COLUMN ONE : Children of Border Divorce : Czechoslovakia’s split has left 1,200 Slovak orphans in legal limbo. They are stranded in the Czech Republic, victims of ethnic bias and political tensions between the wary new neighbors.

Zoltan and Marko live in a big yellow building with ceilings so high that even a giant wouldn’t hit its head. Their room has more toys than Santa’s workshop, including a playpen brimming with colorful balls that swallow them up like a friendly sea monster when they jump inside.

The problem is that the building is called home, but everyone knows it isn’t really. It is a place where boys and girls born to mothers and fathers who do not want them wait for new parents to take them to a real home.

Zoltan and Marko have spent all but the first few days of their lives here. For nearly three years, they have watched as dozens of playmates skipped off hand-in-hand with new families.

The two boys have been left behind for one reason: They are Slovaks in the Czech Republic. Zoltan and Marko are foreigners in a divided country that has been unable to cope with the unwanted children of its abrupt--and still bitter--divorce two years ago.

“Time is running out for these kids,” said Zdena Pavlikova, staff psychologist at the Most Children’s Home, where 120 Czech and Slovak children live. “We do the best we can for them, but it is just not possible for even the best institution to substitute for a real family.”

There are about 1,200 Slovak children stranded in the Czech Republic, among them three dozen or so in this Bohemian mining town near the Czech-German border.

Officials said they do not know of any Czech youngsters in Slovakia, since few Czechs live there, although it is likely there are some.

The children have been suspended in legal limbo since Jan. 1, 1993, when the former Czechoslovakia split without settling the prickly questions of international adoption and how to shuffle unclaimed children across previously nonexistent frontiers.

Czech authorities, citing the best interests of the children, have refused to send them to Slovakia, where it is feared that many would live in overcrowded institutions that offer fewer comforts than their Czech counterparts.

Slovak officials have hinted that they may not want all the children anyway, particularly those who might be disabled or too old or otherwise difficult to offer for adoption and would require years of expensive state care.

But Czech courts and social agencies have been reluctant to place the Slovak children with Czech families because the two countries have no formal agreement allowing it.

The often testy relationship between the new neighbors has created a political climate in which neither side wants to be accused of forcing its will on the other.

“Nobody expected a breakup of the country, so we weren’t prepared with laws to deal with this problem,” said Josefina Havelova, an official with the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, which oversees adoption.

Efforts to develop a solution by following the example of other divided countries have failed.

Havelova said officials have been unable to find an appropriate model; some republics of the former Soviet Union--which split before Czechoslovakia--have even approached Czech and Slovak officials for guidance, she said.

“These are very complicated legal and political matters,” Havelova said. “Every institution and layer of government has had a different interpretation of how to deal with this.”

Barbora Zvarikova, an official at the Slovak Embassy in the Czech capital, Prague, said there has been “goodwill” in both countries to help the children. But she acknowledged that the children have been made hostages to the tedious--and seemingly uncaring--political process of divvying up a broken nation after three generations of union.

Until now, the few Slovak children legally adopted in the Czech Republic have gone through the complex procedure of having their citizenship changed, an option not available to most children because of the exacting criteria, lengthy delays and cost.

“We are in a very unusual situation,” Zvarikova said. “In Czechoslovakia, the law did not permit international adoptions, and the family laws in the Czech and Slovak republics have still not been changed. Only classic adoptions are allowed in each country--a Czech family can adopt a Czech child, and so forth.”

The problem has been allowed to drag on for so long partly because most of the children have mothers who do not care and fathers who would rather remain unknown. Many are the offspring of Slovak prostitutes who hustle German truckers and motorists on the congested E-55 highway, the main link between Berlin and Prague that passes not far from here.

Hundreds of young women in tight skirts and revealing tops walk the shoulders of the asphalt brothel, which has become known as the “Highway of Love.” For a German traveler, an erotic interlude costs half as much as an encounter back home, and in a country where the risk of AIDS is lower.

Slovak families, many of them poor Gypsies, moved decades ago to the heavily industrialized region to work in state-run coal mines, at the urging of Communist authorities.

But when communism collapsed in 1989, the jobs dried up, the border opened and many women ended up on the highway. Some were sold to pimps by their families for a few hundred German marks or a fistful of gold jewelry.

“The street here gives us work, gives us life,” said Mirka, a 23-year-old Slovak prostitute at a seedy roadside motel a few miles from the German border. “When I got pregnant, I had an abortion. But a lot of the girls can’t afford it.”

It did not matter as much when the prostitutes were citizens of the country where they strut their wares. Their babies usually found good homes; there is a long list of Czech families eager to adopt healthy infants.

But once the women--many of them lifetime residents of the gritty border region--suddenly became expatriates, their babies became entangled in the bureaucratic web that has robbed them of a home life.

Citizenship here is determined not by place of birth but by the citizenship of a child’s parents.

“More than two years may not be a long time for government bureaucrats, but for children it can be a lifetime,” said Marie Vodickova, director of the Fund for Children in Need, an advocacy group based in Prague that has been urging the countries to settle the matter. “In some cases it has meant the lost chance of getting a family. A child that might find a home at age 12 will have no luck at 14.”

Many of the Slovak children have another strike against them: They are part Gypsy, meaning they have dark skin and brown eyes in a part of the world where light skin and blue eyes are placed at a premium. Prejudice against Gypsies is widespread in Central Europe, even against sandy-haired Gypsies fathered by Germans along the E-55.

Officials from children’s homes, such as the one in Most, meet once a month with representatives from adoption agencies and foster-parent programs to try to place children with families.

The preliminary matches are made by exchanging photographs. Those of Gypsy children--both Czech and Slovak--usually end up at the bottom of the pile.

“Zoltan has been here since almost the day he was born,” said a nurse at the Most home who tenderly stroked the boy’s hair. “Unfortunately, he is both Slovak and Gypsy.”

Two German couples stopped by the children’s home recently to inquire about adopting Gypsy babies born to Slovak prostitutes. Such visits are not uncommon among Germans who want “to atone for the guilt they feel” because so many abandoned children have been fathered by their countrymen, said Pavlikova, the home’s psychologist.

German charities also donate toys, clothing and equipment. But finding German parents for the unwanted babies is not a solution.

The same murky laws that prevent Czech families from adopting Slovak children would prevent German families as well, officials said.

Last December, the Slovak government, hoping to break the impasse, asked the Czechs to release seven Slovak babies so that they could be adopted by families in Slovakia. The Czech government refused to let them go after a disagreement arose between the Czech health and social affairs ministries.

Social affairs officials were ready to give up the children, but health officials, who are responsible for abandoned children younger than 3, have long opposed wholesale transfers. The ministry said each child should be considered individually to make sure he or she did not end up worse off in Slovakia.

The Fund for Children in Need supported health officials, insisting that it was criminal to move anyone across international borders without his or her consent or that of a parent.

Officials at the fund, which was established before the division of Czechoslovakia, were looking for any legal grounds to block the move. They believe that the children are better off in the Czech Republic because it is the only home they have known and it devotes more resources to child care than does Slovakia.

“These children may have Slovak citizenship,” said Vodickova, who has seven adopted and foster children of her own. “But they have never lived in Slovakia, and many of their parents have not either.”

The row over handing the babies over to Slovakia led to a new round of negotiations. The two sides decided to draft an international agreement that would allow both countries to look for suitable families. The children would then be placed wherever it was deemed to be “in their best interest.”

But the talks soon bogged down over whether the agreement should be ratified by both parliaments or simply signed by their presidents.

For Milan Valek, director of the children’s home in Most, the dispute was more than he could bear.

“We have seen so many deadlines come and go that we don’t believe anyone anymore,” Valek said. “We decided we weren’t going to waste any more time.”

Valek called a lawyer to his office and, together with his staff, they mapped out a strategy to save at least nine Slovak toddlers. The nine are young and healthy enough to be prime candidates for adoption, making it easy to find interested families, he said.

The others, about two dozen older and disabled children, will probably have to wait for an international resolution of the problem, regardless of how long it takes.

The Most home decided to begin releasing toddlers on “long-term furlough” to prospective Czech parents. After several months, the parents may apply to a district court for pre-adoptive care, followed by an application for permanent adoption.

Under Czech law, if the adoption is approved, the child automatically becomes a Czech citizen because his parents are Czech, thereby circumventing the vexing citizenship issue.

Valek is banking on judicial compassion for his plan to succeed. When the adoption cases come to court, he said, he expects judges will be reluctant to break up new families to return youngsters to an institution and will be willing to break new legal ground to justify their decisions.

To strengthen his hand, the prospective parents are being drawn from a list approved by local adoption officials.

“It is too early to know what will happen since none of the cases have gotten that far,” Valek said. “But we decided we had to act. By prolonging the institutional education of these children, their future development and whole personality have been affected.”

Neither the Czech nor Slovak government has tried to block Valek and the handful of other institutions that have quietly tried the same approach in recent months.

Zvarikova, the Slovak Embassy official, sidestepped questions about the strategy, saying her government has not been officially informed. The Czech social affairs ministry went so far as to praise the innovation but acknowledged that it can help only a fraction of the displaced.

So far, two Most children--one who has lived his entire four years in the big yellow building--have been released to families. The next two children are scheduled to follow this month.

Their names are Zoltan and Marko.

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BACKGROUND

Just three years after a peaceful revolution ended communism in Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and Slovaks decided--once again peacefully--to end their 75-year-old federation, which had been founded on the ruins of the Hapsburg empire. The 1993 split followed years of tension within the union and was sparked by nationalist sentiment in Slovakia, the smaller and poorer of the republics. In the end, it was the Czechs who engineered the divorce, in part to be freed of the economic drag Slovakia had become on their capitalist economy.