Journey For Freedom-Defection From Communist Czechoslovakia
The author was born in 1955 in the picturesque European country of Czechoslovakia, where he lived his first twenty-seven years of life under the iron fist of a Communist government. In 1983 he took his wife and two small children on vacation to the Communist country of Yugoslavia, where they successfully escaped across the border to the Western country of Austria. They spent three months in a refugee camp applying for entry into America, eventually being sponsored by the First Lutheran Church in Beach, ND. Upon arrival in the U.S., they had $600 in their pockets, the clothes on their backs, two small children, and they could not speak any English. His first job in America was working on a pig farm, for the minimum wage of $3.35 per hour. Once he learned English, his options improved. Soon he found work in the construction industry, where he quickly advanced through the ranks to a management position, eventually owning his own company. He also became a motivational speaker, strongly drawing on his life experiences due to living half of his life under government oppression and dictatorship, and the other half living free in the United States of America.