YMCA Girds for a New Push in Eastern Europe

On Na Porici, a busy Prague street, stands a six-story building with a dilapidated swimming pool and a warren of small offices that for 40 years has been the headquarters of Czechoslovakia’s top sports organization, known as the Physical Training Union.

Built with American assistance in 1928, it originally offered up-to-date housing for 400 young men, as well as offices for the headquarters of the fast-growing Czechoslovak YMCA.

But 11 years later, in 1939, the YMCA lost its building to the invading Germans and later, in 1950, to the Communists. Today, the authorities and the sports organization itself recognize the YMCA’s renewed claim to the building but say they have nowhere to go.

The situation is typical not only for Prague but for YMCAs throughout Eastern Europe. As Communist governments crumble, the YMCA is moving back in to find its former properties confiscated, its young men of 40 years ago dead or retired and a younger generation that knows nothing of the traditions the Christian service organization built in Europe in the first half of the century.

Now, however, the Y is signaling its determination to re-establish its work in Eastern Europe:

In Poland, where the YMCA won official recognition earlier this year after being abolished in 1954, a specially appointed commission is working on the return of the buildings the organization owned.

“We have the middle generation,” observed Polish journalist Stanislaw Podemski, who is active in the new YMCA. “But the young people--that is the problem. They have so many possibilities of engagement elsewhere. So we have no cadres, no donations, no special attraction, and our coffers are empty. But we have the will to work. We have the hope.”

In East Germany, where the Y tended to place more emphasis on sports and hobbies than in other parts of Eastern Europe, YMCA official Albrecht Kaul exulted: “We have more freedom now than we ever dreamed of. . . . We had to work under the roof of the church; now we also want to do missionary work.”

And here in Czechoslovakia, Lubor Drapal, a former student secretary at the Y, said he was surprised by the eagerness of the old members to start over. Membership figures are not yet available, but the organization already is working to set up a program that may include English-language classes as well as Bible study in English.

Recently, Egon Slopianka, the YMCA’s European secretary, told Czechoslovak Deputy Prime Minister Josef Hromadka that “events have moved so fast that we do not yet have a strategy in place. We are not prepared for the situation, and the young people are in a state of shock.”

Hromadka, who until assuming his present post was the head of Czechoslovakia’s largest Protestant church, the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethern, promised support for the Y.

“In past years,” he said, “the church had the advantage of winning the sympathies of the population. Now that we have freedom, people could either come much closer to the churches or go off in other directions.”

The YMCA “could become a bridge between these people and the churches . . . could speak to the people who in the past supported the churches for political reasons,” he added.

The history of the YMCA in Czechoslovakia begins around the time of World War I, when American officials of the organization were invited here by President Tomas G. Masaryk, who had been impressed by YMCA work among prisoners of war.

After the armistice, 60 U.S. officials, contributing to the organization’s typical mixture of concern for both physical and moral well-being, helped introduce the Czechoslovaks to such American institutions as volleyball, basketball, self-service canteens and Mother’s Day.

But now, even those who were young members after World War II are pensioners, Drapal said recently, adding: “Many have died, and we cannot rely on much voluntary financial support. Nevertheless, there is daily new evidence of interest in the YMCA.”

He said that one local chapter has been renewed in the city of Hradec Kralove and that people in Slovakia are expressing interest as well.