A Friendship Survives Time, the Iron Curtain : Refugees: Two Czech women, one Americanized and the other not, are reunited in Costa Mesa after 20 years. They are examples of assimilation, and the struggle to adjust faced by a family just arrived.

When they were young girls, Petra and Sasha passed notes and candy back and forth in a basket on a string from their balconies, one above the other, in the apartment building on People’s Militia Square in Prague.

Then came the Prague Spring of 1968--and the Soviet invasion. With Russian tanks rolling into the city, Petra, then 12, fled with her family across the Czech border into Austria, and then into Switzerland, where they settled. The two schoolmates were separated by thousands of miles and what then seemed like an indestructible Iron Curtain.

Today, 21 years later, just as the curtain is disintegrating and enormous change is sweeping over their homeland, Petra and Sasha have become neighbors again--in Costa Mesa.

Petra, who married an American in 1981 and moved to Orange County the following year, speaks fluent English and lives with her husband and their two children in a comfortable home on Littleton Place. She and her husband are partners in a flower shop business in Costa Mesa.

Sasha lives with her husband and children a few blocks away, in a cramped apartment behind a bar and bowling alley on Harbor Boulevard. They defected to the United States only last June; they are still learning rudimentary English, and her husband, Jiri, earns $6 an hour as a car jockey at a nearby Cadillac dealership.

“It’s very nice having her here,” said Petra Numar. “Surprisingly, somehow, when we grew up, we didn’t really grow apart. We still have the same kind of thinking, we’re interested in the same things. We’re both family-oriented.”

For Sasha, still painfully shy when speaking English, having her old friend nearby again is more than just a heartwarming reunion. Petra and her husband, Steve, have been a lifeline for Sasha and Jiri, sharing their house with them for their first three months, and helping them find jobs and an apartment.

“It wouldn’t have been possible without her,” Sasha said through an interpreter. “When we came over here, she took care of everything.”

Jiri Cvekl, Sasha’s husband, is cautious when he talks about the profound political changes Czechoslovakia is undergoing right now. The decision to leave was not made lightly, and all of Jiri’s energy is going into his family’s new life in the United States. If he ever had hoped for a better life in his homeland, that hope was left behind, along with just about everything he and his family owned.

“I’m very happy for the people there,” said the tall, blond, bearded 31 year-old, who goes by the name George in the United States. “But it is going to be very hard work. Right now, it’s just a big mess, and there is not any visible change.”

Jiri said he and another Czech who works at the car dealership follow the unfolding political drama closely--and are asked about it almost daily by their colleagues, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico.

“They ask me what I think about it, and if I want to go back,” he said. “I say, ‘No, I stay here.’ ”

In Czechoslovakia, Jiri said, he had to work three jobs to support his family.

Once, Jiri recalled, he refused to enroll in a “voluntary” payroll-deduction program that company officials said would benefit disaster victims. Many workers doubted that the money ever got beyond the party bureaucracy, he said.

“When they found out I didn’t pay it, I had to go in front of the captains,” Jiri said. “They wanted to know why.”

Jiri said he did not get in serious trouble for his refusal to pay the fee, but the experience was typical of a system that prized rigid conformity.

“If you were a member of the Communist Party, you always had better advantages, more money,” Jiri said, sitting in the family’s new apartment. “If you weren’t in the party, working hard didn’t help you any.”

Still, Jiri said, a part of him does wish he had been involved in the massive demonstrations that filled historic Wenceslas Square and forced the hard-line Communists to cede power.

“I would like to have been a part of it,” he said. “It’s not really my nature, demonstrating, but I would have liked to have helped.”

Jiri and Sasha Cvekl made the decision earlier this year to defect.

One of the three jobs Jiri worked to support his family was as a ship’s cook on a Czech freighter. Last spring, he received permission to take his family on the ship for a vacation.

They gathered up their two children, Antonin, 14, and Alexandra, 10, and took a train to Poland, where the ship sailed first to Finland and then to the mouth of the Mississippi River, just south of New Orleans.

When the ship’s crew took a bus into New Orleans one day, the Cvekls got their chance. They approached port authorities, and in halting English Jiri told them of their plight.

Jiri paused as he carefully re-created the words he spoke that day. “I said: ‘We have big problem. We like stay here in United States. Can you help me please?’ My heart was beating, I was very nervous, it was a very big decision.”

The Cvekls were taken to New Orleans police, who contacted an immigration official--who, with the aid of a Czech interpreter, found out that they had friends in Orange County.

Petra Numar wasn’t entirely surprised when the immigration official called her the night of June 23. She had received a letter a few weeks earlier from Sasha, saying that they were aboard a ship and would be in New Orleans in June.

“She wanted to know if we could meet them there, so I knew she had something important to tell me,” Petra said.

But Petra had no way of answering Sasha’s letter--and, in fact, she and her husband had plane tickets for a trip to Europe in late June. They planned on visiting Petra’s family in Switzerland, and on traveling to Prague, where they would see Jiri and Sasha.

“I told the immigration official that yes, of course, they were welcome to come and stay here with us--in fact, they could have the house while we were gone,” Numar said.

The Cvekls were put on a bus that night--the children traveled free, while the parents paid half price for their tickets--and spent the next three days on buses headed west.

The two families were reunited at the Regional Transportation Center in Santa Ana. Petra and Sasha hugged. They cried. Petra marveled at Sasha’s 10 year-old daughter, Alexandra--who looked just like her mother had looked when Petra had last seen her.

“It was very emotional,” Sasha said. “We couldn’t believe that we were seeing each other again after 21 years.”

It has been five months now since Jiri, Sasha, Antonin and Alexandra Cvekl arrived in Orange County. Sasha is homesick and frustrated about her struggle with English, but she expects to get better. Her friend Petra did.

Jiri misses the mountains and forests of Czechoslovakia. He has no car, but he has a driver’s license, and a bicycle will do for the time being. In fact, each member of the family gets around Costa Mesa by bicycle.

“When my English is good enough, I want to go back into my profession--I want to be a very good chef,” Jiri said. He has no particular specialty in the kitchen, or special recipes; that leads to laziness, he said.

“I like to experiment and use my imagination,” he said. “You always have to keep creating something new.”

He did not come to this country to get rich, he said.

“I don’t want more, more and more,” Jiri said. “I want a good life, and I think that’s possible when you live here. I wish that my children have better lives then we did when we were teen-agers.”

Antonin and Alexandra--who go by Tony and Sasha--say they are happy in their respective schools, Costa Mesa High and College Park Elementary. They are doing well, Jiri said proudly as he pulled a few commendatory certificates from a folder to prove it.

The two children share a room upstairs in the apartment, and jump at the chance to show it to a visitor. Sasha has taped picture stories she made in school above her bed. Tony has a pair of red boxing gloves hanging over his bed, a birthday gift from his sister.

“He likes to hit me sometimes,” Sasha said, smiling broadly.

She is wise beyond her years. She is only 10, and glowing in the excitement of living in a new country with no food lines at the grocery, but Sasha also understands the difficulties that lie ahead for her family.

Where once they were at least able to leave their drab Prague apartment for weekend skiing in the mountains, now the Cvekls are working, saving, struggling to find a niche in American society.

There will be no ski weekends for awhile.