A Czech Refugee Returns, Finding Family and Hope Alive

Nearly four decades after fleeing my homeland as a little boy, I walked past the house where I was born, past the 15th-Century cathedral where generations of my family were married. At the end of an avenue dusted by morning snow, I rang a doorbell.

A lady with white hair appeared. For a few moments we looked at each other silently, then fell into a long embrace. “Zdenku, Zdenku,” Aunt Vlasta sobbed. “We knew you would come back one day. We knew you would come home.”

Thirty-nine years ago I had leaped off a moving train into the darkness and run through frontier forests that gave cover to thousands of us--refugees fleeing the Stalinist gloom into which Eastern Europe was receding.

I knew nothing about communism or the Iron Curtain and little of what we--me, my mother, my younger sister and our guide--were doing that summer night in 1951.

But filtered through a child’s sensitivity, the forest rustle became a sinister pursuer. And with the dawn--caught exposed in a wheat field--came palpable terror: Our mysterious guide was grappling with a border guard and all of us were running, running. . . .

We survived, crossing the Czech-Austrian border and finally being smuggled into that great refugee haven of the Cold War: the sector of Vienna occupied by American forces.

Ahead was a joyful reunion with my father, who had been forced to flee a year earlier, and freedom for me and my family. We severed our links to the past, gave up traditions, property, friendships, even our Czech names.

The country and relatives we left behind went through the iron rule of the 1950s, the dashed hopes of the 1968 Prague Spring, and last year’s bloodless uprising that allowed me to re-establish ties without fear that my relatives would be jeopardized.

On the afternoon of my return, my uncle, Slava Mecir, called my father in California. The two brothers--very close as boys and young men--had not talked to each other since 1950 when my father, a rising young politician vocally opposed to Communist rule, was warned of his impending arrest and managed to flee with the help of a Roman Catholic priest.

That evening, uncle and aunt, cousins and their children--three generations that ideology had separated from me--talked and talked. We planned the coming days together and brought out bottles of the slightly bitter beer for which Pilsen is renowned.

“To a new, better Czechoslovakia,” we toasted.

“What happened last year, our ‘Velvet Revolution,’ was indescribably wonderful, although I won’t live long enough to enjoy its fruits,” my 76-year-old uncle said. “But perhaps my children or grandchildren will.”

Two of the grandchildren--lovely and lanky Petra and Michaela--proudly told how they organized protests and traveled to factories and farms to explain democratic demands. Petra, a molecular biology student at Prague’s Charles University, had donned a Santa Claus outfit to deliver sacks of coal and potatoes to the doors of communist leaders to mock and rattle the fallen order.

While both talked of job opportunities and perhaps scholarships in the West, the stories of my uncle and aunt sadly showed that they and their generation could have made far more of their lives and abilities.

Well-educated and capable, Slava was running factories and other businesses owned by his in-laws before the 1948 Communist takeover. Then all the businesses were summarily nationalized without compensation and Slava spent seven years in forests chopping down trees.

During the Stalinist era, many people in Pilsen disappeared. Others, less lucky than ourselves, were shot or captured trying to breach the Iron Curtain. Slava was shadowed, threatened and interrogated about my father by the STB, the dreaded secret police which was recently abolished.

In the 1960s, while I was attending Yale University and my father was succeeding as an executive at IBM in Paris and New York, Slava was employed as an administrator at an institute of physical education. Eva, one of his daughters with whom I played as a child, was refused admission to the college of her choice because of her “bourgeois-capitalist background.”

Slava retained his dignity and a sense of humor. But like most Czechs, Eva told me, her father made his compromises with a system he privately detested but felt incapable of changing. He kept a low profile and avoided the ideologues. He focused his life on his family’s happiness and as much economic well-being as was possible.

The Prague Spring brought momentary hope to my relatives, as it did to millions of Czechs. They began exploratory contact through letters to an aunt. Then the Soviet tanks came.

“Good day,” my uncle greeted a passer-by as we strolled together through Pilsen. “Your father knew that man,” he said to me. “He was Pilsen’s master tailor. In 1968 he took out an old American flag and flew it. For that he was made a furnace stoker. It happened to many.”

We walked through the streets and main square of the inner city, my uncle persuading me that my vague remembrance of Old World charm was not mere nostalgia. But grime now coated once stately residences and even historic buildings were dilapidated behind painted facades. Slava pointed to the scaffolding around the city’s symbol--the cathedral tower.

“For each of the past six years, newspapers wrote that the tower would be repaired by year’s end,” he said with a wry smile. “But in this great workers’ state they couldn’t even organize the clearing of the meter-thick layer of pigeon droppings in the belfry.”

“The past 41 years have been an endless parade of stupidities; the state robbed the people and the people tried to rob the state,” my uncle said. “Work and ability didn’t matter. More important was turning up for the May 1 parade.”

Eva, sensitive and perceptive, described people as sleepwalking through the workweek; speaking one way and thinking another, even avoiding friendships for fear of betrayal.

“We withdrew into ourselves and our families. We longed for the Saturdays and Sundays,” she said. “Now let’s hope that we can look beyond and treat one another with more kindness. . . . “

Before I left the city of my birth, I had a private reunion with someone I had missed most over the years, perhaps because I never got to know the full man, and because boys make idols of their grandfathers.

His grave lay on the crest of a hill, watched over by pale birches and barren oaks bending to an icy wind. Patches of snow and flowers withered by winter covered the raised earth.

“It just can’t go on like this. The Communists are bound to crack soon,” my uncle said grandfather told him before he died in 1965, full of hope until the end.

In his youth, grandfather had dreamed of a Czechoslovakia independent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so he deserted the emperor’s army. Alongside the Allies, he fought at Verdun and other murderous battlefields of World War I.

Independence was won, but the Communists would take away grandfather’s property, his basic freedoms and, in a sense, half his family. His son, my father, stood up bravely until hopeless odds drove him into exile.

Now a third generation of our family is trying for a more decent Czech way, with Michaela marching on the streets of Prague and Petra playing Santa Claus to thumb his nose at the old Communist leaders.