Leaving Czechoslovakia comes to Cleveland

 

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library's traveling oral history exhibit, Leaving Czechoslovakia, is currently on display at Cleveland's Bohemian National Hall. Click here for a list of opening times and directions.

On Sunday, July 28 Project Coordinator Rosie Johnston and the NCSML's Director of National Development Charity Tyler will be on hand to discuss the exhibit's creation, and the work that the NCSML has been doing more generally over the past couple of years - in Cedar Rapids and around the country.

The NCSML is excited about presenting Leaving Czechoslovakia in Cleveland, as so many of the materials used in the exhibit originally came from oral histories recorded in the city. The exhibit contains excerpts from interviews with Zdenka Necasek and Melania Rakytiak, and artifacts such as this theater program, which was shared with the NCSML by interviewee Kveta Eakin:

The presentation of Leaving Czechoslovakia will take place on Sunday, July 28 at 3:00pm at the Bohemian National Hall. For photos of the event, watch this space!

Related Reading #3: Skutečnost

A Lasting Impression: The Independent Periodical Skutečnost (Reality) was lent to the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library by Peter Demetz. It is a collection of articles which first appeared in the émigré journal Skutečnost, published in Geneva from 1948 until 1953. The anthology is edited by Czech historian Vilém Prečan.

In his interview with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, one of the journal’s founders, Peter Hruby, explained the idea behind the publication:



In this collection (published by the Československé dokumentační středisko in 2008), selected articles are presented thematically, with chapters dedicated to Czech-German relations, Czech exiles, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and democracy and totalitarianism. Contributors include Peter Hruby and Peter Demetz as well as prominent figures in the Czech émigré community such as Pavel Tigrid and Ferdinand Peroutka.

One of the articles which caught my eye in this anthology was titled Tří měsíce v Americe (or Three Months in America), written by Jan Tumlíř in 1952. The introduction to the article sets out his premise:

“Here are a few unrelated comments and nothing original. Excerpts from diaries and letters and interviews. When you spend so long preparing for America and you are here for such a short time, you cannot be certain whether you are really thinking something or merely remembering something you once read…”

The article continues with a few anecdotes from the author’s life in New Haven and his travels to Cleveland. It concludes:

“I have never thought so often about two things as I have in America: home and death. Home and death, where is the connection?

“If I had stayed there, I probably wouldn’t be able to think about anything other than freedom. Leaving Czechoslovakia was the only way for me not to lose my home, if home is the place you love.”

Skutečnost has a small epilogue in English by editor Vilém Prečan. Otherwise it is in Czech. It can be found for purchase at Kosmas.cz.

New Transcripts at the NCSML

Voucher for buying goods at Tuzex stores in Czechoslovakia

More oral histories have been transcribed as part of Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. Full transcripts are available to researchers upon request at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library.

In this excerpt from an interview with Dasa Kozakova, she remembers shopping - and the shortage of goods - in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s:

"There wasn’t toilet paper. So my father-in-law was forever sitting and cutting newspapers into little squares. Really! There just wasn’t paper... And, for example, onions - all of a sudden for four months there weren’t any onions. And it is difficult to cook Czech food without onions. Czech food has lots of sauces and their base is an onion.
 
"I would always pull up at a store with the kids in a pram and ask what was on sale. Then we would stand in the queue and buy as much of it as we could, because we gave it then to my parents and my mother-in-law too, so that everybody had. And that was it, quite simply - the constant struggle for ordinary things. Then, when I went to work (I worked at Albertov),  there was a little store, and I had to go there at noon to buy bread. Because if I went when I finished work at 3:30, there wasn’t any more. So, there were all of these nonsensical things. In the end, everyone had bread, but with such difficulty! 

"When the boys had just started at primary school, my son sat beside a greengrocer’s son. And the greengrocer’s son was always bringing in oranges or apples – these sorts of things – and my son never had them, because I wasn’t capable of finding them. I went into the grocery store and there were potatoes, maybe carrots. There just weren’t these sorts of things. And so I, even though I didn’t like it, after about half a year of my son saying ‘I want an orange too!’ I said ‘You can’t have one! Oranges are for Christmas!’ – because all of a sudden there were oranges then. Everyone could buy two kilos. They were Cuban, they were ugly – they were good, but they were ugly. They didn’t look good, but they were juicy. So I went to the greengrocer, the kid’s father, and asked him either to stop giving his son this fruit, or to give it to mine too!"

..."Meat was also impossible to find. There was always beef brisket. And if you were lucky there was shank or ribs. But we never saw sirloin. We never saw that sort of meat. You just couldn’t get it, not even in restaurants. I don’t know. You couldn’t find rump steak. Ham? I don’t know where that disappeared. Because again, all you could get was pork belly, you know. So belly and pork brisket you could get. And always on Monday the butcher’s was closed. And so for meat on Tuesday there were queues from first thing. My mother-in-law, she still came from that old school and she still cooked and so she always stood in these queues so as to buy fake tenderloin or something of the sort. So meat was also a big problem. Finding bacon? And ham? Not possible! For a normal person, that is, who didn’t have any connections…"

How were the stores back then? 

"Everybody went about with a string bag. This was a type of bag which looks quite modern – maybe not now but a couple of years ago this bag reappeared. So everyone had a string bag, and when someone by chance saw something available, they bought it!"

Recording Voices & Documenting Memories in Florida

Late this May, Recording Voices & Documenting Memories made its first trip to Florida. The NCSML recorded the stories of a number of Slovaks and Czechs who had settled in and around Sarasota and Miami in particular.

Emil and Elena Brlit in The Brlit Dental Lab

Emil at work in the Brlit Dental Lab

The first stop was Brlit Dental Lab to meet Emil and Elena Brlit. Emil left Czechoslovakia with his family in 1969, while Elena came to the United States more recently, in 1983. Following each of their interviews, they shared a number of old photographs with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories:

Elena dressed in local kroj as a child in Slovakia

Emil (fifth from left, front row) with the Sarasota Slovak Soccer Club, 1990s

In Miami, the NCSML spoke with Luba DeWitt, head of the local Czech-Slovak Cultural Club. Following her interview, she showed Recording Voices & Documenting Memories the Club’s North Miami home, where a Sunday lunch of goulash was being served:

Luba DeWitt in front of the Miami Czech-Slovak Cultural Club

Preparations for lunch at the Czech-Slovak Clutural Club, Miami

Finally, the NCSML met with Dr. Tomáš Gral, who moved to the United States age 39 in 1964. Dr. Gral shared his experiences of incarceration at Auschwitz and Gleiwitz during WWII, and his memories of studying at medical school in Bratislava immediately after the War.

Portrait of Dr. Tomáš Gral from 1945

Dr. Gral in his apartment, 2013

For clips from Dr. Gral’s and each of these other interviews, follow the NCSML’s oral history web pages over the months to come. 

Early Learning from Interviews with Post-1989 Immigrants

Jozef Bil in Pittsburgh, 1990s

Since 2011, the NCSML has been recording with newer Czech and Slovak immigrants who came to the United States following the Velvet Revolution in 1989. In doing so, the museum has gathered new types of information.

For a start, those who came after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia have provided us with eyewitness accounts of the Revolution. Responses to this have been particularly varied.

Irena Kovarova was a student at Charles University in Prague in November, 1989. She says she felt impelled to get involved in the protests which brought about the fall of the government: “What I really started feeling more and more, I felt embarrassed that I’m allowing these people to rule my life... And so that was sort of brewing, and when this November demonstration of students was going to take part, it was absolutely clear. I mean, we had to be there.” 

Pavlina Parks, meanwhile, was a few years younger and in eastern Moravia. She suggests that events took her somewhat by surprise: “I was in seventh grade and I remember going to Rožnov for my piano lesson... I remember there were a lot of people on the square… and I didn’t have quite an idea of what’s going on… There was a main speaker and I do not know who he was, what he was talking about… It was a very new experience for me; I was just there with a lot of new people around me and I could feel the big energy and the big vibe and the whole power of something happening, but I didn’t know what.”

“Then they were showing some stuff on TV and we were slowly explained to in school what’s happening, but we didn’t understand why the change is happening because we did not feel that we had a bad life up to now... Teachers started to explain to us that there is democracy in different countries and what a democracy is, and these words were empty to us. We didn’t know what to [think].”

Czechs and Slovaks who came to the United States following the Velvet Revolution often suggest they left for different reasons than those who came before. Many interviewees suggest that they were attracted to America by wanderlust, and so as to seek adventure. This was the case with Ludmila Sujanova, who came to the United States from Košice, Slovakia in 2003. She makes a direct link between the events of the Velvet Revolution and her ability to travel west:



… Others, meanwhile, came to the United States to make money. Many discuss their immigration in initially temporary terms (which is another difference between post-1989 immigrants and those who came before, and who sought political asylum). Stanislav Grezdo moved to New Orleans in 1999:



To date, the NCSML has recorded around 45 interviews with Czechs and Slovaks who came following the Velvet Revolution. This constitutes about one sixth of the interviews we have in our collections.

Related Reading #2: Prague Winter

To mark Secretary Madeleine Albright’s visit to the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library on May 17-18, Recording Voices & Documenting Memories suggests her most recent book, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War 1937-1948, as an interesting piece of reading related to the oral history project. 

Prague Winter tells the tale of Secretary Albright’s early childhood in Prague (and then in Great Britain during WWII), and of the more recent discovery of her family’s Jewish background.

Secretary Albright pours over her parents’ diaries and papers to learn more of their WWII experiences. She references correspondence sent to and received from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia throughout the War. She also conducts interviews with relatives and former neighbors as part of her research.

She does so to try and understand “Why we make the choices we do… What prompts one person to act boldly in a moment of crisis and a second to seek shelter in the crowd? Why do some people become stronger in the face of adversity while others quickly lose heart?”

Prague Winter provides a unique eyewitness account of WWII from a Czech émigré perspective. The book is meticulously researched and comments originally on the Czech history of the period.

Prague Winter is sold at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library’s store. For more information on purchasing the book, click here.

Leaving or Staying: Personal Stories of 20th-Century Czechs and Slovaks

The following text is the summary of a presentation made at the Bohemian National Hall in New York City on April 23, 2013: 

Since 2009, The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML) has been recording the stories of Czechs and Slovaks who settled in the United States throughout the course of the Cold War. Of the 282 interviews recorded to date, around one tenth have been with people who left during the normalization period. For the purposes of this blog post, normalization means the era following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and prior to the Velvet Revolution. It refers to the 1970s and 1980s, and the rule of Communist Party Leader Gustáv Husák in particular. There are, of course, many reasons why Czechs and Slovaks emigrated during this period. Marek Skolil explains his reasons for departure in the mid-1980s thus: “I realized that I want to leave the country – if I cannot study, I will leave.” Jan Kocvara, meanwhile, suggests that it was for his family’s sake that he decided to leave the country:

Among the older generation of NCSML interviewees, who emigrated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there are many dramatic stories of crossing the border into West Germany on foot, often with bullets whistling past as they ran. By the 1970s, to all accounts, the process of emigration seems to have been a lot more bureaucratic. Borders were almost hermetically sealed, and the way out of the country was often through bribing and/or tricking a functionary, or stealing a stamp or appropriate piece of letterhead. Jerry (born Jiří) Barta’s experience reflects this trend:

A favorite means of emigration during this time was through the organized coach tour. Interviewees discuss traveling to Yugoslavia and seeking asylum at a UN-run refugee camp in Belgrade. West Germany was another country in which Czech and Slovak tourists frequently claimed asylum. Tomas Pavlicek took a coach to Munich with his daughter in 1987:

In total, historians believe that around 13,000 Czechs and Slovaks settled in the United States during the normalization period. Following the Velvet Revolution, it is thought that thousands of them returned to today’s Czech and Slovak Republics.