Where Is My Home?: A Refugee Journey

By Miriam Potocky-Tripodi

Rarely does one persons family history intersect dramatically with a countrys momentous events. In Where Is My Home? A Refugee Journey, Miriam Potocky-Tripodi describes the Czech Republics decades-long struggle for freedom and how it affected her own life. Only after the fall of Communism in 1989 could the author reclaim her homeland by visiting Prague and discovering her Czech heritage.

This family history, written with both poignancy and unwavering honesty, is the story of how the Nazi and Soviet invaders tried to destroy the soul of the Czech people. Yet the story also contains vignettes of triumph, from the authors fathers defiance of Communist officials to an uncles dreams of escape.

Like Czech history, this family account has moments of aching sadness. The author relates how she searched for any scrap of information about her grandparents, who were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Yet, this book also reveals glimpses of radiance, from a painters sly humor to the author's feelings of connection to her fellow Czechs.

Can an exile ever return home after decades of living in America? This difficult question reverberates throughout this book, leaving the reader with a richer understanding of Czech history and one person's quest for self-identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 11, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469784465

Miriam Potocky-Tripodi

Miriam Potocky-Tripodi, Ph.D., was born in Prague and left as a refugee child with her family following the 1968 Soviet invasion. She now lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She is a professor of social work specializing in scholarship on refugees. She invites readers to contact her at [e-mail].

Book preview

Contents

Booking Passage

Laying the Tracks

Home Depot

Passages through Prague

Transport to Auschwitz

Tour Guides

The Dining Car

Crossroads

To my parents and the memory of my grandparents

Where is my home?

Where is my home?

Water murmurs among the meadows

Pine trees sigh among the cliffs

Orchards radiate with spring blossoms

An earthly paradise to the gaze

That is that beautiful land

Land of Bohemia, my home

Land of Bohemia, my home.

—Czech National Anthem

With special thanks to Tony and to Gail

Booking Passage

It all began for me over thirty years ago when, one morning while I was in my first-grade class, the other children’s parents began arriving to take them home early. I thought this was very odd because normally the parents didn’t come until much later in the day. But no one said anything, and one by one they came, until I was one of the last children left. Then my mother came and took me home. She didn’t say why. On the way home, I remember hearing continuous talking over the public address loudspeakers that were strung on lampposts on every street in my city. I didn’t comprehend what was being said.

That evening my parents, my grandmother, my younger brother and I were at home when we heard a tremendous rumbling outside. My father peered out the window, then quickly turned out all the lights in the house and told my brother and me to crawl under the kitchen table. I asked him what it was; he said a row of tanks was rolling down our street. This was Prague, and this was 1968. The Prague Spring had just been crushed, and my life, though I didn’t know it then, was about to go through an equally momentous change.

About a year later, my brother and I were sleeping one night when suddenly the lights were turned on and my father was in the room. We were going on an airplane ride, he told us. Two suitcases had been packed and were standing by the door. As we were ready to leave, I saw my grandmother place a golden chain and pendant around my mother’s neck. My mother was crying; she would never see her mother again. Nor would I see my homeland; we, like hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, were fleeing from Communism. A few months later, after being shuffled through Western Europe by refugee agencies, we and our two suitcases arrived in the United States.

After a year’s stay in New York City, we settled in Denver, where my mother took on the typical occupation of immigrant women—the garment worker. My father, who knew English before our arrival in the United States, fared better. He worked as an engineering technician.

Growing up as both a Czech and an American posed some difficult dilemmas. At school and in the outside world, I was expected to be like any other American child, but at home my family tried to maintain Czech ways and there was constant awareness of the suffering of the Czech people. So I lived in two worlds, which often conflicted. I had neither a Czech identity nor an American identity. I didn’t even know what a Czech identity was, for, not being around many Czechs, I didn’t know which beliefs and behaviors of my parents were typically Czech and which weren’t. And I was raised without religion by my Jewish father and Catholic mother-so I had no religious identity to turn to either.

Throughout those childhood and adolescent years, I often wondered and fantasized about what life would have been like had we stayed in Czechoslovakia; and, as is the nature of fantasies, I imagined it would have been better. I sought out any and all things Czech. But in Denver in the 1970s, these were hard to find. Back then, Czechoslovakia was shrouded in mystery behind the Iron Curtain, which was, for all practical purposes, impenetrable.

So items and news from Czechoslovakia were few and far between. Although my mother regularly received letters from home (whose stamps I would gaze at for hours), transcontinental phone calls were unheard of. Even if we could have afforded the calls, most of our relatives back in Prague didn’t have phones; and those that did would have suffered political retribution for talking with people in the West. So for over two decades the land I was born in seemed incredibly far and impossible to reach.

As a young adult, I continued to have a sense of uncertainty about my identity. When people I met would ask me where I was from, I wasn’t sure what to say. Was I from Colorado, where I grew up, or was I from Czechoslovakia? Sometimes I would talk to people who had been to Europe and they would talk about differences between European and

American women. I found that I couldn’t place myself in either of the descriptions. And although my English had become much better than my Czech, I always had some awareness that English was not my native language. I yearned to spend a day of my life hearing only Czech.

Then, in November 1989, the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia—seven days of peaceful mass demonstrations that resulted in the collapse of the Communist regime that had gripped the nation for forty-one years. As I watched the demonstrations on the nightly news from half a world away, I sat there stunned, not knowing what to feel. I felt elation, and I felt reborn along with Czechoslovakia. But I also felt a twinge of loneliness. I wanted to go out and party with some Czechs. I wanted to hug some Czechs and hold onto them for a while.

In the summer of 1995, I finally made my long-anticipated return to my homeland. My father had recently suffered a heart attack, and his resulting heightened awareness of his mortality impelled him to return to see his family one more time. My mother did not wish to go. So my father and I made the journey together. Later in our two-week stay we were joined by my close friend, Gail. Over the next year, I made two more trips to Prague, again with Gail and also with my future husband, Tony.

As I had anticipated, the return to the land I had not seen in twenty-six years was an emotional pilgrimage. This is the story of that journey. It was a journey in search of identity. I followed tracks that had been laid before I was born. I made stops at my old childhood home. I walked for miles throughout Prague, seeking a connection to my birthplace. And I tracked down information about my grandparents, who had perished in the Holocaust. Along the journey, I had tour guides—family members and friends, those I met and those I only heard about. Their stories were my connection to my past and my glimpse into the present.

I don’t claim that my story is unique; on the contrary, I believe it is fairly typical of Czech exiles, particularly those who left as young children. Likewise, the stories of my tour guides—the family members and friends that I describe here—are also, I believe, not uncommon among Czech citizens. It is precisely for these reasons that I tell my story—to illustrate how historical and political events on the grand scale have impacted the lives of people on the small scale.

My story revolves a great deal around the Holocaust and Communism. Yet, I have not personally been subjected to these evils. But they are events that have haunted me all my life. I do not write as a Holocaust survivor or as a victim of Communist political persecution. When I tell their tales, it is through the lens of my own perception. I write as a member of the second generation—those of us who are possessed by a history