Charles Ota Heller

    After years of playing golf without a single hole-in-one, I had my second ace in fourteen months today. Playing with Bill Cole and John Smith, I hit a pitching wedge which landed in the cup on one bounce–Heritage Harbour Golf Club, Annapolis, Maryland, hole number 7.

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The latest “long journey home” was the best of them all. The entire Heller family–my wife Sue and I, son David and his wife Bobbi, and three grandchildren: Sam, Sarah, and Caroline–journeyed to the Czech Republic. It was our grandchildren’s first opportunity to connect with their Czech roots. I had waited a long time for…

The following story-written by Heather Maher-appears in the July 2014 issue of The Rotarian magazine, which has a worldwide circulation of 1.2 million: Rotary Stories: Charles Ota Heller Charles Ota Heller came to America to start a new life. He became a serial entrepreneur – and a link to a reemerging Rotary tradition back home.   …

As a boy living in refugee camps in Germany, I dreamed of a far-off utopia—a land called the United States of America—where justice ruled and all people loved one another. After escaping from Communist Czechoslovakia, we could have immigrated immediately to England or Canada or Australia, as a reward for my father’s distinguished service in…

“In the last days of World War II, nine-year-old Ota Heller picked up a revolver and fired it at a Nazi. He did not wait to see if the man was still alive.” — Radio Prague    Join us Wednesday for a free event:  Prague: My Long Journey Home A Story of Survival, Denial, and…

      In 1979, Senator John Danforth of Missouri introduced legislation to designate eight days of each year as “The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust.” Events are held throughout the nation–including federal government agencies–to commemorate the victims and to educate Americans about the horrors of the Holocaust.      I was honored to be…

  Several members of my family–including my grandmother, Otilie Hellerova, and my best friend and great-grandfather, Gustav Neumann–made their way through this gate. The sign above it informed them that “work will make you free.” Instead, it was a gateway to hell. Terezin, a concentration camp located in the Czech Republic, was a stopping point on the…

In the past couple of weeks, Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal have reported on the atrocities committed by Muslims in the Middle East against Christians. USA Today reports that, in eastern Ukraine, the thugs who seek the return of the Soviet Union have issued a proclamation, requiring all Jews to register and to…

Her name was Irena Sendler. She was a Polish lady living in Warsaw when World War II came. During the war, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. She smuggled out Jewish infants  in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a…