An Interview With Annie Schindler

Interview conducted by: Taylor Van Nest and James Galvan

In 1938, Annie Schindler’s parents immigrated to the United States to avoid Nazi invasion. While 7-months pregnant, her mother and father made the journey from Czechoslovakia, to New York city then to Houston, Texas. In this interview, Annie remembers her childhood and life her family created in Houston.

Interview

This interview was made in collaboration with Department of History in University of Houston and Czech Center Museum Houston. The following text is the verbatim transcription of the oral history project.

October 25, 2019

Annie Schindler: And what is this for?

UH Interviewer:   This interview is an option for our final…

Annie Schindler: Well, so, so I'm a former teacher. We're going to work for an A, I don't want a B or C. unlike my son who went to school, he barely passed. He said, but mom, it's in the passing column. So we don't want to say magical teachers. So they, what?

UH Interviewer:  My parents are also teachers, so they made sure that I didn't slack off at all.

Annie Schindler: So, you wouldn't be a teacher? I keep telling my son not to be a teacher. He's a teacher. He married a teacher herself.

UH Interviewer: That's the path I'm on. I don't know about the marriage part, but the career.

Annie Schindler: Where do your parents teach?

UH Interviewer:  They teach close to the border in Brownsville and ... Yeah. So they have a lot of Hispanic students, a lot of ESL students. And so they're, they're usually learning the material as well as, you know, the American side of culture at the same time. Yeah. So I thought this is really good, like overlap perhaps. My mom, my mom actually teaches English for the students who are learning English at the same time. So they're learning or they're reading some, I guess over here like elementary, middle school level. Yeah. Literature while they're learning English as well. So I think that's pretty helpful.

Annie Schindler: So, you're from the Brownsville area?

UH Interviewer:   Yes.

Annie Schindler: And where are you from here?  Where did you go to school?

UH Interviewer:   Briarwood School, it’s a private school

Annie Schindler: Over on the West side.

UH Interviewer:   Yeah. I then went to Sam Houston State.

Annie Schindler: Oh, well you're a former bear cat like I am and my son went to Sam Houston.

UH Interviewer:   I didn't graduate from there though. I did go with there.

Annie Schindler: I went to Sam Houston State when it was called Sam Houston State Teacher's College, back in the middle ages.

UH Interviewer:  I had a generous offer from Sam Houston State, but when I came to U of H it was originally for engineering. So I wanted to go with that path and then I changed to history.

Annie Schindler: Of course I'm partial. Sam Houston State, but do my parents went to U of H. so yeah, my husband went to U of H and I told my son, my husband away when my son was 13 and when he got ready to go to college, I said, you can go anywhere but U of H. cause I thought he needed to leave home for a walk.  And so I said, but you can go only in this circle. So that included Sam Houston, Stephen F have all of those and he, he picked Sam Houston without me telling him. He had two roommates. Now one is an air marshal and another one is an assistant district attorney in Fort Bend. So they all went after criminal justice.

UH Interviewer: How did your family connect with the community?

Annie Schindler: When they came they were total non-English speakers and  we had it went to Czech church and then  we joined or my parents joined a Czech or they'd belonged to several Czech insurance companies and the Czech insurance companies have social groups like the SP JST lodge 80, that's insurance, but it also is social. But my parents didn't. Most of their connection with the community and all was to what was called a Social and they stayed a lot with the Czech people and anything they can make net connected with the community. If I needed anything to school, they would support it from the school. I mean, things of that nature. I don't know if that's what you're looking for or not, but that's pretty good.

UH Interviewer: What denomination was this church?

Annie Schindler: It was Czech Moravian and then became the Brethren Church. The Brethren Church was on North Main, but it's no longer Brethren. It's changed to like a community church. I, I no longer attend there, but my parents, that's where I was raised and they were, yeah, they were fairly active in that church. But the church had a visiting minister that came once a month and he preached in Czech and the other Sundays we didn't have a minister. We just had Sunday school. So I went there to Sunday school and they didn't go to Sunday school. They just sent me to Sunday school.

UH Interviewer: So, other than that, they were in that, that group?

Annie Schindler: Another Czech with that was called a Social and they were very active in that. And they were mainly Czechs involved in that. They tended to stay with the Czech people, but yet, dad voted in all of the elections. And as a young kid, I used to go to the voting polls with them and I've translate for him. I mean he could speak some English and he learned to speak English from the newspaper and read and I would do the translating for him. But the Social was a social group and it, we did calisthenics and all, but they then part of the group, they did Czech plays and they would perform them for the other Czech people here in Houston and traveled around like the little bordering little towns like Hilgee and Guy, that you've probably never heard of, but they're not far from here.  When we moved to where I grew up, most of, we moved to an English speaking neighborhood and I say English, but they were, they were Italians. There were Hispanics, there were different people and they all communicated, but they all kind of stayed within their group. You have to remember we grew up, I grew up in World War II, during World War II.

UH Interviewer: Did you come over on a boat?

Annie Schindler: I didn't come. I was born here, but my parents left in 1938 and when they left the Czech Republic, they were leaving on the train. They saw the Nazis coming in on tanks and they were going to Bremen, Germany and they sailed on the ship, Bremen over to New York. And my mother was seven months pregnant with me. So technically I was no, they sailed into New York and they were met in New York by a lady and the lady they knew and she helped him transfer to a train and they went from New York to Fort Worth. And then from Fort Worth they came to Houston. And my daddy had a uncle that lived in what is now Sugar Land and he support, he was their sponsor. So they went to, to his home. And if they arrived here in August and mother was seven months pregnant, he had a little country farm house made of tin you know like they used to long time ago and it was very hot there and some people came to visit and the lady said that they couldn't stay there. It was just too, too bad from my mother. So they moved them and they were Czech speaking and they moved them to a dairy farm with them and they stayed in a house at the dairy farm over on Elk Ridge. What is now Eldridge that used to be dairy farming out there and then I was born, they came in office and I was born in October and after that we stayed here in Houston that he found this up a house and we stayed in the house in the Cottage Grove area, which was primarily Czechs Polish and German.   And then we lived there for about six years, kind of contained in that little community. And then we moved over across Washington, which I don't know if either of you know about it, but back then it was just the way to get out of town. It was a highway out of town, Washington Avenue, which is now quite a swinging area. Back then it wasn't.  Back then it used to be feed stores and we moved over to what was called West End and that's where I grew up and went to school. Okay. And a daddy went to work. He learned to speak English. Mother never went to work. She could speak English enough that she could go pay bills and do her grocery shopping, but I don't think she could carry on a conversation with us.

UH Interviewer: What did your dad do for a living?

Annie Schindler: My daddy was a mechanic. Yeah, he uh, he worked for the bus company and then he worked for himself. He repaired lawn mowers.  That was easy for him to do. He tells a story. He worked for the bus company, and I don't know if this is relevant or not, but he tells, he tells a story to apply for the job and they say, can you drive a bus? And he said, sure. Bused this night ... He did fine, so he got the job and he worked there for quite a while. It was called the Houston Transit Company. It's now Metro.

UH Interviewer: Fortunately, you answer two of the next questions I had as far as establishing sells in the U S and why Houston? So that was

Annie Schindler: Well, why Houston I asked him because his uncle lived here and when I asked him as I was growing up, I'd see daddy, why didn't you come to the United States? Why did you come to Texas? I wanted to see Cowboys and horses never rode a horse that I know of in his life afterwards. But every year growing up, we'd get in the car and when the salt grass trail Riders would come in, we'd go out and see it, the Salt Grass Trail, right. He'd get his fill of the horses and we'd go, what then used to be the Fat Stock Show, we'd go to the Fat Stock Show and look at all the horses.

UH Interviewer: Some of my friends from out of state, they would ask me like, Hey, so why, like did you ever ride a horse to school and those kinds of things?

Annie Schindler: No, when I've gone back over there, the long. Did you all have horses and stuff? The paper, when we first started going to the Czech Republic visiting, they had my family. I don't know about the others, but my family had a really weird concept of what we have here. I don't have any horses. Oh we don't have cars. We got dogs and cat, so yeah.

UH Interviewer: Um, what was it like growing up in the US during such, uh, an eventful time?

Annie Schindler: Wasn't any different for me than any other child. Now I had, I had two parents and they were very loving and I was an only child and my mother and daddy had no relatives here. So I was the only thing, so I'm caught. I was spoiled cause we

UH Interviewer: So You were an only child. So that was pretty rare back then.

Annie Schindler: It was that my mother said that reason she would, I was an only child was because she always thought that they would go back and visit and she didn't want to have to travel with two kids. And so I became an only child and uh, she always wanted to go back… When they came, they left all of their relatives and uh, she always wanted to go back and see her mother. And so there was the opportunity that we had once I got out of college and I started teaching and I said, well let's go back.   And I said, you can't go back until you get your citizenship papers. Daddy got his back in the forties right away. He went and got, but I'll have to tell you the story. I don't know if I want it on tape or not, but daddy mouth it off to the judge. And I asked the judge why he had to learn all those facts when the people going to school here or didn't finish school or they didn't know. Some of the questions that he had to know…

UH Interviewer: Like the government questions?

Annie Schindler: Mainly my godfather who was Czech and he didn't know any of the things that my daddy had to learn. So he said, why do I have to know that? And the judge kind of got back at him and said “Well Mr. Cocci, I think you should go to citizenship school. So he so you can learn more.”  So he had to go back to school. So when we told my mother's that she couldn't go back to the Czech Republic to visit until she got her citizenship paper, because at that time it was under communism. And I said, if you go back, they're going to keep you, you're not going to get back here. And another thing, she always said, I can't wait to go back to the Czech Republic, I can't wait to go back home. And that always bothered me cause to me home is here and I'm kind of getting ahead. She did get her citizenship paper. We studied, I studied with her, she studied, she went down and passed her papers the first time. Never let my dad forget it. “I passed it the first time you had to go to school.” So I mean, and, but uh, it was always, I can't wait to go back home. And as I said, that bothered me. We were there one night and the next morning she said, Anna, I can't wait to go back home, back to the United States. It took her one day, one night to realize what she had here and what they had there. So, and I've said all these times that I've gone back and I've gone back several times, everybody in the United States needs to go at least once to a foreign country to realize what we have and how we should appreciate our freedoms and what we have. But nobody listens to me.

UH Interviewer: What is the difference between the Czech and America in the living conditions?

Annie Schindler: Almost all of the Czechs have like, normally I would be living with my son. They would be taken care of. I would eat, they would be upstairs in my family. Let's put it this way. The older parents live in the lower level and one child, if there's one child, it's that one’s job or one child out of them will live upstairs and kind of keep, help. They have the conveniences we do now, but it's still different. I don't know how I can explain, but it's different. They're buses when, well, it's, it's different. It just, you know, you're in a foreign country now. They have shopping centers, but the first time I went, you didn't have shopping centers.  You went to little stores.

UH Interviewer: What year was that?

Annie Schindler: I went back in, about 1962 and then starting in 1990 or 1991 or 92. I've gone back that every four or five years and I can see progress, but I wouldn't want to live there. It's just, it, we have, I like to go into a store like to Kroger's and get everything. They can do things yet, but I just, it, there is a difference and I don't know how to put my finger on the difference but uh, the people are, people are very nice and somehow or other, they know you're American when you walk in, they, they meet you, recognize you as an American. Modes of transportation are older. They're cars are older, some of them and they, they take very good care of their cars. My family does not have air conditioning, which they probably don't need.  And it wasn't until my cousin got very ill that they have got a fan but it's cooler there so they really don't need it. And their refrigerators, they're getting the larger ones now, but there’s the little apartment refrigerators. And the first time I ever went there I stayed with my aunt. She cooked on a wood stove but now they have gas stoves. So I mean there and they have also transport transferred over to cell phones. Everybody has cell phone just like we do, but they don't have landlines cause their landlines are too expensive. So when I call over there, I have to call them on their cell phone and it costs me a few cents more to call on the cell phone. So, but I just see you, that's what…if I want to talk to them.

UH Interviewer: So it's been really interesting to hear about how other countries, technology here is this like way, way up there. And you think everywhere else you think…

Annie Schindler: Everybody has a computer here. Even old people like me, I have one. Can't use it very well. I have one. They don't have it. My cousins my age do not have computers because that's it. If you had a computer, we could Skype. We don't have one now. The younger people, my son's age, they all have Skype. They have the WhatsApp. Okay, we have the WhatsApp and we talked to them through that? Sometimes, but, and, but they all do have cell phones. Even the old people have cell phones.

UH Interviewer:   Did your family hang on to any Czech traditions?

Annie Schindler:  Oh yeah. We celebrated Christmas Eve and in the Czech Republic you, celebrate the name day more so than your birthday. You celebrate your birthday but not as much. And we celebrated name day Saint Anne Day, July 26th was a big deal. And March 17th to Saint Joseph's day, that was a big deal in our family. We, Mothers the Saint Mary day, but we didn't celebrate her (inaudible) but we, we celebrated the name days. We celebrated, uh, Christmas Eve, we open our gifts on Christmas Eve and we ate fish on Christmas Eve cause over there they eat carp on Christmas Eve. Well we didn't eat carp. Sometimes daddy would have fish and mother and I would have the shrimp. We kind of deviate a little bit that the name days. I think those were the biggest traditions that we had.

UH Interviewer:   Was there any difficulty hanging onto some of those traditions being around American often?

Annie Schindler: No. The only difficulty we had is I married a German and his family celebrated Christmas Eve, so that was a little difficult. We'd go to his house and then we'd go to my house and that was too many Christmas Eves, until my son came along. And then we said, okay… Mother. They said, well we'll come over Christmas day and you go on over there Christmas Eve. So and as it is with the German side of the family, we still celebrate Christmas Eve as a family go Schindler group gets together on Christmas Eve and then we do Christmas Day with my son's family or at his house cause of the grandkids. But that was the only one that was hard to kind of, and up until I got married, it wasn't a problem. 

UH Interviewer:   That's all the questions that I have. Is there anything you have?

Annie Schindler: Oh, I didn't speak English. When I went to school, I learned English at school. We didn't have, but I learned English and daddy didn't put me in kindergarten. Kindergarten was available, but I didn't get to go because he said I'd be going to school the rest of my life. And I think that, I don't know if he knew I was going to end up being a teacher that he saw that but no, he just said no, we'll put her in first grade. And I went to first grade, started first grade and then went on became a teacher. So, but um, that’s another thing, and we spoke Czech at home and my mother died first and then my dad lived alone and he had a dog and when daddy died, I brought the dog to my house. He didn't understand English. She only understood Czech.  I'd call him in English and he'd just look at me. I call him in Czech and he'd come and after about two weeks the dog disappeared. I don't know if he ran away or someone stole him, took him. I live on a busy street and I thought, I feel so sorry for that dog because he was a cute little dog cause whoever got it was going to think he’s the dumbest dog. They don't have the same thing, but he was bilingual. He wasn't even bilingual. He was a Czech dog. So, and let's see if I can think of anything else that would be, would increase your grades.

Annie Schindler: Education was important to daddy. Uh, he was determined. I was going to go to college, come hook a crook. I was going to college and after my son was born and his dad died, my dad lived for another year and he kept stressing to me. He has to go to school, he has to get an education. So I was determined. I had to do what daddy said. And he did. He got an education. He got, he went to school, whether he got it, he did get an education, but, so the education was extremely important to daddy. And he's the only person I know. Long time ago, we have an election now. They used to send out the newspaper used to put pictures of the candidates and their little biographies. My daddy would read those and he would know everything about a candidate. He's the only person I know that researched his candidates the way he did.  In fact, sometimes I feel guilty because I don't research mine as well. And we would go to the voting booth and they all knew me at the Memorial elementary where we voted. Cause I would go with daddy, he would, he would vote and he knew he was voting, who he was voting for and what, and I don't think, I don't guess I would have put this down, but he would go through that and he'd, he'd out our Mark through every attorney and every insurance person cause he thought the attorneys and the insurance people were not honest. And I keep saying, daddy, you can't do that. I can do that if I want to. Gus Whitney, none of his candidates won. One time we went after I started voting, he was for one candidate and I was for another one. And I said, no, you, this one's better. And he's, no, this one's better. So we'd go to the polls together. When we got out, I said, well, you convinced me. I voted for your man. He says, yeah, I voted for yours so we cancelled each other out. But for years, so I don't know. Is there anything else y'all want to know?

UH Interviewer:   Okay. Any other stories you think?

Annie Schindler:  Nope. No of any of that. And I can actually repeat. Oh, they used to, well they went, they, they did these Czech place going around these little bitty Czech towns. That was always a hoot going to these places.  I guess that's about it.

UH Interviewer: I know one place actually it's called the Czech Stop. I think it's coming down from
Waco West.

Annie Schindler: Yeah. It's West Texas. Yeah. And uh, they sell kolaches. The whole little town of West is very Czech. Everybody there has a Czech name practically. And also when you get to Waco, there's a man from the Czech Republic, he's going to open a beer brewery there and they're going to make beer and it's going to open a hotel. And each room in the hotel is going to be named after a big city in the Czech Republic. Yeah. I don't know how that's going to work out or what, but he, uh, I belong to this group. In fact, we're kind of moving in partly here, the Czech Heritage Society. And I volunteered, uh, it, we have a genealogy library where you could go and look up your genealogy and, uh, we're closing down the library because we don't have enough volunteers and we're bringing some of our books over here.  A lot of Czechs belonged to that. So anyway, and the other thing on the genealogy, I would always ask her daddy, I'd say, well, what was grandma's name? What was great grandma's name? Cause I was trying to get some, he didn't know. He didn't know. He said, what you want to know for, it's not important. And if you go over there, and if you asked my family, I know other families are different, but my family, they don't know. And I asked my one cousin, I said, well, what is the great grandmother's name? She said, you know, we grew up at, during the war we had the war here. We didn't do that much traveling from town to town. So she said, I barely ever saw our grandmother because we were, we were in this town and it wasn't, but maybe 45 miles of away, but they don't measure by miles.  They used kilometers, but still it's, it's an hour away. It's 30 minutes away. So they'll say, well, how far does your son live from the, I think he lives an hour away. And so that gives him a, they, they measure by hours mostly now they know it's different. And when you write a Czech, you have diacritical marks. I cannot read nor write Czech, I can speak it, but I can't read or write. So I couldn't write to my family over there. And my cousin would say, go ahead and write the letters and write the way you want to and look, put the marks in where we need to put it.

UH Interviewer:   What do you mean by a marks?

Annie Schindler: The little diacritical marks that long.

UH Interviewer:   Some of the books have different marks…

Annie Schindler: Diacritical marks over the letters. And that tells you how to be pronounced. That sometimes then R has a little Mark on it at all.  And I don't know how to do that. And I'm too old to learn and I've taken Czech, but I've, just never soaked in.  

UH Interviewer: Because I know of English is actually one of the hardest languages to learn. Because there's a lot of words like their, there. Sounds the same. But they're spelled differently.

Annie Schindler: And when they send an email, they might get it
mixed up, but we know what they're saying.  What made you decide on the Czechs?

UH Interviewer:  Well, I don't know about you, but I got an email from someone that works here saying if you're able to conduct an interview or this day, then come on in…  

Annie Schindler: It was Czechoslovakia until they changed the name of the other, the revolution in the Czech Republic. And it would Czechoslovakia. And at one time it had the Czech area and it had Slovakia over here. And Slovakia was a beautiful mountainous area, but they decided they wanted to be their own country, so they went away. And uh, so they became Slovakia and we became the Czech Republic. And the Czech went public itself. Well, Czechoslovakia was divided into Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. All right. Slovakia is its own country now. And Moravia and Bohemia stayed together, my family is from Bohemia, which is, and they live an hour from Prague to the West. And there's a difference in the two sections, or Moravia is more folklorish. These dancers that are going to come here tomorrow night, they're from Moravia that the Moravian people hold onto their traditions a lot more.  You go by their houses and they're all decorating everything with these flowers and everything painted on their homes. You go into Bohemia and it's more industrial and it's kind of dingy, but they still keep their houses, you know, painted and all. But it's still, it's not as pretty is Moravia. And I can say that because of my family all lives in Bohemia, they don't live in Moravia so, but Moravia is prettier. But Bohemia, it's very pretty. I mean the country's gorgeous and they have castles everywhere you look; I mean there are more castles. I finally said, if you seen one castle, you've seen them all, but they have this gorgeous castles. Some of them had been restored and they're really, really pretty. And it's a lot of fun to go through a couple of them. But after a couple of you get kind of tired.

UH Interviewer:   Do people live in the castles…

Annie Schindler: Some people… very few. And I have been told that some of them are Chateau had been turned into bed and breakfast.  The Chateau was like the large…so some of them, but there aren't that many that are, yeah. But some people, in fact, when we had some cousins over, a young man, a young lady, we're over here visiting us, they were cousins and I took them through River Oaks and some of those houses are huge. And he said, there's only one family.   And I said, yeah, he said, well, back home, but it'd be four or five families living there. So he's the only one family. And my home is just the typical three bedroom living room, dining room, just you know, and they, my cousins house had one bedroom or living room and a kitchen and dining room and the eating area with the kitchen. And that was downstairs and upstairs. They had the same type of thing and they raised two children's children upstairs. I mean here, you know, oh no, he's got to have a bedroom for each kid and all that. And they, they, they deal with a lot less there. Of course there's land is smaller. And when we just recently had our flooding Emelda a son called me and his, you better call over there. I said, why? He said, you better call the relatives.  I said, why? Just talked to them. They all think we're dead or we drowned. I said, what are you talking about? He said, they're showing all these flooding problems in Houston and they think we've all drown. So I called him and I said, don't they know that Houston is big? I said, half of them have been here. Now they think we've drown because they said Houston's on the border. So they did get the news from here. And it seems like every time they mentioned Texas or Houston, immediately it affects us, which it didn't. And I said, you better call them. They think we've drowned or flooded. We didn't. I said I'm barely got any rain.

UH Interviewer:   When you were growing up in Houston, was it as diverse as it is now?

Annie Schindler: It was because we had, I lived here, we had Italians live here, we had Hispanics that lived here and we had blacks that lived over here. Of course you have to remember, I grew up in the forties and fifties and we did not play with the black children. They played on this side of the street and I played on this side street, which was so stupid.  There they weren't here. We were in the ditch and the street was between us and I had to go to school. There was a little black school right here. It was like two blocks from my house, but I had to go to elementary school all the way over here, which is like 16 blocks from my house because I'd count them every day cause I'd have to walk in because we were one car family.  My mother didn't drive. So I'd walk to school and usually if it was raining bad or something, my mother would walk with me because I guess she'd make sure I got there. No, but yeah, it was diverse and you had the Czechs and you had Germans and you had Polish.

UH Interviewer: So everyone lived in like what's called ghettos, right. Where it's just like everyone, same diversity lives.

Annie Schindler: It wasn't like you would think ghettos today. Everyone had their own little frame house and kept their yard clean. Everything was nice and neat and all. But a lot of now and in Cottage Grove where I grew up, the Czechs still stay together. Now we moved into West End and there were all these different people there and that's what helped my dad ignored speak English because he would stop, talk to the man across the street who was Italian. He didn't speak English much better than my daddy did, but they communicated.  Our mother when we lived over there, they were all Czechs on their streets. So that's all she talked to with the Czech ladies. Daddy went to work. So he learned to speak English more than my mother did.  So it wasn't ghetto like we think of ghetto. Again, I was, it was a different term back then and now.  We all lived in our own little sections. It was a little, not communities, but we just, you know. But we'd still, every week you'd give with the Czech people if that little Social place and if it was the calisthenics or whatever are, if they practice their play or whatever and they would go to dances and I'll Czech polka dances and all. So anything else?

UH Interviewer: No, that answers every question I have. Thank you so much for speaking with me today and sharing your story.