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!"

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.

New Transcripts Just In

Recording Voices & Documenting Memories is happy to welcome a new intern. For the past two months, Cecilia Greco has been producing transcripts of interviews with former Czech & Slovak political prisoners and their families. Watch the NCSML's oral history web pages over the weeks to come for the complete transcripts and, in the meantime, here is a taster of what to expect:

Jana Svehlova three weeks before her father's arrest

Jana Svehlova was interviewed in Washington, D.C. in 2010:

"My parents left Czechoslovakia in 1939. But they married in England – they met in England. My father was with the Royal Air Force – with the 311 Czechoslovak Squadron. And my mother managed to get to England as a domestic person. And her War duty was delivering milk to English homes. And all her life she complained about those dirty English women not washing those glass milk bottles properly."

So, both of your parents fled the Nazis?

"Yes, they fled the Nazis. And my father and mother met in Cardiff, because my mother went with her friends to an official Air Force Club in Cardiff. And she was still very sad because her boyfriend in Czechoslovakia told her he wouldn't marry her. But she was persuaded by her friends, and she went. And in walks a group of handsome Czechoslovak airmen. And one of them asked her to marry him – I mean, I'm sorry, to dance with him. And she said yes. And next, he asked her to lend him money for cigarettes. (Laughs) And next thing, they have a date. And then he asked her to marry him because he said, 'look, I'm going to get killed anyway. So why shouldn't a nice Czech girl get a good pension?' And so they married in May 1943. And I must admit, I was born December 1943."

So, when did you then return to Czechoslovakia?

"Well, my father couldn't wait to get back to Czechoslovakia. So in August 1945 – immediately after the War when they demobilized – he went back to Prague. And my mother did not want to return because she was from the Sudetenland, her first language was German, and she didn't have the best memories of Prague just before the War. So she wanted to stay in England, but my father wouldn't hear of it. So, first the families of people who fought with the Allies were flying back. But so many planes crashed that the Red Cross organized that the spouses - basically the wives and the children - would go by train and boat. So my mother and I then came by train to Czechoslovakia in 1945."

... Jana's father was arrested in December 1949, when she was 10 years old. Despite this, Jana says she still has good memories from childhood:

"I was never hungry. My mother told me, and I have lived with this – my mother complaining, not having money for example for coal. So, I know that one of the neighbors – we found out later that that particular neighbor was the one that was reporting on us to the Secret Police. But she was very nice to us. (Laughs) And she gave us money, or lent us money for coal. And also, when my mother was writing to the president and everybody else, you know, 'Let my husband out; he's been out there now five years; I think he's reeducated.' Because her first language was German, she was never sure about the Czech grammar. So this particular neighbor was also helping her with those letters. And I – after my mother died, she died when she was 92 in England – and I found she kept all the letters from my father from prison. All those 10 years, year-by-year. So I found those letters and it was kind of funny. Oh, and some of the letters she wrote to the president. And she also wrote a letter to the commandant of the labor camp, 'My husband has been there for seven years now; let him out. I'm sick, and my child needs a father.' And he wrote back, 'Your husband's behavior is not right. He is not reeducated and he plays cards.' Because sometimes when they were down in the mine, you know, the guards wouldn't go down there. So, somebody obviously must have said it that he played cards. (Laughs) My mother wrote back, 'Well, he was a gambler before he went to prison, and I guess the prison hasn't cured him yet.' (Laughs) So, they didn't let him out. Maybe because he was playing cards." (Laughs)

Visit http://www.ncsml.org/Content/Oral-Histories.aspx for more full-length transcripts over the months to come.

Women in the Workplace in Communist Czechoslovakia

Jana Svehlova at TESLA, late 1950s

In the second of a series of posts, Recording Voices & Documenting Memories continues to showcase the work of history students at Utah State University who used NCSML oral histories to write research papers for their Eastern Europe Since 1500 class.

For her paper, Rochelle Brockman chose the theme of Women in the Workplace in Communist Czechoslovakia:

“In the party-controlled magazines for women… they are instructed to be good workers and party members first...-- never themselves?” While the author of this statement was Slavenka Drakulić from the former Yugoslavia, this statement nevertheless accurately depicts the Western perception of communist femininity. Westerners typically consider the “de-feminized” women of formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe-- in this paper, specifically Czechoslovakia-- to be the brainwashed victims of Moscow: that communism stripped them of their femininity and thus their individualism. The simple question of whether or not some women might have gained satisfaction in their traditionally masculine employment is rarely posed. In interviews with women from the former Czechoslovakia who immigrated to the United States, the nostalgia for the jobs and job opportunities they had under communism versus the jobs and opportunities they found in America was almost palpable. The remainder of this paper will explore this nostalgia and its causes through the discussion of secondary analysis of Czechoslovak law and statistics, as well as interviews with the women themselves.

Officially, communism advocated gender equality. This ideal can be clearly seen in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1960 which asserted that “equal status of women should be secured by the development of facilities and services which will enable women to participate fully in the life of society.” At least superficially, this aim was in some ways accomplished. In 1954 only 54 percent of Eastern European women were employed. By 1970, this number had escalated to 85 percent. Female enrollment in secondary schools leapt by 114 percent between 1954 and 1965, while male enrollment increased by only 14 percent. While women’s employment rates sky rocketed during the first few decades of communist rule, did they truly want to work or enjoy it? Or are these statistics the simple result of legislation that required all adult citizens to work? For the answers to these questions we must turn to interviews with Czechoslovak women who were employed during communist rule.


Vera Plesek drives a forklift truck, Czechoslovakia, 1960s

Vera Plesek was born in 1949 in what is today the north eastern region of the Czech Republic. She began working at a road equipment factory when she was in the ninth grade. While there she learned how to paint cars and how to weld and bend metal. She then became a crane operator and fork lift driver when she was 18. When asked if she liked her job there, she enthusiastically replied “I loved it there. I used to run to work every day.” She expressed no sense that she felt deprived of a normal childhood or education by beginning to work so early. She went so far as say those nine years of Czech education were the academic equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. She referred to her education as being “very solid” before she began working at the factory. She then compared young people in Czechoslovakia to young people in the U.S. She said that Czech young people were more responsible, less sheltered, and did fewer drugs than their American counterparts. Whether or not these assertions were true is irrelevant, they simply illustrated that Plesek did not perceive life in America to be unequivocally better than life in communist Czechoslovakia. It should be clarified, however, that Plesek was nostalgic for life in Czechoslovakia before the Soviets invaded in 1968. She referred to her life as normal under Czechoslovakian communism. Though this normalcy did not extend through the post-1968 era of normalization, Plesek said she did not resist because she did not think it would change her circumstances.

She immigrated the following year, 1969, to the U.S. because of some legal trouble in Czechoslovakia. When she first arrived in America, the second-generation Czech family that sponsored her helped her get a job in a radio factory. This stint in a typically masculine American job did not last long, however. Plesek was fired just three weeks after she was hired. In the interview, which occurred nearly 40 years later, she still expressed shock that in America one could be fired so arbitrarily. She said there were nearly 2,500 workers in that factory and that she was the first one to be terminated despite the fact that she was a good worker. She then compared this experience to her memory of communist Czechoslovakia. She said that there, no one was fired but just demoted so that one was never unemployed. This difference may have been created in part because unemployment was illegal in Czechoslovakia, and there were penalties for being unemployed. This risk of penalization might have made managers more hesitant to fire hard working employees, even if it was not economical to keep them on the payroll. In a capitalist country like America, unemployment-- while inconvenient and often times tragic-- is not illegal. Therefore, employers might have been less reluctant to let workers go if it meant an increase in profit. However, to a woman like Plesek-- whose ability to stay in the U.S. was contingent on being employed-- this type of attitude may have been perceived as inhumane.

Plesek later attempted to get a job as a crane operator. When she told the employment officers in Iowa that she was trained as a crane operator in Czechoslovakia, they laughed at her. In a pre-Betty Friedan America, the idea of a woman working in such a masculine role would have seemed absurd. Plesek did eventually find employment, but now instead of working as welder or crane operator, she worked in a more acceptably domestic domain as a dishwasher in a hospital. While she worked as a dishwasher, Plesek was not satisfied with participating solely in the domestic activities 1960s America relegated her to. She continued to maintain some of her more masculine hobbies, like repairing cars. She was extremely proud of these hobbies and even said “I always did a man’s work and I loved it.”


Helena Fabry in Bethesda, MD, 2011

Another Czech immigrant, Helena Fabry, expressed a similar though less obvious sense of nostalgia for the job opportunities available for women in communist Czechoslovakia. Fabry was born in 1925 in north eastern Czechoslovakia. She was educated and studied English in school after the end of WWII. In the late 1940s she got a job as a reporter in Prague covering city life and art events. She said of this job “it was wonderful, I loved it. I was on top of the world” : a sentiment she never expressed about the jobs she held in America. Soon afterward she was made a regional reporter for a small provincial town. While there she began to write exposés on the unethical criminal justice system that existed under the communist government. For this criticism she was expelled from the journalistic society of Czechoslovakia, which like all other organizations was communist run. As was discussed above with Vera Plesek, Fabry was not fired from the newspaper but was demoted to doing errand work. It is important to point out that Fabry was not nostalgic for the working conditions communism created--she continued to berate communism, for as she called it “its abuse of power,” for the rest of the interview. She did, however, enjoy the more egalitarian opportunity communism created for an educated woman like herself to enter a traditionally male dominated field.

Her opportunities changed in 1950 when she and her husband immigrated to the United States. Shortly after their arrival, she and her husband got jobs-- she as a cook and he as chauffeur-- at the summer home of a friend of the former Czechoslovak ambassador to the U.S. While Fabry expressed nothing on camera but gratitude for the job she had, it would not take a large leap of the imagination to suggest she may have missed the intellectual rigor that her profession in communist Czechoslovakia provided her. Even after she and her husband found more permanent employment, Fabry continued to work traditionally feminine jobs while her husband--of similar educational and linguistic background-- became economically successful and attained an advanced professional position quickly. In 1951, her husband applied for a civilian job with the U.S. Army. Because of his linguistic background he was assigned to work in an off shore procurement unit in Germany. While her husband was handling matters of international trade, she became a typist -- although she too could speak German. After she and her husband returned to the United States in the late 1950s her husband began working for Sears and eventually became the chairman of its foreign buying department. During this time she worked as a librarian in a design factory and focused on raising their son, who was born in 1960. She said “he (her husband) worked very hard but he was very successful. America was very good to us.” It is interesting to note that while Fabry had a similar level of education and worked as hard as her husband, American tradition and custom allowed only her husband to become very successful professionally. Had she stayed in Czechoslovakia, she would have-- at least theoretically-- had similar opportunities to excel professionally so long as she did not engage in politically subversive activities.

America afforded women like Vera and Helena fewer professional options than Czechoslovakia, and some of the immigrants expressed nostalgia for their former opportunities. These facts, however, do not mean that communism was some sort of feminist paradise. The Czechoslovak Constitution of 1960 may have formally professed that the “equal status of women should be secured by the development of facilities and services which will enable women to participate fully in the life of society,” but this does not mean completely equal status was the reality. Traditional domestic roles were not abandoned in Czechoslovakia simply because communism became popular. In addition to their employment outside the home, women on average spent nearly six hours a day doing house work while “husbands refused to share in work regarded as undignified.” While women’s participation in the work force may have increased at an unprecedented rate, they still only held five percent of managerial positions and made 30 percent less than their male counterparts in 1970: a dismal amount of progress seeing that the governments that professed such commitment to equality had been in power for over two decades.