"Curd cheese in any quantity. You couldn't get that [in the US]. But seriously - the cuisine was pretty much replicable in the Czech regions or nearby. You probably couldn't wear a traditional costume, [have] your car, your Tatra, your Skoda, your Wartburg, or whatever the cars were. But overall, the compensation in America, from a material point of view, was not really a problem. It was really about the relationships that they had with family members, and the loss of relationships with their mothers and their brother and sister, and the opportunity to be with friends and family members, and the pleasant experiences that they had in the places that they went - in Velké Bílovice or Radhoštěd."
"Western democracies are not perfect. They need to be nurtured to work. We need to preserve freedom and the ability to make free choices. And to have an open dialogue, to respect other individuals who have different views, and to create an environment of civil society that recognises the value of the individual and the importance of freedom and choice. But being free doesn't mean you can take advantage of other people. You have to respect where they come from. The world and communities have shared values, and those shared values include the ability to engage in discourse, to have a belief, a religion if you want, or not to have one, but not to take it away from people who disagree with you."
"We were very happy to come here [to Czechoslovakia after 1989] again. That was the main thing - the opportunity to meet some of the family members in Brno again. But they were also shocked by how austere, sterile a country it was. It had no face that had life. It was like looking at a battered nation, a nation that was sad and needed to be energized. But maybe they were prejudiced. Maybe we didn't see the whole Czech experience. It was [here] grey, but I would say there were [also] slivers of hope. You saw people regaining their freedom. But we noticed that people here didn't have eye contact. There was always a little bit of suspicion. There wasn't the kind of community that you have in America, at least where we live."
"Of course I got over it, but a certain aftertaste remained. There is a question - why did my parents leave me and take my brother with them? Why did they leave me alone in the country they fled from? It's possible to go through therapy, or to take a new approach to it. [There's a] movie with Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice, where you have to decide between your children. And I came to the conclusion that my parents made that decision thoughtfully. They didn't do it with malicious intent, but it was basically a survival instinct - let's save what we can for now and figure out the rest later."
"My parents spoke English or tried to speak English as much as they could. When we came [to the U.S.], my father decided that we wouldn't move to a community where it would be easy to assimilate. It would be a Czech-speaking community - there were communities in the Chicago area like Berwyn, Cicero, Pilsen, where the Czech community tended to emerge and flourish, and they spoke Czech in the stores and banks. But they realized that the future was not to keep their Czech language, but to learn the language of the country in which they lived. And my father decided not to go to communities where it would be easier for us to live, but to the American parts of Chicago where we would have to learn the ways of the Americans. He felt that learning the language was the way to succeed rather than clinging to the past."
George Thomas Drost was born on 14 December 1946 in Brno. His father Jan Drost was a lawyer and came from a German-Jewish family. His mother Dobroslava, née Matelová, had Czech-Polish ancestry. Shortly after the February 1948 coup, his father fled Czechoslovakia and soon his mother and older brother Rudy managed to cross the border. George Drost, who was only one and a half years old, stayed in Brno in the care of his grandmothers because he would not have been able to make the journey across the border in secret. It was not until two years later that his illegal surrender at the Austrian border was successful and he was able to be reunited with his parents. That same year, the family traveled to the United States and settled in Chicago. Here the local Presbyterian community took them in and helped them get back on their feet. The father passed his bar exams and was able to continue working in his profession. His son George also became a successful lawyer. He was appointed Honorary Consul of the Czech Republic for Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana from 2000 to 2005. He is a current board member of American Friends of the Czech Republic and an avid collector of Czech art. George Drost has written a book of family memoirs, The Quiet Hero. In 2024, he was living in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
