Czechoslovakian native, Kirkland author details struggle for freedom in new book

Published 3:39 pm Thursday, January 27, 2011

Milan Heger is a free man today.

He wakes up every morning in his Kirkland home and takes in the Lake Washington scenery as he crosses the 520 Bridge to his company, Heger Architects in Seattle. He finds comfort in Kirkland’s quaint culture, taking in performances at the Kirkland Performance Center, the International Ballet Theater and reading books at the Kirkland Library. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two grown children.

Life was not always this way for Heger.

The Czechoslovakian native details his arduous pursuit to find such freedom in his new book, “The Art of Freedom,” which is based on his life.

“When I was seven – that’s when the communists took it away,” Heger recalled on a recent afternoon, sipping tea at the Juanita Starbucks.

Growing up in Slovakia in the ’60s, Heger remembers his family’s last possessions before they were seized by the communist government. His grandfather’s collection of 300 Middle European impressionist paintings “were just looted, sold on the black market and we’ve never seen them again.”

It was a slow progression from living in a castle with his family, to a villa and then a smaller home.

“And even that was taken away, so it was a progressive demise of the family legacy,” said Heger. “It was strange, I just proceeded as one day it was here and I loved it and the next day it wasn’t.”

He said he felt injustice that the communist regime restricted his country in so many ways. They couldn’t travel or obtain information.

“We were supposed to just be limited in our vision and they fed us the ideology they wanted to feed us,” said Heger. The book describes how it feels to have “double thoughts and double speak and that you can think something, but you cannot say that and you can say what you don’t believe in.”

Somehow, his family was able to save their private library. Feeling endangered, Heger read through at least 4,000 books inside his family’s apartment to gain as much knowledge as he could. He even learned eight different languages that he speaks fluently today.

Heger says people have many different freedoms. In “The Art of Freedom,” the main character first fights for his physical freedom. Czechoslovakians were confined by barbed wire fences that surrounded them for many years.

“There were several fences where they raked the ground in between so that no one would leave without leaving footprints,” he recalled. “They had watchtowers, dogs, machine guns – we were trapped in a huge prison.”

He began exchanging letters with a family in Hawaii when he was 9 years old. He said he developed an obsession for Hawaii.

“Who wouldn’t?” He said. “Living in a gray environment with uniforms and ugly gray clothes. We couldn’t even find blue jeans in communism. Blue jeans and panty hose were like gold. Anything that was colorful with a brand name were treasures.”

He wrote the family each week until he actually went to Hawaii at the age of 30 to teach art and architecture at a university – his first taste of physical freedom.

“It was so beautiful to be in the free world,” he said. “My first feeling of freedom was just enormous. It was an ecstasy of feeling free.”

While teaching in Hawaii, he continued his passion for fine art and painting, “then all of a sudden the horizon opens up and you see there are layers and layers of freedom.”

He also discovered freedom of expression, self-censorship, speech and love.

Heger eventually became an architect and moved to Kirkland with his family. He instilled his arts appreciation in his daughter, who studied at the International Ballet Theater and is now finishing medical school at the University of Washington. His son is also studying visual arts at a university in Slovakia.

Heger, 52, is currently a writer, artist, architect and he even designs furniture. His contemporary artwork is displayed at Patricia Cameron Gallery in Seattle.

He hopes his new book will inspire others to create something too, or perhaps even change the direction of readers’ lives.

“Because freedom is only as good as we know what to do with it,” he added.

More information

For more information about Kirkland author Milan Heger, visit www.theartoffreedombook.com. His book is also available at Amazon.com and in local bookstores for $15.95.