Georgina Teyrovsky
<p> </p><p>Georgina Teyrovsky was born in Prague in 1924. Her father, Otakar, was a member of the Czechoslovak Legions in Russia during WWI and met Georgina’s mother, Katerina, at her home there while awaiting evacuation. They married quickly and both departed from Vladivostok. In Prague, the couple lived with Otakar’s mother in Žižkov. Georgina’s father found work as an accountant in a bank while her mother became a seamstress. When Georgina was eight, the family moved away to the outskirts of Prague. Georgina attended a gymnázium which she says was focused on classical education and required classes in Greek and Latin. In March 1939, her schooling was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and she was sent to work as a draftswoman. Georgina says that she was caught in the bombing of Prague towards the end of the War and was hit by shrapnel while biking home. Days before the end of the War, Georgina traveled to Vysoké Mýto in the hopes of securing food for her family and, as a result, was not in Prague when the city was liberated. She hitched a ride home with Russian soldiers heading towards the capital.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Following the War, Georgina finished high school and enrolled at Charles University. She first studied medicine, but soon switched her course of studies to languages and philosophy. While on a trip to the Beskydy mountain range in Moravia, Georgina met her future husband, Edmund Tevrovsky. The couple married in June 1947. Shortly after the Communist coup in February 1948, Edmund’s textile business was nationalized and the Teyrovskys decided to leave the country. After two unsuccessful attempts, they crossed the border into Germany in March 1948. Although the Teyrovskys hoped to immigrate to the United States, they learned that it would be years before visas would be available to them. Instead, they decided to immigrate to Australia where they were obligated to work certain jobs for two years. They arrived in Melbourne in August 1948, and initially took jobs which required them to live apart – Georgina worked for a family doctor and Edmund in a brick factory. They later both managed to find jobs at Kew Mental Hospital; however, they were still not able to live together and were instead housed in hospital dormitories. In 1950, Georgina and Edmund were released from their contractual obligations and found an apartment to rent. Georgina learned to sew and found work as a dressmaker. The couple eventually moved to Sydney where they owned a succession of grocery stores and shops. Their daughter Vera was born in 1954.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In 1955, the Teyrovskys received visas to the United States and sailed to San Francisco. After a number of moves, they settled in Oakland, where their younger daughter, Helenka, was born. While Georgina worked as a seamstress and in a deli, Edmund finished his university degree and started working in the dyeing business. They opened a dye house in Union City, California, which they owned for over twenty years. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Georgina and Edmund often traveled back to their homeland. Georgina has been active in the Bay Area Czech community and is the vice-president of the local Sokol chapter – a position she has held for many years. Now widowed, Georgina lives in Castro Valley, California.</p>
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Ingrid Chybik
<p>Ingrid Chybik was born in Brno, Moravia, in 1939. Her mother Hilda stayed at home and raised Ingrid and her younger brother Alfred, while her father (also called Alfred) directed a textile business. During WWII, Ingrid fell ill with diphtheria which, she says, saved both her and her brother, as they were quarantined when the nursery school they normally attended was bombed. Both of Ingrid’s parents were killed during the War and so she and her brother were taken in by relatives living in Novosedlý near Mikulov, southern Moravia. In 1946, Ingrid moved with her brother to Vienna, where the pair stayed with their grandmother. Ingrid spent six years in Vienna until she was sponsored by another aunt and uncle, Bohumil and Erna Hlavac, to come to Chicago. Ingrid says her aunt and uncle had left Czechoslovakia in 1950 when they heard that Bohumil may be arrested on charges of having collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Such charges, says Ingrid, were ridiculous as her uncle had spent much of the War imprisoned in Mauthausen concentration camp.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Ingrid arrived in Chicago in March 1952. She first attended Epiphany Grade School, where she says the nuns were sympathetic and helped her learn English, and then Lourdes High School, where she did well academically. Upon graduation, she started working at Continental Bank downtown and studied accounting at DePaul University at night. She did not finish her degree, but says the accounting classes she took subsequently helped her with her business career. She continued to live with her aunt and uncle and, after years of speaking German in Vienna, re-learned Czech from them at home. Ingrid says she perfected her Czech by going to the cinema to watch old movies with her aunt. In 1963, she married <a href="/web/20170611035028/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/miroslav-chybik/">Miroslav Chybik</a>, whom she had known for five years and whom she had originally met at a series of Czech community dances in Chicago. The couple went on to have three daughters.</p><p> </p><p>Ingrid says she became involved in a number of Czech and Slovak cultural groups in Chicago, and remains active in these societies to this day. She was president of the First Czechoslovak Garden Club of America until the end of 2010 and served as a long-term member of the United Moravian Societies. She has taken her children to Vienna and the Czech Republic to meet her relatives on a number of occasions. Today, she lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with her Czech-American husband Miroslav, whom she says she feels lucky to have married as he understands her so well.</p>
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Jarmila Hruban
<p>Jarmila Hruban was born in Radešov, on the Czechoslovak border with Bavaria, in 1926. Her father was the mayor of nearby Boubská, the principal of the local school, and a regional administrator of a national cooperative bank called Kampelička. After attending elementary school in Boubská, Jarmila traveled to nearby Strakonice every day to attend <em>gymnázium</em>. When the Sudetenland was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, she found herself passing through Nazi Germany on her daily train ride to school. Jarmila’s schooling was disrupted by the war; in 1944, she was sent to work in a box-making factory in Bohumilice for a year, and so finished <em>gymnázium</em> one year late, in 1946.</p><p> </p><p>She then started a degree in philosophy and English at Charles University in Prague, but was expelled following the Communist takeover in 1948 when she failed her <em>prověrka</em> – a test asking each student about his/her political views. She decided to leave the country and, in March 1949, a relative who worked as a border guard helped her cross into Germany near Kvilda, not far from where Jarmila grew up. Jarmila spent a year and a half in Murnau refugee camp in Bavaria before being granted a visa to Canada. She lived there for one year until some of her relatives who were already in the United States successfully petitioned for her to come to New York City. In New York, Jarmila attended Hunter College, before receiving a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. It was there she met her husband, <a href="/web/20170609123103/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/zdenek-hruban/">Zdenek Hruban</a>. She became an American citizen in 1957. Now widowed, Jarmila lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park district and is particularly active in the local Unitarian Church.</p>
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Jaroslava Stephina
<p>Jarka Stepina was born in Prague in 1944. She lived in the city’s Žižkov district with her parents and younger sister until 1953, when her parents divorced and she moved to the Letná district with her mother and stepfather, who worked at the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. Jarka’s father also remarried and, as he lived in Prague as well, she saw him often. Although it was her desire to become a pediatric nurse, Jarka attended business school at her parents’ behest. She had a variety of jobs over the summers, including caring for children with Down syndrome and working in a factory and at a camp. Upon graduation, Jarka started a job as a payroll cashier. As a young adult, Jarka was involved in a youth group which afforded opportunities to travel to places such as Austria, West Germany, and Yugoslavia. It was through her activities as a young woman that she met her husband, Mila Štěpina.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Jarka and her husband were planning on taking a trip to Yugoslavia in September of 1969; however, her brother-in-law warned them that the borders would be closing soon, so they decided to leave for West Berlin, where Jarka had friends, in August of that year. The pair lived in Germany for two years where they applied for a visa to the United States. In 1971, Jarka and Mila settled in Cleveland. Jarka remembers that finding their own apartment was difficult as they had no credit when they first arrived; however, they soon were able to rent a place. After a few years, they bought a house in Parma, Ohio. Jarka worked in accounting at American Greetings while Mila was an electrical engineer who had several jobs. Jarka says that the two traveled throughout the United States, especially to Colorado and the Southwest, as Mila was fascinated with American cowboy culture. Jarka has been back to the Czech Republic many times, although she says that after her first visit back in 1978, she was subsequently denied a visa for about ten years. She says that after being in the United States for 40 years, she feels more at home here than when she is in the Czech Republic. Today, Jarka lives in Parma, Ohio.</p>
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Jitka Exler
<p>Jitka Exler was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1959. She grew up with her parents, Václav and Věra, and her older sister, Blanka, in the nearby town of Ostrov nad Ohří, which Jitka describes as a ‘showcase communist town.’ Although Jitka’s father was a foreman at the Skoda factory in Ostrov, Jitka says that he was called ‘the man with the golden hands’ because he could make or fix anything, and he was often busy working on cars. Jitka’s mother was an expert knitter who sold her work to a shop in Karlovy Vary. Jitka herself grew up playing sports and also made her own equipment. She was very interested in art, and even enrolled herself in art and drama classes at the age of six.</p><p> </p><p>After high school, Jitka moved to Prague and studied at Vyšší odborná škola grafická [School of Graphic Arts]. After completing her arts program, Jitka found a job at an animation studio. She was then encouraged to apply for a job at the Bratři v triku animation studio at the Barrandov complex. During her time in Prague and through her husband, Leoš Exler, Jitka came to know many dissidents and people in the underground scene, and the pair signed Charter 77. Jitka says that the two were followed by secret police for a while, and they eventually decided to leave Czechoslovakia. Although they had trouble getting visas and exit permits, Jitka and Leoš left the country in 1980. They escaped through Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy, and crossed the border into Austria. Because of their background as Charter 77 signatories, they were able to live in an apartment instead of a refugee camp while waiting for their paperwork to clear. In January 1981, Jitka arrived in New York City.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Jitka’s sponsoring organization helped her find a job as a seamstress. She also got involved making puppets for a black light theatre company started by a fellow Czechoslovak émigré. In the early-1980s, Jitka called Jim Henson’s company and asked for an interview. She was accepted to Muppet University where she was tasked with designing and making a Muppet. After working as a freelance puppet maker, Jitka joined the staff at Sesame Street. Of her time with Jim Henson and his company, Jitka says that she felt like she was contributing to something bigger. After eight years with Sesame Street, Jitka began working for a toy company, designing toys and overseeing production. When her younger son was born (with her second husband), Jitka became a freelance toy designer, a job she continues to this day.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Jitka first returned to the Czech Republic only a few months after the Velvet Revolution, and she attempts to visit her home country every year. Her sons speak Czech and enjoy her Czech cooking. In addition to designing toys, Jitka is an avid painted. Today, she lives in Larchmont, New York.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Joan Zizek
<p>Joan Zizek was born in 1941 in Pardubice, eastern Bohemia. Her parents, Jaroslav and Růžena, had grown up in the small village of Buček, but moved to Pardubice when her father was offered a job as an agricultural bookkeeper. While still a young girl, Joan remembers air raids and shootings that occurred in Pardubice during WWII. She also recalls spending summers with her grandparents in Buček. She attended first grade in Pardubice, but shortly after the Communist coup in 1948, her father was warned that he was in danger of being arrested and the family (which now included her brother, <a href="/web/20170609043330/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/jerry-rabas/">Jerry Rabas</a>) decided to flee the country. They left that night and crossed the German border near Cheb where they were picked up by German soldiers. When they were released (after her father bribed a soldier with a pair of nylon stockings), the family stayed in refugee camps for another 15 months. While in Ludwigsburg, Joan remembers small accommodations, attending school, and being sent to another camp in Switzerland for two weeks.</p><p> </p><p>In August 1949, Joan and her family sailed to New York City, and then traveled on to Chicago where they lived with her mother’s aunt for a short time. Joan’s father found a job as the manager of a Sokol hall in the South Lawndale neighborhood where the family settled. Joan remembers this area as predominately Czech, with shops, restaurants, and a Czech movie theater. While her father became very involved in the Czech community, founding the Alliance for Czech Exiles in Chicago and holding leadership positions in the American Sokol Organization and the Moravian Society, Joan herself participated in Czech social activities like Sokol and summer camp. She became a U.S. citizen in 1963 and got married shortly thereafter to Russell Zizek whom she knew from the neighborhood; they had two children. In 1973, Joan returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time with her father and daughter and says she enjoyed the experience, especially returning to Buček. Today, Joan lives with her husband in Lemont, Illinois.</p>
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Joseph Pritasil
<p>Joseph Pritasil was born in Miřetice, eastern Bohemia, in 1925. He was one of seven children raised on a farm by his father, Antonin, and mother, Anežka. Joseph says he had to walk three and a half miles to school on a daily basis and, on Sunday, the family walked the same path to the nearest town to attend church. After receiving his basic education, Joseph attended metal-working school and, from 1942 until the end of WWII, he worked in a local factory as a machinist.</p><p> </p><p>Immediately after the end of the War in 1945, Joseph was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, which he says was ‘a joke,’ as there were neither guns nor uniforms for any of the troops. He was told he could train for the police force instead, which he duly went to Prague to do and was accepted into the police academy. He rose through the ranks of until he became a deputy chief of unit, and was sent to Domažlice (on the West German border) to work as a border guard there. Around the time of the Communist coup in 1948, Joseph says he was asked to join the Communist Party, and when he refused he was demoted. He subsequently received an anonymous phone call saying that orders had been issued to arrest him the following day. He escaped while on duty at the border, in April 1948. Joseph spent over a year in refugee camps in West Germany; he was housed in the Goethe Schule in Regensburg before being shipped eventually to Ludwigsburg.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, he was sponsored by some distant relatives on his father’s side to come to South Dakota and work on their farm. He did that for less than one year before moving to Chicago, where he found work in a factory making fire-proof doors. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and sent to Heidelberg, Germany, for two years. During this time, says Joseph, he competed on behalf of his unit (the 62nd Anti-Aircraft Division) at the ski championships at Garmisch Partenkirchen. He says he has ‘fond memories’ of his time in the Army, but was eager to return to Chicago to marry his wife, Rose. He was married in 1954 and has four children, all of whom speak Czech. Joseph worked as a superintendant at a number of factories in the Chicago area until his retirement, and has presided over a number of local and national Czech organizations, such as the Czechoslovak National Council of America and the District Alliance of Czech Catholics. He hopes to visit Europe with his grandson in 2011.</p>
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Karel Kaiser
<p>Karel Kaiser was born in Domažlice in 1932 and grew up in nearby Kdyně. In 1938, he moved to Prague with his father and two older sisters – Karel’s mother had died shortly prior to the move. Upon graduation from high school, he studied architecture at Charles University for one year, but was then expelled because of his father’s position as a self-employed tailor. During a <em>brigáda</em> [work brigade] in Ostrava, where he was employed as a builder, Karel met his future wife, Vlasta, who was working as a secretary. The couple moved back to Prague, married and had two daughters, Miroslava and Iveta (who later Americanized her name to <a href="/web/20170609131421/http://www.ncsml.org/exhibits/yvette-kaiser-smith/">Yvette</a>). Karel began his career in theatre as a writer, but soon transitioned into the technical arts, working on sound, lighting, and set design. At Divadlo Na zábradlí he worked with Václav Havel and, while at D 34 (now known as Divadlo Archa), Karel met Josef Svoboda, a renowned architect and scenographer. In 1959, Svoboda invited Karel to join his Laterna Magika project, a non-verbal theatre which had enjoyed great international success the previous year at Expo ’58 in Brussels. Working as a theatre technician for Laterna Magika’s eastern touring company, Karel traveled extensively throughout the Eastern Bloc, visiting Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union.</p><p> </p><p>Karel says that the idea to leave Czechoslovakia had been germinating for a while, due to his treatment at university and his hope for his daughters to have a better life. But, he says, he was waiting for a ‘safe chance’ to move his family. In January 1968, he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, with the western touring company of Laterna Magika for HemisFair ’68. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Karel traveled back to Prague for a short visit, during which time he and his wife made a ‘quick decision’ that the family would leave the country. After he returned to the United States, Karel sent his wife an affidavit and she began securing visas and passports. In late December 1968, his wife and daughters traveled to England to stay with his sister for one month. They arrived in Dallas, Texas, on January 25, 1969. The family found a small apartment in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas and Karel found a job in construction. In 1971, he found employment at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel as a light and sound designer, while also working nights as a janitor. After 12 years, he became head electrician at the Hotel Anatole, also in Dallas. In 1999, Karel and his wife retired and moved back to Prague. Vlasta died in 2005 and Karel returned to the United States. He currently lives in Chicago with his daughter Yvette and her husband, Tim.</p>
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Katya Heller
<p>Katya Heller was born in Prague in 1960 to an American mother and Czech father. Her mother, Joy, had left the United States in 1947 to travel to Europe with hopes of going to the Soviet Union, but decided to stay in Prague. She then met Katya’s father, Jiří, while they were studying Russian at Charles University. Both of her parents held communist beliefs (her mother was denied membership in the Communist Party because she was American); however, Katya says that following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, they both lost their jobs and her father became disillusioned with the Party. Katya says she first began having thoughts of leaving the country when she was having difficulty getting accepted to the high school of her choice because of her parents’ backgrounds. She was admitted to Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty where she studied English and Spanish and enrolled in the school’s translating and interpreting program. While in school, Katya had several freelance interpreting jobs which she says put her in contact with the secret police who hoped that she would pass on information she gathered about the West. In 1985, Katya married her first husband, an American who was teaching in Prague at the time. The couple left Czechoslovakia in 1986 and went to Barcelona, as Katya’s husband had received a one-year fellowship. Their daughter was born the same year and, the following year, Katya and her family moved to the United States and settled in Seattle.</p><p> </p><p>In 1989, Katya was in Bratislava at the start of the Velvet Revolution. She returned to Prague where her brother was involved in the student leadership of the Revolution and told her about a job opening. Katya succeeded Rita Klímová (who left the position to became ambassador to the United States) as interpreter for the press office of the Civic Forum. She held that job until the first elections took place in June 1990 and then returned to the United States. Katya subsequently lived in Seattle where she held interpreting and translating jobs, and worked in several art galleries. In 1999 she moved to New York City and married her second husband, Doug Heller. Today, Katya is the director of the Heller Gallery, which showcases glass sculpture. She also serves on the board of directors of the Czech Center in New York.</p>
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Kveta Eakin
<p>Kveta Eakin was born in Karlovy Vary, in western Bohemia, in 1956. When she was 18 months old, however, she moved with her mother to her maternal grandparents’ home in Brno, Moravia. Her father, Arnošt, was a successful agricultural engineer, who subsequently moved to Cuba to work for the government there. When Kveta was eight, her mother (also called Květa) remarried. Kveta’s stepfather was Dr. Vladimír Šimůnek, an economist who became one of President Alexander Dubcek’s advisors during the Prague Spring in 1968. Dr Šimůnek had been teaching economics in Brno, but shortly after marrying Kveta’s mother gained a fellowship in Prague, and so the pair moved there, while Kveta herself remained with her grandparents. In 1969, Kveta’s mother and stepfather moved to the United States, when the latter was offered a position at Kent State University in Ohio. The pair defected and Kveta was, in her stepfather’s words, ‘kept hostage’ for six-and-a half years in Czechoslovakia. Following the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Kveta was reunified with her mother in Cleveland in February 1976. She says she was the second person released from the country as part of a pledge to reunify families torn apart by the Cold War.</p><p> </p><p>That year, Kveta started her studies at Kent State. She graduated in 1980 with a major in psychology. Ten years later, she returned to university to gain a masters degree in rehabilitation counseling, which is her current area of work. Kveta is now settled in the Cleveland area, where she is active in the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and the local Czech drama group, Včelka. She has one son, Paul.</p>
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