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The Czechoslovak Talks is a project that embraces the life stories of Czechoslovaks around the world – the stories of the personal ups and downs, the opportunities and obstacles, and especially the life experiences that we would like to preserve for future generations.

 

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It surprised me how easily I decided to leave Czechoslovakia. It first occurred to me shortly after

I am the oldest son of Miroslav Hruška and Marta Hruška (nee Krobathova). I am not a refugee from Czechoslovakia

I was born on April 25, 1949, in Havlíčkův Brod. My father was a doctor, mother a housewife, later

I was born in Vienna in 1923, but my family lived moved to Prague when I was less than three years old

How was my journey from the hometown of Pačlavice to South America in 1929: It started on January 20

My name is Peter Seligman and I was born in 1944. My father Richard Seligmann escaped from Czechoslovakia

I was born on May 7, 1943 in Prague – Nusle where the end of war and the liberation reached us – me and

Ten years after the failure of the Prague Spring and the onset of "normalization", after ten years of control, spying

I come from Martinkovice near Broumov. I left Czechoslovakia as a nineteen-year-old in October 1949

I have lived in Tahiti with my wife Anna since 1925. I held various administrative positions, and I did some business, but in the end

My name is Dana Jones (born Dana Daczicky z Heslova). I was born in Prague in 1945, at the very end of World War Two.

Father said we were going into the exile. He said he was wrong when, two years before, he turned down the chance to emigrate with us to the United States

"From the very start, the problem I had in the communistic Czechoslovakia was that my parents encouraged us to be honest and truthful. We wouldn’t be deterred, even when they fired my father from the police force and he could only work as an unqualified labourer after

"The communist regime seemed to be at the height of its power when I graduated from the Charles University’s Faculty of Medicine in 1961. The path to my graduation was by no means a straight line."

"I was born near the small village of Mlynske Struhadlo in southern Bohemia on April 13, 1937, as the youngest of 3 sons in a family of millers. Flosman´s Mill had been in the family for generations and it was the life blood of the surrounding villages

"My grandfather Jan — or Juan, as he his known locally — Osyčka came from Moravia but life brought him all the way to Argentina. He was there when the Czechoslovak agricultural colony was established."

"My father founded the automobile factory Aero and later also took an interest in aviation. I decided to follow in his footsteps

"I was young back then and I didn’t see the appeal of staying in one city for too long. I had an adventurous spirit; I wanted to see the world

"I was born in the spring of 1936 in Ashiya, Japan as the only son of a Czechoslovak diplomat, Jan Fierlinger. As the war was drawing near, my father was ordered to return to Czechoslovakia."

"About a week before the end of the war, in May 1945, I became a partisan. We ambushed a Sokol gymnasium in Nový Bydžov, where the Germans kept their weapons

"After I completed military training, I got a job at the Ministry of Finance; they sent me to Cheb, since I knew the German language

"One day I was offered to participate in an audition for a cabaret dancer at Alhambra. It was one of those really strange auditions, but I was chosen. However, I only stayed there for a short time."

"Growing up, it did not even cross my mind that I would witness so much sorrow and live through the Terezin concentration camp. If you wanted to survive in the ghetto, you had to suppress your feelings and work very hard."

“Our most beautiful and earliest memories are of playing games together in the garden with stones and paths of yellow sand. After the war, everything started to change, and as father inferred, not in a positive direction.”

“My name is Peter Messner, and this German name has helped me several times, even though I am Jewish. Before the war, we lived in Czechoslovakia, and when Hitler came to power in Germany, my foresighted father decided to emigrate.”

“The Nazis shot my husband in Terezín right in front of my eyes. Then they transported the rest of the family to Auschwitz. In the end, my sister and I were the only ones to survive the hell of the concentration camp.”