Recording Voices & Documenting Memories in Toronto, November 2011

This November, the NCSML was invited to Toronto to present Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. Never ones to pass up on a good recording opportunity, we met a number of Czechs and Slovaks who immigrated to Canada over the past 60+ years whilst we were in town. As ever, look to our web pages for excerpts from the interviews over the next couple of weeks. Here is a fraction of the interesting photos and other archival documents which our interviewees shared with us when we visited their homes:


Czech ball, Montreal - photo courtesy of George Heller

George Heller came to Canada with his parents shortly after the Communist coup in 1948. The family settled in Montreal. The photo above shows George’s parents (on the far right) at the city's yearly Czech & Slovak ball, which he says was the émigré community’s annual social highlight.


Photo of George Heller's father, Havlickuv Brod, 1948

Prior to leaving Czechoslovakia, George’s father was a baker. In this photo from 1948, George’s father is shown taking part in a parade in Havlickuv Brod representing the bakery he worked for at the time, named Rozvoj (meaning progress or development in Czech). Along the side of the truck are both Czech and Soviet flags and a caption which reads “sixty-nine wagons of bread baked in 1947 – 4,650,000 bakery items.”


George (in the blue coat on the right) with Queen Elizabeth II, 1994

When George was 18, he answered an advert posted by the Hudson’s Bay Company recruiting fur traders to work in Canada’s Northern Territories. He enjoyed tremendous success at this job and, after a number of promotions and some time spent in other firms, rose to the position of president and CEO of The Bay. He took some time off from this job to organize the 1994 Commonwealth Games, which were held in Vancouver. In the photo above, George is watching the Games’ opening ceremony with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.


Dagmar Benedik with fellow members of the swim team, Kladno

Dagmar Benedik left Czechoslovakia with her family in 1968. Prior to emigration, she attended junior and senior high school in Kladno, where her father was coach of the junior hockey team, and enjoyed swimming competitively for the city, as evidenced by the photo above, in which Dagmar can be seen on the top left.


Envelope containing correspondence from Dagmar's pen pal

Following her interview with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, Dagmar shared a number of interesting documents with the NCSML, including this envelope which she received from her pen pal in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Dagmar says that Czech and Slovak schoolchildren would often write to a peer in the Soviet Union as part of their Russian language training at this time. This particular letter came encased in an envelope commemorating February 23 - Soviet Army Day.


Milos Krajny upon arrival in Canada beside Professor Julius Axelrod (left)

Milos Krajny also came to Canada in 1968 to work in Quebec as a medical doctor. He subsequently moved to Toronto where he opened his own practice and, among other achievements, became the president of the Toronto Philharmonic. Dr. Krajny is extremely active in the Czech community in Toronto and organizes a series of classical music performances called Nocturnes in the City, about which more details can be found here.

Excerpts from all three of these interviews and more will be posted to www.ncsml.org over the weeks to come.