Prague: My Long Journey Home

Prague: My Long Journey Home PDF Author: Charles Ota Heller
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 145820121X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Author Charles Ota Heller's early childhood in Czechoslovakia was idyllic, but his safe and happy world didn't last long, Three years after his birth, Germany forced an occupation of his country; afterward, most of his young life consisted of running and hiding. His life, just like those of the other youths who lived in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s, was shaped forever by the dangers, horrors, and unsettling events he experienced. In this memoir, Heller, born Ota Karel Heller, narrates his family's story—a family nearly destroyed by the Nazis. Son of a mixed marriage, he was raised a Catholic and was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and fifteen members of his family disappeared. Prague: My Long Journey Home tells of his Christian mother being sent to a slave labor camp and of his hiding on a farm to avoid deportation to a death camp. With the war coming to a close, Heller tells of how he picked up a revolver and shot a Nazi when he was just nine years old. Heller, now an assimilated American, left the horrors of the past—along with his birth name—behind to live the proverbial American Dream. In his memoir, he recalls how two cataclysmic events following Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought him face-to-face with demons of his former life. On his personal journey Heller discovered and embraced his heritage—one which he had abandoned decades earlier.

Prague: My Long Journey Home

Prague: My Long Journey Home PDF Author: Charles Ota Heller
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 145820121X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Author Charles Ota Heller's early childhood in Czechoslovakia was idyllic, but his safe and happy world didn't last long, Three years after his birth, Germany forced an occupation of his country; afterward, most of his young life consisted of running and hiding. His life, just like those of the other youths who lived in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s, was shaped forever by the dangers, horrors, and unsettling events he experienced. In this memoir, Heller, born Ota Karel Heller, narrates his family's story—a family nearly destroyed by the Nazis. Son of a mixed marriage, he was raised a Catholic and was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and fifteen members of his family disappeared. Prague: My Long Journey Home tells of his Christian mother being sent to a slave labor camp and of his hiding on a farm to avoid deportation to a death camp. With the war coming to a close, Heller tells of how he picked up a revolver and shot a Nazi when he was just nine years old. Heller, now an assimilated American, left the horrors of the past—along with his birth name—behind to live the proverbial American Dream. In his memoir, he recalls how two cataclysmic events following Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought him face-to-face with demons of his former life. On his personal journey Heller discovered and embraced his heritage—one which he had abandoned decades earlier.

Long Journey Home

Long Journey Home PDF Author: Helen Notzl
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1525508199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
A four-year-old girl survives a harrowing escape across the heavily armed border of Czechoslovakia with her mother and brother after the Communist takeover in 1948. The family leaves everything behind to flee to freedom in Canada. Years later, as a young woman living in Toronto, she finds herself drawn to the country of her birth and returns to Prague, along the way finding love, danger, heartbreak, and her family's legacy. Helen Notzl's poignant memoir takes readers on a voyage between two starkly different and conflicting worlds - from affluence and fulfillment in Canada to passion and revolution in Prague. Must she choose between the two? With intense drama, vivid narration, and brilliant detail, Long Journey Home tells the story of a woman's quest for those things that truly matter to all of us: love, family, identity and homeland.

Name-Droppings

Name-Droppings PDF Author: Charles Ota Heller
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 1458211452
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
How did Clint Eastwood spend his Thursday evenings? What caused one of Americas greatest basketball coaches to scream the n-word at the author? How did Heller become an early witness to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair? Why did jazz singer Helen OConnell proposition the young, innocent Charlie Heller? What led the author to insult the leader of Americas space program? How did Heller and a TV star/sex therapist develop immediate rapport? How did the author and the leader of a famous rock band become friends? These are some of the interesting vignettes told by Charles Ota Heller, a former CEO entrepreneur, educator, venture capitalist, athlete, and engineer who came to America as an immigrant from Czechoslovakia at the age of thirteen and who now looks back at a life of chasing the proverbial American Dream, chronicling the famous and near-famous people he met along the way.

The Rotarian: July 2014

The Rotarian: July 2014 PDF Author:
Publisher: Rotary International
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description


Ready, Fire, Aim

Ready, Fire, Aim PDF Author: Charles Ota Heller
Publisher: BQB Publishing
ISBN: 1608081826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
"Under the best conditions, being an entrepreneur can be filled with anxiety and trepidation. Throw in some challenging circumstances, and trepidation turns to downright terror. Charles Ota Heller is a Holocaust survivor who arrived in the US as a penniless thirteen-year-old who spoke two words of English. Exhibiting strength, persistence, and determination, he earned an athletic scholarship to college and obtained three degrees in engineering. He became an academic at the cutting edge of new computer technology and was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. Over the next twenty years as CEO of technology companies and an additional twenty as an investor in, and mentor of, startup companies, Charlie experienced the joys, successes, failures, and terrors of entrepreneurship. When the FBI attempted to shut down his company on a trumped-up charge, memories of World War II and the Gestapo filled him with the terror of uncertainty. He was betrayed by a member of his management team and was deposed from leadership of the company he founded. Then he discovered that his partner in a venture capital fund was dishonest and Charlie had to fight to maintain his own reputation. Ready, Fire, Aim is the story of his riveting journey, told as a powerful, candid, engrossing adventure that will not only entertain but will leave present and budding entrepreneurs with valuable takeaways."

Czech It Out

Czech It Out PDF Author: Miloslav Rechcigl Jr.
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1504920716
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1379

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Book Description
Czech it Out: Czech American Biography Sourcebook provides a wealth of information on a variety of sources relating to biographical information on notable Americans with Czech roots. Besides the national figures, also included are information sources on significant individuals at the state, regional, and local levels. Beyond that, we saw it fit to also incorporate ethnic information sources, which frequently contain a wealth of information on pioneer settlers and individuals active at the community level. Having in mind the interests of genealogists in individual families and their descendents, a listing has also been provided on family histories and genealogies. Even though Czechs have been living in the US practically since colonial times, no composite biographical dictionary exists about the accomplished Czech Americans. Biographical information about them is scattered in a plethora of sources, which are difficult to find and some are not readily accessible. The present author, who, literally, devoted several decades of his life to the study of Czech-American history, has canvassed hundreds of sources at national and local levels to identify, not only notable individuals but also pioneer settlers who played a significant role in the growth and development of the US. This publication should fill a great void in literature until a comprehensive biographical compendium about Czech Americans has been written.

My Long Journey Home

My Long Journey Home PDF Author: Lily Golden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

Empire of Friends

Empire of Friends PDF Author: Rachel Applebaum
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

The Downside Review

The Downside Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


From Immigrant to Inventor

From Immigrant to Inventor PDF Author: Michael Pupin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Inventors
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The author tells of his life story coming from Serbia as an immigrant arriving in Castle Garden with five cents in his pocket. His objective for writing the book was to describe the rise of idealism in American science, and particularly in physical sciences.--Publisher's description.