Summer Break From Freedom Fighting : East Bloc: A student leader of the Czech revolt binges on oranges and garage sales in Los Angeles but looks forward to getting back to Prague.

At 6-foot-6, Jan Bubenik could see above the crowd surging into a narrow street flanked on both sides by Czech police and knew what was about to befall them--and him.

Uniformed arms rose and fell as white nightsticks turned bright red from the bloody heads of student demonstrators.

Bubenik, a 22-year-old medical student at Charles University in Prague, was an organizer of the event last fall commemorating the 50th anniversary of a demonstration that resulted in the Nazis closing the country’s universities.

Word of it was spread by cryptic signs posted around the capital city, picturing a crown of barbed wire. “Bring a candle and a flower to Wenceslaus Square at 5 p.m. on Nov. 17, 1989,” was the only message.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Bubenik has earned a place in it as one of a triumvirate of student leaders of the successful revolution. He subsequently was the youngest member elected to the new Czech Parliament.

Recalling those heady but frightening days, Bubenik likens them to leaping into an abyss. He said he had no idea if a handful people or a hundred would show up that night. Or that the turnout of tens of thousands would spark the overthrow of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

“I didn’t have no clue,” he said, using an Americanism he picked up in Los Angeles this summer.

Bubenik has been here for eight weeks, attending the UCLA Extension American Language Center, an intensive program during which students from around the world learn English. He will return to Prague later this month for the fall term at medical school.

Living in the Southland has been like another world for Bubenik, who, with sun-bleached hair and sunglasses hanging around his neck, looks like a typical California college kid.

He has spent the summer picking oranges off a back-yard tree; he has seen “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and become a big garage sale fan.

Bubenik also quickly picked up the essential ingredient of L.A. living. “In Los Angeles, everybody who does not have a car is an absolute dead person,” he said.

Bubenik has socialized with Henry Kissinger and been a guest of Ivana Trump on earlier visits to the United States, traveling with his country’s president, Vaclav Havel, when he spoke to Congress.

He has savored more fresh fruit and vegetables in one summer than he thought imaginable.

Yet the bountiful life in America is not his favorite topic. The struggle for freedom is. When he speaks of the revolution and his country’s release from a totalitarian regime, his eyes light up, and the words tumble out.

Bubenik is clearly a hero of the story, though he doesn’t tell it that way. Instead, he talks of his fear and ambivalence on the night when the press of the crowd and the police was so strong that the dorm-room key in his back pocket gouged his flesh.

Only a backpack full of clean laundry he had picked up on the way to the march protected him from more serious injury.

Bubenik said he had only one thought at the time: “to get out of this massacre.”

When he made it back to the dorm, he and his roommate had a drink and decided revolution was not for them. But by morning, they had reconsidered and began going door to door telling fellow medical students that the official government version of the march--that a few hooligans caused a problem--was not true.

A few days later, the student strike was called, with Bubenik standing on the stage of the National Theater representing the medical students and reading a proclamation. An orchestra played the Czech national anthem.

“Everybody cried,” he said.

The crucial problem was communication with the populace, and that is where the student network came in, Bubenik said.

Video recorders are a rare commodity in his homeland, but each department of the medical school had one. They were rounded up, and students spent a day making copies of a tape of the demonstration and the brutal response by the police.

Bubenik said he took to the road showing groups what had really happened at the protest. One such meeting became a moment of truth for Bubenik when a Communist Party leader showed up unannounced to dispute Bubenik’s account.

Looking around the room, Bubenik saw heads bowed as those at the meeting tried to hide their identity from the official.

“No one can imagine how deep was the fear,” he said.

At that point, Bubenik said he had to decide whether to be careful like the others or remain on the front lines. Thereafter, he vowed, he would try to be so busy that he would have no time to be afraid.

His credo became “Nobody should be afraid again.”

“This idea helped me very much,” he said.

Bubenik’s decision to become an activist was not unprecedented in his family. His father lost his university professorship in the 1968 Czech uprising when he protested the treatment of his colleagues and has worked as a railroad laborer ever since.

The youngest and, he quickly notes, the shortest of three brothers in a family of athletes, Bubenik plays basketball and tennis.

But mostly this summer he played unofficial Czech ambassador with a dizzying schedule of meetings, speeches and social events. Everyone in the Los Angeles Czech community wanted to meet him, as did other groups interested in a first-hand account of his experiences.

Bubenik has lived with Linda and Sherman Mickell in Brentwood this summer. When Linda Mickell thought he wasn’t having enough fun, she sent him to La Jolla to party with the Mickells’ daughter and her fiance, a Navy pilot, and their friends.

Linda Mickell said she has been impressed by Bubenik’s ability to “come out of darkness” into a society like this and not have his head turned or become complacent with the special privileges that have been accorded him.

To his English teacher, Tara Neuwirth, “The main thing is that he’s an incredibly nice person, naturally charming and with no artifice at all.”

Besides learning English this summer, Bubenik had a difficult decision to make: whether to relinquish his seat in Parliament to concentrate on medical school or devote himself full time to politics.

With the help of his sponsor, friend and occasional translator, Mia Valert, he has decided to concentrate on his education, while staying involved in the Civic Forum Party and other projects.

Bubenik explains that, at his age, “it’s necessary to work very hard on myself now.”