Peter Demetz
<p>Peter Demetz was born in Prague in 1922. His mother, who was Jewish, was a seamstress and his father (of German ethnicity) worked in a theatre. When Peter was about five years old, he moved to Brno with his parents and lived there for ten years. While in Brno, Peter’s parents divorced and his mother remarried. Peter’s father, meanwhile, returned to Prague. With the signing of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Peter’s stepfather escaped to London and Peter and his mother moved back to Prague. In 1941, Peter’s mother was deported to Terezín where she died.</p><p> </p><p>Because Czech universities were closed during WWII, Peter says that he took private language lessons and read to keep up with his studies. In 1944, he was sent to a labor camp in Silesia. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and transported back to Prague where he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of his association with a resistance group. He was then sent to a camp near the German border where he stayed until the end of the War. Upon his return to Prague, Peter began studying philosophy and comparative religion at Charles University, but switched to English and German literature. He spent one semester in Zurich in 1946 and one semester in London the following year. He received his doctorate in 1948 and began lecturing at Charles University. Peter recalls joining the student march to Prague Castle to protest the Communist government in February 1948.</p><p> </p><p>In 1949, Peter and his then-girlfriend Hana (whom he later married) left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Germany. While at a refugee camp in Munich, Peter and Hana were recruited to work at a school in Bad Aibling, a children’s refugee camp. They stayed there for one year and Peter says it was an enjoyable time, as they made frequent weekend trips to Munich and Salzburg. After being offered jobs at Radio Free Europe, the couple moved back to Munich. Peter worked as the editor of cultural features and also contributed to the exile journal Skutečnost.</p><p> </p><p>Peter and Hana received visas for the United States and, in 1952, arrived in New York City. Peter says that his main reason for leaving Germany and moving to the United States was to continue his studies and start a career in academia. He took courses at Columbia University and received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. He joined the faculty at Yale immediately after graduating and holds the post of Sterling Professor Emeritus for Germanic language and literature. Peter has also edited and authored many publications on subjects ranging from German literature to the history of Prague. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his second wife.</p>
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Paul Burik
<p>Paul Burik was born in the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice in 1954. His father, Nicholas, was a doctor, while his mother, Vlasta, worked as a pharmacist. When Paul was still a toddler, the family moved to Prešov, in eastern Slovakia, which was where Paul’s father (who was ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn) had grown up. After nearly six years, however, the family moved back to Bohemia, first to Prčice and then Sedlčany, where Paul’s father worked as the chief surgeon in the local hospital. When Paul was still a teenager, his mother died of a terminal disease. His father worked long hours so Paul says he grew up fairly independently. In 1967 his father traveled to the United States to visit his brother (Paul’s uncle Alex) who had immigrated to Cleveland shortly after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Paul says his father spoke with a number of American doctors during his visit to the States, but decided to return to Czechoslovakia because, at the time, ‘things were good there.’ Following the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, however, Paul’s father suggested to him that the pair resettle in America. Paul says he looked forward to the ‘adventure’ of emigrating and agreed with his father’s suggestion.</p><p> </p><p>The pair left Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 and spent almost three months in Vienna, Austria, where Paul attended English classes at the Berlitz language school. They lived in an apartment belonging to an Austrian physician who wanted to help Czech and Slovak doctors displaced by the invasion. Paul arrived in Cleveland on November 8, 1968 and says he was shocked at the size of the city, worrying in particular that it would prove ‘impossible to find his school’ in a town so large. He and his father spent their first couple of months living with Paul’s uncle Alex in Lakewood, Ohio, where Paul attended Harding Middle School. When Paul’s father secured a medical internship, the pair moved into an apartment provided by the hospital, where Paul says he spent a couple of ‘good, but challenging years’ as his father was so busy retraining as a doctor.</p><p> </p><p>In 1972, Paul enrolled at Kent State University where he studied architecture. He spent a term in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1977. His first job was at Robert P. Madison International, an architecture firm in Cleveland. In 1985, he became an architect for the City of Cleveland. He retired in 2010. Paul says he is particularly proud to have worked on Cleveland’s Westside Market and Hopkins Airport, as well as City Hall and the municipality’s numerous recreation centers. Paul says that when he moved to Cleveland, his uncle Alex introduced him to local Rusyn and Ukrainian groups. Over time, however, he says he has become more involved in the local Czech community, joining the Czech American Committee of Greater Cleveland (Krajanský výbor) and the local chapter of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is currently president of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Garden. Today, Paul lives in Avon, Ohio, with his wife Fran.</p>
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Paul Brunovsky
<p>Paul Brunovsky was born in the spa town of Piešt’any, in western Slovakia, in September 1930. His father Štefan was a builder, while his mother Katarína stayed at home raising Paul and his five siblings. Paul says Piešt’any was ‘peaceful’ during the War; so much so that a large number of German children were sent there to escape the bombings of major German cities. Paul says relations were strained between the local Slovak kids and their visiting German peers. After the War, Paul finished his schooling in Piešt’any and started an apprenticeship in the glassworks of Gustáv Gelinger. There Paul trained to become a glass beveler. At this time, Paul became very involved in the Slovak Catholic youth movement Orel. When this group was outlawed by the Communists in 1948, Paul and fellow members of the local chapter renamed themselves Divadelný krúžok Jána Hollého [The Ján Hollý Dramatic Circle]. Paul says this theatre group had a good deal of success, with several members being invited to become professional actors in the nearby town of Nitra. With pressure growing on the group to conform or dissolve, and Paul’s place of work in line for nationalization, Paul decided to leave the country. He left with a friend, Jozef Strechaj, in October 1949.</p><p> </p><p>The pair crossed the border into Germany near the Bohemian town of Poběžovice. Paul spent the next 18 months in nearly a dozen different refugee camps in Western Germany before signing up to go to Canada. Paul’s first job in Canada was as a lumberjack, in Batchawana Ontario, for the Algoma Timberlakes Corporation. After one year, Paul moved to Toronto, where he became involved in the Slovak community at the city’s St. Cyril & Methodius Church. In 1959, Paul was granted an American visa and decided to settle in Cleveland, where his friend Jozef Strechaj was already living. He started to work as a printer at the local Czech paper Nový Svět, but left the publication after a short time to take a job at the Cleveland Press, where he subsequently worked for over 20 years. Paul married a third-generation Slovak-American, Kathleen, and had four children, two of whom have become priests with different orders in the Cleveland area. Paul is a member of several Slovak organizations in Cleveland, such as the First Catholic Slovak Union, the Cleveland Slovak Dramatic Club and the Zemplín Club. In 1971, he founded the city’s annual Slovak Festival which continues to this day.</p>
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Oliver Gunovsky
<p>Oliver Gunovsky was born in Trenčín, western Slovakia, in 1944. When he was four years old his father, Peter, left the country under the threat of arrest for his involvement in the black market, and his mother, Maria, felt pressure to move as well. Oliver lived with his grandparents, Gregor and Maria Malec, for a number of years in Trenčianske Teplice before joining his mother in Liptovský Hrádok where she was working in the restaurant industry. He remembers enjoying elementary school where he participated in sports, plays, and poetry readings and had a lot of friends. Because of his father’s illegal exit from the country, Oliver says his choice of secondary school was limited. He applied to three schools, including a military school, and was rejected from all of them. He was given a place in an engineering school in Bánovce nad Bebravou, but transferred to Ružomberok after one year to be closer to his mother. During secondary school, Oliver played many sports, and he especially excelled at cross-country skiing. Even though he had no contact with his father and, at this point, did not know his whereabouts, Oliver says he was not allowed to compete internationally for fear that he would try to leave as well.</p><p> </p><p>Oliver graduated from engineering school in 1962 and worked for one year in a machinery factory before joining the army. It was at this time that he first got in contact with his father and discovered he was living in England. When he left the army in 1965, Oliver attempted to obtain a visa to visit his father, but says he was repeatedly denied. In the spring of 1968, he was issued a travel visa and left for England on August 13. Upon hearing about the Warsaw Pact invasion eight days later, Oliver decided to stay in England. His wife, whom he had married only a few months earlier, was able to join him in the fall. Oliver worked for his father, who owned a butcher shop, grocery store, and restaurant. After a short time, Oliver then found a job at a hotel. He and his wife applied for immigrant visas to several countries and were granted permission to move to Canada. They settled in Kitchener, Ontario, with their young son, also called Oliver, in 1970. In Kitchener, Oliver worked his way up the restaurant business and eventually owned the Metro Tavern, which he says was known as a schnitzel house, but also served other Central European fare, and became a gathering place for Slovaks in the area.</p><p> </p><p>In 1982, Oliver and his family moved to Florida where he hoped to open another restaurant. When that plan fell through, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and opened a fast food schnitzel restaurant, which he sold after one year. After the Velvet Revolution, he was a founder of the American Czechoslovak Society (later the American Czech and Slovak Association), which assisted young Czechs and Slovaks who were visiting the United States to learn about western businesses, politics, and communities. In 1991, Oliver went back to Slovakia for the first time since leaving, and he continues to visit his mother there regularly. Today, Oliver lives in Washington, D.C.</p><p> </p>
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Miroslav Chybik
<p>Miroslav Chybik was born in Jalubí, Moravia, in 1935. His mother Josefa and father Miroslav met in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1920s, but had returned to Europe to care for their ailing parents in 1930. Miroslav’s father retained his American citizenship and attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the whole family back to the United States in 1937. Instead, the Chybíks spent WWII at their farm in Jalubí, parts of which were commandeered by Nazi troops who set up a vehicle maintenance shop in one of their barns, says Miroslav.</p><p> </p><p>In 1948, Miroslav’s older sister Ester gained U.S. citizenship, on grounds that her father had been considered an American at the time of her birth. She came to America in December 1949 and encouraged her brother to do likewise. Miroslav heeded her advice, applied for U.S. citizenship, and left Czechoslovakia on May 25, 1950. He arrived in New York two weeks later, aged 15, and traveled straight to Chicago, where he was met by his sister who had already found a job for him in a sheet metal factory. When work dried up towards the winter of that year, Miroslav took a job with the Czech newspaper Svornost. He worked there for one year and a half until he decided to become a carpenter. Miroslav’s family friend, whom his father had worked with in Chicago, helped him enroll in an apprenticeship program and join the carpenters’ union. Two nights a week, Miroslav attended Morton High School East to learn English and complete his education.</p><p> </p><p>In 1957, Miroslav decided to move to California to gain more professional experience. He stayed there until he was drafted into the US Army in 1958. After completing basic training at Fort Ord, Miroslav returned to the Chicagoland Area, where he has lived ever since. In 1963, he married his wife, Ingrid Chybik, whom he met at a local Czech folk dance group. Miroslav and Ingrid have three children who all speak ‘some Czech.’ An active member of the United Moravian Societies, Miroslav also mentions his involvement with CSA Fraternal Life and, up until recently, the patriotic Czech athletic association Orel in Exile. Today, Miroslav lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with Ingrid.</p><p> </p>
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Milan Hauner
<p>Milan Hauner was born in 1940 in Gotha, Germany. His Czech father, Vilém, married his German mother, Gertrud, when she was threatened with sterilization (because of a handicap) by the Nazi government under the Nuremberg Laws. During WWII, Milan’s grandfather and uncle were arrested and executed on charges of anti-Nazi activities. Milan moved to Prague with his parents when he was just over one year old and grew up there. Vilém was a renowned book binder and Gertrud worked as a seamstress. Both Milan’s parents were deaf and, in addition to speaking German and Czech, he and his younger brother Roland learned sign language. From an early age, Milan loved history and says he had access to many older books, including some that were eventually banned by the Communist government. He attended elementary school and <em>gymnázium</em> in Prague, and began studying history and literature at Charles University in 1957. Upon graduation, Milan was conscripted into the Czechoslovak Army and served for two years. He remembers spending most of his second year in the army in prison as punishment for ‘breaches of discipline’ and his outspoken ways.</p><p> </p><p>After leaving the army, Milan returned to Charles University for postgraduate work in history and earned his doctorate. He also spent this time applying for visas to study abroad. In 1966, he was accepted to a one year study program in France, and, after some friends who were Communist Party members vouched for him, was given a visa. Milan returned from France in the fall of 1967, and the next year was able to secure a travel visa to the United Kingdom. He left Czechoslovakia in the first week of August in 1968 with a plan to work for one month and then travel the British Isles for another four weeks. Milan was picking fruit on a farm in East Anglia when he heard of the Warsaw Pact invasion on August 21; he decided to stay in Britain and moved to London shortly thereafter. In London, he joined an organization that assisted Czechoslovak refugees and soon began studying at Cambridge where he received his doctorate in English. Milan married his wife, Magdalena, also a scholar, and he built a career in academia. In 1980, Magdalena received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Subsequently, Milan taught and held research positions at several universities and institutions in the United States.</p><p> </p><p>Milan and Magdalena have three children who all speak Czech. He says he felt ‘exhilarated’ upon hearing about the Velvet Revolution, and has returned to Prague since then to teach. Today, Milan is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his areas of expertise include Czech and military history. In 2011, Milan was awarded a stipend to conduct research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.</p>
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Martin Holub
<p>Martin Holub was born in Prague in 1938. His father, Ján, was a lawyer who, after the Communist coup in 1948, was not allowed to continue practicing and sent to work at a cement factory. He later worked in a photography lab and then as a librarian at the Architectural Institute in Prague. His mother, Miloslava, has also studied law and went on to become a rather well-known art historian. During WWII, Martin spent a lot of time in Moravia where his mother’s parents lived. He says that rather than feeling afraid during the War, he recalls events such as air raids as ‘fun’ due to the excitement.</p><p> </p><p>In 1950, Martin’s mother was arrested on charges that she helped a relative illegally cross the border. After 18 months in prison, she was put on trial and released of all charges. While she was in prison, Martin was sent to a boarding school in Poděbrady, where he was a classmate of Václav Havel. Martin returned to Prague, graduated from high school and studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague). He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and worked for a state-owned building contractor.</p><p> </p><p>Martin says that since graduating from university he had been hoping to travel to the West, applying for work abroad. Although he was frequently offered opportunities (particularly in Great Britain), he was repeatedly denied a visa. In 1967, Martin had applied for and been offered a job with the Greater London Council. To his surprise, he was given a visa and he left Czechoslovakia in August 1967. Although Martin planned to return to Prague after one year, he was still in London when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and decided to stay in the West. In January 1970, Martin took a job with an architecture firm in New York City and moved to the United States. He settled in Manhattan and opened his own private firm in 1971.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Martin first returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and then again following the fall of communism. With a friend living in Prague, he opened a branch of his company there and continued to visit his hometown yearly. Initially reluctant to seek out his fellow émigrés, in recent years Martin has become active in the Czechoslovak community in New York, including assisting in the renovation of the Bohemian National Hall. Today, Martin continues his architecture practice and lives in Manhattan.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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Marie Cada
<p>Marie Cada was born in the small village of Komorovice, southeastern Bohemia, in 1919. She became an orphan at a young age and spent her early teenage years looking after the family farm with her brother Václav. Marie went to school in nearby Humpolec and then trained to become a teacher at a religious college in Kutná Hora. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1948, she was working at a three-teacher school in Petrohrad, near Prague. Her boss, the school’s principal, had strong anti-communist views. He was let go and Marie was asked whether she would take over his position. Her fiancée, Václav Cada, discouraged her from working for the communists and urged her to escape with him. The pair left Czechoslovakia in March, 1948. They were married in Dieburg refugee camp in Germany in the spring of that year.</p><p> </p><p>Marie and Václav Cada spent three-and-a-half years in Sweden before arriving in Chicago in 1952. They became American citizens in 1958. Václav’s work brought the couple to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1960s. The Cadas had three children. Prior to her passing in July 2012, Marie was an active member of several Czech cultural groups in Iowa, including the Cedar Rapids Czech Heritage Singers. Her granddaughter was crowned Miss Czech-Slovak Minnesota in 2009.</p><p> </p>
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Madeleine Albright
<p>Madeleine Albright was born in the Prague district of Smíchov in 1937. Shortly after her birth, she traveled to Belgrade with her mother, Anna, to join her father, Josef, who worked at the Czechoslovak Embassy in the Yugoslav capital. With the outbreak of WWII, the Körbel family traveled to Britain, where they settled first with relatives in Berkhamsted before moving to the London district of Notting Hill Gate. It was here that Madeleine experienced the Blitz. Madeleine’s father began work for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, serving as both the private secretary to Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and the head of the Czechoslovak service of the BBC.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine remembers her schooling in the United Kingdom during WWII, as well as a starring role she played in a Red Cross film about refugee children (in return for a stuffed rabbit). She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in 1945 and spent several months living in Prague on Hradčanské náměstí before her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. Over the two years that followed, Madeleine says she led a “pretty constrained life” at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade, as her father did not want her to attend school with communists and so she was taught at home by a governess. In 1948, Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland in order to learn French.</p><p> </p><p>Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Madeleine’s father was appointed to a UN commission on Kashmir. As a result of this appointment, the family traveled to the United States to live. In 1949, following the coup, the family sought asylum in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where Madeleine’s father took a teaching position at the University of Denver. Madeleine attended Kent Denver School and then Wellesley College for her undergraduate degree. She subsequently attended Columbia University in New York City, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the role of the media in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.</p><p> </p><p>Madeleine became involved in politics as a campaigner for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, and then as a member of his staff. She worked for the Carter administration under Zbigniew Brzezinski and then as the head of the National Democratic Institute. In 1993, she became the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1997, she was appointed Secretary of State, making her the most powerful woman in the history of U.S. government until then.</p><p> </p><p>Today, Madeleine Albright teaches the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including <em>Madame Secretary: A Memoir</em> and, most recently, <em>Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War</em>, which reflects upon her own Czechoslovak background. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.</p>
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Ludvik Barta
<p><img class="wp-image-2516 size-full alignleft" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815im_/http://ncsml.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ludvik-barta-SQ.png" alt="" width="240" height="240" /></p><p>Ludvik Barta was born in the town of Liberec, northern Bohemia, in May 1945. His mother, Anna (maiden name Biedermann), was a Sudeten German, while his father, Ludvík, was a Czech who narrowly escaped execution after working for the Nazis as a translator during WWII. Ludvik’s father became a member of the Communist Party in 1936, but changed his views completely in the early 1950s in light of the high-profile political trials taking place at the time. Shortly before his father’s death, when Ludvik was 12, he says his father urged him never to join the Communist Party. Later on in life, Ludvik followed this advice.</p><p> </p><p>When Ludvik was 17, he went to the local technical school to train to be a bricklayer. After two years he put his studies on hold to do his military service. Just before leaving for military training in Turnov, Ludvik married his wife Lenka in June 1964. The couple soon had a daughter, also named Lenka. Upon return from military service, Ludvik became a successful builder, and constructed the family’s own apartment. In August 1968, his wife Lenka finally had a chance to visit her father – who had left Czechoslovakia in 1948 – in his new home in Cleveland. When Lenka returned home, shortly after the Soviet-led invasion, the family decided to move to the United States. However, while arrangements were being made, the Czechoslovak government changed its passport requirements, which nullified the family’s existing travel documents. It subsequently took Ludvik and his wife 11 years to come to the United States. When they did, they had to leave their daughter behind. Two years later, having established residency in the United States, Ludvik and Lenka petitioned the Czechoslovak government to allow their daughter to come to America. The family was reunited in 1981.</p><p> </p><p>Today, the Bartas still live in the Cleveland area and are owners of ‘Hubcap Heaven’ – an emporium of wheel covers for automobiles.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170609104815/http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=117360&catid=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A link to Ludvik’s star appearance on WKYC’s program ‘What Works’</a></p>
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