Lukáš Palec

* 1970

  • "When we were arriving - maybe we weren't even at the border yet - one of the border guards, one of the ones who could make the decision, said that we weren't going across the border that day. That we were sort of out of luck. And there were two, the one, he was an older gentleman, so he said, but yeah, they have all the documentation, come on, come on. And somehow he talked the other one into letting us go..."

  • "For me it was very interesting. But I thought... it was very broken here. Not just physically, the buildings, but the society. People were frowning here. There was no enthusiasm for life - maybe at home - but you couldn't see it on the street."

  • "I ended up in a school that was eighty percent black and twenty percent Puerto Rican or Hispanic and one white, and that was me. Fifth grade, all bigger, not that they were repeating the class, but... Basketball was the favourite sport, martial arts was practiced during lunch. I remember it was a completely different type of school than what I had experienced in the Czech Republic up to that point. There, the teachers and school staff were afraid of the students. It was a completely different environment. There were guns and drugs in the classroom, and I vaguely remember messing it up a little bit because I was doing homework..."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 17.11.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:40:18
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 15.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:19:53
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Between a world citizen and a homeless man

Lukáš Palec in 1985
Lukáš Palec in 1985
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Lukáš Palec was born on 22 July 1970 in Tábor. His mother was Hana Zora Palcová, a well-known journalist of the Voice of America, his father Miloslav Palec was a painter and lectured at universities in America. In 1979 the family decided to emigrate. The witness did not have valid documents, but they managed to forge them, and the crossing of the border went smoothly. The family eventually reached the USA via Vienna. At school in San Francisco, he encountered ethnic discrimination and racism, which soon brought him problems and even fear for his life. The family moved frequently depending on where the father taught. They lived in Florida, Tampa, Illinois, Washington. When he was about sixteen, his mother started working at the Voice of America. So, they stayed in touch with the Czech development. In 1988, he graduated from high school and started working, then tried to study political science at the University of Iowa, where his father taught, but dropped out. Instead, he took a two-month trip to Europe. He remembers the stark contrast between East and West; everything seemed „broken“ in socialist Czechoslovakia, people didn‘t smile. Already a year later, things were different, during the revolution he perceived hope for a free and good life. His parents returned permanently from America in 1996, and Lukáš Palec eventually settled here as well. For now, it seems, permanently, at least as long as his two children keep him here. In 2022, he was living in Prague.