Czech adoptees search for their lost past
Brian Whitmore, Prague
The Globe and Mail [The Boston Globe]
June 23, 2001

Stanislava Uzlova sits in her kitchen drinking lemonade and wondering who she is.

She stares at decades-old, brittle, yellowing documents, where in dry bureaucratic prose is the evidence of her stolen past - a mother who never met and a sister she didn’t know existed.

A 50-year-old divorced mother of two, Ms. Uzlova is one of the so-called "Children of Communism," infants who were seized from their parents in the 1950s and and early 1960s by Szechoslovakia’s pro-Soviet government and "adopted" by politically connected families.
Now after five decades in the dark, she is determined to discover her lost roots. It has been a frustrating and emotional quest that has led her through police archives, courtrooms, government agencies and numerous dead ends.

The controversy over political adoptions is just the latest example of the Czech Republic’s drive to face up to the most unsavoury aspects of its past.

It has become an obsession for Ms. Uzlova and others, victims of a 40-year regime that put its need for loyal subjects above the rights of parents to raise their own children.

"If I hadn’t been adopted, maybe I would have been poorer, but at least I would have been with my real mother," said Ms. Uzlova, who has been estranged from her adoptive parents for years.

Between 1948 and 1962, Czechoslovakia’s Communist government routinely took away infants from those considered "inappropriate" parents and gave them to loyal Communist members. Birth records were often changed so the children grew up thinking they were with their natural parents.

Now in their 40s and 50s, the lost children can learn the truth.
A six-year investigation by a special police task force, called the Unit of investigation of Communist Crimes, uncovered hundreds of cases of children taken against the will of the parents.

Some were born behind bars to political prisoners, or to common criminals. Others, like Ms. Uzlova, were taken from single parents deemed by the Communist authorities unfit to give their children a "politically correct" upbringing.

"This was like a guarantee that the children would be raised with the ideals of the socialist regime," said Otakar Liska, a historian who is helping the investigation.

The case that sparked the probe involved Ivan Toman, kidnapped in 1948 by the StB, Czechoslovakia’s feared secret police.

His father, Zdenek Toman, a high-ranking government official before the February, 1948, Communist coup, was convicted of treason in April, 1948. After his arrest, his wife, Ivan’s mother, jumped to her death from the window of the family’s Prague apartment. In June, 1948, Zdenek Toman escaped from jail and fled the country.

Authorities spirited seven-month-old Ivan away to an orphanage and changed his identity. In August, 1948, he officially "disappeared."
After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the new democratic regime began investigating the case. In 1994, they revealed that an StB agent kidnapped Ivan from the orphanage and sold him to a police officer.
Although Ivan died in 1961, the outcry over his case prompted the authorities to investigate political adoptions. The results, released earlier this year, revealed that nearly 600 infants were taken from their parents, including 164 from women in jail. Of these, 32 children were taken from political prisoners.

"If the relatives were not considered politically reliable, the child was usually given to a new family, " said Josef Slanina, a retired police officer.

Ms. Uzlova was inspired to uncover her past after reading a newspaper article about the issue in February.

She knew she was adopted and her parents were politically connected – her adoptive father was an official in the Foreign Ministry and her adoptive mother was employed by the secret police.

"They tried to give me a good Communist upbringing," she said. "Thank God it didn’t stick."

She recalls how, when she was 17, her mother ridiculed her for crying when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring democracy movement in August, 1968.

After months of searching, Ms. Uzlova pieced together what happened to her nearly 50 years ago. Her natural mother, Josefa Levickova, did not want to give her up, according to letters Ms. Uzlova found in government archives, but was pressed into doing so by authorities.
Ms. Uzlova also discovered an older sister, Jana Smetakova, whose whereabouts are unknown." When you are 50 years old and think you are alone and suddenly you discover you have a sister, it is a bit strange," she said.

But since learning the truth about her family, Ms. Uzlova has been unable to find her mother or sister, or determine if they are alive.
So far, only a few people have approached the authorities for assistance in discovering their histories. Part of the problem is that because of altered birth records, many don’t know they were adopted.
Others simply don’t want to know the truth.

"For many people this is a reminder of times they are not proud of," said Pavel Bret, deputy director of the Unit for Investigation of Communist Crimes.

"But it is also an opportunity to discover the real history of our country."

Since most of the adoptions were legal when they took place, prosecutions are unlikely.

© The Boston Globe

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