Promised Land: A Life's Journey to Success in Canada

By Peter Kunstadt

Peter Kunstadt took his chance in 1968 when Soviet Bloc forces occupied his homeland, Czechoslovakia ─ he and his fiancée Susan were on holiday in Romania, and made a dash for the West with little more than their beach clothes.  This is the story that led to that great escape ─ surviving the Holocaust and Communist rule ─ to the grea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772571226

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Prologue

When my fiancée Susan and I arrived in Canada in October 1968, we were refugees. As refugees, we made no demands on Canada and we did not ask for any special accommodations. On the contrary, we made efforts to adapt our lifestyle to become true Canadians as soon as possible. It did not even occur to us that the Canadian society should change to accommodate our habits and sensitivities. Canada is the greatest country on the planet. I can’t think of another society where a young couple like us, without financial means, could start a new life, be immediately accepted, and become successful almost without delay. We often remind our Canadian friends how great our life in Canada actually is and how much we all should appreciate our wonderful way of life. Canada is our home now and we have no other.

Susan and I have told the story of our escape from behind the Iron Curtain numerous times, starting when we arrived in Montréal in 1968. Later on, we were able to add new, exciting life experiences to our story. On several occasions, it has been suggested that our tale should be written down in a book. More recently, I was driving with my son-in-law Jonathon to the cottage when he expressed interest in our past. After the hour that we spent together, Jon was clearly moved by our story and suggested it needed to be recorded for the sake of our grandchildren. I agreed, but I was not yet ready to take the step.

Enter my son Ronnie. We had completed the 19th Annual Kunstadt Open Tennis Tournament in August 2015, and I was driving Ronnie back home when he suggested we should stop for nachos. I did not think this was possible, as it was two a.m., and we were exhausted, but he persisted and guided me to a seedy watering hole in Stittsville, near his home. He expressed keen interest in the details of our life’s journey, which he was already familiar with, and I began talking. That night, he categorically proclaimed: We are going to write a book! The next morning, I was contacted by Tim Gordon of Burnstown Publishing House, who asked me to confirm that I was planning to write a book. Well, the rest is history now. It was Ronnie who got the process started. Soon after, I met with John Stevens, Burnstown Publishing’s Senior Editor, and told him my life story. John has been highly supportive right from the outset. When I realized he was the same John Stevens who wrote the book White Gold about our local ski legend, John Clifford, I knew I was in good hands. It is now less than a year from the day we started the process, and I am excited to see the fruits of our efforts shaping up. John was extremely helpful throughout the process, prompting me on many occasions to open my heart just a little more and helping me sound better while still maintaining my own voice.

My whole family was supportive all the way through. I must especially recognize that it was Ronnie’s determination that got me started. I owe him a vote of gratitude for that. My cousin Joseph, who is one of the busiest individuals I know, always found the time to read my chapters as I was producing them and to respond with a comment in a very timely manner. Joseph’s knowledge of our family background was immensely helpful. In the process of writing this book, I have learned a lot about my own roots and the tragedy of our family history. I have also learned about our family’s resilience and ability to survive. Personally, I appreciate Joseph’s positive attitude and his endless moral support.

My wife Susan has been very helpful in my understanding of her side of our family history, the struggles they endured during World War II, their imprisonment by Gestapo, and, later, her dad’s imprisonment by the Communists. She and her sister Sonia are presently working with a journalist in Bratislava Slovakia on their dad’s experiences in Communist prisons.

My good friend Terry Gnesko was my rock all the way through. He was always there when I needed him, giving me suggestions on style, grammar, or content. He always found the time to help, and I am very thankful for that.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

August 21, 1968, Mamaia Beach

It was five a.m. on August 21, 1968, at the Black Sea beach in Mamaia, Romania. I was sleeping in our tent when Susan woke me by shaking me and frantically proclaiming, They are occupying us! There was no system of reserved camping spots on the beaches of Romania, so my first reaction was, Let me sleep and I will deal with the bastard who put his tent too close to ours, when I wake up, But Susan was relentless and I eventually stepped out of the tent. There was a considerable commotion on the beach, people running about, gesticulating. I finally realized what They are occupying us! actually meant.

Our Soviet brothers and their Warsaw Pact allies had been growing increasingly impatient with the concept of communism with a human face, also known as the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia, under President Alexander Dubček, where we were able to read newspapers and actually believe what we read. We were also able to believe what we heard on TV and on the radio. And horror of horrors, we were even able to take limited trips beyond the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, the Russians and their Communist allies did what they do best: They started up their tanks, airplanes and other military hardware and came to beat some sense into us. On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and its main allies in the Warsaw Pact — Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, and Poland — invaded Czechoslovakia. Romania and Albania refused to participate.

Our first reaction on the beach was to contact Susan’s sister who lived in Prague and to get a first-hand update. We rushed to the nearest post office, the place where all telephone contacts were made from. But this was a very short event. We were promptly told that communication with Czechoslovakia was no longer possible. That, more than anything, gave us a clear idea of the gravity of the situation. So, back we went to the beach and packed our tent into my shiny new Fiat 850. We didn’t know what to do. We wandered up and down the beach, trying to make a decision: Either we go straight home (I had recently been drafted by the military and avoided draft by being conveniently sick), or we head West and possibly never return. Needless to say, the Western Europeans were packing it in and getting the hell out of Romania. There was a large group of people at one spot on the beach, huddled over a portable radio. There was a student translating Nicolae Ceaușescu’s speech to the Romanian nation. Wow, the old dictator was using a kind of language we had never heard. He was talking about getting the Romanian army ready to fight the Soviet enemy. Even in the days of communism with a human face, our politicians never had the cojones to badmouth the mighty Russians like that! We were extremely frightened, to put it mildly. Although Romania was a member of the Warsaw Pact, Nicolae Ceaușescu was not about to be pushed around. It’s a good thing, however, that the Russians were busy in Czechoslovakia or else they would have kicked his butt, big time.

Our camping spot in Mamaia.

We were getting closer to making our final decision. I must say, Susan was more enthusiastic than I was about escaping and maybe never being able to go back home again. Susan’s father was arrested on a trumped-up charge when she was a little girl. Her family was very bitter about the whole socialist society. She prevailed, and with the benefit of some forty-seven years of hindsight, I can now say without hesitation that she was absolutely right.

Okay, the decision was made! We were not going back home! We set out for Yugoslavia, a Communist country independent of the Soviet bloc, with some free enterprise and a currency that was accepted in Western Europe. From here on in, the rest of it seemed like a no-brainer. We may be excused for our naïveté, as at the time I was just twenty-fve and Susan was in her late teens. We took our last look at the Mamaia beach, checked to make sure all our belongings were in the car, and in the afternoon of August 21, 1968, we hit the road. We needed to make one more stop before embarking on the big trip. We had some Romanian currency vouchers that needed to be converted to cash. We stopped at the nearest bank; I went in and soon left with a fistful of Romanian Lei. Susan was to wait for me in the car.

When I came out, there on the street, next to my white Fiat 850, was a silver Fiat 850 with licence plates from our hometown of Košice. Susan was sitting in the other car; it became obvious that the silver car belonged to someone we knew. In the other Fiat was our friend Igor Kropáč with his wife (whose name I forget now) and their three-year-old son. They were on their way home from a vacation in Bulgaria. They had no clue about what had happened in Czechoslovakia. (At this point, it needs to be said that in our world back then, car radios had not as yet been discovered.) As soon as we told them, they proclaimed, We are going with you! This was the moment when Igor uttered the words that made us the butt of many jokes later on. Igor said Don’t worry, I have Western money. As it turned out, Igor was the proud owner of five Deutschmarks. Yes, you heard me right, 5 DM! And here our famous naïveté certainly bordered on stupidity. I said Cool, I will pay for everything while we are in Romania and you’ll take over when we cross the border. You can imagine how far we would have gotten on 5 DM (about $ 2.50) in Western Europe if we ever made it there!

We were almost ready to go. Once we filled up the cars, bought some salami, bread, cheese, and some juices to help us survive the approximately 580-km trip to the Yugoslavian border, we finally hit the road. Five hundred and eighty kilometres was an incredibly long trip back in those days. Some of the potholes in the highway to the West were large enough to swallow our little Fiats, but having grown up in Czechoslovakia, we were quite used to such things. We certainly weren’t about to complain about the state of Romanian highways at the time. Throughout the night, we made slow progress and, once in a while, we were detoured to make room for army trucks carrying soldiers only God knows where. Of course, when you’re stressed, your mind races. Obviously, the Romanians were mobilizing their troops to face the Russians. To our Soviet Bloc-trained minds, this was an extremely scary proposition. Nobody in our world had ever had the guts to stand up to those bullies. Every time we had to make a detour, those roads were in even worse shape than the regular roads (if that’s even possible). We worried that the Romanians were directing us into an area where we were going to be collected and arrested. Fortunately, none of this was true.

August 22, 1968, Yugoslavian border

It was dawn on August 22 when we finally arrived at the Yugoslavian Border town of Turnu Severin. This was the route all Italians and other West Europeans used to get themselves out of the Communist Bloc. The lineup of cars here was remarkable. As Czechoslovakian citizens, we were obligated to provide exit visas in order to cross into any other country. These had to be granted to us by the Czechoslovakian authorities. Crossing into Yugoslavia would certainly be subject to these restrictions, as Yugoslavia was definitely considered to be the gateway to the West. The Romanian border authorities were aware of this requirement. They asked all Czechoslovakian citizens without valid exit visas to leave the lineup in order to keep the cross border traffic flowing. After the gruelling overnight drive, we were going nowhere again. It just so happened that I was the only one with the precious visa in my passport, but not the rest of the crew…

My parents had planned a vacation trip to Yugoslavia that summer. As the Yugoslavian dinar was a currency exchangeable on the Western market, each Czechoslovakian traveller was allocated only a limited amount of currency (about $20). In order to be allowed a little bit of an extra amount, they registered me as the third traveller. That’s how I happened to have a Yugoslavian exit visa in my passport. Okay, so I was able to go, but not the others.

When we enquired about how to remedy the situation, we were advised that we needed to get to a Czechoslovakian consulate and get them to grant us the necessary permissions. Easier said than done! Bucharest is almost all the way back where we came from; we were all dead tired; we were travelling with a child. This was not funny at all. After a short meeting, we decided to drop the girls and the child in some hotel and Igor and I would take the 350-km drive back to Bucharest, find the consulate, and try to convince the authorities to give us the required stamps. As we were driving around looking for accommodations, Susan came up with a bright idea of historical magnitude. She said, Bucharest is 350 kilometres away, but isn’t Belgrade closer to the border? Could we not get our permissions at the Embassy in Belgrade? Once again, she was right. Belgrade was 100 kilometres closer to the Romanian border than Bucharest! Every little bit helps. Were things finally looking up for us?

There was another slight complication here. My exit visa was good for only one entry to Yugoslavia. I could go there, take everyone’s passport with me, but I couldn’t come back in to Romania to deliver the newly stamped passports. We decided to take a chance. We agreed to meet at an appointed time, in the middle of no-man’s land between Romania and Yugoslavia, where I would hand over the passports without actually crossing the border. This was a better idea than it sounds! There was a discrepancy in the socialist system’s configuration: rigorous checks at checkpoints and inconsistent security in surrounding areas. We hoped to be able to take advantage of this. However, if anyone were caught trying to cross illegally anywhere, dire consequences would follow. The risk we were taking was monumental!

It was now early morning of August 22. I needed to get to Belgrade ASAP. I was tired out of my mind and the last thing I wanted to do was to drive for another several hours. I was more than a little worried. I was on my way to Yugoslavia and couldn’t return to Romania. I was leaving my girlfriend and my friend with his family in Romania with no passports or any other means of identification. What if the plan doesn’t work? Well, we had already decided to make the big move and we were not going to let anything slow us down. We were enthusiastic and reckless enough to suppress any fear of consequences. Luckily, I was just twenty-five and full of pep; I would never have done anything like this even a few years later. As I was passing through the border patrol in Romania, a gentleman asked me to give him a ride. No problem, I said, and if you want to drive, that would be even better. Unfortunately, the man didn’t know how to drive, so I was on my own there. As we arrived at his house, he proved to be a very kind man. He let me take a nap on his sofa until it was time for the embassy to open. He also accompanied me to downtown Belgrade the next morning and showed me where the embassy was. Then he said goodbye and wished me luck.

The Czechoslovakian embassy

I walked into the consular section of the Czechoslovakian embassy with a stack of passports and wondered what the reaction of the authorities would be. We were conditioned to have great respect for authority, or at least fear of the power of government workers over our lives. In this instance, my worries were unfounded. There were a few factors that made this process much easier than I anticipated. The embassy employees were quite unhappy about the Russian invasion of our country and were happy to assist anyone in any activity that would undermine the Russian dictators. Additionally, the young consul, a sports enthusiast, recognized my name as a member of the Alpine National Team. Igor was on the National Team for water polo and the consul recognized his name as well. No sweat! The consul stamped all the passports and hand-wrote in Czech, "Rozšířeno o Juhoslavii (Extended to Yugoslavia). Problem solved — we’re good to go!" I thought to myself.

Back to the Romanian border

I was as proud as a peacock. Mission accomplished. All I needed to do was to get back to the border, pass the passports to the gang, and off we would go. The return trip is just a blur. All I remember is that I was not slowing down when I passed through numerous villages on the road and I believe a few chickens who tried to cross the road ended up in the big chicken coop in the sky. Time was of the essence, and that’s all that mattered. The no-man’s land at the border was nothing if not intimidating. One needed to cross a few speed calming devices such as water basins, sharp turns, and serious bumps. In the middle of it all was a Romanian border guard with a machine gun in his hand. So I had arrived. I stopped by the friendly machine-gun guy and turned my car around so it faced Yugoslavia. Shortly afterwards, I saw Susan, Igor, and the rest of the crew walking up to me. I proudly handed the passports over and sent them back to clear customs (yes, you had to clear customs on exit as well). They were going to join me at that spot and we would continue our trip together. Of course, that would be just too simple. Romanian is a Latin language. These guys don’t understand Czech at all. As they looked at the passports, they did not understand the Czech phrase, Extended to Yugoslavia, and in order to err on the safe side, they decided not to honour our newly acquired exit visas. Oh crap!

I saw them walking back to me, and it didn’t require a genius to recognize that things didn’t go well at the Romanian Customs. Now we had a serious problem. I was in Yugoslavia and couldn’t go to Romania. The rest of them were in Romania, not allowed to join me. We were desperate. We didn’t have any more fancy ideas. While we were complaining and feeling sorry for ourselves, Igor was doing some serious small talk with the border guard, speaking with him in Hungarian. A large portion of Romanians are of Hungarian origin or at least speak some Hungarian. So, as Igor is schmoozing with the dude in Hungarian, he tells us in Slovak: Get in the car and get the hell out of here! I couldn’t believe my ears. The two ladies and the kid were jammed onto my front seat, as the rear one was full of baggage. I stepped on the gas (I had my engine running all that time) and got going as fast as the car and the road allowed me. All this time, I was expecting the border guard to start shooting the crap out of us. As we reached Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavian officers quickly opened the steel barrier separating us from Yugoslavia, and I quickly turned behind a building, and we were safe in Yugoslavia. After the elation of a successful escape slowly subsided, it didn’t take long for me to understand that I was now in a foreign country with two young ladies and a child, with no tangible means to take care of them.

Reunion in Yugoslavia

As soon as we calmed down a little after the quick journey from the dangerous border into the safety of Yugoslavia, we started to understand the gravity of the situation we found ourselves in. Here we were, three and a half of us — two ladies, myself, and the kid — in relative safety. However, we had left Igor, the father and husband, behind in Romania, with nothing but his car. How could we carry on? What was to become of him? Desperate times call for desperate measures. It is important to understand at this point: A car was an unattainable dream for the majority of Czechoslovakians. Those lucky ones of us who had cars valued them above anything else. Nevertheless, we considered the situation to be serious enough to stop a Serbian gentleman travelling to Romania and asked him to look up Igor and give him our message. We described the car to him and gave him the licence number. In the message, we advised Igor to leave the car behind and cross the border on foot. It was much easier to walk across than to go through the rigorous checkpoints on the road. I cannot emphasize enough how desperate we had to be to consider abandoning a precious car!

I am not sure how much time passed in the meantime. It sure felt like an eternity! Suddenly, we saw Igor walking up to us, safe and sound. We were all supportive. We assured Igor it was no problem — we would continue our trek in one car (though I had no idea how we would all fit into the little vehicle, packed to the brim with camping equipment). But the water polo team of Košice was famous for their street smarts. Igor had proven himself to be worthy of this reputation. As we congratulated him on having the courage to leave his precious Fiat behind, he uttered the words I will remember for the rest of my life: My car is coming. We demanded an explanation and this was it: In the line-up of Westerners trying to get themselves to the other side of the Iron Curtain, there were two Italians travelling home. Igor convinced one of them to drive his car across the border and the Italian fellow agreed to take the chance. The rest went smoothly: He produced an Italian passport to the customs officer and he was driving an Italian car. The fact that the car had a Czechoslovakian license plate escaped the officer’s attention. It is now some forty-seven years later, and we are still trying to figure out how Igor actually managed to communicate with those guys, as he spoke only Slovak and Hungarian. At the time, we didn’t think to ask; we had entirely different issues on our minds.

BELGRADE

Getting there is half the fun

We had reached the other side. Our decision was now final: We were not going back home, we were starting a new life, we were leaving everything and everybody behind, and we had no idea what awaited us. You have to be young to be able to carry this kind of burden. And there was another burden we were to carry for quite some time to come. We were leaving our home country without the permission of the Communist authorities. That in itself was a criminal act. We were painfully aware of the fact that all our loved ones whom we left behind would be punished in one way or another by the vindictive regime.

Be that as it may, it was time to hit the road again. I knew the way to Belgrade, having been there just a day earlier. We followed the mighty river Danube from the Yugoslavian border town of Kladovo on the other side of the Romanian border town of Turnu Severin, through Majdanpek, Požarevac, and finally Belgrade. This was an easy, uneventful trip of some 100 kilometres.

You will recall that Igor bragged about having foreign currency, all of five Deutschmarks. They now became essential, as here in Yugoslavia, our Romanian lei and Czechoslovakian crowns were not worth the paper they were printed on. At least Igor’s 5 DM bought us enough gasoline to get our two little cars to Belgrade.

Map of our escape out of Romania.

A warm welcome in Belgrade

Our experience in Belgrade was absolutely positive. The Yugoslavian authorities, with their friendly dictator Josip Broz Tito, took all Czechoslovakian refugees under their wing in the warmest manner imaginable. As soon as we arrived in Belgrade and had a chance to look around, we felt secure and welcome. Immediately, we were given a decent room in a university dormitory. I have no recollection which university it may have been. There were three square meals per day every day, and we understood that there was no rush; we were welcome to stay as long as we needed to. We were able to stop panicking and start making rational decisions about our immediate as well as long-term future. It was a wonderful feeling to know that our hosts, our Slavic brothers, welcomed us with open arms and embraced us unconditionally!

Our plan was actually very simple. We would visit the embassies of as many Western countries as necessary and we would immigrate to the first country that would have us. We equipped ourselves with a map of Belgrade, found the addresses of assorted embassies, and got going.

We had no problems communicating with the locals. The Serbian language, like all the other Yugoslavian languages, is of Slavic origin, as is Slovak, our native tongue. We understood most of the words we heard and we understood the rest from the context. The Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet, same as the Russians. This was no issue for us, as we had been forced to learn Russian throughout high school, right through the second year of university. We could read and understand everything in Serbia without any difficulty whatsoever.

The embassies

We embarked on our tour of embassies in Belgrade the next morning. Unfortunately for us, the Russian invasion had happened only three days prior, and virtually none of the consular offices had received any guidelines for the treatment of Czechoslovakian refugees. For example, the Germans required a sponsor/guarantor, so we just moved on. The Australians were very sympathetic, but they asked us to return in three weeks when they would have received instructions from their capital, Canberra. We thanked them very much, but we didn’t believe we could wait for three weeks.

Next, we arrived at the Canadian embassy, where we met the consul, who was the nicest man you would ever want to meet. The Canadians, too, needed to wait from instructions — from Ottawa — but at least the man was nice enough to grant us an interview. It was at that point that I experienced the greatest embarrassment of my life. My command of the English language (I had spent nine months in Colorado