Twenty-five years ago, a wave of people’s uprising across central and eastern Europe countries ripped down the 'iron curtain' to banish authoritarian Communist rule.

 

In Czechoslovakia, the so-called Velvet Revolution was considered a miracle because of the regime’s stranglehold over its citizens.

 

A generation later, Czechs have mixed emotions and experiences about the changes to their country. Some have told their stories as part of a project to mark 25 years of post-communist life.

 

Vladimir Gottwald sits proudly in the lounge room of his double-storey home in the south of Canberra. His house is perched on a hillside with commanding views across the valley to the rolling Brindabella mountains in the distance. Gottwald surveys his surroundings. It’s the “destiny” he has created.

 

His journey to this contented point is a long and, at times, emotional  one. It's an inspiring story punctuated by struggle against adversity and determination to provide a better life for his children.

 

Gottwald describes himself as a proud Czech, born and raised in Prague, and a sculptor by trade. But Communist rule had driven him to despair. So, in 1980, he made the tumultuous decision to leave Czechoslovakia, a country he felt no longer offered the opportunities he wanted for his wife and three children, aged six, four and two.

 

His story of emigration is one shared by more than 500-thousand Czechoslovaks who left after the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the ensuing generation of Communist rule.

 

Yet, 25 years since the end of the regime in 1989, the legitimacy of the stories of Czech émigrés is still being debated. These people – once loathed by some for seeking wealth in the West – still don’t believe their decision to leave an oppressive regime is fully understood.

 

For Vladimir Gottwald and his wife Jana, the decision was clear-cut.

 

“The regime kept the whole country in the darkness,” he said. “There was no freedom, you couldn’t express yourself, you couldn’t even travel to other countries to learn about other cultures.”

 

On their way to a government-approved holiday in Yugoslavia, the Gottwalds stopped at an immigration checkpoint in Austria and asked to be granted asylum. Three months later, the family was on its way to Australia in a process Vladimir describes as “remarkably smooth” given the high stakes.

 

Watch the video of Vladimir Gottwald's story.

 

The flight to freedom was more dangerous for others. Jiri Pehe, who would later return to the Czech Republic as an advisor to President Vaclav Havel, was days away from imprisonment when he slipped across the border in 1981.

 

Pehe had been flirting with danger by reading banned samizdat literature (or literature from dissident writers and artists). He then joined the voices of dissent by penning an article for an underground magazine. His rookie mistake was to attach his own by-line to the published story.

 

Fortunately, he and his wife had a holiday approved for Yugoslavia, so they left with little notice or planning, knowing that he would be arrested once the magazine landed in the hands of the regime.

 

The Pehes convinced a couple of tourists to hide them in the boot of their car as they crossed the Yugoslav border into Italy. They endured a 45-minute wait in the queue, breathing in the car’s petrol fumes, as border guards interrogated every crossing.

 

And from the dramatic to the traumatic, as other émigrés dealt with the emotion of separating from their mother country. Zdenka Grundelova and her husband had agonised for five years before eventually leaving in 1988, also for Australia. But their plan was a closely-guarded secret.

 

“Before we left, we went on a long holiday with my parents and my sister,” Zdenka said. “They didn’t know we were planning to leave so I just wanted to have good and lasting memories of us together.”

 

The emotional scars were inevitable when many left in the dead of night. Both Gottwald and Grundelova lost their fathers in the first few years of settling in Australia. The regret of not having a final goodbye still weighs heavily on both of them. This was the conflict many had to deal with: the quest for freedom versus the emotional wrench of leaving their loved ones.

 

Vladimir Sobell also feared the thought of “never seeing anyone again”, but for him the reward outweighed any loss. Sobell felt his dreams were falling apart under Communist rule, and during the summer of 1969, while working at a holiday camp in England, he decided “the thought of going back was like going to prison”.

 

For all those who left during the Communist years, there were consequences. Anyone who dared to return would automatically be sent to prison for two years. And for those who owned property, as Vladimir Gottwald did, it was taken by the state.

 

“The government told my parents that they would have to pay rent for the house, even though it was my house,” Gottwald said. “It was very painful for me that my parents had to be punished and use their money, which they did not have a lot of, to pay rent because of my actions.”

 

The emotional rollercoaster ride of leaving Czechoslovakia was draining, and for many people, this was only made worse by the introduction to their new country. For Valdimir Gottwald, it was as soon as he got off the plane in Sydney.

 

He recalls the bus ride from the airport to an immigration hostel which passed through suburbs where housing was in decay and ready for demolition. It was a fleeting moment, but in his first hour on Australian soil, Gottwald had not expected such an ugly and despairing sight that he would not even have seen back in Czechoslovakia.

 

“At this moment, I had tears in my eyes. I kept asking myself: ‘Where have I brought my family to?’”

 

It was a question he asked himself frequently in those first few months. Most émigrés share a similar tale of despair, frustration and humiliation while trying to settle in a country where they couldn’t speak the language. The flow-on effect was limited employment options.

 

“And that was the problem, we couldn’t even practice the language,” Vladimir Gottwald said. “If you swept the factory floor, there was no need to speak to anyone and no one had a need to speak to you.”

 

Vladimir Sobell said, at times, he “felt like a slave”. Zdenka Grundelova said the language barrier was overwhelming.

 

“If I knew what was waiting for me, I wouldn’t have migrated (to Australia),” she said. “It was very difficult coming here with no language. I was a doctor in Czechoslovakia, here I felt like nothing.”

 

The feeling of being an ‘outsider’ was soul-destroying and lonely. But from the depths of despair emerge stories of perseverance and determination to overcome the hurdles. There was even a hint of stubbornness in refusing to acknowledge that, possibly, they had made the wrong decision because, for many émigrés, the decision to leave Czechoslovakia was eventually vindicated.

 

“We were slowly making progress,” Gottwald said. “The kids were happy, there was so much freedom in this country. The weather was good. There was just no way that we could have gone back.”

 

For others, the motivation to stay the course was the thought of what they left behind. Vladimir Sobell remained in England, he graduated at university to Masters level and married an English woman.

 

“I was so haunted by the Communist regime that I would often have a dream or nightmare about being in Prague, and then would wake up in a cold sweat.”

 

The passage of time in a new country also developed a sense of belonging. Language barriers ceased to be an issue and adopted cultures welcomed their independent thinking in contrast to the Communist way of being told what to do.

 

In many cases, the emotional and physical drain had given way to a world of opportunity, careers and freedom.

 

They were hard-won rewards which Jiri Pehe believes many Czechs who remained behind, either did not understand or were not prepared to acknowledge.

 

On a wall in Pehe's New York University office in Prague is a framed Laterna Magika poster of Ulysses, or Odysseus. No one recognised Ulysses when he returned to the island after 20 years because they were not really interested.

 

“We all felt a bit like Ulysses,” Pehe said. “You are trying to tell people, ‘This is what I went through’. You could understand what they went through, but at the same time, you couldn’t really communicate your story to them because they don’t have that point of reference.”

 

New-found freedom in another country did not always guarantee happiness. Michal Verveka and his wife Marcela moved to the US in 1979, appalled by the Czech regime’s suppression and the submissive way its people accepted their fate.

 

But the couple never really settled. They often felt like outsiders, unable to embrace the pressure to conform with what they perceived to be materialistic ideals.

 

“A home is a home,” Verveka reflects, and the lure of roots, family and culture were too powerful to resist, so they returned to Prague in 1999.

 

Like the Vervekas, some emigrants returned. But the reintegration into a society they thought they knew intimately was not always easy. It is the subject of some contention or, more accurately, the story of two perspectives.

 

Vladimir Sobell, now a British citizen, did return. He was curious to see what had become of his homeland. He didn't have expectations, yet the way he was treated by the Czech bureaucracy shocked him.

 

He was made to compress 20 years of his life into a document folder just so that he could get his car registered, a process which took 10 months. The experience angered him.

 

“There are remnants of the past which are still strong,” Sobell said. “I call it the ‘Internal Iron Curtain’ which prevents [Czechs] from functioning as free, independent people.”

 

The topic of the trauma experienced by returning migrants was the focus of a book by Canadian academic, Professor Madelaine Hron from Wilfried Laurier University. She looked at the Czech experience by speaking to those who returned to the country after the revolution of 1989.

 

During the 1990s, there was much debate among commentators and politicians about émigrés. People who had spurned the country were now returning to reclaim citizenship, their right to vote and restitution of their property.

 

The tension was described by one author, Thomas Pecina, as an “undeclared war” between Czech émigrés and Czech citizens.

 

Professor Hron concluded that those who returned were seen by those who endured Communist rule to the bitter end as opportunistic and driven by money. She uncovered émigré stories of discrimination, even xenophobia, and the casting of these people as foreigners in their own land.

 

The notion that those who stayed were hostile, dismissive or even ambivalent to those who left has been reconciled by Jiri Pehe. He thinks the divide is created because there are not many shared or common experiences between Czech citizens and émigrés.

 

Pehe is cautiously optimistic that the country will heal as well as develop into a democracy. But the message seems to be that Czechs have to stop thinking that the government must always provide the solution.

 

Half-a-world away in Australia, that is exactly the sentiment of Vladimir Gottwald. He eventually established his family in Canberra where he became an acclaimed designer of notes and coins at the Royal Australian Mint.

 

His zenith arrived when he became the first Australian to design the Royal Queen’s effigy for a coin – an honour only ever bestowed on a designer from the United Kingdom. Tears well up in his eyes as he speaks with pride about the rewards of persistence and overcoming adversity.

 

“My wish when I came to this country was to achieve something. I just didn’t want to live day-to-day without any goal, and I think this way of thinking pushed me to do what I have achieved.”