John Palka, a retired Professor of Biology, is a first-generation immigrant to the United States. His parents and he were driven out from home twice for political reasons. The family was culturally and politically prominent for many generations.
His grandfather, Milan Hodža, was the only Slovak Prime Minister of democratic Czechoslovakia. As a result, John grew up in a home where Slovak culture and traditions, including the language, were vibrantly alive. This intimate connection with Slovakia has enabled John to maintain active ties with his extensive family, friends and colleagues there.
John Palka's story is part of a Global Slovakia Project- Slovak Settlers , authored by Zuzana Palovic and Gabriela Bereghazyova. The book is available for purchase via info.globalslovakia@gmail.
com. My roots in Slovakia are very deep. Except for our two daughters, their children, and two cousins in England, all the members of my family live in Slovakia.
I know the history of my family back to the late 1600s. And I know all too well exactly how and why my parents and I had to leave Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia) twice, escaping first from the Nazis and then from the Communists. The United States has been a safe haven for me, and I love this country dearly, but those roots continue to bind me tightly to Slovakia even after over seventy years of living in the U.
S. Being forced to leave home did not break those ties. Neither has living for so long in American society caused them to wither away.
What makes my roots so alive? Let me start with language, poetry, and song. When I was with my parents, I never spoke anything but Slovak. Where we were living made no difference; Slovak was the only language of home.
It became so deeply engrained in me that, even though I hardly spoke my mother tongue for the ten-year period between when my parents died (around 1980) and when we were able to start visiting Slovakia (around 1990), I remained totally fluent. I have no education in Slovak apart from half a year in first grade, second grade, and half a year in third grade, so my vocabulary is restricted when it comes to sophisticated fields, but at the same time Slovaks both there and here regularly remark on how pure my language is and some even try to identify which region it comes from. Is it Martin speech? Is it Mikuláš speech? For this I am very, very grateful to my parents! They also wanted me to absorb as much of Slovak culture as possible, even while we were living in the United States.
For example, my mother told me numerous children’s stories in Slovak. Varila mamička kašičku v maľovanom hrnčíčku . .
. (Mommy was cooking porridge in a little painted pot . .
. )—a rhyme of nine or ten lines that she often recited to me at age four or five as I was going to bed in Chicago. The story is also often sung.
Traditional hand motions go with the text and provide the storyteller or singer with an excuse to tweak each finger of the child’s hand, to tickle its palm, and in the end to tickle it under the armpit! For me, this was meant to be a bed-time story! Well, it worked and, as you can see, I still know many of the words seventy-five years later. Folk songs were an even bigger part of our family life. There was never an evening with guests when we did not sing one song after another for hours.
My mother had a weak voice but an excellent memory, and she was the one who could produce all the verses. My father provided a rich voice and everyone, without exception, sang together. There were no songbooks or sheets.
These were traditional songs that had become part of the Slovak national movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Slovakia is extremely rich in folk music, dance, and costumes. There is a great deal of regional variation in these, but there is also a core set of songs that most people know.
Those are the ones we sang—and that I still love to sing whenever the occasion arises. My parents wanted me to assimilate in America, to feel truly at home here, to have a successful career, not to feel like a foreigner. But they also wanted me to keep those deep roots alive and strong.
The way they managed this was through making our home a Slovak home in which Slovak language and culture were completely natural. They also wanted me to know the most important aspects of Slovak history, because they saw the history as part of the soil in which my roots were growing and because a number of my forebears had played prominent roles in this history. In addition, sweeping historical events were the cause of our family’s emigration to the United States.
I was born in July of 1939, neither in Slovakia nor in America but in Paris. Why Paris? Because just two weeks earlier my mother had made her way to France from Slovakia, slipping out of the Slovak State that prevailed during World War II. In March of that year, under pressure from Hitler, Czechoslovakia had split into two portions: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was ruled directly from Berlin, and the Slovak Republic, generally known as the Slovak State, which was nominally independent.
However, the government of the Slovak State was ultranationalist and pro-Nazi. The Slovak State couldn’t do anything that Hitler actively opposed and was effectively a German vassal. This affected my parents very directly.
Not for religious reasons—we were Lutherans, not Jews, and thus were not subject to the extremes of anti-Semitism legislated by the Slovak government. And extremes they were. The Slovak government even voluntarily paid the German government a significant amount per capita to accept the tens of thousands of Jews whom it shipped out of Slovakia and into Germany.
My parents were affected for two other reasons. First, my mother’s father, Milan Hodža, was one of twentieth-century Slovakia’s most prominent political figures. He served as prime minister of Czechoslovakia during the years 1935 to 1938 and was the only Slovak to hold that position during the entire so-called First Republic, from the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 to its break-up in 1939; all the other prime ministers were Czechs.
My grandfather was adamantly anti-Nazi. He was also a strong proponent of a united Czechoslovakia, whereas the pro-Nazi Slovak government was led by men who wanted to separate from the Czechs. For these reasons Milan Hodža was persona non grata to the new government.
Long after going into exile, he was prosecuted by that government and was ultimately sentenced to eighteen years in prison for treason. They took the trouble to carry on a protracted legal process while the war was raging and Hodža was in exile! This attitude placed his immediate family in constant danger of arrest, and all of them got out of the country. My mother was the last to leave.
The other reason for my parents’ departure was that my father, like so many of our family, was active in a burgeoning anti-Nazi resistance. I always knew that my father had not accompanied my mother to France and had not been present at my birth. However, it was only after my parents’ deaths, when I was searching through family archives, that I finally understood why.
It was because of my father’s commitment to the underground anti-Nazi effort. He stayed behind in Slovakia because he was encumbering his share of a family-owned leather business in Mikuláš to obtain large amounts of cash. He smuggled this cash across the border into Hungary, and then across a second border into Yugoslavia, where he delivered it to the attorney Janko Bulík, a member of one of the centuries-old Slovak communities in Serbia.
Bulík was the leader of an active anti-Nazi group in Belgrade whose main focus was to help escapees from Slovakia and from the Czech lands, many of them Jews, gain legal standing to enter Yugoslavia and stay there long enough to arrange for transportation to some other destination. My father made three such trips, each time risking his life. Then one night he was awakened by the mayor of Mikuláš, who came to tell him urgently that he had just learned at a meeting with police officials that my father would be arrested the following morning and sent to the prison in Iľava.
That prison was well-known as a staging point for extradition to Germany. My father took a few belongings, jumped on a midnight train, and made it safely to Belgrade. Later he finally came to join my mother and me in Paris.
Through Janko Bulík, my father obtained and brought with him a false passport and other documents that declared him to be Janko Pafković of Novi Sad in Serbia, not Ján Pálka of Liptovský svätý Mikuláš in Slovakia. These documents allowed us to escape the watchful eyes of the Gestapo that was soon operating in Occupied France, where we were trapped for a year and a half. At one point, however, we received an order to report within twenty-four hours to the Gestapo headquarters in Nice with no more than one suitcase per person.
It was no secret what this meant—a concentration camp. Once again, my parents managed to get on a midnight train. It took us from Nice to Paris.
In a few days, the French Resistance smuggled us across the border into Free France. From there, on the basis of that false Yugoslav passport, we made our way into pro-German Franco Spain. I celebrated my second birthday in Madrid.
Finally, we reached neutral Portugal. My parents were able to get us on one of the last commercial flights from Lisbon, the last remaining open port in Europe, to New York. Thus began our first stay in the United States.
We spent most of the war years in Chicago. My mother, the prime minister’s daughter, worked as a file clerk in an insurance agency. My father, the factory owner, worked to exhaustion on the assembly line in a factory whose owner had Slovak roots.
We lived in a duplex whose Slovak owner had immigrated from my mother’s hometown of Sučany, near Martin. He was a modest house painter, but he had managed to accumulate enough money to buy this duplex. He and his family lived downstairs; we lived upstairs.
Volta Elementary School was only a few blocks away. When I started kindergarten there, it was my first regular exposure to an English-speaking environment. The language that was so important to my parents was not just a means of communicating.
Starting toward the end of the eighteenth century, language came to be felt as central to the sense of identity of many European peoples, Slovaks among them. Here is one illustration of how this feeling manifested. In Slovakia there is, in addition to the national anthem, a set of national songs that have a place in culture rather like that of “America the Beautiful” in the United States.
By far the most frequently sung of all these songs is Hej, Slováci (O Slovaks!) The text was written in 1834, just as Slovak national awareness was gaining momentum. It was written by a Slovak passing through Czech Prague and set to a Polish melody, reflecting the close bonds among Slavic nations. The opening is all about language: Hej, Slováci, ešte naša Slovenská reč žije, pokiaľ naše verné srdce za náš národ bije, .
. . O Slovaks, our Slovak language still lives, as long as our faithful heart for our nation beats, .
. . I absorbed this song, as does virtually every Slovak child, and I even have an audio recording of me singing it.
I was seven and a half when we returned home to Slovakia right after the war. Before our departure from New York on the SS Americ a, there was a farewell party at which one of our family’s dear friends made a series of commemorative recordings on bright red plastic record disks that I still have. I am the star on two of them.
This is how I know that I spoke English fluently but with a strong accent. At one point my mother’s brother asked me to sing. I responded rather quietly with a dull church hymn, but he interrupted me.
“Don’t you know something livelier, something Slovak? How about Hej, Slováci ?“ And immediately my tone changed. I sang with a new voice: bold, rhythmic, and filled with energy. When I was finished, my uncle complimented me.
“ Výborne, “ he said. “Excellent!” We arrived in Czechoslovakia in December of 1946. After a few months of staying with my father’s sister, Ľudinka, in Bratislava, we were able to move into the house that my parents had built in Liptovský svätý Mikuláš and where I have been many times in the years since the Iron Curtain fell.
However, the Communist coup came in February of 1948, not much more than a year after our arrival. In April, just three months later, my father was arrested for alleged anti-state activities. It was a charge that potentially carried a death penalty but fortunately, after a few months of solitary confinement, he was released.
Nevertheless, the factory of which he was part-owner was confiscated and he was followed by secret police all the time. In the face of this constant danger, in March of 1949 we escaped. This entailed literally crawling under a barbed wire fence that ran down the middle of a wide, ploughed-up strip of no-man’s-land, mindful of the machine gun towers and searchlights that interrupted it at intervals.
I was almost ten years old at the time, and I remember our escape vividly. In December of 1949 we arrived as political refugees in the United States for a second time. It was just three years after we had left for our Slovak home, dreaming of a joyful future in the embrace of beloved family, culture, and society.
This time we settled in New York, in the Jackson Heights section of Queens where many other refugees from Czechoslovakia had also found housing in modest apartments. I graduated from P.S.
(Public School) 69 in 1953, from high school in 1956, and from Swarthmore College in 1960. My mother worked for the Czechoslovak Desk of Radio Free Europe. My father tried hard to get an international export-import business rolling, based on his many old connections, but it never truly worked, and he retired at an early age.
Through all these years, our family life was just like it had always been. There were no more children’s stories, but the home language continued to be exclusively Slovak; when guests came, we sang the same songs we had always sung; and my mother continued to steep me in Slovak history. At Swarthmore I met Yvonne, whose parents were immigrants from Switzerland.
After we graduated, Yvonne and I spent a year in India and we married there. After we finished graduate school at UCLA in 1965, Yvonne in neuroendocrinology and I in neurophysiology, we returned to India for another year. Our first daughter, Rachel, was born there.
Thereafter came academic careers, first for three years in Houston—where our second daughter, Tanya, was born—and then for more than thirty years in Seattle. Yvonne worked primarily at Antioch University Seattle, I at the University of Washington. During this long period, we were separated from my parents, who stayed in New York until the very end of their lives when they joined us in Seattle.
Whenever it was just my parents and I, I always spoke with them in Slovak, but we corresponded in English so Yvonne would be included and, of course, family conversations were all in English. I did not manage to pass the Slovak language on to our daughters, though they heard many recordings of Slovak folk songs and liked them a lot. But Slovakia was in no way forgotten.
In 1975 – 76 we spent a sabbatical year in Cambridge, England. In the spring of 1976, I applied for visas that would let us visit Czechoslovakia. I had applied for a visa several times before through the Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington but had always been denied.
In London, however, everything went smoothly, and we had our visas by return mail! It was an amazing visit. Twenty-seven years after I had crawled out under the barbed wire, I and my wife and children landed in Prague. We were met at the airport by my father’s brother, Dušan Pálka, a well-known writer of popular music, especially the so-called Slovak tango.
After staying with him and his family for a few days, we went on to Bratislava, where we stayed with Aunt Ľudinka again, this time also with her son, my cousin Karol Pavlů, and his wife, Darina. Ľudinka had managed to secure permits to travel abroad several times (through the clever bribery that was a routine part of life under Communism), so we had all met her in New York previously. We visited other family members in Bratislava and in Martin.
We visited nearby Sučany and Rakša, where the Hodža family had centuries-old roots. We visited Mikuláš, where my parents’ house had been confiscated by the government and turned into a childcare center. We met my best friend from childhood, Ivan Rázus, with whom I had gone to school during that all-too-brief post-war interlude.
We made a thrilling excursion to the Tatra Mountains. And we flew back to England with folk costumes (kroje) stitched specially for Rachel and Tanya that they treasured and wore for years on special occasions. They still have them.
All of a sudden, Slovak roots were a reality not only for me but also for Yvonne, Rachel, and Tanya—for all four of us. That sense has never faded. Rachel and Tanya visited again on their own (communicating in French) in 1985 when they were in college.
Starting in 1990 we visited every year or two. In 1992 Darina and her daughter, Darinka, came to stay with us in Seattle, and Darinka went to the local elementary school for a term. Everything changed again in 2002.
During World War II, Grandfather Hodža, like my immediate family, had ended up in the United States. He died in 1944 and was buried in the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago. In 2002, responding to the promptings of historians, the Slovak government decided to bring his remains home and re-bury them in the cemetery in Martin, which serves as the Slovak national cemetery.
This was done with great ceremony and intense press and television coverage. Our whole family, including several grandchildren, participated in Chicago. Then Yvonne and I flew to Bratislava on the official government airplane, traveling with the government delegation and the press corps.
Amidst ceremonies at the Bratislava airport we were greeted by the prime minister, Mikuláš Dzurinda, and I had my first taste of being pulled aside for radio and television interviews, all in Slovak, of course. At the end of the day, we were taken by limousine to Martin for the final extended ceremonies. The conclusion came two days later with the actual lowering of the casket into the grave that also held my grandmother’s remains and was graced with a new headstone.
Of course, life could never be the same after events such as these! Visits to Slovakia became even more frequent. We took our daughters and their families a number of times. After a great deal of research, I wrote a book about my family in the context of Slovak history.
It came out in Bratislava in 2010 as Moje Slovensko, moja rodina and in the United States in 2012 as My Slovakia, My Family. The last time I visited Slovakia was in 2019, on a detour to our oldest granddaughter’s wedding in England. Whether I will be able to go again remains to be seen.
In 2017, Yvonne and I moved. We had lived in the Pacific Northwest for nearly fifty years, around thirty in Seattle and, after we retired from academia, another twenty on one of the nearby islands, Whidbey Island. Now we were living on the outskirts of Minneapolis, minutes away from Tanya and her family and a few hours’ drive away from Rachel and her family.
Here, we found a very active Czech and Slovak community, including several wonderful organizations. Soon we were involved in a song circle, and a book club, and a variety of performances and social events. The great majority of immigrants here are Czech, but they are extremely inclusive of Slovaks and are interested in the added perspective that I am able to bring.
Czechoslovakia went through a totally peaceful Velvet Divorce effective January 1, 1993, and for the first time ever Slovakia became a truly independent country. Fortunately, in the years since then Slovakia and the Czech Republic have become the best of neighbors, with a huge amount of interchange at home and heartening cooperation between their official legations abroad. This extends to the immigrant communities.
It’s a model relationship. I have been blessed with an extraordinarily rich life. Its early years were traumatic in many ways, especially for my parents.
Losing one’s homeland under duress, especially losing it twice, is bound to leave scars. Once we really settled in the United States, however, my parents’ dreams came true. They raised a son who has felt at home here, has raised a loving family, had a successful career, and in the process never, ever separated from his Slovak roots.
Those life-filled roots have had a strong impact on the next generation, and on the generation after that. If my parents could see us, I’m sure they would be holding hands and smiling! 1) Place the sauerkraut, stock, and prunes in a large pot, and boil for 1 hour over low heat. 2) During the last 20 minutes, add the sausage, peppercorns, and mushrooms (without the milk).
3) After 20 minutes, remove the sausage to a plate. 4) In a medium bowl, mix 2 TBSP of the mushroom milk with the flour and sour cream. Add to the soup and stir in well.
5) If the soup is too thin or too sour, grate in one raw potato and continue cooking until the potato has softened. 6) Slice the cooked sausage and add it back into the soup, cooking until the sausage is heated through before serving..
