Life in America, the first ten years were very cruel. We were used to such a relaxed lifestyle in Dimitrovka, e.g when there was football, we brought a TV there, because the work was not very important there. But in the USA, the pace so high that you had to chase in those 8 hours to do it. There was a very high pace of work and it was very difficult to get used to it. Another thing is,I had knowledge of the theory of electrical engineering and such. But they had a totally different metric system. All they norms very completely different. Then I worked for ten years for individual companies, but when there was a job, they hired me, but as soon at is was over, I was without work."
"Well, the childhood was cruel. In 1953, we started to build a house. The first thing was that my father got the ten hectares he had there. He sowed wheat, corn and God knows what else, and as he sowed it in that year, he had to hand in the whole acre, otherwise he won't be able to teach. Neither he nor my mother could work as teachers and they would have no income. So not only did he have to hand over all the land to a collective farm, but he also had to persuade other villagers to join the JRD."
"Once Czechoslovakia was 160 km from Tashul to the east. That means Uzhgorod, Mukacheve, Bereh - all of this belonged to Czechoslovakia. In the 1945, Stalin came and divided the family in half. Half of them remained in Tasula, another half in Uzhorod. Another half was in America. Those, who stayed there from before the war, died, only three aunts were still living there. My parents didn't have problems with the government per se, but they were the intellectual elite. And such people were sent to how to say it, hellholes. In 1950, they were relocated to Staskov-Polgrun, in Kysuce. There was nothing, one house here, another there."
Alexander Stavrovsky was born on February 25, 1944 in Humenné. His parents were teachers, his father was a highly qualified expert in working with deaf children. During the war parents taught in a small Ruthenian village Nechválova Polianka. In 1950, parents were forced to leave to teach in Kysuce for cadre reasons. In 1953, they returned with Alexander to the east of Slovakia. The land fell to cooperative, his father was forced to join the party. Alexander completed high school in 1961 and went to study electrical engineering in Bratislava. Here he met his wife Judita, together with whom he decided after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in 1968 to illegally leave from Czechoslovakia. They were granted asylum in Colorado, USA. In 1980, they acquired the US citizenship.
