Vladimír Zikan

* 1929

  • "I came home from work and I had a correspondence card there. I didn't know what it was, so I was waiting for Zdeněk, because he spoke English well. So, he said, 'Well, next week you have to report here and there.' And everyone said, those who were there longer: 'You get Four F - they just don't accept you, you don't speak English.' And I got One A - the best classification! And they said: 'You will learn there!'"

  • "First impression… I came there through the Catholic organization; the sponsors were Catholics (and I'm not a Catholic). Two ladies were waiting for me from that ship - hats like that! It was a Packard car, they are not made anymore - with a driver. They took me and drove me to the station, they gave me money and a ticket. I said: 'Oh well, if this’s America!' The first thing I bought were Lucky Strike cigarettes, I put them in my pocket. But it was July, Louisiana, it's subtropical, it's awfully humid on the Mississippi River, it's like a laundry room. Then, I said, 'Now to Chicago, and all the way up, what a journey!' But the train was air-conditioned. What would have I thought that any trains are air conditioned! So, I lit a cigar by the window and said, 'Vladimir, you're going now!'"

  • "And how did the interrogation go with the CIC? It was a secret service…" - "Very well. A box of cigarettes and coffee and chocolate. Very friendly. But he said, 'I want to know everything from the time you were born to the time you walked into this office.' They knew more than I did." - "Did they know about your life?" - "They knew more. I didn't hide anything, but sometimes he said: 'What about that?' So, I realized... or I thought it wasn't important to talk about it. But they knew more than I knew."

  • "Jindra had a friend there, she was a Sudeten German, but she was not expelled. She went with her mother and they were watching, they knew when the guards were marching there. They arranged it all in German, and I back then - even though I spoke quite good German - but I just heard 'um acht Uhr' and 'Wasser', so I knew 'at eight o'clock' and that there was water. But the water, it was supposed to be, that it would only reach our ankles, and it probably sent us to... or we went somewhere else - and I went into a water hole all the way to the waist, in November! The handle of my suitcase tore off because it was a paper suitcase. Well, that´s how we moved to the Russian zone."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 01.08.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 01:47:37
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The first impression of America? I died and woke up in paradise!

Vladimír Zikan in 2018
Vladimír Zikan in 2018
zdroj: A photo taken during the filming

He was born on February 23, 1929 in Prague. After the war, he was a member of the National Socialist Party‘s youth organization. In the autumn of 1948, he and his friend Jindřich Hoffmann decided to run away from the communist state. They illegally crossed the North Bohemian border and passed through the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Then, with the help of smugglers, they crossed into the British zone in Helmstedt. They were sentenced by a British court to two weeks in prison for illegal border crossing, and they were also questioned by the US counterintelligence service CIC. After receiving political refugee status, they spent two years in a refugee camp run by the International Refugee Organization in Hanover. In July 1951, Vladimir Zikan went to the United States, first to a farm in Wisconsin, then to New York. There he lived in the Czech Quarter in Manhattan, but in the summer of 1952 he joined the US Army. After four months of training, he was sent to the Korean War, where he fought until its end in July 1953. In 1954, he returned to the United States as an American citizen. He made a living by playing football, among other things, then he settled at the electronic company Westinghouse in Baltimore. He graduated from college in the USA, got married and raised two sons. During his visits to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the 1970s, the State Security tried to get him to cooperate, but failed.