Helena Majerová; photo by Martin Bury.

She’s just 4’9,’’ but Helena’s iron will and spunky personality makes her anything but small. She was born in the village Brehy, in Central Slovakia, on March 17th, 1928, just ten years before Hitler divided Czechoslovakia into the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the puppet-state of Slovakia. With the exception of a brief relocation during World War II, she has lived in the village her entire life. In fact, she has only ever resided in three houses. While severe osteoporosis in her hips has slowed her down considerably, it has by no means stopped her; Helena even continues to wear high heels. When she is unoccupied she backs herself into a corner with her crutches and scans the room until she can once again become useful, or eases herself into a chair and subconsciously proceeds to massage her gnarled arthritic hands, finger the prongs of a fork, or ever-so-delicately trace the pattern on the tablecloth. She simply can’t be idle.

Helena comes from a generation in which people had to “make a living” with their own sweat and manual labor, and she’s got the hands to prove it. Leathery and sun-spotted, they bulge with thick, knotted knuckles and her thumbs and fingers are permanently callused. They are an autobiography in themselves. With these hands Helena has sold pottery around Slovakia out of the back of a wagon, tended to horses and other animals, and kept gardens that fed a family year round, typically yielding peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, plenty of potatoes, pears, apples, plums, grapes, wheat, and more. She has stuffed countless pillows and blankets with down, woven beautiful carpets and rugs which still line the floors of her family’s home today, and scoured every inch of surface in homes and schools on her hands and knees. She has patiently kneaded, rolled, and prepared countless loaves of bread, batches of Christmas koláče and bountiful bowls of bryndzové halušky. For Helena, “making a living” literally means creating these life necessities, not performing abstract tasks and earning a wage to pay for them.

“Now people don’t know how to do anything,” says Helena after relaying the list of chores that once comprised her life. “They just buy everything,” she adds as she shakes her head.

Throughout our interviews Helena repeatedly remarked that while growing up no one in Brehy was rich, they all got by. They produced all their own goods, including food. That probably explains the Slovak propensity to fixate on food and obsess over whether guests or family members are sufficiently fed. Yet in an age of not only supermarkets but also hypermarkets, people no longer want for food. The conditions Helena remembers from before this current age of plenty might conjure a picture of an austere life, or just one of absolutely no excess or frivolity. It was rough, but it was rich.

“Takto to bolo,” (“that’s how it was”) says Helena with a shrug and a nod of confirmation.

Takto To Bolo (How It Was)

Helena is an only child, though she was preceded by one sister who lived less than a year and died before Helena was even born. Infant mortality was common; as Helena says, “the healthcare wasn’t that good.” Aside from the lack of neonatal units, large families were not prevalent because it just wasn’t possible to produce enough resources to feed and clothe many family members. Therefore, ever since she was a little girl Helena helped her parents put bread on the table by performing a diverse set of chores and jobs including but not limited to the tasks mentioned before.

She is a Jill of many trades, well-versed in the arts of staying alive. But her area of expertise is the kitchen. All her life Helena has been a skilled cook, gratifying the bellies of her family members with delicious Christmas koláče (cakes), homemade bread, noodles for polievka (soups), and of course the token traditional Slovak dish, bryndzové halušky. It’s a hearty staple for Slovaks made from the boiled batter of flour, potato, egg and water, then slathered in bryndza cheese. With a consistency like that of gnocchi, the creamy white bryndza cheese reminds most Americans of macaroni and cheese.

She has also offered her culinary services to others. While families were largely self-sufficient, the whole community would often pitch in to help each other out for events like weddings. There were no catering fees and Helena did not even barter another service or good in exchange for her own cooking. The family of the bride and bridegroom provided the ingredients or foodstuff, and Helena with some of her fellow village women would prepare the banquet feast.

Instead of keeping a strict “nine-to-five” (or even “five-to-nine” as I’ve heard people recently comment on absurd working hours), Helena’s schedule was more like “five-to-whenever our work for the day is done.” That could mean a quick morning out in the field or the forest to fell wood, then being home for a good lunch and an afternoon of leisure; or it could mean being out and tending crops or animals well past sunset. The season or time of year factored into the equation, as did the success or failure of the year’s crops, how many or what kind of animals the family had, or any number of other variables. While the objective and tasks remained largely the same, no two days were identical. People who work outside of the controlled atmosphere of an office or establishment know that that a clean-cut “schedule” does not exist, and that just like the flow from one season to the next, the load and rhythm of work is anything but static.

Helena Majerová (left) participating in paracky — stuffing pillows and blankets with down; photo courtesy of Majer and Bury families.

In order to pass the time while working Helena and her fellow villagers had a broad repertoire of songs to sing. Returning from long arduous days, Helena recalls singing a song to the sun. The direct address calls on the big ball of light in the sky to set a little faster, appealing to its conscience by saying that if it knew how hard it was to labor away, it would hurry up and go down more quickly. As she sings me the cathartic, simple melody I imagine the tune keeping time for the villagers as they plodded along carrying tools or leading animals back to their modest homes after a long day of work—one foot in front of the other, back and forth, back and forth, just keep walking. As she hits the repetitive deep notes of the refrain I hear and feel a heavy tiredness even though she is speaking a language I do not fully understand.

Waiting Out World War II

World War II disrupted the regular rhythm of life when Brehy, neighboring Nova Bana, and the surrounding villages became occupied by floods of both Russian and German soldiers. These military men routinely pillaged the towns and deprived the locals of the few resources they had such as food, supplies, tools, or animals. If they demanded goods, there was little a person could do but acquiesce, no matter how reluctantly.

Helena recalls how on one such occasion German soldiers approached the Maruška cabin and, with threats of death for noncompliance, demanded their horse. The animal was handed over with little to no protest. Yet, as her dejected father returned to the house to retrieve the reins, a feisty seventeen year-old Helena boldly yelled in Slovak, “Don’t give him the reins, he didn’t ask for them.” The soldier must have been Slovak or understood the language because he then jammed a gun at her chest and angrily barked something at her in German. It seems odd, even unbelievable, that today Helena sits in a modern house with heated floors and a bottle of Coca-Cola behind her, and taps on the same chest that years ago was held at gun-point in the midst of poverty and war. I wonder if exerting pressure on that particular part of her body gives her an odd physical sense of déjà vu, or if was so long ago and the world is so different now that it all feels like a movie or a dream.

In January of 1945, Russian and German soldiers fought in the village itself, and the only survivor from either side was a single German soldier. In order to stay alive he had feigned death and buried himself under the corpses of his fallen comrades. After the smoke cleared he escaped back to headquarters where he reported the battle to his higher-ups, though according to Helena he did make it a point to say that the Russian military and not the citizens of Brehy were the culprits. Regardless of responsibility, the German commanders were angry and wanted to raze the whole village, so the citizens were all evacuated to Hliník nad Hronom where they remained for three months. Despite my questions Helena did not elaborate much on what life there was like, possibly because she viewed it almost as a break, a timeout from reality. Brehy was her home, Brehy was where she lived and worked and existed.

Sending one or two family members to work abroad for months or years at a time was common in Slovakia ever since the 1880’s. Be it from poor agricultural conditions, slow modernization, war, or a blatant lack of resources, adverse living conditions were nothing new. There is even an old end-times joke about Brehy which multiple aged residents, including Helena, have told me. The joke asks, “When will the last days be?” and the answer, that day that’s never really going to come is, “when everyone from Brehy is home,” (i.e. not working abroad).

With that dark, though remarkably still intact, sense of humor, the Slovaks had gotten pretty comfortable with relocating individuals, sending solitary members out into the unknown to seek out more forgiving living conditions. But relocating entire families, and even worse entire towns, wasn’t simple. Families lived in villages and homes for generations. Their fields and land were their livelihood and means of survival; they couldn’t simply be converted into cash and wired to a far and distant land. There was no uprooting and “starting over” somewhere else, unless it was for keeps. That is why despite the violence and plundering of the soldiers, the Slovaks who had not decided to emigrate just had to do what they had always done, gird their loins and bear it. What else were they supposed to do?

Built to Last: The Reality of Romance

Upon returning to Brehy, Helena started dating fellow Brehy native, Ján Majer. As is common in most small villages the pair already knew each other from before the war, but were not closely acquainted. Jan, like many Slovak young men, had been conscripted to fight for the German army. However, despite where his political allegiance was supposed to lie, Jan actually did a lot more evading than aiding the German war effort. He was even arrested for deserting a few times, such as when he was caught in the town Žarnovica. Somehow he always managed to weasel his way out of custody and run. His eventual homecoming to Brehy in early May 1945 would have been happy, except that his mother had died just a month earlier. Since he had been on the run, there was no way to contact him.

Helena’s two year courtship with Ján was anything but wildly passionate. Even the proposal was bereft of any vestige of romance or flair — all the creativity her boyfriend at the time could muster was to ask, almost as an after though, “so, you want to get married?” Helena almost didn’t even remember him popping the question — it’s such a silly triviality to her. After being together for about two years, she says, getting married is just what people did back then. I pried for details about the courtship — what did you do together, whose house did you spend time at more regularly, did you go for little walks in the fields, and did he bring you homemade presents or fresh picked wildflowers? I was calling on anything even remotely pastoral I had ever read or seen, and a little bit of my own imagination and creativity, to try to paint a picture of this young love budding in the hills of the Slovak Country side out of the ashes of World War II.

“No,” she replies, after no deliberation, “we just got married. We were married for 56 years and we never bought each other presents. Now people buy each other all kinds of presents, but then get divorced after a year!”

While her dating experience may have been less then memorable, it is apparent from the onset of the story she remembers her wedding like yesterday. It was February 9th, 1947, and there was so much snow (she illustrates with her hand as a bench mark about two feet off the ground). Her eyes brighten and a girlish smile spreads across as her face. Suddenly, her son-in-law chimes in from another room, saying, “It was very cold!” as if he were there, proving that this story is comfortable and well worn from years of use at the dinner table or other family gatherings.

Helena and Jan Majerová; photo courtesy of Majer and Bury families.

The Maruška house was up the road a ways from the centrally located Church and her future home, the Majer abode. As the wedding party processed from her childhood home, everyone had to tromp through deep snow drifts on their way to the Church. Trudging through snow is hard enough, but trudging through snow while precariously trying to balance a giant wedding cake can be pretty challenging. Helena demonstrates with outstretched arms the thankless task of one of her companions, then pantomimes dropping the cake do snehu, (into the snow). She giggles and leans forward with an incredulous look on her face.

Since this seemed like the climax of the story I asked whether they considered the cake a total loss. “No,” she replies, as if the idea of wasting a perfectly good (albeit a little wet…) cake was the most preposterous thing she’d heard in a while, “we just picked it up again… there wasn’t a lot of food.”

After the wedding ceremony every one danced until midnight, and as she tells me this once again there is a youthful glimmer in her eye accompanied by a coy smile. That night was the first time she slept at her new husband’s home. About three days after the wedding her parents and extended family once again paraded towards her new residence — this time with her bed and dowry — joyously singing all the way about the recent passage of their one and only daughter to a new home, a new family, and womanhood.

Unfortunately, I was never able to meet her late husband, Ján. He died January 10, 2003, leaving Helena as the matriarch of the Majer family. From the sounds of it, Ján had a magnanimous personality. He remembered many old songs and had a reputation as quite the storyteller. A woodsman and carpenter by trade, his grandsons recall walks through the forest with him, where he could identify anything and everything that grew outdoors. Together Ján and Helena had two daughters. Elenka Majerová was born January 12, 1950 and Jana Majerová Buryová was born March 27, 1963.

Jana Buryova, Jan Majer, Helena Majerová, Elenka Majerová; courtesy of by Majer and Bury families.

Today Helena’s two grandsons, Andrej and Martin Bury, tower over her physically, but her incredibly involved role in raising them means that they still look up to her. Unlike Helena, both of her daughters come from a generation that worked outside of the home, so “starká” and “starký” (grandma and grandpa) are virtually synonymous with mom and dad for these boys.

Andrej Bury (left), Helena Majerová, Martin Bury (right); photo by Whitney Medved.

“The Worker”

While Helena has worked her entire life she did not get her first paid “job” until she was 30 years old, and she worked there for the next 30 years. Even though getting paid for work was a new concept for her, the cooking and cleaning she did at the local kindergarten — just across the street and three doors down from her own house — was not. Aside from general housekeeping she also helped fill in and watch the little ones if the teacher had to step out, or took the children for walks. She never attended any pedagogical training, but having two daughters of her own, helping raise her two grandsons, and growing up in the extended community environment of a village was certification enough.

Under Communism however, all workers were required to attend training on party doctrine. She was supposed to study Communist theory and even take a written test. I got a wonderful mental image of Helena staring at a book with one eyebrow cocked and her lower lip jutting out, trying to absorb theories about the “worker”—as though her own lifelong experience working was moot—with a hand on her hip and a cleaning rag wound between her fingers, a pot of halušky bubbling away on the stove, or little children racing around her feet while she asked herself why she was doing this again? I asked her if she remembered even one shard of information or doctrine, but with the swat of her hand she shakes her head and exhales, saying, “It went in one ear, and out the other,” as she gestures towards her head.

The Communists imposed more than just ideology on Helena and her family. In the 1950s, all property and businesses were nationalized, and this is a big problem for people whose livelihoods literally sprung from their own fields. The new policy turned self-sufficiency on its head. Suddenly owners of factories found themselves managers of their former businesses, and farmers might find themselves harvesting the state’s potatoes on land which used to belong to them.

When it came time for the Majer family to sign over their fields, Helena’s husband refused. With an obstinacy reminiscent of seventeen-year-old Helena and the horse reins, her husband flat out denied to sign the property over. It didn’t take long for him to lose his job at the aluminum factory in nearby Žiar nad Hronom. He remained unemployed for an entire year, during which time he was repeatedly arrested in attempts at bullying him into signing. After the year though, the family’s need to survive outweighed the principle or even possibility of protest. All of the Majer family land was nationalized, with the exception of a small garden where the family still has a modest chata (like a shack). That garden continues to grow apples, pears, grapes, sunflowers, and a whole panoply of vegetables today.

Takto To Je (How It Is)

Helena has seen a lot, and while she’s acclimated rather well to the conveniences of the modern world—cooking with gas instead of over an old fashioned wood-burning stove, asking one of her grandsons to look something up on the internet without batting an eye — she maintains a firm grasp on the culture which formed her. She still laboriously hand rolls long, fine noodles for polievka that could easily be purchased at a supermarket. She continues to preside over Christmas dinner, upholding the pre-meal rituals and formalities as the matriarch of the family. And until very recently, when the debilitating osteoporosis in her hips finally got the last word, she persisted in attending Mass every Sunday in the same church where she said, “ano” (I do) on that snowy February day so many years ago.

Whitney Medved, Helena Majerová, and Jana Buryova.

For those who find meaning in the date, asking about it is also sort of like opening up floodgates for a dissertation on life under socialism. How does a person express what effect an event had or failed to have without telling you what the environment was like before? How does one pull on a single thread without unraveling the rest of the complicated tapestry?

I spoke with Dr. Maja Vrábelová, who like me believes that history isn’t just a dusty, printed pile of objective facts, but also an experiential archive that must constantly be communicated and handed off to the next generation.

“I’m from a generation which remembers a lot, so I can share my experiences, memories, and stories with my students just to let them know how it was,” she said. “We have to defend our history. Each new generation has to learn this history to be proud of our forefathers and be motivated to be even better. The nation which does not remember its history will never move ahead.”

Communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia was not toppled in a day, but a big step was taken on November 17th. In Prague’s Václavské Námestie (Wencelas Square), a peaceful student protest marching toward Narodni Divadlo (National Theater) was met by an armed police blockade. The students pushed forward, empty hands or illuminated candles lifted up as evidence as they shouted, “Máme holé ruce! (We have empty hands!).” The “Velvet” Revolution, dubbed such because of its supposedly non-violent nature, became a little less harmless when many of these students were clubbed and beaten by the law enforcement. The protestors escaped into the theater, where the actors flung open their gates to provide refuge for the students, and then quickly slammed them on the police. The theater became a sort of political sanctuary, and typical evening performances turned instead into dramatic political discussions and rallies, led by figures such as Vaclav Havel.

Dr. Maja Vrábelová vividly recounts the above events of November 17, 1989, though she was not present in Prague nor an actively protesting student. Even though the Czech capital city was the epicenter of all the socio-political action, the sentiment ran throughout Czechoslovakia, and Vrábelová felt and still feels very connected to the events that took place there in ‘89.

A native of Bratislava, Vrábelová was born in 1952 and refers to her generation as the “Youth of Gottwold.” Her entire life has been laced with political undertones, from the Soviet propaganda which decorated her classroom walls as a child to the conversations she overheard her parents having in hushed tones, intentionally muffled by the sound of running water.

“I became an adult very quickly,” she says.

On August 21 of 1968 — the year of the “Prague Spring,” another politically and culturally momentous year in Czechoslovak history — a sixteen-year-old Vrábelová watched an invading Russian tank gun down her classmate, Peter Legner in a square in Bratislava while she stood only a few feet away. For Vrábelová, the rolling boil of determination and resolution that manifested itself in the protests of ’89 —and spilled over into the squares of Prague, Bratislava, and other towns and villages throughout Czechoslovakia — had been a long time coming.

It generally took time for things to ripple out from Prague to Bratislava.

“Honestly, during the time of Czechoslovakia, Bratislava was always like a smaller sister who did not need anything new, who was modest and content with the leftovers from her bigger sister,” she said. “Prague was getting everything — new construction and repairs of Old Town, new bridges, big department stores. Also good movies, new books, and so on.”

As the “big sister,” Prague not only had access to material items first, but the city also paved the way in terms of social activism. It took about three days for news of the uprising in Prague to reach the Slovak capital, and when it did, Bratislava rose too. The Vysoká škola Muzických Umení (University of Musical Art) became the epicenter of political meetings; and just like in Prague, the actors offered asylum to the students, and turned the regularly scheduled evening performances into impassioned political gatherings.

In the two largest cities of Czechoslovakia, the aftermath of the first large-scale protest manifested itself in these repeating theater meetings, and outdoor protests in squares.

But was November 17 so dramatically charged for all Czechoslovak citizens? What about those who lived far away from the hustle and bustle of capital cities, in the towns and villages scattered throughout the mountains, valleys, and countryside?

Pavla Seifertová wasn’t part of any underground insurgency movement. She didn’t aid in circulating samizdat nor convene in the theaters like the Magic Lantern to protest. She was not part of the protest at Václavské Námestie, the following protests in Letna where thousands gathered in spontaneous yet theatrical protest, nor the eventual rallies in Bratislava. The extent of her activism was attending music festivals at which protest was alluded, but in a strictly censor-friendly presentation.

Seifertová lived hours and hours away from all the action, nestled in the hills of Brezno (now Slovakia), already married with two children, ages seven and ten. She was teaching, leading a more or less ho-hum life regulated by the not-overly oppressive yet looming presence of Communism.

Or perhaps it was suffocating — while trying to dredge up memories Pavla said, “I realize how much I can remember and it’s amazingly frightening.”

Since she had no knowledge of another way of life though, nor anything to compare socialism to, she didn’t know how frightening the limitations placed on her really were. At the time, Seifertová felt the weight of Communism most through the restrictions on movement and travel.

“We were locked in this socialist part of Europe, so nobody could escape from this ‘paradise.’”

Even traveling to other Soviet bloc countries was a hassle. It also made communication with family and friends from the outside virtually impossible. Her sister had immigrated to Sweden, so seeing or even speaking with her was out of the question indefinitely.

As the 17th approached, Seifertová could at least empathize with the determination of those in the bigger cities. It was contagious. For her, this pronounced break from the status quo seemed to come out of left field, but was no doubt “the signal” that change was brewing. Under socialism, people had become accustomed to accepting life as it was.

“You couldn’t simply choose something, it was given,” she said.

While the exact date of November 17 wasn’t particularly momentous in Brezno, the following days were. After any sort of nationally momentous event, the school becomes an important venue for discussion, digestion, or at least explanation. Therefore, for about a week after the protests started, all-school meetings disrupted regular scheduling. Confused students and teachers watched the The Day After, a fictional American film about a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and tried to discuss what exactly was going to change, to the best of anyone’s knowledge.

Twenty years later, the restrictive life under Communism is at least economically a distant memory — what with Tesco and other “hypermarkets” — and is sometimes even remembered fondly through a pair of rose-colored lenses. Was it really all that bad?

People who experienced the Velvet Revolution, like Vrábelová and Seifertová, are grateful for the gained freedoms of elections, religion, travel, and simply the possibility for a better life for their children. However, they also cite an increase in crime and drug use, more expensive food (“Western prices with Eastern salaries” according to a saying Seifertová has heard) and a general discrepancy between inflated cost of living and still low salaries as residual effects of the fall of the Socialist system.

The current generation of youth have a cursory understanding at best of November 17 and the Velvet Revolution, or even what life was like under socialism. When I ask younger people about it, they frequently reply, “Well, we weren’t alive” or “We were so small.” Yet they have no problem developing a visceral reaction towards the oppression of the Hungarian Empire in the 12th Century.

Maybe twenty years is just far enough away to feel detached, yet not far enough to consider “historical.” Like the awkward growing-out stage of a bad haircut — it’s not quite short but you wouldn’t call it long. The Slovak Republic has only technically been an independent nation for sixteen years, but before this most recent demarcation of territory, Slovakia had a cultural or ethnic identity for centuries. When you’re working with a history that reaches so far back, twenty years must be like the blink of an eye. Maybe the country is still trying to process what exactly November 17th meant, and what role it had in shaping Slovak national identity.

Photos scanned from Z tých dní by Pavla Mikuláška and Občanske fóry by multiple authors.

At this point, you may be wondering what one of my campers this past summer asked so eloquently: “But why don’t you write about something—interesting?”

This honest boy was just vocalizing a commonly shared sentiment in our society. We live in a culture that does not value old fogies. Since there is no longer room for them in our mostly nuclear family households, once ol’ gram and gramps are incapable of taking care of themselves, they are to be packed up and sent off to assisted living places with names like, Sunrise Knolls, Splendid Autumn, or some other euphemism that masks the harsh reality of walkers, meds, and general getting old-ness with pleasant seasonal imagery and metaphors. We visit every now and again, collect checks on birthdays and holidays, and maybe let our grandmothers grab our cheeks or wipe a little schmutz from our faces from time to time.

But rarely does it ever occur to us that grandma Mabel might have some crazy stories up her sleeve. What if I told you that your grandmother had offered asylum to a deserter who was evading the occupying Russian army, or that your grandfather and great uncle spent time dressing as women and diving into haystacks to accomplish the same feat? Have you ever asked how exactly those knobby, familiar hands became so perfectly gnarled or wondered how many quilts were stitched, spools of thread spun, loafs of bread kneaded or clay pots were thrown? How often do we really consider the source of the physical and psychological wear-and-tear on our grandparents (the older generations)?

In 2007, during a brief stay in my late grandfather’s village of Brehy, I learned that what I had long considered my unique Slovak heritage is actually shared by many Americans. The exodus of people from Slovakia to the United States began around the 1880s and helped fuel Iron Belt industrial towns like Pittsburg and Detroit for decades. Iron and steel mills, as well as automobile plants (like the ones my grandfather and great-grandfather worked in), employed many of these immigrants. The work was physically taxing, oftentimes mentally numbing, and it chewed up and spit out many of the laborers like the scrap metal they were producing. The culturally stripping process of American assimilation also robbed many Slovaks and their offspring of cultural identity and pride.

The fact that people were willing to travel across an ocean for such a bleak and arduous existence shows how destitute the region was, and how desperate its inhabitants were to make a better life—and, who can blame them? Modernization lagged behind the surrounding territories (what is today the Czech Republic or Hungary), living conditions remained peasant-like even in industrial areas, and most productive workers went elsewhere to try and make a better living. Many villages were left populated mainly by women, children, and the elderly. Society was floundering. There used to be as saying about the picturesque Slovak mountains, the High Tatras—they’re beautiful, but you can’t eat ‘em.

Politically speaking regime changes in Slovakia seemed to shift more than the seasons—in the last two-hundred years alone Slovaks have experienced repression under the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a big reason people left in the first place), seen the creation and dismantling of Czechoslovakia (including Slovakia’s brief stint as an independent state from 1939-1945), not to mention the coming and going of Communist rule — this November 17 Marks the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. While a history book might summarize those transitions in a few consecutive paragraphs or chapters, people spent entire lifetimes witnessing the unfurling of these drastic socio-political fluxes and their repercussions. But no matter what institution wielded political power, life continued. People were born, they died, weddings were celebrated and gardens were harvested. Everyday life turned out to be the greatest preserver of traditions, customs, and culture, which is why I am so determined to collect accounts of it first-hand.

I never asked my Slovak immigrant grandparents about their lives in the Old Country while they were alive; we lived so far apart, and I was young. Maybe it is the fact that I am getting older myself, or perhaps it’s the inherently American need to be able to identify with something, and trace roots back more than a few hundred years to a more primal origin. It definitely comes from a small dose of “Slovak guilt,” which constantly forces me to question how I got such a lucky break in life when only two generations ago (and really only one…), my family was toiling away in factories and on assembly lines to advance their quality of life (another family saying engrained in me since youth is, “Medveds don’t quit”). Whatever the reason, I feel an incredible sense of urgency to collect as many stories as I can in hopes of preserving these threads of history. I need to do it now, because every year that passes takes with it more of these incredible lives and stories, simply erasing them.

Growing up, I thought Czechoslovakia was just an impossibly long word to spell and reserved for use only in “Where my Family is From” school projects, that it was a secret club that only a few people were in on. Despite my ignorance, I still took pride in my heritage, and always felt like it was a little bit special. Now, I understand that it is incredibly special, and I feel indebted to the older generations of Slovaks.

There is no way for me to go back and lighten their load, or retrospectively try to shoulder some of the burden. But I can remember and acknowledge the strenuous lives of these people and be grateful. I can share their stories with you so that, together, we can celebrate them as survivors, fighters, and keepers of precious traditions. I can assign more meaning to my heritage than, “Medved means ‘bear’ in Slovak.” We can all better understand a culture that, just twenty years ago, was still trudging along a path towards that nebulous goal of “freedom,” and a kind of life many of us take for granted.