Milan Haluška

* 1953

  • "When I came to Italy, I could speak no Italian at all. And I only knew a little English. When I came to Italy, I applied for political asylum there. And at the time, it worked so that they sent me to a refugee camp in Latina near Rome. Because I took advantage of the fact that we arrived in Venice for a day visiting the city. And I used it to keep myself from coming back. And then, when I lived in Latina, I eventually moved to Rome. Well, I lived in Italy for about a year. Or less than a year before we flew to America as refugees using documents that allowed us to work and live there."

  • "Then when I grew up, and when I started working, and then when I started to find out how it worked with politics there in Czechoslovakia and so on, I started to have the idea that I would like to live somewhere else, that I would like to live out of the regime, away from the social system that was there. I wanted to go somewhere else. And over time, I just… My idea, my idea actually turned into a plan, and so I then… No one was not allowed to travel out of country to a country that had other than socialist regime. But that's what I wanted, so I got prepared for it. It was not easy. Well, that's how I actually got to Italy. And then from Italy to America. And I lived there for about twelve years."

  • "I first met other Czechs in Latina. But not only with the Czechs who fled their countries. It was extremely interesting to see people who came from the same country for almost the same reasons. But without any idea of what they will do next. So it was a very interesting thing. And it was also interesting that we met there with people from other socialist countries that were under communism: Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians. And we looked at each other, as we all had the same reason, but we did not know our languages, so we couldn't speak. Because we didn't know English yet, neither could we speak Italian. But what united us was Russian, which we all had to learn at school. So suddenly the language we didn't like and had to learn was suddenly such a connecting one. Which was such fun. But we all participated in English courses and over time we just switched to English. And it was such a captivating time and a captivating feeling of coming freedom."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Florencie, 26.10.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 50:44
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I think the ones who like each should be together the most

Milan Haluška was born on February 5, 1953 in Prague. Here he went to primary school, studied mechanical engineering. He also made a living for a while, so that he could subsequently resort to the work of a journalist at ČTK and then at Technický týdeník. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he and his girlfriend emigrated to Italy via the then Yugoslavia. At first he lived here in a refugee camp in Latina, later he worked as an editor and proof-reader of the exile magazine Listy. He later emigrated to the United States. He studied economics at the university and managed a company, which put various patent innovations into practice. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Milan returned to Czechoslovakia. He founded a company here for the production of chemical preparations. He sold it a few years later and moved to Malta, where he lives to this day.