The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 forced Veronika Martenova Charles to desert. (Jan Novotny)
As the provincial government offers support for Ukrainian refugees who may want to move to Newfoundland and Labrador, some Eastern European refugees recall their experience decades ago in Gander, when they fled Soviet-era countries and took refuge in Canada.
Veronica Martenova Charles, who fled Czechoslovakia in 1970, said her experience was different from that of fleeing Ukrainians – but there were some similarities.
“The situation is very different,” Charles said. “There were some casualties, but it was peaceful. We didn’t have destruction like what is happening now. But the effect on people leaving is the same.”
Before 1968, Charles enjoyed his life in his home country as a member of a pop group. That all changed after four Warsaw Pact countries – the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary – stormed in to suppress the reform movement.
“There was this absolute distrust and shock from the whole population and their lives were turned upside down in hours. People lost their careers,” Charles said. Her life was not directly affected at the time, but many of her friends chose to leave the country.
“I knew at the time that I would never be able to see them again because you were not allowed to travel to the West … They were just dead in some way because you would never see them again.”
Over time, Charles began to see an increasing impact on her life.
“When we went to concerts, we drove past many convoys of soldiers, and he knew it would never be the same. For example, you can’t go to the forest and pick mushrooms because you can meet the soldiers. “
But she hoped Czechoslovakia would return to the country she knew and loved.
That changed after Charles toured with his band in Cuba in May 1970, and the new environment – “seeing the blue sky, being on the other side of the world, the ocean and the fresh air” – inspired her to reconsider her decision to stay in her country.
Charles lives in Toronto. (Submitted by Veronica Martenova Charles)
The next stop on her band’s tour was in the Soviet Union. She did not want to leave, but she knew that leaving would have serious consequences.
“I knew that if I did that, I could never come back, because if I came back, or even if I flew somewhere else in Europe, I was caught [at] at some different airport, I was put in jail, “she said.” Leaving at the time was considered treason. After I left, that’s it. You could never come back. “
When her group boarded a plane in Havana, Charles wasn’t sure if he would stop to refuel on the way to the Soviet Union. According to fate, she really stopped – in Newfoundland, a place she had never heard of before.
“When he stopped in Gander, I decided I was just going to stay.”
Charles did not tell anyone that her plan was to escape because he knew they would try to force her to stay on the plane. But passengers were allowed to wait at Gander Airport until the plane loaded and she saw a chance to escape.
“My group was sitting there drinking tea. I just walked away and saw that there was a door and it said Immigration. I went in and said I didn’t want to go back on the plane. ”
Initially, there were some difficulties in communicating with immigration officials.
“I knew English because I listened to English pop songs,” Charles said. “So I knew what it sounded like.”
But she noted that employees at Gander Airport do not speak in the same way as Elvis sang.
“It didn’t sound like the songs I was listening to. Somehow I thought, “So, where am I?”
However, immigration officials left Charles in their office and asked the Cuban pilots to drop off her luggage. The pilots refused and Charles was left with only her bag and the sun dress she was wearing.
Travelers ignored a 70-foot mural by Saskatchewan artist Kenneth Lochhead in 1959. As Gander Airport was a key refueling destination for many flights to and from Cuba, the airport became a central center for Cold War-era deserters. (Gar Looney / Library and Archives of Canada / National Film Council)
In the end, Charles spent only one night in Gander. An airport official took her to a hotel to stay the night, and the next day she flew to Halifax, where she stayed at the immigration center on Quay 21 for four months.
“I puzzle everyone because I was young. I was a woman. I had no relatives in Canada, but I still had all these stamps in my passport because we traveled to Germany and other places and [the immigration officials] I couldn’t understand how I got these stamps like that. “
She said the confusion over the seals led the RCMP to interview her several times, asking her if she was a spy. Police provided her with an interpreter, but Polish.
“I have no idea how the translation actually went,” she said.
Eventually, Charles received a temporary residence permit and was allowed to leave Pierre 21. She used English vocabulary to learn the language and got a job as a laboratory assistant at the University of Toronto.
She saved money and eventually studied design at Ryerson University, then became an interior designer and continued to write and illustrate children’s books. Charles later earned a master’s degree from Yale University in Connecticut and received a doctorate in education from York University in Toronto.
In a tragic turn, Charles said, moving to Canada indirectly saved her life.
“About a year or so after I left, my bandmates were coming home from another tour. And while they were landing at the airport in Prague, the plane caught fire and the whole group died.
In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Charles has returned twice to today’s Czech Republic – but this is not the country she remembers from her childhood.
“Change,” she said. “It was interesting to walk the streets I walked as a child. It was nice, but now it’s a different place.
“Charles Bridge with these statues has become a great tourist destination, but when I was there, I just sat there with my friends next to these statues and we would talk at night and no one else was there.”
Charles Bridge in Prague was pictured in March 2021. Charles says the Czech Republic is not the country he remembers from his childhood. (David Cherny / Reuters)
Charles said she wrote about her own experiences as a refugee in a children’s book called The Land Beyond the Wall. “I tried to express what it feels like to come to a place where you don’t know the language and you don’t know anyone.”
What is happening now with Ukrainian refugees reminds her how everything changed for her in 1968, she said.
“All these people, it marks them for life,” she said. “It brings me back when the tanks arrived in Prague and the absolute shock for everyone. I feel it.
“I am really sick and with a broken heart… All these mothers with children who leave their husbands without knowing if they will ever see them again. Even if they can return, what will they return to? It’s just a desolate land. It’s just incomprehensible. “
Lyuben Boykov, center, is pictured in 2016 with two other Bulgarian artists who deserted from Gander, Eli Yonova and Vessela Brakalova. (Heather Barrett / CBC)
In February 1990, Lyuben Boykov moved from Bulgaria to Gander with his wife Elena Popova and their two-year-old daughter. Bulgaria at the time looked like what Russia is now, he said.
“It was still under Soviet rule, the communist, totalitarian, authoritarian regime. Very limited human rights, civil liberties, essentially a classic communist country. So we decided to get away with it.
Boykov and his family saw their chance in 1989, when they were allowed to apply for passports. Under communist rule, he said, Bulgarians were not allowed to have passports and were not allowed to travel abroad. After receiving their passports, they began making plans to leave the country.
But the only places they could go outside Bulgaria were other communist countries, but they heard that some flights to Cuba had to land in North America to refuel.
“We decided to take a risk and buy tickets to Havana, to pretend we were going on vacation.”
They boarded a Soviet airline flight from Moscow to Havana. Boykov said the flight crew was secretive about the details of refueling.
“They were allowed to be flight attendants, which meant they were politically loyal to the regime. And they knew very well at the time that all the passengers were potential deserters. So they didn’t tell us anything.”
When the plane landed, Boykov looked out the window, and although he didn’t know where they were, he knew it wasn’t Havana.
“When the plane started to land and approached the surface, we noticed that there was snow on the ground, so we knew we were not in Cuba.
Almost all we knew about Newfoundland was the fact that it was an island, it was part of Canada – and we also knew about the Newfoundland dog. – Lyuben Boykov
When the plane landed, they had no idea where they were.
“Then we saw a Canadian flag waving in the background at the top of the terminal building and we knew we were in Canada. Then, when the plane approached, we saw Gander, so we knew we were in Newfoundland.”
Before landing in Newfoundland, he said he didn’t know much about the place.
“Much of what we knew about Newfoundland was the fact that it was an island, part of Canada – and we also knew about the Newfoundland dog.
Although it felt good to know they had landed in Canada, he said, they still had a battle to get off the plane.
“They did not allow us to go down. So we had to do it by force in our case. “
Fighting on board the plane
Stewardesses and some others …
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