Upon graduating from gymnázium in 1946, Alex spent one month as a tour guide with a group of French students. That fall, he began studying medicine at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist coup in February 1948, Alex was arrested, but soon released. In 1949, he was expelled from school during a time when the Communist Party undertook a massive review of university students. Alex believes that his expulsion was a result of an incident several months earlier when he was ordered to report to a labor camp, but was able to get a note from a doctor stating that he was not able to do so. In June 1949, Alex and a friend secured jobs at a farm cooperative in the Šumava region with the intention of leaving the country if the opportunity arose. Only a few days after arriving, Alex crossed the border into Germany. He was sent to a processing camp in Amberg, and then to a refugee camp at Ludwigsburg.
In November 1950, Alex’s brother (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1947 and made his way to South America) sponsored him to come to Venezuela. His brother helped him to find his first job as a diesel mechanic in a cement factory. In 1953, Alex moved to Maracaibo and began working as a salesman for a large import company. He met his German-born wife, Katja, in 1957. In December 1958, Alex moved to New York City. Katja, who had returned to Germany, received a visa shortly thereafter. The couple married and settled in Queens. Alex’s first job in the United States was as head waiter at the Golden Door restaurant. In 1961, he worked for one year as a manager for an export agency which saw him traveling through Central and South America for all but two weeks out of the year. In 1964 Alex bought his own export company. He later bought a company that imported steel into the United States. After the fall of communism in his homeland, Alex began working for Pfizer as a liaison between the company and private buyers in Czechoslovakia.
Over the years, Alex was an active member of the Czech community in New York. He was president of the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, an organization that sponsored skiing competitions and tennis matches. Alex was also instrumental in the revival of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, which acts as an umbrella organization for a number of Czech and Slovak heritage groups, and served as president of the association. He lived in Bronxville, New York, with his wife until his death in late 2012.
]]>Alex Cech was born in Kolín in Central Bohemia in 1927. His father Alois was the head of the Board of Civil Engineering in Kolín, while his mother Karolina stayed home and raised Alex and his older brother Vojen. Although there was little entertainment and he often went hungry, Alex says that the years during WWII were a ‘beautiful time’ as he developed very close relationships with his classmates. Alex was also involved in underground activities during the War, which involved sabotaging train tracks and highways used by the Nazi soldiers. He was detained for a short time by the Gestapo because of these activities.
Upon graduating from gymnázium in 1946, Alex spent one month as a tour guide with a group of French students. That fall, he began studying medicine at Charles University in Prague. Following the Communist coup in February 1948, Alex was arrested, but soon released. In 1949, he was expelled from school during a time when the Communist Party undertook a massive review of university students. Alex believes that his expulsion was a result of an incident several months earlier when he was ordered to report to a labor camp, but was able to get a note from a doctor stating that he was not able to do so. In June 1949, Alex and a friend secured jobs at a farm cooperative in the Šumava region with the intention of leaving the country if the opportunity arose. Only a few days after arriving, Alex crossed the border into Germany. He was sent to a processing camp in Amberg, and then to a refugee camp at Ludwigsburg.
In November 1950, Alex’s brother (who had left Czechoslovakia in 1947 and made his way to South America) sponsored him to come to Venezuela. His brother helped him to find his first job as a diesel mechanic in a cement factory. In 1953, Alex moved to Maracaibo and began working as a salesman for a large import company. He met his German-born wife, Katja, in 1957. In December 1958, Alex moved to New York City. Katja, who had returned to Germany, received a visa shortly thereafter. The couple married and settled in Queens. Alex’s first job in the United States was as head waiter at the Golden Door restaurant. In 1961, he worked for one year as a manager for an export agency which saw him traveling through Central and South America for all but two weeks out of the year. In 1964 Alex bought his own export company. He later bought a company that imported steel into the United States. After the fall of communism in his homeland, Alex began working for Pfizer as a liaison between the company and private buyers in Czechoslovakia.
Over the years, Alex was an active member of the Czech community in New York. He was president of the Association of Free Czechoslovak Sportsmen, an organization that sponsored skiing competitions and tennis matches. Alex was also instrumental in the revival of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, which acts as an umbrella organization for a number of Czech and Slovak heritage groups, and served as president of the association. He lived in Bronxville, New York, with his wife until his death in late 2012.
“For us, it was the most beautiful time, the War. It’s crazy, you know. Unfortunately, my father was [taken by] the Gestapo several times and my brother was in the Gestapo [headquarters], but they let them go so our family was not really hurt. For the rest of us like me, it was the most beautiful time because we had a beautiful friendship. All the time I was going to the gymnázium and our class was going together and we had a very, very close friendship. The reason for that was, you see, there was nothing else to do. Nobody was going for vacation anymore and we didn’t have money to do anything and we didn’t have money to buy anything and we didn’t have money to eat. But for that reason, everybody was sitting home and we were meeting each other every day and we were very close to each other and we had a very close friendship. Naturally, for everybody who lived through that and was fortunate enough that they didn’t have big problems with the family, it was a beautiful time which I never had after, because once it was all over, you could go dancing here and dancing there. During the War, we couldn’t dance, for example. It was forbidden by the Germans. Dancing was forbidden. We were dancing, but we got a permit for the dancing school. But the only place we could dance was the dancing school in the fall. About two months, once weekly, we had a dancing school, but there was no dancing any other place. It was against the law. Naturally, too many parties. We were having parties as much as we could, but there was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, so everything was very restricted. It was crazy.
“I have very bad memories which I will never forget. Several times, I came to the pantry and I was hungry. In the afternoon, I came home off the bus and I would like to eat something, so I went to the pantry and I was looking all around and there was absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even bread. Nothing!”
What did you do?
“Nothing. What could you do? You didn’t eat. My father lost weight and I lost weight. When it was over, I was weighing about 65 kilos. But we had a very beautiful social life.”
“We used to sabotage. For example, we used to put sand in the wheels of the trains and all kind of nonsense like that.”
You and your friends?
“Yeah, you know, you couldn’t have a very big group because they would crack it very fast because the Gestapo was very efficient and when it started getting large, they could always get you. So you could operate only in very small numbers. So there are only three guys, let’s say, and nobody else. Nobody knows about you and you don’t know about anybody else. So they would have to catch one of the three to crack you. But why should they catch you again? Because if you go during the evening or in the night to someplace in the railroad station and you fill the wheels with sand or stones or who knows. They couldn’t watch everything. So we were doing all kinds of nonsense like that. We would put rope over the road, over the highway, because nobody was driving but the Germans. Nobody had gas; nobody had a car, so if somebody was driving on the highway, it must have been Germans. So we would suspend the cable over the road and they would cut the heads off when you hit it.
“But on the other side, it was very dangerous because, as the Germans naturally do, they just took a hundred people and they killed them. Never mind who did it or didn’t do it, and under that condition it was very difficult to do something because people hated that you were in the underground. Because they were blaming you that the Germans were killing them. So you could never get too much collaboration from the population because the punishment was so severe.”
“Once you finish high school, the horizon opens up around you, in front of you, and there is no limit to what you can do. As long as you can remember, you are going to school in the morning and coming home in the afternoon and now, all of the sudden, you are sitting there and you can do whatever you like to do. Which is depressing in a way, because I was with my friends since grammar school, so we were together for some 12 or 15 years sitting in the same class, and all of the sudden it was all forgotten. Everybody went different ways. I had a little problem with it, so my father arranged for me that I went as a guide with a French group of university students which were visiting the Czech Republic, and then spent the whole month with them guiding them through Czechoslovakia – which was very interesting, because in a month I learned perfect French. What I was trying to learn in gymnázium for five years and never learned. I couldn’t say oui. So in one month I was basically perfect in French which was remarkable. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much opportunity to speak French ever after, so most everything I have forgotten, but at that time it was very nice.
“So we were traveling through all of Czech Republic. I took them to Krkonoše and we walked to the Riesengebirge, and it was very nice. It was unbelievable; it was something that I never witnessed ever after, which happened after the second World War. Because foreigners were sort of heroes and they were very well accepted and invited. Myself with my group, we sort of separated from the main group and five of us went on our own just traveling. Where ever we came, we didn’t have to pay. In the train for example. When we entered the train, the conductor would in the moment find out we are Frenchman, so he would take us to first class and say ‘Ok, sit down’ or if there was not first class, he would excuse himself and say he was sorry, there is only second class because this is a local train and they don’t have first class. I remember, my guys, we were in Prague, naturally as all young people are – we were at that time 20 years old – interested in the night life. So I took them to Lucerna, which was at that time, the largest, the biggest, and the most known nightclub and naturally, my guys, they have on shorts. They were not dressed. They had rucksacks, all of them, and that’s how they were coming. So I took them with the shorts to Lucerna and the head waiter, in the moment he found out we are French, no problem. We got the best table in the place. Unbelievable.”
“In March ’49, they decided they will make a so-called prověrky [review] that everybody has to come to the commission and has to be accepted to stay in the university. At that time, they expelled 50,000 university students and I was one of them.”
On what basis?
“No basis. You have an appointment when you have to go. It was in the fyzický ústav [physics institute] so I had to go there. So I enter into the room and there were three guys sitting there, all of them with beards, and they asked my name. So I told them my name, they looked in some papers, and told me ‘You are expelled from the university’ and that was it.”
Do you have any idea why?
“I got a dekret [decree] from the Ministry of the Interior and they sent me a dekret that said I have to go to forced labor for three years. I received that in ’48 in about November, after they let me go from jail. So two weeks later I received the dekret – that’s what it used to be called – and that I have to go in about two weeks or three weeks and register in the concentration camp in the uranium mines. So I was supposed to go there, but that time, they did it to about 35 of my friends in Kolín. Everybody who was sort of going over the evidence, so all of us they consigned to that concentration camp. But that was the end of ’48 and they were not so well in control, so actually what I did, was I went immediately to the doctor – Kaiser was his name – and showed him that I have to go to the jail and he said ‘No, you are not able to go to the jail’ so he gave me a dekret that I am not able to go in jail. So I didn’t go and I just sent in a copy of that and that was it. But it wasn’t it, naturally.”
“It was the best place in New York. Kennedy – the president – that was the only place he ate in New York, Le Voisin, with his wife and his sister-in-law and the count. They were eating at Le Voisin. Everybody. I knew everybody. That was the place where you can see everybody. The King of Spain used to be my customer. Only, at the time, he was not the king. He was studying here at the military academy and, to my pleasure, he was always bringing a different girl each time he came there. But he was very good, very nice. Dali. With him I was very friendly because naturally I spoke [Spanish] with Dali and his señora. Anybody. You name it, I met them. Gregory Peck and Kennedy – the other one – Robert, he was always coming there with three or five kids. I didn’t like him. He never sat at the table. He had five kids sitting there and he was going from table to table. He was always running for something, I guess, because he was going from table to table, talking, because they are all known people there, so I guess he knew all of them. I always had a problem with it because I didn’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“So all of the sudden I was president of the Bohemian Benevolent [and Literary] Association [BBLA] which basically didn’t exist because there were the old associations of the ČSA and now the only association was the Sportsmen – the only living association – and myself as the president. Now I naturally decided that I have to do something about the BBLA, to get rid of the old associations which do not exist and get new guys. So the Rada svobodného Československa (Council of Free Czechoslovakia), which was Horák, immediately asked if they could join and I said ‘Ok, why not’ so he brought $2,000 and Rada svobodného Československa was a new member. Papánek came after me and invited me for lunch and said ‘Doctor, what about letting us join the BBLA?’ and the SVU, that was at that time Dr. Pekáček, Dostal and Pekáček. Pekáček came to me and said ‘Pane doktore, could we join the BBLA?’ I said ‘Why not?’ So within about ten days, all of the sudden, we had all the living associations, about seven of them, join the BBLA and so all of this is what I call the founding of the BBLA because the old stuff basically disappeared and now I was the president and I got the new organizations in and that was the new life.”
Anna Balev was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, in 1950. She grew up outside the city in the small village of Březce with her parents, three siblings and grandparents. Prior to the Communist coup, Anna’s father, Jaroslav, was a language professor at a nearby gymnázium. Anna describes him as an ‘avid Catholic’ who ‘went out of his way to provoke’ the communist authorities. He was arrested and sent to prison for two years. Anna’s mother, Blažena, returned to school to become a nurse in order to support the family once her father ran into trouble. Anna says that she was the only one in her class who was not a Pioneer and was instead sent to religion classes. Each year Anna spent the summer with her maternal uncle and aunt in Krnov, times she fondly recalls. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Anna’s brother left the country and settled in Canada.
Anna attended gymnázium in Šternberk and hoped to study languages at Charles University (she was taught French, German and Latin by her father), but was not accepted. She instead decided to study nursing, recognizing that a practical profession would make it easier to start a life elsewhere if she left the country. Anna studied for two years in Olomouc and moved to Prague where she worked at a psychiatric hospital. She then took a job in Karlovy Vary, where she was hired because of her German language skills. In 1975 Anna reconnected with her future husband, an American who had emigrated from Ukraine. The pair had met while she was living in Prague and he was visiting the capital city. They decided to marry in order for Anna to legally leave the country. After getting married in Karlovy Vary, Anna immediately set about getting permission to immigrate to the United States. She arrived in New York City in May 1976 and was handed her green card at the airport.
Anna says that she ‘fell in love immediately’ with the city and was astonished at the freedom she now enjoyed. While studying for her RN exam, Anna found a job at a women’s clinic. She subsequently worked at Roosevelt Hospital and for a plastic surgeon. Anna stopped practicing nursing when her first daughter was born in 1980. Her second daughter was born two years later. Anna also attended Hunter College part-time from her first year in New York. In 1985 she received degrees in English and theatre arts. Today Anna is the owner of a rental company and owns property in the Czech Republic as well as New York.
Anna has returned to the Czech Republic nearly every year since she left and has recently become a dual citizen of the Czech Republic and the United States. She is active in the Czech community in New York as a member of Sokol and the local chapter of SVU (Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences). Today, Anna lives in New York City with her husband.
]]>Anna Balev was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, in 1950. She grew up outside the city in the small village of Březce with her parents, three siblings and grandparents. Prior to the Communist coup, Anna’s father, Jaroslav, was a language professor at a nearby gymnázium. Anna describes him as an ‘avid Catholic’ who ‘went out of his way to provoke’ the communist authorities. He was arrested and sent to prison for two years. Anna’s mother, Blažena, returned to school to become a nurse in order to support the family once her father ran into trouble. Anna says that she was the only one in her class who was not a Pioneer and was instead sent to religion classes. Each year Anna spent the summer with her maternal uncle and aunt in Krnov, times she fondly recalls. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Anna’s brother left the country and settled in Canada.
Anna attended gymnázium in Šternberk and hoped to study languages at Charles University (she was taught French, German and Latin by her father), but was not accepted. She instead decided to study nursing, recognizing that a practical profession would make it easier to start a life elsewhere if she left the country. Anna studied for two years in Olomouc and moved to Prague where she worked at a psychiatric hospital. She then took a job in Karlovy Vary, where she was hired because of her German language skills. In 1975 Anna reconnected with her future husband, an American who had emigrated from Ukraine. The pair had met while she was living in Prague and he was visiting the capital city. They decided to marry in order for Anna to legally leave the country. After getting married in Karlovy Vary, Anna immediately set about getting permission to immigrate to the United States. She arrived in New York City in May 1976 and was handed her green card at the airport.
Anna says that she ‘fell in love immediately’ with the city and was astonished at the freedom she now enjoyed. While studying for her RN exam, Anna found a job at a women’s clinic. She subsequently worked at Roosevelt Hospital and for a plastic surgeon. Anna stopped practicing nursing when her first daughter was born in 1980. Her second daughter was born two years later. Anna also attended Hunter College part-time from her first year in New York. In 1985 she received degrees in English and theatre arts. Today Anna is the owner of a rental company and owns property in the Czech Republic as well as New York.
Anna has returned to the Czech Republic nearly every year since she left and has recently become a dual citizen of the Czech Republic and the United States. She is active in the Czech community in New York as a member of Sokol and the local chapter of SVU (Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences). Today, Anna lives in New York City with her husband.
“We were always very poor, due to political reasons, so basically my grandparents played a big part in my life. They gave us a place to stay; they supported us, giving us… If the pig was slaughtered we got some of that and otherwise we were just supporting ourselves by planting fruits and vegetables and having the animals at home so we can survive.”
“My brother is very spontaneous. He decides; he goes. So he very spontaneously on the way to the train, which is a 15 minute walk, he tells me ‘Come with me.’ He’s already packed, he’s going to the train, and he says ‘Come with me.’ I said ‘What do you mean? Like, right now, this minute?’ He says ‘Yeah, why not?’ I said ‘Yeah, but I’m just going to be a burden to you because I don’t know anything. I wouldn’t know how to take care of myself. I’d be just dependent on you; I don’t want to do it. But I am certainly going to try to get out when I become something, when I have a profession to fall back on.’ So he just went. I guess I was quite reasonable then. I’m pretty much down-to-earth, so I was thinking logically that it’s not practical to leave right now, and I should at least finish my studies in thegymnázium.
“But it certainly planted a bug in my head that I should follow him, and I was certain I could get out. And then I thought ‘Ok, I’ll still try to do the university’ and university didn’t work out; then I really purposefully became a nurse, figuring that I speak German, I’m surrounded by German-speaking countries, Germany and Austria, so I’m going to try to get there and I could work as a nurse. I found out also later on that in Germany there was a shortage of nurses so it would have been great. But there was no way to get out. Absolutely no way for me because we were considered such high-risk that we were not even allowed to go to Yugoslavia, which was the route that many people fled – and I admit, I would be the first one.”
You couldn’t even go on vacation to Yugoslavia?
“No, no.”
“The voting I went through in Czechoslovakia was absolutely ridiculous. With the age of 18 you had the ‘right’ to vote, and it consisted of you being forced to go and vote. You were handed a paper filled out with the Communist candidates, which you folded and threw in some container. That was the extent of the voting. Absolutely absurd stuff. I don’t know if they were putting up some image for the Western countries because there was no real free election.”
“With my family, with my husband, with the properties, and emotionally, much more invested here. I love this country, very much so, because it gave me freedom. I was so fascinated when I came here in ’76, switched on the TV and people were bad-mouthing the president, for example. They were saying bad things about him or people high in the government. This was absolutely a no-no in Czechoslovakia. The freedom of speech was just, to me, so refreshing and so amazing. After ’89, I went there almost every year; I still do, so I saw the changes and all that. But you grow apart from these people. You become different, and I don’t think I would be accepted 100 percent back because I am different already.”
Upon arrival in the United States, Barbara attended classes at St. Teresa’s College in Kansas, while her family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1950, she gained a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas. She moved to St. Paul upon the death of her father some two years later, and started taking classes at the University of Minnesota in the evenings after work. After a short stint in New York City (where she met her husband Vaclav Skypala), Barbara moved to Chicago with her family in 1953. Her first job in the city was as an administrative assistant at the Container Cooperation of America. In Chicago, Barbara and Vaclav raised two children, Christine and Madeleine. Barbara gained a master’s degree in theology and began to work with the Archdiocese of Chicago, specializing in religious education. Now widowed, Barbara lives in Elmwood Park, Illinois. She enjoys traveling to Europe and has recently visited Tibet and China, but she says that Elmwood Park is now her home.
]]>Barbara Skypala was born in Ružomberok, Slovakia, in 1930. She lived there until the age of eight, when she says the family was expelled from Slovakia due to her father’s Czech nationality. The Pellers spent WWII in Brno, where her father worked as a district attorney and her mother made money embroidering. Barbara says she knew the War was coming to an end thanks to the BBC and because ethnic Germans started to leave town before Soviet troops arrived. She remembers stray animals on the street at that time and says her family came to inherit a canary when it flew in through their window and into an open cage they had hanging in the house. The Peller family left Czechoslovakia in April 1948 when a warrant was issued for Barbara’s father’s arrest. They took a bus to Znojmo and crossed the border into Austria, where Barbara says her family was ‘smuggled’ into the American zone with false papers provided by locals. She spent time in St. Johann im Pongau refugee camp near Salzburg before being sent to boarding school in Switzerland with her sister, which she says she disliked, as she was used to much more ‘emancipation.’ Barbara came to America in the fall of 1949.
Upon arrival in the United States, Barbara attended classes at St. Teresa’s College in Kansas, while her family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1950, she gained a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas. She moved to St. Paul upon the death of her father some two years later, and started taking classes at the University of Minnesota in the evenings after work. After a short stint in New York City (where she met her husband Vaclav Skypala), Barbara moved to Chicago with her family in 1953. Her first job in the city was as an administrative assistant at the Container Cooperation of America. In Chicago, Barbara and Vaclav raised two children, Christine and Madeleine. Barbara gained a master’s degree in theology and began to work with the Archdiocese of Chicago, specializing in religious education. Now widowed, Barbara lives in Elmwood Park, Illinois. She enjoys traveling to Europe and has recently visited Tibet and China, but she says that Elmwood Park is now her home.
“I am from the pre-communist generation, and there is a huge difference… I feel it even here in the Czech church. We are so different from the ones who were raised under the Communist regime.”
How different?
“Well, it’s different because when we had an enemy; it was someone German speaking in a gray uniform. But with the communists, it could be anybody; your neighbor, your family. You did not have the sense of ‘us’ being in the right. I mean you may have felt it… I really thought it was destructive to the soul of the people. You had to be forever on the watch. It was also that way, I mean, I remember the War very clearly; I was a teenager and I was 15 years old when the War ended, you knew where your safety was. I don’t think the generation that was raised under communism (I mean people my age or a little older who stayed) they did not have that security. They had to learn how to float between all the negatives and all of that.”
“Well, one thing is, we were fairly well sheltered in that we had strong family units. Secondly, I was in a gymnázium, I was in a secondary school. We had brave, imaginative teachers. I did not have history in school, but my mom got history books, and every day I would have to sit by the table and read for an hour, we allowed for that. There was bombing, and the city was burning, and I think there was snow outside. But by golly, on Friday, we went to dancing lessons! There were the gentlemen, and there were the ladies, and you learned how to dance because, we learned that not doing things and giving up would be giving in. And dong things stubbornly… My first formal [ball gown] was cut from three different dresses. We never gave up and I think that was the strength. And even as youngsters, we picked it up.”
“We didn’t have any plan. We needed to leave to save our lives. So when we came, the Austrians hid us in a jail when we crossed because there were agents that would come and kidnap people. In Vienna, my sister and I could not speak to each other in Czech; we spoke German because people were kidnapped. This was the beginning; this was a question of pride for the regime. So, we were brought to Vienna, and there, again, gave us false papers to get into the American zone because we were in the middle of the Russian Zone. They hid us in a jail and they transported us.”
“The first thing when we came to a camp, someone came from the village, said they heard there was a little child. So they took my sister to school. Nobody asked, and they gave her free lunch. It was kind of funny, she came home to the camp and she said “Mom! Guess what! I get a free lunch, I am considered poor!” My mother cried for three days and my sister thought it was just peachy! They only took families. They had the openings so they took us. They were so well organized; Of course they refused to go to Tito, that’s why they remained in exile. They were so well organized, that we had services in Sunday, and they had the army cook who was horrible, but we ate, and we were warm. And someone from the village sent skis to me. We went skiing believe it or not. I mean they were kind of rinky-dink skis, but they were good to us. And of course it was so beautiful. St. Johann is just down the stream and down the valley from where Silent Night was composed. So it’s that kind of a thing. On Christmas, they had the whole orchestra, and you came to church. And there were skis in the snow banks all around.”
“Well the first thing of course was, watching out of the train. And, I come from the Tatras, and around Brno. It was hills and trees, and here I went through this plain. Here and there I would see black people working in the fields. It was different. My family was wonderful, but what I missed most was the age of the buildings. Everything seemed so rinky-dink. Not in a bad sense, just so temporary. The first Sunday, I was loaded into the car, and we went to Independence [Missouri]. And when we came to Independence, we parked the car, and we started walking. And we came to this house, and there was a presidential flag, and an American flag, and one U.S. marine. We walked right up there and nobody stopped us. Here he [Harry S. Truman] was at home. Now that impressed me. You know, being used to castles, and moats, and fences. That impressed me. We went in, and me and Willy, (my father’s friend, Willy and Gilda) took a picture of me with the marine, and nobody stopped us, he just stood there. And then we left, so that was kind of cool. I don’t think that would happen today anymore.”
In October 1968, Dagmar moved with her family to Toronto. She says that her parents chose to immigrate to Canada because it was a neutral country. Her mother started working as a housekeeper and nanny, and her father found employment as a watch-maker – a trade he had learned in Kladno. Dagmar attended high school and took English lessons in the mornings before school. She continued to swim and, in 1969, won the Toronto Championships. After graduating from high school, Dagmar began working at a bank and married her first husband, Josef Benedík, who was also a Czech émigré. In the late 1970s, then divorced, Dagmar traveled around the United States and says she ‘fell in love’ with the country. In 1986, she had a business opportunity there and moved to Tampa, Florida. She received American citizenship when she married her second husband. In 1995, Dagmar went to Prague with the intention of working as a translator for one month; she stayed in the Czech Republic for six years, where she ran her own business and then worked for Strojexport and Adamovské strojírny.
Dagmar says that she continues to keep Czech traditions at home and has learned several Czech crafts. She refers to herself as a ‘citizen of the world’ and exercises her voting rights in the countries of her citizenship. Today, Dagmar lives in Richmond Hill near Toronto, but is planning on moving back to Tampa, which she considers home.
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Dagmar Benedik was born in Kladno, Central Bohemia, in 1952. Her mother, Jarmila, taught at an after-school program and her father, Jiří, was a hockey coach. Dagmar recalls her childhood in Kladno as ‘fantastic.’ She says that many of her friends played on her father’s hockey team and she enjoyed traveling to Prague each week for French lessons and swimming practice and competitions. In the summer of 1968, Dagmar’s family planned to travel to Germany where her younger sister, Zuzana, was going to spend a few weeks with a family studying German. Because of a delay in processing, they received visas just a few days prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21, and Dagmar says her father made the decision to leave Czechoslovakia for good immediately following the invasion. Dagmar’s family drove toward the border at Rozvadov; because they entered the town through a local route instead of the main road from Plzeň, they avoided the barricade that had been set up to prevent travelers from crossing the border. Once across the border, they stayed with Dagmar’s sister’s host family for two weeks before spending six more weeks at Karlsruhe refugee camp.
In October 1968, Dagmar moved with her family to Toronto. She says that her parents chose to immigrate to Canada because it was a neutral country. Her mother started working as a housekeeper and nanny, and her father found employment as a watch-maker – a trade he had learned in Kladno. Dagmar attended high school and took English lessons in the mornings before school. She continued to swim and, in 1969, won the Toronto Championships. After graduating from high school, Dagmar began working at a bank and married her first husband, Josef Benedík, who was also a Czech émigré. In the late 1970s, then divorced, Dagmar traveled around the United States and says she ‘fell in love’ with the country. In 1986, she had a business opportunity there and moved to Tampa, Florida. She received American citizenship when she married her second husband. In 1995, Dagmar went to Prague with the intention of working as a translator for one month; she stayed in the Czech Republic for six years, where she ran her own business and then worked for Strojexport and Adamovské strojírny.
Dagmar says that she continues to keep Czech traditions at home and has learned several Czech crafts. She refers to herself as a ‘citizen of the world’ and exercises her voting rights in the countries of her citizenship. Today, Dagmar lives in Richmond Hill near Toronto, but is planning on moving back to Tampa, which she considers home.
“When I was probably 13, they built a team and I started swimming, and that of course, took all of my time. I went to school and we had practice eight, nine times a week, so we went before school. In Kladno we did not have – and this is probably interesting for people, especially these days when they have everything – Kladno didn’t have a pool. They had a ‘city bath’ it was called, where all the people after work, all the steel mill workers and all the coal miners, went to soak themselves. So the water was very thick sometimes. Our pool in there was six by nine meters. It was very, very small. And the water was only – I would have to say, I am 5’8” and I have not grown since grade seven, so I’ve been this tall for a long time – and it was about to here [four feet], was the water. There was no deep end, there was nothing. So when I say thick, [it was] thick. And when people talk about chlorine this and chlorine that, we had a woman that took care of the water come with a bucket of chlorine, powdered chlorine, and just chuck it into the water over our heads.”
“We got into a convoy of Army cars, and then my mother started freaking out, and we of course too, because we didn’t know what was happening. You could look into the woods and there were soldiers dug into dirty, filthy… because they were there for a couple of days. You were getting closer to the border so the woods were there, but they were everywhere. So you could see them and that was a very scary thing. Probably not very much conversation going on in the car, not that I remember. I remember holding a doll and just sitting there, not knowing what was happening.”
“My parents got a job at Siemens so they started working, and I went to gymnázium. I went to school; the weirdest school I ever went to was in Germany. My sister and I both went to school. The school was – for Germans, when you really think how structured they were and how strict – the school was like a zoo. I remember having a class and having a teacher, and somebody in the first row would start reading a book, tear the page out and send it through the class. They were throwing sneezing powder around so everybody would sneeze. We had an all-girls school across the yard, so the guys had binoculars and they were looking at the girls across the yard during class! Nobody stopped them. It was the weirdest zoo, I have to tell you.”
“In those days, you would go to the movies and there was a newsreel. There were still newsreels before the movie in the late ‘60s. A lot of the things, I had to get out, because a lot of it was about the occupation of Czechoslovakia and I couldn’t take it. To this day for example, if I watch, from time to time, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the part of the occupation, I have to leave the room because I start crying. And it’s not a bad cry anymore and I don’t know if it ever was, but what I did not realize then and what I realized it much later when I was here and I was older, that it was a death of life, because the life that we knew was gone.”
“What changes is, I think, the need to do something with it and to leave something behind and have the younger generation continue with that. But it’s always been important for me. That’s why I learned a lot of the crafts and the specific crafts. When I was in Czech [Republic], I learned the wire work and doing those things. I did the blueprint, the fabric, I made my own clothes. When I was in Tampa, of all places, I did a lot of that because I was part of a program the city had called ‘Artist in the School,’ and they paid people to go and teach underprivileged kids. And that was one of the most satisfying things is to see these little kids and you teach them to weave and they leave you a note and write thank you, you were part of their Thanksgiving Day or whatever. I think that’s what I feel is important. As I grow older, I wish I could teach. As is popular, ‘nobody is really interested in doing this,’ that’s not true. You have to find the ways and teach the old ways.”
In April 1949, Eda’s future wife Alice (whom he had met in Prague while she was at business school) escaped from Czechoslovakia. He spent the next several months attempting to join her. On October 14, Eda crossed the border into Germany with 12 other people. He was sent to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he was reunited with Alice. They soon married and had their first child, Alice. In early 1951, Eda joined the ranks of Radio Free Europe as a writer on the Czechoslovak desk and moved to Munich. In June 1952, the Vedrals received visas for the United States and arrived in Chicago. Eda says that they were helped by the Czech community there and he quickly found a job in a steel factory, which only lasted a short time. He then started working on the assembly line at Hotpoint, making washing machines and dryers. The Vedrals moved to Cicero, Illinois, and Eda and Alice had seven more children. Eda says that he made a point to speak to his children only in Czech; today, most of them still speak the language fluently. Eda also became very active in expatriate tramping circles. He has been the ‘sheriff’ of a group called Dálava for many years and has traveled to places like Canada, the Czech Republic, and the American West for tramping get-togethers.
Eda became an American citizen in 1965; he says that he waited so long because he believed he would be returning to Czechoslovakia to live. In 1972, he made his first trip back to visit his mother in Písek. His father, whom Eda had not seen since he left the country, died shortly before his visit. Eda says he feels at home in both countries and, if not for his children living in the United States, would consider returning to the Czech Republic to live. Now retired, he lives in Cicero with his wife Alice.
]]>Eda Vedral was born in České Budějovice in 1927. His mother, Ludmila, was a teacher and his father, also named Eduard, was a journalist. When Eda was six, the Vedrals moved to Mladá Boleslav where his father worked as writer and editor for the local newspaper. Eda says that the year before he graduated from gymnázium, his class was sent to dig trenches for the German war effort. Since Eda had knee problems, he was sent back to Mladá Boleslav and became a firefighter to provide assistance in case of a bombing. At the end of WWII and in light of his training as a fireman, Eda took part in watching over and transporting Nazi prisoners. In the summer of 1945, Eda’s father again changed jobs and became a political writer for a newspaper in Liberec. Eda graduated from gymnázium there in 1946 and began studying journalism at Charles University in Prague. After the Communist coup in 1948, Eda switched his course of studies to law; he says he was eventually kicked out of university in 1949 because of his father’s political background. Back in Liberec, his uncle helped him to find a job as an accountant in a factory. He was fired three months later, but soon became an accountant for Liberec’s municipal services [komunální služby města Liberec].
In April 1949, Eda’s future wife Alice (whom he had met in Prague while she was at business school) escaped from Czechoslovakia. He spent the next several months attempting to join her. On October 14, Eda crossed the border into Germany with 12 other people. He was sent to Ludwigsburg refugee camp where he was reunited with Alice. They soon married and had their first child, Alice. In early 1951, Eda joined the ranks of Radio Free Europe as a writer on the Czechoslovak desk and moved to Munich. In June 1952, the Vedrals received visas for the United States and arrived in Chicago. Eda says that they were helped by the Czech community there and he quickly found a job in a steel factory, which only lasted a short time. He then started working on the assembly line at Hotpoint, making washing machines and dryers. The Vedrals moved to Cicero, Illinois, and Eda and Alice had seven more children. Eda says that he made a point to speak to his children only in Czech; today, most of them still speak the language fluently. Eda also became very active in expatriate tramping circles. He has been the ‘sheriff’ of a group called Dálava for many years and has traveled to places like Canada, the Czech Republic, and the American West for tramping get-togethers.
Eda became an American citizen in 1965; he says that he waited so long because he believed he would be returning to Czechoslovakia to live. In 1972, he made his first trip back to visit his mother in Písek. His father, whom Eda had not seen since he left the country, died shortly before his visit. Eda says he feels at home in both countries and, if not for his children living in the United States, would consider returning to the Czech Republic to live. Now retired, he lives in Cicero with his wife Alice.
“I remember that, yes, for sure. We remember the Nazi occupation for sure. Even as kids, we know how the situation is, we understand it. Even if we were young kids, it didn’t bother us much, but we knew it was a really serious thing, especially after the Heydrich assassination and so on. ‘Keep your mouth shut and be careful.’”
“The end of the War came, so we, who were working for the firefighters, we got this stuff [weapons], and we started taking the Germans together, something like that, so I had a machine gun.”
So, were you rounding up Germans at the end of the War?
“Well, they wanted some of those prisoners, they have to move them to other cities for example. So we have to accompany them, watch them, or watch them at the barracks in Mladá Boleslav, so that’s why we had to have guns. And I had it at home, and my brother almost killed me.”
Did you use this gun? Were you shooting people?
“Well, I started to. Once, one of the prisoners tried to escape and I saw him. Now, you are a young man, you never had something, and he’s an old soldier, he knows what to do. I didn’t shoot him, exactly, I shot over his head. It was nothing funny, I tell you. Now I make a little fun out of it, but at that time it was nothing funny.”
“Some of those people [from RFE] went through those camps, Czech camps, looking for editor-writers and so on. I had luck – it was luck – they thought I was my father, because [we have the] same name, and the guy was from Mladá Boleslav, he knew my father. He knew me personally, so he said ‘Hey, this is it.’ He said ‘You have to go to Munich and have an interview.’ So I went over there, I interviewed in English, he spoke a little bit of Czech, this English guy. ‘Ok, dobrý.’
“I was an editor-writer for announcements in between [pieces], continuity. You have to find out what the guy wrote about, say it in two sentences, and they put it between programming. So the people in Czech Republic will know ‘Hey, tomorrow will be this,’ because they don’t want to listen to it eight hours a day; it’s dangerous. But if you are interested in this program – that was my job, to tell them what the program practically is.”
“Tramps are practically wild Scouts. The Scouting organization is organized. Tramps, not. Everybody knows about everybody or what’s going on, but you have no organization. That’s why the Nazis and Communists could ruin up Scouts or other organizations, but they couldn’t ruin up tramping. So most people going with the tramps enjoyed themselves or covered what they were doing, because nobody could catch them, even the Communists. And when they sometimes went over there and beat the people, they wondered ‘How come there are so many people here? How come you know there’s something here?’ Nobody had to send anything because everybody knew from Czechoslovakia, from the First Republic, every Sunday, every second Sunday in April, we’re going there. But otherwise, it’s like Scouting. But it’s wild because there’s no organization. You can change it, you can switch it, you can close it up, you can start a new one. There can be one man, there can be two, there can be thirty. Nothing’s written either. But you love nature. The real tramps, they really love nature and enjoy it. And clean up after themselves.”
(Video courtesy of Studio Na Koleni, Chicago)
In December 1956, following the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet occupation of the country, Elizabeth decided to leave Hungary. She crossed the border on foot and made her way to a refugee camp in Vienna where she stayed for about one month. She sailed to the United States and arrived in New York in February 1957. After a short stay at Camp Kilmer (a camp for Hungarian refugees in New Brunswick, New Jersey), Elizabeth moved to New York City. She says that although her English language skills were poor, she found a job as a seamstress working for a Viennese woman. While working, Elizabeth was able to attend Columbia University where she received her bachelor’s degree in Germanic language and literature. She later received a master’s degree and doctorate in the same subject from the City University of New York (CUNY). Elizabeth also has a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University. An expert on Franz Kafka, she taught literature and library courses at City College and the Graduate College of CUNY. She retired as professor emerita from CUNY in 1996 and, in her retirement, has written several books and taken an interest in photography, staging exhibits in the United States and abroad.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Elizabeth met her husband, Herman Rajec, a Slovak who had immigrated to New York after WWII. The pair became active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, attending dances and events at the Bohemian National Hall. After receiving U.S. citizenship in 1962, Elizabeth returned to Bratislava and Budapest for the first time, and has returned to Europe often to visit family and friends. Today she lives in New York City.
]]>Elizabeth Rajec was born in Bratislava in 1931. She grew up in the center of the city where her parents, Vavrinec and Theresa, owned a tailoring business. She also lived with her two brothers, one sister and grandmother. Due to her diverse background (her four grandparents were Austrian, Slovak, Hungarian and Croat), Elizabeth spoke several languages at home and school. Her family owned a cottage in the outskirts of Bratislava and Elizabeth has fond memories of spending summers there. In 1947, Elizabeth and her family were deported to Hungary following the passage of the Beneš decrees. She calls this event ‘devastating,’ especially for her parents. The family settled in Budapest where Elizabeth graduated from gymnázium and studied Germanic languages and literature at university. After graduating, Elizabeth volunteered to translate for a Slovak folk group that was performing in Budapest. She was then offered a job as a translator and director of cultural affairs for a Czechoslovak cultural organization in Budapest.
In December 1956, following the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet occupation of the country, Elizabeth decided to leave Hungary. She crossed the border on foot and made her way to a refugee camp in Vienna where she stayed for about one month. She sailed to the United States and arrived in New York in February 1957. After a short stay at Camp Kilmer (a camp for Hungarian refugees in New Brunswick, New Jersey), Elizabeth moved to New York City. She says that although her English language skills were poor, she found a job as a seamstress working for a Viennese woman. While working, Elizabeth was able to attend Columbia University where she received her bachelor’s degree in Germanic language and literature. She later received a master’s degree and doctorate in the same subject from the City University of New York (CUNY). Elizabeth also has a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University. An expert on Franz Kafka, she taught literature and library courses at City College and the Graduate College of CUNY. She retired as professor emerita from CUNY in 1996 and, in her retirement, has written several books and taken an interest in photography, staging exhibits in the United States and abroad.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Elizabeth met her husband, Herman Rajec, a Slovak who had immigrated to New York after WWII. The pair became active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, attending dances and events at the Bohemian National Hall. After receiving U.S. citizenship in 1962, Elizabeth returned to Bratislava and Budapest for the first time, and has returned to Europe often to visit family and friends. Today she lives in New York City.
“I have the best memories. I had a very good childhood. We were kind of middle-class-ish; we had a summer house on the outskirts of Bratislava. In the city we had a three-story building where my family lived too – my grandma lived there, my aunt lived there. I was very, very wanted; I was the [youngest sic] girl after little Theresa died, so I have the best memories. I had excellent school friends. I can say only the very best. A lovely childhood ruined, of course, after 1938 because of the War. Then everything went down.”
What happened?
“For instance, my father was a tailor and he had sometimes even 30 or 40 employees. It was a big enterprise, and lot of the Jewish customers no longer were able to order or came, so that he lost his better lady customers. Because of that, then we moved to a smaller place. The War years were not easy on anybody.”
“The Germans started to collect any male they could at the very end – and I’m talking here about the end of March and beginning of April 1945; Bratislava was liberated on April 4 – and when my father heard that, and since my brothers were 17 and 18 at that time, in other words, in a very dangerous age group, he wanted to run with them to our summer house and hide there. They were trying to go through the front line where the Russians and Germans were fighting before it closed and they never made it because the Russians came closer and closer. So they made it back to Marianska Street where we lived just in the nick of time. Maybe an hour later Bratislava was occupied by Russians and liberated. Many times we had Russian generals and soldiers sleep in our house. The police came around and asked for people to accommodate, and we had excellent relationships with them, speaking the Russian language too.”
So the Russians were good guys.
“Very. Very welcome, very wanted. For us they were really our liberators.”
“My first kindergarten schooling was in the Czech language because we lived in Grösslingová and that was quite a famous city [school] where better middle-class people had their children. This was still under the Czechoslovak Republic when I was born, so my first education was really in the Czech language. Then came the decision to put me in the Ursuline convent school, which was supposedly the best and there we had Hungarian and Slovak mixed education. After that, by 1941-ish, I was enrolled in the German gymnázium, which of course I couldn’t finish. I was 16 [when deported] and not yet ready and I eventually made my maturita examination and finished my gymnázium education in Budapest. So I was raised in four languages. We always spoke all languages at the dinner table. Everybody could say it in the best way he wanted to, so it was an international polyglot family dinner every night.”
“I left after the Hungarian Revolution and my last day in Hungary was three days before Christmas. My escaping is a very interesting story and luckily, again, I had a good star above me helping me. The railroad people were very kind to us and helped us [know] when to escape and how to escape the last part on foot, because by that time Soviet tanks were already coming on the hour, by the hour and we had a very short time to cross the border. It was very risky. A lot of people died and if we would have been caught, we would have been sent to prison, so that was very difficult. The actual three hours that I needed to cross the border was a very stormy, snowy night and I helped a family with a baby and we most likely walked around in circles. We didn’t know where to go because we couldn’t see in front of our nose; the snow was falling and windy and bad. But here I am and I made it.”
“Since my father was a tailor, I had a fashion school degree and I knew a lot about fashion. So I went to the unemployment office here in New York and said that I would like to find a job in the fashion industry, and it happened to be that a company called Johanna Frankfurter was looking for somebody to help. When I went to introduce myself, it turned out to be a lovely lady from Vienna and, since I spoke German and lived in Vienna for a short while, we fell in love and she immediately hired me. All she is asked is ‘Do you know how to make buttonholes?’ and I said ‘Of course I know,’ because there are three types of buttonholes. For those who are not familiar with the fashion industry, you can make them with fabric, you make them as embroidery and you can even match when you have square fabrics and patterns. My father taught me so I knew a lot and the only problem I had when I asked for the job and introduced myself was when she said ‘Make it three-quarters of an inch’ as a sample, and I had no idea what three-quarters of an inch was because I was raised with centimeters. I did not dare to give it away that I didn’t know, so I thought ‘It cannot be that small like on a shirt; it cannot be as big as on a coat; it must be the in-between like on a jacket or something,’ and I made exactly a three-quarters of an inch buttonhole without knowing. So they came and measured it and said ‘Perfect.’ Then I gave it away and said ‘Sorry if I did not match it exactly, because I have no idea what an inch is.’
“With that, I just indicated I was very ignorant and uneducated for the American system; however, I knew more than anybody else there. They discovered that I knew how to handle velvet, I knew how to handle specials silks, knew how to make patterns, how to cut. So in no time I became almost like the leader at the company which was excellent. The relationship was so good with Mrs. Frankfurter; she became like my mother and I became like her daughter. The other thing was that she let me go and study. I said ‘My goal is that I want to continue and I want to finish and I want to end up with a PhD.’ So she helped me and I could go away anytime I wanted to. For instance, we made fashion shows at the Plaza Hotel, among others, and the wedding dresses, always the biggest job, was always me. And I went there Saturdays and Sundays and I worked on my own to make sure I finished everything. So our relationship was excellent, which gave me an excellent salary that I could pay for Columbia – I didn’t ever have a loan – and could support my parents in Hungary.”
“I felt a little disturbed by that. The reason is I was born in Czechoslovakia, so my childhood, my education, my upbringing was always in the Czechoslovak spirit, the Czechoslovak Republic. Then when Slovakia was first created, that was during the fascist period and that was something negative rather than positive. Then after 1945 when Czechoslovakia was combined again, we were euphoric, we were happy. Then came the communist takeover and the whole change, so it’s almost like a roller coaster you go and experience. Now when I go back – the latest was a year ago, to Prague – I think that it was a good decision. That the two have different backgrounds, and I’m talking economic backgrounds. The Czech Republic region was always more industrial and more advanced and the Slovak [region] was more agrarian, so to speak. They always supplied. I was told all the eggs and all the bread always came from Slovakia. True or not true, I do not know. But today Slovakia has a chance to become more industrialized – Volkswagen apparently has a company there and other American steel industries created companies in Slovakia, so they have a chance to grow on their own.”
Following liberation, Eva went to work as a clerk and translator at the British Embassy in Prague. She left Czechoslovakia with the help of a guide shortly after the Communist putsch in 1948, crossing the border into West Germany, where she says she went to work for Radio Free Europe in Munich pending admittance to the United States. In 1954, she was duly granted a U.S. visa and flew to Chicago, where she has lived ever since. She wrote of her adoptive home to the Chicago Tribune in 1995: “After 40 years, Chicago is my home, my favorite city which I watched grow from a duckling into a beautiful swan. More power to it.”
]]>Eva Lutovsky was born in Vysoké Mýto, eastern Bohemia, in 1922. Her father, František, owned a flower shop, while her mother, Hana, worked as a secretary at the local courthouse. When Eva was still a toddler, her mother moved to Prague without her father and started working at the Supreme Court in the city, raising Eva on her own. Eva was sent to the capital’s English gymnázium to study, for which she says she was subsequently extremely grateful to her mother. During WWII, Eva and her mother sheltered two Jewish women active in the Czech resistance movement PVVZ (Petiční výbor Věrni zůstaneme) for 22 months in their apartment until liberation. One of the women, Heda Kaufmanová, wrote about this experience afterwards in her memoirs, entitled Léta 1938 – 1945 {The Years 1938 – 1945]. Eva says the women had to lock themselves in the bathroom when she and her mother had visitors, and that the hardest part of hiding the women was that Eva’s rations and those of her mother had to be split in half and shared amongst the four.
Following liberation, Eva went to work as a clerk and translator at the British Embassy in Prague. She left Czechoslovakia with the help of a guide shortly after the Communist putsch in 1948, crossing the border into West Germany, where she says she went to work for Radio Free Europe in Munich pending admittance to the United States. In 1954, she was duly granted a U.S. visa and flew to Chicago, where she has lived ever since. She wrote of her adoptive home to the Chicago Tribune in 1995: “After 40 years, Chicago is my home, my favorite city which I watched grow from a duckling into a beautiful swan. More power to it.”
“Prague English grammar school was I think the very best thing that happened to me in my life. Yes, I’ll tell you, if you speak English… when you speak any other language, and especially if it is one like English or like German, so many people know it, speak it, use it – you’re half a step close to them. So when I left over the border illegally, leaving Czechoslovakia, I knew English. So when they asked me ‘Do you speak English?’ I said ‘Yes, of course I do!’ And they were of course surprised, because they didn’t expect that. And that was one of the first times I started thanking and thinking of my mother; how bright, how farsighted she was, to steer me to a foreign language, because my maternal grandmother – she was not Czech, she was German, but at that time when my grandparents got married, such close, close-by intermarriages were no surprise, no nothing. The Germans were right here, and we were right next to them and they were right next to us, so the mingling was very… ‘Yeah, of course, sure, why not?’ No problems, no friction, no nothing.”
“They had to stay with us, in our home, and never move out, never even open the window when mother and I were gone to the office in the morning. They knew they cannot move because you can hear on the lower floor that somebody is walking up there. My first thing here in America, anywhere I went, I would always listen – can I hear the people from above? No you can’t, because your building is different! But you know, here we are laughing, but it wasn’t laughable. But well, we just felt, we must be lucky enough, because that means there will be four people alive after the War – my mother and I, and the two ladies we were sheltering.”
“Well, we just sat down, and first and foremost my mother said ‘I know this is my last cigarette, but I know I’ll be able to buy them easier now, so I’ll just smoke this one to celebrate.’ So my mother celebrated for all of us, because she was the smoker.”
Following the Communist coup in February 1948, George decided that he didn’t want to ‘live under another occupation’ and left the country. After visiting a Sokol camp in southern Bohemia that July, George and a friend crossed the border into Germany. He spent several months in Regensburg and Schwäbisch Gmünd refugee camps; he then signed up with the European Volunteer Workers group and traveled to Britain where he was assigned to work in a brickyard in Peterborough. George worked there for over two years waiting for a visa to the United States.
After receiving a visa, George sailed to New York in February 1951. He began working in a plastics factory before being drafted into the U.S. Army in July. George served in the Army for two years, one of which was spent in Germany working as a cartographer. After his discharge, George worked as a draftsman for an engineering company in New Jersey for one year and then moved to Malden, Massachusetts. In 1955, George married his wife, Ludmila, also a Czechoslovak émigré, whom he had met in New York. They had two children, Peter and Sandy, whom they raised speaking Czech.
In 1962, George – who says he had always wanted to move to California – found a job at Stanford University working on a linear particle accelerator, the longest in the world. After five years there and a short stint in Philadelphia, George returned to California to work for GE’s nuclear energy division. In 1992, he retired from full-time work, but continued to act as a consultant until 2011. George also continued his education in the United States, earning a degree in engineering and management from Northeastern University and an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University. Now a widower, George enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He lives in Santa Clara, California.
]]>George Skoda was born in Prague in 1927. His father, Josef, studied accounting and held several jobs in that field, and also owned a business in the city. His mother, Louisa, worked as a stenographer before getting married and later stayed home to raise George. After elementary school, George began studying at an English gymnázium, which was closed down by the Nazis in 1941. He then transferred to a Czech school, which was also closed, and entered an industrial school. In the waning months of WWII, George was recruited to dig ditches near Olomouc for the German war effort. After a short time, with the end of the War imminent, George escaped from his work detail and returned to Prague. After liberation, he finished school and, in 1947, entered ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) to study mechanical engineering.
Following the Communist coup in February 1948, George decided that he didn’t want to ‘live under another occupation’ and left the country. After visiting a Sokol camp in southern Bohemia that July, George and a friend crossed the border into Germany. He spent several months in Regensburg and Schwäbisch Gmünd refugee camps; he then signed up with the European Volunteer Workers group and traveled to Britain where he was assigned to work in a brickyard in Peterborough. George worked there for over two years waiting for a visa to the United States.
After receiving a visa, George sailed to New York in February 1951. He began working in a plastics factory before being drafted into the U.S. Army in July. George served in the Army for two years, one of which was spent in Germany working as a cartographer. After his discharge, George worked as a draftsman for an engineering company in New Jersey for one year and then moved to Malden, Massachusetts. In 1955, George married his wife, Ludmila, also a Czechoslovak émigré, whom he had met in New York. They had two children, Peter and Sandy, whom they raised speaking Czech.
In 1962, George – who says he had always wanted to move to California – found a job at Stanford University working on a linear particle accelerator, the longest in the world. After five years there and a short stint in Philadelphia, George returned to California to work for GE’s nuclear energy division. In 1992, he retired from full-time work, but continued to act as a consultant until 2011. George also continued his education in the United States, earning a degree in engineering and management from Northeastern University and an MBA and master’s in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University. Now a widower, George enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He lives in Santa Clara, California.
“My parents were on vacation at that time, and I was supposed to go – well actually I did – to a Sokol camp down in southern Bohemia, so they thought I was at Sokol camp. And the reason I didn’t tell them was, I said, ‘Well, if I get caught and they interrogate my parents, my parents can honestly say ‘We didn’t know about it.’’ So it was obviously a great shock when they came back from vacation, and they didn’t hear from me for about six weeks. Of course my mother was [thinking] ‘Is he killed somewhere?’ or ‘Where is he?’ Because the mail at that time… There was no Germany; there was a U.S. occupation zone, French, English. So we had to write to a guy in Switzerland and he had to write to somebody in Czechoslovakia [to say] that we are okay. So that took six weeks, seven weeks for the mail and so finally they got [notice] that ‘Oh yeah, they are okay.’”
“We tried several places. Well, we inquired; we didn’t try. Šumava was one of them, and we knew some people and they said ‘Well, there were some people that crossed here, but there were some people who got caught over there,’ and then finally a friend’s friend said ‘Well there’s people crossing over at Bor u Tachova.’ I had never been there before. I didn’t know the countryside, but I had a map and a compass and it was a chance we took. The border guard came five minutes after we crossed; as a matter of fact, when we were crossing, I heard somebody hollering, some dog barking, and what sounded like shots. But we said ‘Oh the heck with it’ and we just kept going.”
And there was no barbed wire? It wasn’t like it got later?
“No. There was a meadow and a granite marker, and one side was ČS and the other was D, Deutschland. That was it. And there were Germans drying hay on the other side.”
“There was a Czech newspaper, České slovo, that was issued in Munich which I subscribed to, so we were pretty well informed of what was going on. My parents and people that I knew didn’t write anything political because a lot of the letters were censored. My father said they got [letters] that the envelope was cut and [said] ‘This is officially censored’ so we never talked about politics. When I was in England and there was, not a girlfriend, but a girl I was interested in at one time. Her father was actually a general in the Czech Army. I sent her a letter and she sent me a postcard written in English that said ‘There’s a lot of problems’ and this and that. I didn’t realize it, but I sent another letter, and she sent me a postcard that said ‘I forbid you to write to this address,’ her father being in the Army. And he was fairly high up – Armádní generál or something. She said ‘If you want to write, write through a friend of mine.’”
“We went to the Sokol to exercise once or twice a week, but that was about the only thing. I don’t know if you know, but at that time there was a large Czech community in New York and it was between First and Third Avenue and something like from 62nd Street to 75th Street. There were Czech butchers and Czech bakers. A lot of these people immigrated to the United States in 1922, ’23, ’24, ’25… As a matter of fact, I lived with a family whose name was Koch – he was a carpenter – and he immigrated to the United States in 1924, so there were old, what they call, usedlíci [settlers]. It was interesting; these people immigrated to the United States for economic reasons. The new wave that came in, we escaped for political reasons, and they just couldn’t quite get it. There was, not a friction, but a lot of misunderstanding.”
“Freedom is a word that’s a lot of little things, and some big things. Freedom of expression. I mean, you can talk over here and you can say that the president is an idiot or not and people either agree with you or don’t agree with you, but nothing happens to you. Over there, under the communists, you ended up in a concentration camp. That’s one thing. Freedom of press. Over there, there was no freedom of press. Freedom of where you can live, how you can live. Freedom of where you want to go to school or don’t go to school. It’s a lot of these little things that are the difference. Under the communist regime; of course, the German regime too was much more regimented and controlled. So it’s not one big thing; it’s a lot of little things that make it happen.”
After spending two weeks with family friends in Ossining, New York, Helena moved to the Boston area where her parents had settled and opened a Czech restaurant. Helena spent a few months becoming comfortable with the English language and then began working in a hospital kitchen. Her next job was in the lab of Glover Memorial Hospital and, at the request of a pathologist, she transferred to what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she worked for 40 years, retiring only a short time ago. Helena gave birth to her daughter Johana in 1974 and bought a house in Holliston (a suburb of Boston) in 1976. She married her second husband, Frank Stossel, in 1981 and first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1987. She has visited her home country many times since. Helena says that it is only recently that she became ‘at peace’ with her emigration, citing her reluctance to leave Czechoslovakia in the first place as preventing her from feeling at home in the United States. In her retirement, she hopes to travel more and go on a canoe trip in the Czech Republic. Today, Helena lives in Holliston with her husband Frank.
]]>Helena Stossel was born in Prague in 1946. Helena’s parents both worked at a small silk-screening operation – her father as the manager and her mother as a silk-screener. Helena and her younger brother, Tomas, were watched by her grandmother and spent a lot of time at the chata her grandfather built outside the city. Helena says that she learned to ‘appreciate nature’ from camping, canoeing, and white-water kayaking. She also enjoyed reading and poetry. Helena went to gymnázium where she focused on the sciences and then studied chemistry at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. She married her first husband, Lev, in 1967. The Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 left an impression on Helena, as she congregated on Wenceslas Square with other young people and talked with the Warsaw Pact troops. Her parents and brother immigrated to the United States in July 1969 and, although Helena was reluctant to leave as she wanted to ‘fight for freedom,’ she joined her husband when he decided to leave in the autumn of 1969. The pair lived in Vienna for one month and then flew to New York City in December 1969.
After spending two weeks with family friends in Ossining, New York, Helena moved to the Boston area where her parents had settled and opened a Czech restaurant. Helena spent a few months becoming comfortable with the English language and then began working in a hospital kitchen. Her next job was in the lab of Glover Memorial Hospital and, at the request of a pathologist, she transferred to what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she worked for 40 years, retiring only a short time ago. Helena gave birth to her daughter Johana in 1974 and bought a house in Holliston (a suburb of Boston) in 1976. She married her second husband, Frank Stossel, in 1981 and first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1987. She has visited her home country many times since. Helena says that it is only recently that she became ‘at peace’ with her emigration, citing her reluctance to leave Czechoslovakia in the first place as preventing her from feeling at home in the United States. In her retirement, she hopes to travel more and go on a canoe trip in the Czech Republic. Today, Helena lives in Holliston with her husband Frank.
“I have to say one thing for the school system, since the third grade we were exposed to the classic music and arts, and that was incorporated into the education. Every month we had to go to the concert hall and see the opera, and so that’s what I think, for the education, that was pretty good.”
“We lived on a corner; one side was a park and the other was a main street where the trolley was going, so the Russian tanks were lined up and pointing the tanks right to your windows. It was shocking. And the Prague radio was still working and they were saying ‘Don’t go to the window. They’re shooting the windows, people are getting hurt, people got killed. Don’t open the window,’ So we were listening to the radio and all of the sudden you heard shots and silence, and I’ll never ever in my life forget that silence. It was dreadful.”
Did you go down to Wenceslas Square?
“Yes, we went down. My mother said ‘Don’t go anywhere’ – my brother was still in the army – ‘Don’t go anywhere; they’re going to kill your brother. Don’t get involved.’ But my ex-husband, with his friends, they were already down there and by the time I went down there Prague radio was done. It was damaged. It was in smoke. We went to Wenceslas Square and it was pretty…First of all, you could feel how much power a crowd has. You get sucked in it and I thought that we were indestructible. We can turn those things and everything. It’s funny what it does to you in that crowd or in that situation. But we went there, it was sad, and people started to talk to the soldiers. Thinking back now, so many years back when everything settles inside me, the first troop of the soldiers they sent, they were probably hard-trained soldiers. They shot everything that moved. Second [wave] that came were like kids. They were probably 17, 18 year old Russians, scared the hell of everything that was moving. I didn’t see it then, because then I was full of hate, like ‘How dare you? What do you want?’ But thinking back, they were probably so scared too.”
“I said ‘I’m not going to leave. I’m going to fight for the freedom and I’m staying here.’ I did not want to leave. When we got occupied by the Russians, I was involved in it and [when] I went back, second day, to the hospital, we put posters there and we all wore black because we did that at midnight when the Russian tanks were all around the streets. So I was involved in it and I was hoping that the Prague Spring, nobody is going to kill it because we were going to win.”
“I didn’t work because I didn’t speak English. It was funny back then – from New York we came to Boston and we were looking for an apartment, so what we just went door to door and we asked ‘Do you have an apartment for rent?’ and somebody did. There was no checking or anything [so] we got an apartment. Lev was working to work, washing dishes [at] Cottage Crest restaurant in Belmont, and I was home. And for the first money we could have, we bought a television, so I would watch television and learn English because my friends sent me a tape of English but it was [British] English so it had nothing to do with American English, so when I went out I couldn’t understand because I had this Oxford English in my ear and it was like ‘What? What language is this?’ So we got a television and I remember watching I Love Lucy and I remember the first time I got some joke, I laughed and I thought ‘Boy!’ I finally understood. So it took me a few months learning and then I thought I had to go to work, so I went to the hospital and I started to work in the kitchen.
“In the meantime, I tried to learn English; I went to take some lessons, so little by little I started to understand, and I got work at Glover Memorial Hospital in the lab, drawing blood and doing chemistry tests. There was a pathologist who was going to open the lab in what’s now Brigham and Women’s Hospital – it was part of the old women’s hospital in Boston – there was another location and he said ‘Helena, I want you to go and open the lab with me.’ And that’s how I started at Brigham and Women’s. And I worked there for 40 years.”
“For Christmas or any holidays we would get together with my ma and father, my brother, his wife and his son and celebrated every holiday together, Czech way. My ma was a very good cook so she made those elaborate cakes and anything. The food, like knoedl [dumplings] and sausage, was just…[so good]. I kept the Czech tradition for Christmas and for Thanksgiving we went to Frank’s parents because we never had Thanksgiving in Czech, so we celebrated American Thanksgiving. So it was always in Frank’s parents’ house and Christmas was in our house.”
“I got over my homesickness and being here, and I am very thankful that I was here because I learned a lot which I would never learn if I never emigrated. My view of the world is much wider and I am very thankful for that because in the beginning it was a very narrow view, [I was] very homesick and I didn’t want to see anything, but little by little you learn and, all of the sudden, now when I go there – I don’t mean it in a bad way – you can see they’re looking at the world through a very narrow view. And me being here and meeting so many different people, being exposed to so many different cultures, so many different things, all of the sudden I feel very rich that I learned so much and that my view is so much bigger. So I am very thankful for that. And I am happy. For the first time, and it took me a long time, I realized that I am very happy that I am here.
“That was a big, big thing for me to come to this conclusion. Prague is always my city and always will be my home, but, all of the sudden, I don’t think I could live there. I would love to live there two months of the year now that I’m retired to get everything that I like, but I could never live there. My home is here now and that’s a huge step for me. To come to that conclusion was a big thing for me. A big relief. Because up till then, I felt, I cannot say guilty, but I felt like I missed something. I wish I was there for all that upbringing and all that feeling of freedom; that I would really appreciate it. So all my life, I felt like I deserted whatever I believed in. But it’s not there anymore. I reached my peace. I reached my point and I am happy I’m here and I learned a lot.”
Jan attended gymnázium in Strážnice and then studied in the Mathematics and Physics Faculty at Charles University. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1988 and served one year in the military as a guard. Jan says that he learned English while listening to the radio and reading during this time. He began his doctoral studies at Charles University in the fall of 1989, and witnessed the beginning of the Velvet Revolution from his office at the university. Jan completed his dissertation – which he wrote in English – and spent one year at Southern Illinois University doing research. He returned to Prague after accepting a position at Charles University, but again returned to the United States one year later. Jan spent five months at Jackson State University in Mississippi before moving to Los Angeles for a post-doctoral fellowship with Arieh Warshel, 2013 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at University of Southern California.
Today Jan is a chemistry professor at Loyola University Chicago. Although he plans to stay in the United States for his career, Jan says that he still feels more Czech than American and returns to the Czech Republic every summer with his children.
]]>Jan Florian was born in Hodonín in 1964 and grew up in the Moravian town of Strážnice. His mother was an accountant and his father worked as an electrical repairman. Jan’s father also built a greenhouse on their property and made extra money by growing and selling vegetables. Although his earliest memory is of watching the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 on television, Jan recalls a happy childhood and says that he had a certain freedom that his children don’t have growing up in the United States today.
Jan attended gymnázium in Strážnice and then studied in the Mathematics and Physics Faculty at Charles University. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1988 and served one year in the military as a guard. Jan says that he learned English while listening to the radio and reading during this time. He began his doctoral studies at Charles University in the fall of 1989, and witnessed the beginning of the Velvet Revolution from his office at the university. Jan completed his dissertation – which he wrote in English – and spent one year at Southern Illinois University doing research. He returned to Prague after accepting a position at Charles University, but again returned to the United States one year later. Jan spent five months at Jackson State University in Mississippi before moving to Los Angeles for a post-doctoral fellowship with Arieh Warshel, 2013 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at University of Southern California.
Today Jan is a chemistry professor at Loyola University Chicago. Although he plans to stay in the United States for his career, Jan says that he still feels more Czech than American and returns to the Czech Republic every summer with his children.
“I got to appreciate the role that my grandma had for the whole family. I will do a little detour because it relates to immigration as well. Her whole family left for America in 1910, something like that. At the time, she was 12 years old. She was left alone in the country. Both parents left with other children who were younger than her and left her to take care of her own grandma who was, at the time, sick and couldn’t travel to America. So a 12 year old child, left on her in 1910 to care for her grandma. They told her they would come back for her and bring them both to America when they settled. They did settle, but the First World War came up so that was not really possible. And then after the War she married and she didn’t want to go to America, and [her] grandma died, and when they were eventually planning to go to America Hitler came and, when Hitler was gone, the Communists came. So she never made it to join the family in America. But she had great credit so I still have some relatives in Michigan and sometimes visit them, and they appreciate her role.”
“I would like to mention that life in Czechoslovakia in the early ‘70s, for a child, you couldn’t have anything better. It was very sweet. You could go anywhere as a child, especially in a small city like Strážnice: 6,000 people, two elementary schools, two churches, a high school. On one side you have vineyards and little hills; on the other side you have the Morava River with some sandy beaches and twists and turns in the river. So the setting is very nice, and I think I had a very good childhood over there. It’s not that people would be immigrating to America because they were suffering at the time in the Czech Republic, especially children. I mean, [they] had a better life, on average, than children in the United States.
“I walked to school. Everybody walked to school there; no school buses. My children now spend a half hour to go to school and another half hour going back from school. Waiting for the bus will take you another half hour, so it’s one and a half hours of your life lost every day because they are forbidden to do any[thing] fun on the bus, and everything is so absolutely serious. So my life was longer, in that sense. The freedom to not need parents to actually live was also important. I didn’t need parents to drive me to chess club. I didn’t need parents to drive me to go fishing. I just picked up the rod and went fishing, or just walked to play the accordion or play chess as I liked. And they didn’t pay anything for these services because they were provided for free by the people who had nothing else to do in that country, because money was of no value. People were doing things for others because they had nothing else to do, in some cases, and some of them are nice and just used their time wisely. So in terms of education, childhood… Could you have anything better than that?”
“In August ’88 there was the 20th anniversary of the Russian occupation in [August sic.] ’68. So we had special emergencies. We woke up early in the morning, a lot of practice, and we had to have special double-guarding of all the weapon warehouses, because they were afraid that people would come take the weapons and actually do some resistance. So I was in charge of guarding this weapon warehouse and I was leading a group of, let’s say, 12 people, and they were the soldiers who were not there to listen to the outpost – their only task was to do this guarding. They were dangerous and there was no way that they would actually listen to me. I had this little gun; they had the big guns. So I knew it was just hopeless – sometimes you saw them shooting deer in the night and it was absolutely impossible to tell them they could not do it; they could shoot you! These people did not have any obstacles. When they got drunk, they did whatever they wanted, and I didn’t want to be shot. So I just took off my boots, put myself on the bed – we were forbidden to sleep; we were supposed to be guarding – I said ‘Do whatever you want.’ It worked. The warehouse didn’t get stolen. When they control came, [the soldiers] actually woke me up. They said ‘Wake up! Wake up, there is the control here. You have to go greet them.’ Sometimes they got the warning call from the headquarters that the control is coming to check me, so I had more time to actually put my boots on, and I survived it, but I can tell you there was a lot of stress there.”
“I wanted to get at the border of the knowledge. That’s what I wanted to do. I thought ‘No I don’t need to be the best; I just want to be where there is a boundary between the knowledge and no knowledge.’ Once you happen to be on the boundary, your options are infinite. Then after I am there, I will [figure out] what to do, but first let me get there. So that was my goal, and when you are in the Czech Republic you don’t have access to the literature, you don’t have access to the journals [and] you don’t have access to the people, so you cannot get to the border of the knowledge; you get to somewhere where the knowledge was 20 years ago.”
“When the revolution came, the borders opened and then we could travel for free because everybody was offering these poor, Eastern Europeans an ability to see the West. I immediately got a short-term internship in Trieste, Italy, at the International Center for Theoretical Physics there. So I got the chance to stay there for a couple weeks, so the first time I got on the train, the summer of ’90, to Italy, my eyes opened. I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t somehow get the cheap ticket for the date when the hotel started, so I went two days ahead. I came to Trieste and had nowhere to sleep and no money to actually go to the hotel, so I went to the park. There’s a beautiful park, and I climbed over the fence because it was closed, and it’s on the shore of the sea. And the Czech Republic does not have the sea, so sleeping there in this Italian park on the first night in the West under the skies and hearing the sea… It was absolutely reverberating, giving you shivers along the spine. This is something monumental in your life and even for the society.”
“The first impression was like going to hell, literally, because you are coming on Highway 10 across the desert, and that’s kind of on the hill. Then you have all this going down, a long slope going down to Los Angeles, and we were coming in the evening and you see all these millions of lights of the huge city all in front of you, and you go down the hill. So it was like red and yellow down there, all the cars going 70 miles an hour on a six-lane freeway, and I have an old car which barely drives, cannot brake, and I don’t know where to go – I just need to keep the pace with them. This kind of horror [was like] going to hell. It was quite tough, this driving experience to the big city.”