Miroslav Duna: I was a second-class citizen in the Czech Republic, but in New Zealand they value me as a fellow human being
The composer and musician Miroslav Duna is a man of many talents and deep family ties worldwide. He comes from a family of nine children.
Duna’s parents are from Prešov and Košice in Slovakia, but they ultimately settled in Prague. Before the transition to democracy in 1989 he made his living playing music and graduated from a school for folk arts, specializing in the piano.
After 1989 he decided to emigrate. Why?
Why did he leave his home, his work, and decide to live in New Zealand? He answers those questions in an interview filmed by Bohumil Havrľa for ROMEA TV.
“I personally had no reason to emigrate, but gradually everybody from my family left. My brother-in-law Vašek Lolo and Malvína emigrated to Australia in 1996. One year later, my other relatives relocated to Belgium, to England, so I decided to emigrate too,” says Duna, who headed for New Zealand.
Duna’s arrival in New Zealand was enchanting, on the one hand, and shocking on the other. He was welcomed by family and friends and captivated by the natural beauty, but he soon realized he had ended up in a place where the cultural life he knew was lacking.
“I had traveled back in time some 40 years or so, there was nothing there, no culture, nothing, there was one hotel, a couple of little shops, and that was all. By 6 PM there wasn’t even any traffic,” Duna says in his interview.
His wife was ready to return to the Czech Republic at any moment, but without financial resources it was not possible for them to make the journey because they had sold all their assets to emigrate. “My wife kept her suitcase packed for about a year. She simply never unpacked it, she wanted to fly home. It wasn’t possible to go back, though, because at home we’d sold everything we owned,” explains the musician, who started playing the piano in a local hotel one week after arriving in New Zealand.
“My wife and I went for a walk and I see this hotel. I went in to ask about things but I didn’t speak English. Despite that we reached an agreement somehow, using our arms and legs, and I began playing there for about 150 New Zealand dollars for two hours,” he says.
In the Czech Republic, Duna had always felt like a second-class citizen, but everything in New Zealand was different. “In New Zealand I felt on top of the world, I felt like I was even more than a Zealander, because they actually valued me as a fellow human being and as a musician,” Duna explains.
“The New Zealanders didn’t understand why we were the victims of racism and oppression in the Czech Republic, they couldn’t comprehend it,” Duna tells Havrľa in the ROMEA TV interview.
