and I was impressed and said ‘Yeah, well somebody kind of needs to attend to that.’ And before I knew, it kind of became my commitment to the Czech community, taking care of that. And I think we’ve been pretty successful. We’ve got some grants from the Czech Republic, we’ve got some donations from specifically the Ptak family, got some grants from the Holden Parks Trust, which is a trust which takes care of some of the parks, or specifically that park. So, we did a lot of things, restored the statues, planted new shrubs, tuck-pointed the masonry and over the years I think it’s one of the better… [We have] had virtually all of the ambassadors that were stationed in the United States come and visit and walk through the gardens.”
The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.
]]>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.
The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.
“Then the Hitler-Jugend came over to Piešt’any, it was a tourist city and they took a lot of hotels over. They were a nuisance to us, they were an arrogant bunch of punks that we didn’t like, they took our places where we used to play. They thought that Slovakia was their colony. Germany was being bombed more, while the war was almost unnoticed in Slovakia, nonexistent, it was peaceful there during the War – especially Piešt’any. There was no bombing, and so they sent their German kids over there to indoctrinate them in Hitler’s propaganda and make them into new citizens, tough new citizens.
“One time I remember there was a skirmish when I pushed one of those kids into a river. We had to hide in our back yards because they were chasing us and there would have been a penalty if they had caught up with us and found out who did that. It was a little river, there was water flowing and in the middle there was only one board, and he purposely… I was on that board first and he thought that he had the right, that I should back up from it, and I did not. So that was the only skirmish that we had.”
“There were two bridges in Piešt’any, we heard that they were blown out by the Germans, so we went up there, and as I got to the bridge there was a boat with soldiers, Russian soldiers, coming across the river, and they had prisoners. And when they came to this side of the river where we were, they told the prisoners to get up out of the boat and walk on the dike. And as one man walked up the dike the Russian soldier who was on the top of the dike pulled his pistol and emptied it right into this guy. So his body rolled down. There was about twenty, thirty, people witnessing this whole thing. They were looking for prisoners, German prisoners, who were hiding. And so people were willing to tell them if they knew somebody was hiding some place.
“Then later on we walked over to around the airport. There was an airport in Piešt’any, and they had bunkers in there. So we went up there to see what it looks like and we saw some dead bodies of Germans, their boots and belts were missing. And some of the explosives were still there, so we tried to grab some of those explosives, we later on used them for fishing. We threw the explosive in the water and the fish popped out and we had it, but we didn’t do too much of it because it was forbidden.”
“We could not go under the Catholic Youth name anymore and so we went under the name Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého. What we did? We put on about five plays every year, and we were pretty good. We competed locally and county-wide and finally we even ended up in Turčianský Svätý Martin, where there was a national competition. And we placed there in a pretty good position, and actually some of us, including myself, were later offered professional acting roles, in Nitra. However, next door to our Orlovna, where we had our own place, was a facility that was owned by a baron. He escaped some place, never came back, and the commies took over that facility and installed a youth program in there. They wanted us to go with them. We resisted. And they were pushing on us in this Catholic Orlovna – what used to be – to get more socialistic. And we resisted, so they were using all kinds of tricks and oppression and threats, and some of the boys were almost ready to go to the military, and I decided to go overseas.”
“We had to go see in the garbage dump and see to find ourselves some kind of a can, washed it off, and that is when we got our first food, some kind of eintopf [stew] – a big spoon of it for both. We had no spoons to eat it with, so we just ate it the best way we could. The next day, Joe had a ring, we sold that ring, and bought a spoon and cigarettes – we were smoking in those days. Breakfast every morning was just a slice of margarine, a slice of kind of a bread and a black coffee. For noon, there were mostly things that were in one pot, like what the Germans call eintopf sometimes, like soup. And the same thing was for supper, something close to it, not much food anyway – and bread with it.”
“We had some political frictions, the Slovaks, but the biggest friction was between the Czechoslovaks and Slovaks. Fights erupted on a weekly basis, and the MPs marched in with big sticks and beat anybody who was outside regardless of what it was, who it was, whether they were fighting or not. Then finally the Germans took over the camp. Rocks were being thrown and even I had to sleep with a pipe in my bed, for my own protection. So anyway, there were a lot of fights, and sometimes the Germans marched in, the German police, and there were a few times that it was so bad that some people… the Germans opened fire and some people got shot.”
“When we got to that place, 25 of us, the wagon was pushed to the side, the train continued, and there was only that little station there, where you could stop the train yourself, and hop on the train and go wherever you wanted to. And at the camp, there was a barrack with bunk beds. You picked your own, wherever you wanted to stay, and then next door was a barrack with kitchen and dining room. We were very hungry and when we got in there we ate like we never ate in all our lives, for maybe an hour or so and finally we filled up! We got back to the barracks and next day was an assignment. It was an assignment to go into the bush, three men to a team. Two pushing the saw and one with a horse bringing the wood to the road. Well, I was not strong enough, nobody wanted to get me in their trio, and there was another Czech fellow who didn’t have no trio. So they assigned us to chop the wood for the kitchen. So we did that for about a week or so, supplied the kitchen with the wood, and in the meantime the others were working as a team piecework. They were making better money, we only got around 80, 79, cents an hour. The food was plenty and good. The sleep was okay, even though there were the trains passing by we never heard them anyway. We got used to it.”
“I suggested at the [Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club]… I came with the idea of a Slovak Festival. And immediately they made a chairman of me of the thing, to organize it. So I started organizing and got some of the factions together, Slovak musicians and all the people to participate. And despite some of the opposition that we had, especially from the older generations, it was a huge success from day one. Nobody ever knew that it would be so successful, people were standing in lines of eight or nine for food and drinks and we had a good program. So we found out that the facility is not big enough if we continue – we started continuing – and we moved to a larger facility. The next year we had so many people that they were fighting outside to get in!”
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
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Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.
Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.
In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.
“He was an avid mushroom picker. He had an eye that would see every mushroom everywhere in the forest, and while he was walking around picking the mushrooms, he started a new hobby. He started picking up pieces of branches of wood and carved them into shapes of animals, like snakes, birds, etc. And that became his sort of profession in his retirement. Then he built little chalets out of wood and pinecones, and then he progressed into carving different statues from folklife in Slovakia. The biggest was larger than life statues that he not carved, but actually chopped out of the big pieces of wood for the festival in Východná. They had a competition of folk artists, and he actually received the official folk artist title. He did many carvings for the museums, and so he became quite famous later in his life.”
“I remember we had to walk across – it had to be about five miles – through the forest and fields to a different church, not the same place where we lived. That’s the way many people went to church also, to different locations where maybe nobody knew them or something. Especially people like teachers, even some policemen, government employees, because they didn’t want people to know that they actually believe and go to church, so they would go to a different town or a different village to attend services.”
“I think the teachers at my age were still the old class of teachers that became teachers before the communist regime, and they didn’t change their style of teaching, just didn’t teach us everything they would like to. Then more and more new teachers came; they were a different style of teachers. What I remember is that those teachers were sort of not teaching as much, but they were trying to catch you doing something wrong, like why didn’t you do your homework, what is this, like punishing and punishing, where the old teachers, they would try to make you understand why you were supposed to do it.”
“There were sports clubs in the communist system. I think that’s probably the only thing, one of the couple of good things in the communist system was that they were supporting the youth, supporting financially all these clubs that my mother or other parents didn’t have to pay any money for us. So everything was paid for, travel and equipment, by the government. I was competing in cross-country skiing. In 1960, I was the second junior in Czechoslovakia, but I wasn’t allowed to go to any outside country to compete. They were always afraid that I would just try to escape and try to get to England where my father was.”
“In ’65 I came back to civilian life and right away I tried to go for vacation to England to visit with my father. When I went to the passport office, the man told me, he looked at the black book again and said ‘Ah, you’re not going anywhere, just don’t even bother.’ So every time I tried again, he told me ‘Get out of here, I told you, you’re not going anywhere,’ until the spring of 1968, when the same man says ‘Please come in and sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ So I thought, ‘Uh oh, something changed, something is brewing.’ So then I got a visa and I was just married for a few months at that time, but I was so afraid that the system was going to change again, that they were going to take the travel permission away from me, that I didn’t even wait until my wife had papers ready. I just wanted to get out and go to England before somebody said ‘No, no that was wrong, you’re not going anywhere.’”
“We did lots of support for young blood coming from Czechoslovakia willing to learn the western system of life and business and politics. They would come out here and didn’t know much, didn’t know anybody so we would help them to make contacts and open the doors for them, help them to attend some internships or schools. After awhile I thought my phone number was written somewhere in Vienna at the airport on the wall ‘When you come to Washington, call Oliver,’ because all of the sudden I had phone calls from complete strangers without any recommendation, calling, ‘Can you help me? Can you give me advice?’ or whatever. And I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it because I was sorry to miss the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so this was my contribution to finally put the final nail in the coffin of communism.”
In 1948, Miroslav’s older sister Ester gained U.S. citizenship, on grounds that her father had been considered an American at the time of her birth. She came to America in December 1949 and encouraged her brother to do likewise. Miroslav heeded her advice, applied for U.S. citizenship, and left Czechoslovakia on May 25, 1950. He arrived in New York two weeks later, aged 15, and traveled straight to Chicago, where he was met by his sister who had already found a job for him in a sheet metal factory. When work dried up towards the winter of that year, Miroslav took a job with the Czech newspaper Svornost. He worked there for one year and a half until he decided to become a carpenter. Miroslav’s family friend, whom his father had worked with in Chicago, helped him enroll in an apprenticeship program and join the carpenters’ union. Two nights a week, Miroslav attended Morton High School East to learn English and complete his education.
In 1957, Miroslav decided to move to California to gain more professional experience. He stayed there until he was drafted into the US Army in 1958. After completing basic training at Fort Ord, Miroslav returned to the Chicagoland Area, where he has lived ever since. In 1963, he married his wife, Ingrid Chybik, whom he met at a local Czech folk dance group. Miroslav and Ingrid have three children who all speak ‘some Czech.’ An active member of the United Moravian Societies, Miroslav also mentions his involvement with CSA Fraternal Life and, up until recently, the patriotic Czech athletic association Orel in Exile. Today, Miroslav lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with Ingrid.
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Miroslav Chybik was born in Jalubí, Moravia, in 1935. His mother Josefa and father Miroslav met in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1920s, but had returned to Europe to care for their ailing parents in 1930. Miroslav’s father retained his American citizenship and attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the whole family back to the United States in 1937. Instead, the Chybíks spent WWII at their farm in Jalubí, parts of which were commandeered by Nazi troops who set up a vehicle maintenance shop in one of their barns, says Miroslav.
In 1948, Miroslav’s older sister Ester gained U.S. citizenship, on grounds that her father had been considered an American at the time of her birth. She came to America in December 1949 and encouraged her brother to do likewise. Miroslav heeded her advice, applied for U.S. citizenship, and left Czechoslovakia on May 25, 1950. He arrived in New York two weeks later, aged 15, and traveled straight to Chicago, where he was met by his sister who had already found a job for him in a sheet metal factory. When work dried up towards the winter of that year, Miroslav took a job with the Czech newspaper Svornost. He worked there for one year and a half until he decided to become a carpenter. Miroslav’s family friend, whom his father had worked with in Chicago, helped him enroll in an apprenticeship program and join the carpenters’ union. Two nights a week, Miroslav attended Morton High School East to learn English and complete his education.
In 1957, Miroslav decided to move to California to gain more professional experience. He stayed there until he was drafted into the US Army in 1958. After completing basic training at Fort Ord, Miroslav returned to the Chicagoland Area, where he has lived ever since. In 1963, he married his wife, Ingrid Chybik, whom he met at a local Czech folk dance group. Miroslav and Ingrid have three children who all speak ‘some Czech.’ An active member of the United Moravian Societies, Miroslav also mentions his involvement with CSA Fraternal Life and, up until recently, the patriotic Czech athletic association Orel in Exile. Today, Miroslav lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with Ingrid.
“Well, in ‘47 or ‘48, my sister was somewhere and someone said, ‘I just heard on the radio that any child born of American citizens can come and reclaim the American citizenship of their parents. Why don’t you look into it?’ So she said to my parents; ‘I’m going to go to Prague, [to find out] the details.’ So, she came back from Prague and she said ‘Yes, I can claim my American citizenship because you were an American citizen when I was born.’
“So she wrote to her cousin, and her cousin brought her here [to America]. And while she was leaving Prague, my father said ‘Since she’s going, you might as well join her.’ So, he applied for my citizenship and that was in October and in April, I get a letter from Prague that it was okayed and that I could come and claim American citizenship after him.”
“When I tried to bring my parents here, and send an affidavit in 1952 or ‘53, I got a letter from my father. ‘Please do not attempt to do anything right now. Because the situation right now, the only place we would wind up or could get to would be Siberia’ because it was at the time when Stalin was insisting on his program. That was when the Cold War actually started. He just followed the Yalta Treaty, which was for 40 years or 50 years. They were in charge of the Eastern Bloc; US, England, and France were in charge of the Western Bloc. You see, Vienna had four different zones; a Russian zone, an American zone, English and French. The same thing was with Berlin. And that treaty was honored until President Reagan said ‘Okay, the time is up. Take the Berlin wall down.'”
“One thing I learned, and this is where the Czech people have a hard time to understand the American people because, over here, Chicago is called a ‘melting pot.’ You had everybody here: Slavs, Poles, Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes, everything. So especially me, in construction, you never knew from week to week who you were going to run into. You might be working one day with a Swede, the next day, you are working with an Italian, and then, you’re working with a German. But one language is the key, the one language. You could be in the army, or come from New York, and you wind up in Chicago, or you wind up in California, it’s still one language.”
“After 60 years of living in America… A lot of times I say, I’m like the kid who has two mothers; one that gives you birth, and one that gives you a home. I’m grateful to Moravia and Czechoslovakia for being born there, as a birthplace. And I’m grateful to America for having the home here.”
After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.
Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.
]]>Milan Hauner was born in 1940 in Gotha, Germany. His Czech father, Vilém, married his German mother, Gertrud, when she was threatened with sterilization (because of a handicap) by the Nazi government under the Nuremberg Laws. During WWII, Milan’s grandfather and uncle were arrested and executed on charges of anti-Nazi activities. Milan moved to Prague with his parents when he was just over one year old and grew up there. Vilém was a renowned book binder and Gertrud worked as a seamstress. Both Milan’s parents were deaf and, in addition to speaking German and Czech, he and his younger brother Roland learned sign language. From an early age, Milan loved history and says he had access to many older books, including some that were eventually banned by the Communist government. He attended elementary school and gymnázium in Prague, and began studying history and literature at Charles University in 1957. Upon graduation, Milan was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and served for two years. He remembers spending most of his second year in the army in prison as punishment for ‘breaches of discipline’ and his outspoken ways.
After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.
Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.
“My parents, between them, used mostly sign language, but with us they insisted on lip reading and actually an oral communication, because they were both trained. It’s interesting; the schools for the deaf in Germany and the former Czechoslovakia used both methods in educating them. My grandmother, my Czech grandmother, was one of the persons who very much insisted on the education of deaf people. She traveled abroad – was still under the old monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian system – and consulted specialists, purchased literature in German and French, translated it, and she helped to improve the teaching of deaf people in the former Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia. She’s very well remembered.”
“One day there was a knock on the door and I went to open the door, and there was a tall Russian officer standing. He had a brown bag under his arm, which will appear later in the story, and one eye was a glass eye. I had never seen somebody with a glass eye, so I walked around him and tried to see the eye turning after him, but it was all frozen always directly in front of him. When he saw that I was lip reading my mother and we used some signs, gesticulated with hands, he must have realized my mother was deaf. I don’t know what his mission was. I think that later I learned that these last-minute patriots sent this Russian to our apartment and that there’s a German woman there, take her out in the prison, or the camps which were built up around Prague for German civilians. He was a bit embarrassed, so he asked for a glass of water, in Russian вода [voda], in Czech voda, it’s the same, I understood him. So my mother gave him a glass of water and he drank it – it was warm outside – quickly, and he asked for another one, and then she brought a bottle of sweetener which was kind of syrup which we used during the War because there was no sugar, some fruit sweetener, and that broke the ice. He started to play with us, with me and my brother, and after a while he simply gave us this little brown bag he brought in and that was full of cherries. So that is my first lasting impression of the Russian barbarians. He in fact was very humane.”
“I was obsessed with history, it was clear. Everyone in my class knew that I was obsessed with history; I had the best knowledge of history in the classroom, always challenging the teacher and reading history books under the desk. I had a vast library because due to the fate which befell my relatives on my father’s side, my grandfather and uncle, when they were arrested, some of their books – if they were not confiscated – landed in our house. So I had three libraries accumulated by my grandmother, my grandfather, and my uncle. I never managed to read even a fraction of them.”
“When I applied to go to the university and the director refused to give support to my application because he was uneasy to see that I was born in Germany and that my mother was German, and therefore he wanted to speak with both of my parents. He felt rather ashamed when my father told him that he lost his father and uncle during the Nazi occupation. So he immediately apologized. So these are the two sides of my upbringing, if you like.”
“I returned to London and joined an organization which was called Toc H which is a branch of Quakers. And for just some food and shelter I was helping to extract political news from the newspapers that was every morning on the front desk, on the wall, and what we provided was information about jobs and shelter for Czech and Slovak students who were fugitives. And I must say the reaction of the English people was extraordinary. Almost everyone who came to us received an address where he could stay overnight and some little money. I think it was kind of a late reaction to the Munich complex among the English people; they felt the analogy was so striking between the Nazi invasion and the Soviet invasion, so they were helping us.”
Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.
Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.
]]>Michlean Amir was born in Nîmes, France in 1940 to Czech Jewish parents. When her father Oscar joined the Czechoslovak Division of the British Army, Michlean and her mother Gertrude traveled with him to various training camps in England. At the close of WWII, the Lӧwys returned to Czechoslovakia where Oscar and his brother re-established the family wholesale food distribution business in Plzeň. Michlean’s grandparents (who owned the business) had been killed in the Holocaust, as were other relatives, including her uncle and his family. Michlean says that her father’s business became very successful, along with two family farms that he ran. After the Communist coup, Michlean’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Israel, came to Czechoslovakia to help the family emigrate. They arrived in Israel in 1948 and settled in Haifa where Michlean’s parents ran a small grocery. Michlean says that her years in Israel were instrumental in solidifying her Jewish identity and that she was reluctant to move to the United States with her parents and younger sister.
Michlean says that it was always her parents’ intention to immigrate to the United States, and they began making plans soon after their arrival in Israel. It was seven years before the Lӧwys were sponsored by a family friend. They left Israel in December 1955 and settled in Rochester, New York. Michlean says their household was very Czech, as they listened to traditional Czech music, her mother cooked Czech food, and her parents were active in the Czechoslovak émigré community; however, any Jewish holiday celebrations they held were because she organized them. After graduating from high school, Michlean returned to Israel for a few years. She met and married her husband, and then moved back to the United States. She studied American and Jewish history in college and received a master’s degree in library science, and has been an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for 14 years. Today, Michlean lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband.
“It became clearer and clearer that the Communists would take over, and we were very fortunate that my grandmother – my mother’s mother – was living already in Israel, and her best friend was the mother of the person who was Israel’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. This lady told my grandmother that if she wants her children to get out of Czechoslovakia, she needs to get there and bring them, because the phones and the mail and everything was censored already. So she did do that exactly, she took a plane and came. Within a very short time my parents put together what they called a lift, which was filled with whatever belongings they could put in. And by the way, my mother had taken courses in photography, so one of the things they put in there was a camera because they thought that maybe she would be able to make a living in Israel as a photographer, and a few other very valuable things because we were well off in Czechoslovakia.
But when the lift came to Israel, instead of all these wonderful possible resources, there were rags. So on the way or wherever, these things were stolen or taken.
“So anyway, this is what we did to prepare to go, and because of this terrible experience of flying from England after the War, I developed a very high fever and they had to postpone the trip to the last plane that left Czechoslovakia for Israel. The plane that we were supposed to go on was one that was shot at, and it fell over, I think, Bulgaria. So that forever was kind of a shock to us that we could have been on that plane.”
“My father had had an uncle who lived in the United States when he was a little boy, and this uncle – as uncles from the United States often did – would come to Czechoslovakia and bring for him and his brothers gifts, he always bore gifts for them. He was one of the co-owners of a large shipping company, so he was able to bring them goodies. And from that time on, my father had this dream to come to the United States. My mother and he had papers to leave, but when the War broke out of course there was no way to leave, and as I said, he joined the Army and so forth and so that fell through.
“So as soon as they came to Israel he started thinking about going to the United States, but it took about seven years until the papers were arranged and we left for Rochester because there was a family friend living there, which is an incredible story.
A man whose roots were Czech but he studied medicine and lived in Vienna. Evidently, he took care of my mother who was a tennis player and had some problems with her knee, and he took care of her and fell in love with her and wanted her to marry him, but by that time my mother knew my father already. I don’t know exactly what the story was, but he sent his wife to Israel and she came and saw how we lived and she said ‘Oh, we’re going to send you an affidavit, we will bring you to the United States, we will take care of you.’”
“First of all, it was my formative years, but it also was the beginning of the state of Israel. That was a very exciting period and everybody was very nationalistic and so forth. I think that in those years, I just did not feel so much of the connection to Czechoslovakia as much as I did later on because my parents were so busy making a basic living, and everyone was trying to assimilate. There were people who came to Israel from all over, and everybody wanted to find a common denominator, so the language was an important factor, and the songs, and the dances and so on.”
“You know, I never think that you have to choose, especially here because our loyalties to the United States, to Israel, to Czech Republic, they’re not conflicting. We all have very basic, democratic values, so it’s not like if I had to choose between Russia. So I don’t see them conflicting. I also think that religion is one thing, but as I said, I don’t think there’s any conflict between being an American and a Jew, and in the same sense, I don’t see any of it as conflicting. Fortunately, I never had to make big choices between ‘I believe this, or I don’t believe that.’ So I think in a way I look at it as very very enriching, rather than otherwise.”
“The wronging, if you will, when you think about it from the economic point of view, yes I know that if it hadn’t happened for it, I’d be living a totally different life because my parents on both sides came from very well-to-do families and I would not have had to struggle with my education, et cetera. But that is not so important. The fact that I never got to meet my grandparents and other relatives; it’s a very painful thing. It’s one thing if a person is taken because they’re ill, but to know that they died such horrible deaths, and with my uncle and aunt and cousin, I really don’t know exactly what happened, because they – the uncle and aunt were young people – they could have been used for forced labor, they might have lived for three, four years, who knows, and who knows what awful life they might have had.
“It’s a pain that does not go away and it’s a pain that all of humanity has to carry, not just for the Holocaust, but for other genocides, for other wrongdoings that just don’t make sense, not fathomable, not understandable.”
In 1950, Martin’s mother was arrested on charges that she helped a relative illegally cross the border. After 18 months in prison, she was put on trial and released of all charges. While she was in prison, Martin was sent to a boarding school in Poděbrady, where he was a classmate of Václav Havel. Martin returned to Prague, graduated from high school and studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and worked for a state-owned building contractor.
Martin says that since graduating from university he had been hoping to travel to the West, applying for work abroad. Although he was frequently offered opportunities (particularly in Great Britain), he was repeatedly denied a visa. In 1967, Martin had applied for and been offered a job with the Greater London Council. To his surprise, he was given a visa and he left Czechoslovakia in August 1967. Although Martin planned to return to Prague after one year, he was still in London when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and decided to stay in the West. In January 1970, Martin took a job with an architecture firm in New York City and moved to the United States. He settled in Manhattan and opened his own private firm in 1971.
Martin first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and then again following the fall of communism. With a friend living in Prague, he opened a branch of his company there and continued to visit his hometown yearly. Initially reluctant to seek out his fellow émigrés, in recent years Martin has become active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, including assisting in the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall. Today, Martin continues his architecture practice and lives in Manhattan.
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Martin Holub was born in Prague in 1938. His father, Ján, was a lawyer who, after the Communist coup in 1948, was not allowed to continue practicing and sent to work at a cement factory. He later worked in a photography lab and then as a librarian at the Architectural Institute in Prague. His mother, Miloslava, has also studied law and went on to become a rather well-known art historian. During WWII, Martin spent a lot of time in Moravia where his mother’s parents lived. He says that rather than feeling afraid during the War, he recalls events such as air raids as ‘fun’ due to the excitement.
In 1950, Martin’s mother was arrested on charges that she helped a relative illegally cross the border. After 18 months in prison, she was put on trial and released of all charges. While she was in prison, Martin was sent to a boarding school in Poděbrady, where he was a classmate of Václav Havel. Martin returned to Prague, graduated from high school and studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and worked for a state-owned building contractor.
Martin says that since graduating from university he had been hoping to travel to the West, applying for work abroad. Although he was frequently offered opportunities (particularly in Great Britain), he was repeatedly denied a visa. In 1967, Martin had applied for and been offered a job with the Greater London Council. To his surprise, he was given a visa and he left Czechoslovakia in August 1967. Although Martin planned to return to Prague after one year, he was still in London when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and decided to stay in the West. In January 1970, Martin took a job with an architecture firm in New York City and moved to the United States. He settled in Manhattan and opened his own private firm in 1971.
Martin first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and then again following the fall of communism. With a friend living in Prague, he opened a branch of his company there and continued to visit his hometown yearly. Initially reluctant to seek out his fellow émigrés, in recent years Martin has become active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, including assisting in the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall. Today, Martin continues his architecture practice and lives in Manhattan.
“Born on the wrong side of the tracks. Capitalists. Enemy of the people. That’s enough. The ostensible charge was that she helped one of her cousins to emigrate. But nothing was proved and 18 months later, after the trial, she was released. She considered herself very lucky. So all this was actually pre-trial custody. She was held in pre-trial custody for 18 months, from 1950 until late of 1951.”
Well, at least she had a trial.
“There was a trial, yes, and there was some semblance of legality because the charge was not proven and she was released.”
“Even though nothing was proven to her, to have been in prison was kind of a black stain on her reputation and she had difficulty finding a job. So we really struggled, but it’s one interesting proof of how resilient a child is, because I have no memories of hardship. I mean, she made it seem like fun. I remember, a week before the end of the month, she would just empty her wallet on the table and say ‘This is what we have to live on until the end of the month.’ And for me it was fun. I budgeted money per day, and I have no memory of any struggle or hardship because a child has no reference. Everything is normal.”
“It was pretty rigorous training. I had an opportunity to compare myself with others when I came to England, and we grew up as a complex. We grew up thinking we are in a cage, we are separated from civilization by this Iron Curtain and we don’t really know what it’s all about; we are just sort of cut off in the boondocks down here. And that made us… I spent hours in the technical library because, interestingly, even though there was censorship of course and the Western newspapers, Western magazines were not allowed to come in, the technical literature was. We couldn’t take it home, but the library of the technical museum had all the architectural magazines in the world – French, English, Italian, American magazines. So that’s where I was spending my time, familiarizing myself with the architecture in the West. So that, when I arrived in London, to the astonishment of my English colleagues, I knew more about contemporary English architecture than they knew. They started explaining to me about James Sterling, and I said ‘Oh yeah, I know about James Sterling. He did the Lester school and he did that and he did that,’ and they were totally flabbergasted. ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Magazines. Magazines.’”
“It was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring, but not even Dubček knew it was the beginning of Dubček’s Prague Spring. But what we knew was that suddenly things started to be a little looser and the main witness was that I was allowed for the first time to leave – I couldn’t go even to East Germany; I never could go beyond the Iron Curtain – suddenly not just for a trip but for a year! It was unheard of. Unheard of. I thought it was a mistake, so I did not question. With my friend, I jumped into a car and drove to London. I thought I would be back in a year. At the time, I had no intention of emigrating for the rest of my life. If I let my fantasy run wild I thought ‘Well, if the first year would go well I might try to extend it for another year,’ and, at the time, to spend two years in London, it was the ultimate to think. Well, as it happened, at the end of the first year almost to the day Russians moved in. I didn’t take much imagination not to return when I saw tanks in Wenceslas Square.”
“I arrived from London in January of 1970, again thinking this would be a temporary stay in America. Having lived in London for three years, the Brits kind of condition you into thinking that America is this cultural wasteland where everybody’s chasing money and no gentle soul could survive, and I bought it. American tourists on Oxford Street are doing a very good job to support this philosophy. So I truly thought that this would be another three or four years to get the taste of America, test myself professionally here, and then I would come back to civilization – civilization being London. I felt very comfortable in London. I had a good job, apartment. There was really no reason for me to leave, except this curiosity. I considered myself a citizen of the world and you cannot be a citizen of the world unless you’ve experienced America. Professionally it attracted me. When I opened architecture magazines in 1969 I liked what I saw better than what I saw in London. So I had this professional curiosity plus sort of the world curiosity. And very quickly, New York and I clicked and I had no second thoughts about ever returning to London.”
“I no longer fit in. It’s a very strange feeling, which cannot be unique among emigrants, that when I walk in Prague I feel like a tourist. It’s the town I was born in, I spent the first 28 years of my life, and still I don’t know really how it works now, having been out of there for 45 years. Life develops and the language changes and there are expressions I don’t know what they mean – Czech expressions. And the same thing, I don’t know which way the busses go and which way the streetcars go and I don’t know the names of the streets, so I am a tourist.”
“I feel Czech-American. This is, I think, the only country you can feel that. Having lived three years in London before I came to America, I think even if I lived 50 years in England I would not be an English Czech, or Czech-English. I mean, that category does not exist. I’d be a Czech living in England, yes, but I don’t think I’d ever feel English. I’d be phony; whereas, legitimately here I feel American, but I am also a Czech. Again, it’s nothing unique about it. This country is composed of German-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, French-Americans and so forth. That’s what I think makes America different from other countries.”
Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.
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Marie Cada was born in the small village of Komorovice, southeastern Bohemia, in 1919. She became an orphan at a young age and spent her early teenage years looking after the family farm with her brother Václav. Marie went to school in nearby Humpolec and then trained to become a teacher at a religious college in Kutná Hora. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1948, she was working at a three-teacher school in Petrohrad, near Prague. Her boss, the school’s principal, had strong anti-communist views. He was let go and Marie was asked whether she would take over his position. Her fiancée, Václav Cada, discouraged her from working for the communists and urged her to escape with him. The pair left Czechoslovakia in March, 1948. They were married in Dieburg refugee camp in Germany in the spring of that year.
Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.
“You know, on a farm, you kind of take care of yourself partly and partly the family. So, there was a time – my sister also died fairly young – there was one time when my middle brother Václav and I lived on the farm alone. So we kind of tried to cook. I was only about 12, and so after father passed away [Václav] was a brick-layer, that was his trade and he made good money, but there was nobody to take care of the farm so he came home and I was just school aged. That was about two years we did things like that, and then he got married, because he wasn’t even married at that time, he was about 20 years old. Well, every family goes through some difficult times.”
“Us young teachers were drafted – women teachers were drafted – there were about twenty of us and we were moved, all of us, to a small town, and our job was to repair German uniforms. It was like an assembly line, there were seamstresses who worked on sewing machines, and those of us who didn’t have sewing machines, we just sewed, you know, whatever. And sometimes there was even blood on these uniforms still, because they had taken it off a dead soldier. But then they decided that this was not enough. They sent us women teachers back to school and young men were drafted.”
“On the way, my husband had an idea that it would be good if he loaned part of his uniform to those three civilians who wanted to escape also. So on the way to Karlovy Vary, not too far away, we stopped the car and we got out and the men, one after another, were putting part of the uniform on. When we finally all assembled back in the car it looked like four policemen and me, and I sat on the floor in the back of the car so I wouldn’t be very visible, you know. We were leaving Karlovy Vary, and at the edge of the city, two policemen stopped us – ‘Stop!’ And oh my gosh, now what? That was bad. But my husband was kind of – he was always that way – quick thinking, you know. And he said ‘We’re going to Oldřichov’, because he knew the terrain. He worked there, on the border, you know.”
“There was a creek, and there was the border. And so then the terrain went kind of up. And so we ran and ran through that creek and then we thought ‘Oh, now we are free, we are free!’ But then we heard ‘tat tat tat tat’. They were shooting after us. Czech people were shooting after us! And it was a German policeman, a border patrol man, who saved us. He waved to them to go back, because we were on his land. And so, it is really an irony, that three years before that, Germans were our enemies, and then a German saved us from Czechs!”
“They told my husband that he has to go to the police station, that they want to talk to him. This was Friday, towards the evening, and my husband didn’t want to do until the following day, but my brother said ‘No, you don’t make your own decision, they wanted you today so you have to go’. So he went. And he was told at the police station that he is not welcome there and that he has to leave in 24 hours. In other words, they threw him out. So, the following day, we had to be at the airport. They took him away and we had to wait. We waited and we waited and they never brought him back.
“I remember then when we walked away from the airport, somebody was watching us, they walked behind us. We went that Monday, that following Monday, to the American Embassy to tell them what happened, that they had taken my husband away and we didn’t know where he was. They asked if we had seen a plane leaving west or east. We hadn’t seen a plane even, when he left. So that last week we didn’t know where he was, we didn’t have any idea if he was at home. Because at the embassy they told us that cases happened that they took refugees like we were to Russia and nobody ever saw them again. So we were scared, you know. But luckily they just took my husband and kicked him out of the country and sent him home. So he was here when we came home. So that was kind of an experience.”
Madeleine remembers her schooling in the United Kingdom during WWII, as well as a starring role she played in a Red Cross film about refugee children (in return for a stuffed rabbit). She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in 1945 and spent several months living in Prague on Hradčanské náměstí before her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. Over the two years that followed, Madeleine says she led a “pretty constrained life” at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade, as her father did not want her to attend school with communists and so she was taught at home by a governess. In 1948, Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland in order to learn French.
Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Madeleine’s father was appointed to a UN commission on Kashmir. As a result of this appointment, the family traveled to the United States to live. In 1949, following the coup, the family sought asylum in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where Madeleine’s father took a teaching position at the University of Denver. Madeleine attended Kent Denver School and then Wellesley College for her undergraduate degree. She subsequently attended Columbia University in New York City, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of the media in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Madeleine became involved in politics as a campaigner for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, and then as a member of his staff. She worked for the Carter administration under Zbigniew Brzezinski and then as the head of the National Democratic Institute. In 1993, she became the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1997, she was appointed Secretary of State, making her the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. government until then.
Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including Madame Secretary: A Memoir and, most recently, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
]]>Madeleine Albright was born in the Prague district of Smíchov in 1937. Shortly after her birth, she traveled to Belgrade with her mother, Anna, to join her father, Josef, who worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in the Yugoslav capital. With the outbreak of WWII, the Körbel family traveled to Britain, where they settled first with relatives in Berkhamsted before moving to the London district of Notting Hill Gate. It was here that Madeleine experienced the Blitz. Madeleine’s father began work for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, serving as both the private secretary to Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and the head of the Czechoslovak service of the BBC.
Madeleine remembers her schooling in the United Kingdom during WWII, as well as a starring role she played in a Red Cross film about refugee children (in return for a stuffed rabbit). She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in 1945 and spent several months living in Prague on Hradčanské náměstí before her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. Over the two years that followed, Madeleine says she led a “pretty constrained life” at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade, as her father did not want her to attend school with communists and so she was taught at home by a governess. In 1948, Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland in order to learn French.
Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Madeleine’s father was appointed to a UN commission on Kashmir. As a result of this appointment, the family traveled to the United States to live. In 1949, following the coup, the family sought asylum in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where Madeleine’s father took a teaching position at the University of Denver. Madeleine attended Kent Denver School and then Wellesley College for her undergraduate degree. She subsequently attended Columbia University in New York City, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of the media in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Madeleine became involved in politics as a campaigner for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, and then as a member of his staff. She worked for the Carter administration under Zbigniew Brzezinski and then as the head of the National Democratic Institute. In 1993, she became the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1997, she was appointed Secretary of State, making her the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. government until then.
Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including Madame Secretary: A Memoir and, most recently, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.
“My father – the thing that was interesting about him, many things, but he was very young. He was Czechoslovakia’s youngest ambassador. And a lot of the émigrés were older people who stayed around the East Coast to some extent and, if I could say, lived more in the past. And they would… I remember this going to the Library of Congress, for instance, when I was in college still – there were a lot of little old Czechs there who kept calling each other ‘Your Excellency’ as they were arranging the card catalogue. And they would say ‘As I said to Beneš…’ And the other one would say ‘Well, as I said to Beneš…’ My father never did that. I mean, they moved to Denver and a lot of people would say ‘Well, if this had worked out, you would have been foreign minister.’ And he said ‘I don’t live that way.’ And he said – and there’s a lot in his papers now in terms of that – nothing made him happier than to be a professor in a free country. And he was so grateful to be in the United States. And really quite stunning in that particular way and so, I think they didn’t think about going back.”
“Our citizenship papers all took a little bit longer because it was during the McCarthy era, and also because technically my father had worked for a communist government for that period from 1948 until he defected, and trying to explain what that all meant… And, by the way, what is interesting is when I went to the UN, they gave me all the papers so that I could see how he begged Dean Acheson for asylum. There were letters from the British Foreign Office saying that he was really a good man and all that. The other part is, as I have been doing research for my last book, they gave me my father’s secret police records. And he keeps being accused of being a pro-Western democrat. But we were getting our citizenship during this difficult time.
“When I got to Wellesley, I didn’t realize this but – I mean, I’d gone to high school in Denver, my English teacher and my Latin teacher had gone to Wellesley – all of a sudden, freshman year, two weeks in, we all wore Bermuda shorts and Shetland sweaters and things like that… Anyway, at Wellesley what happens is that someone would come to visit you and they would announce it over the loudspeaker, so all of a sudden somebody came and said ‘Madeleine, there are some ladies here who want to take you into Boston to show you what the American girl wears.’ So I came down in my Bermuda shorts and Shetland sweater and anyway, it turns out that I was seen as a foreign student at Wellesley. And when I went to find out how… It was different days when they didn’t tell you what your SAT scores were, and I went to find out and they said ‘Amazing! Absolutely amazing!’ And I think it is because they thought I was a foreign student.”
“All we ever talked about was foreign policy and history and politics. I mean, other people might have other discussions, but that’s all we ever talked about. And my father was amazing in terms of explaining history and in terms of telling stories that went along with it. And then what happened was that he… I kid about this, Alexis has heard me on the subject – I am old, he is dead, and I am still the perfect daughter; all I ever wanted to do was to be the perfect daughter. And so whatever my father was doing I did. So, he got interested in India and Pakistan, so I wrote a paper on Mahatma Gandhi (by the way, I have now found everything, it is in a box here). And so I learned about all of this, and I wanted to know, as my father wrote books, I always wanted to know what he was doing.”
So I had a copy of my father’s book, and Havel knew that he was going to meet with some American delegation and I’m handing him my father’s book and he says ‘I know who you are. You’re Mrs. Fulbright.’ And I said ‘No, I’m Mrs. Albright.’ And that is how our friendship began.
“We were in the Castle, and I told him what NDI could do, and that we could help. And he said ‘It would really help me… I need a new electoral law.’ And in two or three days I managed to get experts that weren’t American (because we had a different system), that came to help on the electoral law. The other thing that happened, he said – we were sitting there with Žantovský and various people and he said – ‘Why don’t you talk to my advisors and, because we are setting up the presidential office, whatever ideas you have…’ So we actually went to Vikárka [restaurant], which is up by the cathedral, and we started talking about – because I had been in the Carter administration – what a presidential office would look like.
“So I explained to them and then, I’ll never forget this: it was January; it was snowing, and I was staying at the Jalta Hotel up by Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Square], but I walked down the stairs and then crossed Charles Bridge in the snow and I thought ‘I’ve never left here.’ And then I thought ‘Well, that’s not possible!’ Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to speak English and wouldn’t have understood how a presidential office really works.”
“Well, I have always believed in the goodness of American power. And the theme in my life has been that America was not present at Munich and terrible things happened. Americans then come into WWII and everything changes. Then, as a result of agreements made during WWII – even though Patton marched 45 kilometers into Czechoslovakia – as a result of the agreements, Soviets ‘liberated’ Czechoslovakia. So, when the U.S. isn’t there, bad things happen. When the U.S. is involved, good things happen.
“So, I have always thought that we, and I believe in… I grew up with this whole concept of what it’s like to live in a free country, the fragility of democracy, the importance of American values, a beacon, sailing past the Statue of Liberty, the whole works in that regard.
So, I have believed in the importance of America’s role internationally. That was very much the theme of when I taught and then specifically when I actually had something to do with it at the UN and when I was secretary. And so I have believed in the fact that we need to be internationalist. President Clinton said it first, but I said it so often – that we were ‘the indispensible nation’ – that it got identified with me. And there was nothing about the word indispensible that means alone – it just means that we have to be engaged.
“And what had happened after… I had worked in the Carter administration for Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is not dissimilar from me in terms of background, and what was the role of the United States? And President Carter with the human rights policy and all that fit into… And then we had Reagan, Bush, who – I thought – did the exact opposite. And what had happened after the Gulf War, when there had been all of a sudden Democrats coming back into office, and there had been sort of a lack of attention to domestic programs – I was afraid that we were just going to look inward. And so that’s why at the UN I thought we needed to be engaged and operate with partnerships and use the United Nations.
“So then, because life is so peculiar, the fact that I should be at the UN with my background was one thing, then the fact that the major thing we dealt with was the Balkans when my father had been ambassador there and I could actually understand it when the Serbs and the Croats came and they spoke to each other. You know, life is weird.”
“Democracy is more complicated than it looks. And I think that there were certain issues that weren’t completely resolved at the beginning. I have said this publicly before, and I said it to Václav Havel personally – he made a mistake in not creating a political party. Because you need… Movements can’t run countries. I believe in political parties. Political parties are the channel whereby people talk to their leaders and vice versa. But because of his experience, with ‘party’ being the Communist Party, there was kind of an allergy to the whole thing.
“Democracy is harder than it looks, and it is not an event; it is a process. And even we – the United States is the world’s oldest democracy – and at the moment we’re screwed up. I mean, I just came in listening to the radio and we can’t decide how to pass a farm bill that is both good for the farmers and the poor people.
You know, everything is an argument; there has been a terrible discussion now between the majority and the minority leader in the Senate over nominations… I mean, democracy is not simple.
“In the Czech Republic, what has basically happened is that there is – from what I read, there is a lot of corruption. Corruption is the cancer of democracy. And I think that one of the things that people forget is that – and this is a term only applicable in Europe – the ‘intelligentsia’ has a very good time during periods of freedom, ordinary people need to have… Democracy needs to deliver. People want to vote and eat. And so reading about, in this very week, reading about what is going on in the Czech Republic should be embarrassing to the Czechs. Because they had an amazing Velvet Revolution with probably one of the most amazing leaders in modern history, who made mistakes – everybody makes mistakes. But he really is the most modern, moral leader that any country could have and the Czechs should be proud that they had him as president. But what is going on now is very troubling.”