I lived a Czech-Canadian childhood
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Michala Netrval was born on July 14, 1960 in Vancouver, Canada to Czech immigrants. Her mother, Libuše Novotná (1926), came from the Doubravka district of Pilsen and recalled the Allied bombing and her friendship with American soldiers. After the communist takeover she decided to emigrate and crossed the border into Šumava shortly before the end of 1948. From a refugee camp in Reich, Germany, she continued by boat to Canada, the Canadian government’s condition at the time being that it would pay the immigrants’ passage if they began working in the new country. A year later, the witness’s father, Josef Netrval, also came to Canada, and together they settled in Vancouver, where they started a family. The Netrvals first visited Czechoslovakia after emigrating in 1967. The Czechs in Vancouver gathered in the family of former National Assembly member Professor Josef Macek, and there was a lively social and cultural life there; the witness’s mother, for example, played in the amateur theatre Za Rohem. Michala Netrval thus lived a Czech-Canadian childhood. She studied architecture, and more recently she mainly designed gardens. At the time of the filming for Memory of Nations, she was intensively engaged in the search for her Czech roots.
