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.
