Tvarůžky in all amounts. You couldn't find that. But seriously, there the cuisines could be replicated to a great degree in the Czech lands or the close. Likely you wouldn't be wearing the native costume – the „kroj“, you had your car, your Tatra, your Skoda, the Wartburg or whatever the automobiles were. But overall, the replacement in America from a material sense, was not really an issue. It was really the relationships that they had with their family members and the loss of society with mothers and with the brother and sister and the ability to be with friends and family members and the comfort that they had in places that they visited in Velké Bílovice or to go to Radhošť. Just absorb the nature and the natural amenities of the Czech experience and Czech lands.
Western style democracies are not perfect. You have to invest in them to make them work. And what you need is to maintain your freedom and the freedom to make choices. And to have open dialogues to respect other individuals who have different points of view, to create an environment of a civil society, one that recognizes the value of individuals and the importance of being free. And being able to make choices. But being free doesn't mean that you can just take advantage of other people. You have to respect where they come from. That the world and communities have shared values, and those shared values are to be able to engage in discourse, to have faith, religion, if you want, or to not have it, but not to take it away from people that don't necessarily agree with you.
They were very happy to come back. That was number one – to be able to reconnect with some of the family members in Brno. But they were also shocked by how austere, sterile of the country was. There was no face to it, that had life. It was very looking down at a beaten nation, the nation that was sad and needed an injection of energy. And again – looking through their eyes, they might have been prejudiced. And maybe we didn't see the whole Czech experience. But it was dower (?), drab and again, I'd say there were slivers of hope to that. You would see people who were regaining their freedom. But we noticed – people would not have eye contact. There was always a bit of suspicion. There wasn't a lot of community that you have in America, at least in our, where we live.
I get over it, obviously, but there's a touch of that and you could also say – why would my parents leave me behind and take my brother? Why leave me alone? In a land that you fled. You you could go through therapy or you could, you know, start to reeducate yourself in a way. The movie with Meryl Streep Sophie's choice, where you have to make a choice between your children. And I've come to the sort of rationale that my parents were making these choices and these choices were thought out. They weren't ones that were done by maliciousness, but basically it's survival instinct of preserve what you can now and then we'll figure out the rest later.
My parents spoke English or tried to speak English as much as they could. When we came over, my father made a decision not to move into a community where it would be easy to assimilate. That would be a Czech speaking community in the Chicago area. There were communities like Berwyn, Cicero, even earlier in what was called the Pilsen area of Chicago, that the Czech community tended to emerge and thrive, and they spoke Czech at Czech shops, Czech stores, banking, financing. But the realization was that the future was not to retain your Czech, but to learn the language of the country you are living in. And my father decided not to go to communities where it might be easier for us to live in. To go to the American parts of Chicago, where we would have to learn the ways of the Americans and in America. He felt that learning the language was the road to success rather than hanging on 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.
