The spring of 1968 had all the intensity, anxiety and unreality of a dream come true. People flooded the narrow streets of Prague’s Old Town and the courtyards of Hradcany Castle and stayed out long into the night. If anyone set out for a walk alone, he would soon join a group of others to chat or tell a joke, and we all would listen with relief as the ancient walls echoed with the sound of laughter. Even long after the Castle gates closed, people would remain standing on the ramparts looking down at the flickering lights of a city that could not sleep for happiness.
Every morning on the staircase of the once-dreaded Central Committee building, women would wait for Alexander Dubcek, the new Secretary General, to arrive at his office. They brought pieces of homemade cake or bunches of flowers. Children gave him their teddy bears for good luck. No one missed a chance to see him on television. It was rare joy to watch a Party official who would sometimes stutter and whose glasses kept sliding down his nose.
The day President of the Republic Antonin Novotny had resigned, in January, I had gone shopping for groceries. The store had been crowded with hurried, impatient people as usual but, for the first time I could remember, no one was pushing or arguing. The girl who was standing in front of me on line turned around and said, “Look! Everyone’s smiling today!”
Late one evening, I was returning home from a meeting at Strahov Library, high above Prague, with a woman friend. It was cold and, as we ran down the steep slope of Neruda Street, we decided to stop in at a little wine cellar to warm up.
The place was packed. All public places were packed then as if, after all those years of isolation, people could not get enough of one another’s company. We could not find a place to sit down and were about to leave when two young men at a nearby table got up.
“You don’t want to go out into that cold again – you look frozen,” one of them said. “Take our seats. We’ve stayed long enough.”
We sat down at a small table that was already accommodating six people. They immediately began signaling the waiter to bring us some hot mulled wine.
My friend, whose husband had spent six years in jail and had died shortly after his release, said to me, “We’ve paid an outrageous price for this, but if it lasts, I want to make peace with the past. Not forgive. Not forget. But come to terms with it. I never imagined that life could be so magnificent, that people could feel so strongly that they belong together, that their life has a meaning. Just look around! You see the same joy on every face, the same happiness...”
“...and the same fear that they’ll lose it all,” said the stranger sitting next to me, and smiled.
Groups of students would sit around the Jan Hus monument in the Old Town Square playing their guitars and singing till dawn. Tourists from abroad and our own people would join them, listening, and pondering those beautiful, deceitful words carved into the stone: Truth Prevails.
Does it? Truth alone does not prevail. When it clashes with power, truth often loses. It prevails only when people are strong enough to defend it.
We worried constantly that the Soviets would not tolerate our outburst of independence. For them, freedom was a virulent disease which could spread to other parts of their sphere of influence before they were able to wipe it out. They had crushed the liberation movements in Hungary, in Poland, in East Germany. What chance did we have?
In July, the leaders of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria met in Warsaw and sent a note to Prague. It was full of threats denouncing our leadership as well as the “situation” in Czechoslovakia which jeopardized the “vital interests of all socialist countries.” Shortly afterward a meeting of the members of the Soviet Politburo and the Czechoslovak Presidium was scheduled to take place in the village of Cierna to discuss these issues. It was hoped that a solution acceptable to both sides would be found.
Nobody slept the night before our delegation was due to go to Cierna. The streets were crowded, as though it were broad daylight, and people clasped hands and called out encouragements to one another. Everyone knew our independence was at stake. The next day, a printed declaration appeared on little tables on street corners and in arcades. People by the thousands stopped to sign their names to this declaration of loyalty to a socialism that did not murder or intimidate or lie, to a socialism that did not bestow social equality and economic security upon those who were willing to silence their consciences and to renounce human dignity. This was the socialism that Rudolf had sought. Twenty years before, it had been an illusion; now it was becoming a reality. The declaration ended with the words: “We shall not retreat, so long as we live, from this road we have chosen.”
I signed it twice, once for myself and once for my son.
Ivan was already living in London. After the truth about his father’s death had sunk in, he felt he could not remain in a country where such atrocities were silently tolerated. I agreed. All Ivan’s relatives, both maternal and paternal, had been murdered by barbarians who had invaded our country. Not one member of his family had died a natural death. There was no peace and no future in the heart of Europe. After finishing high school, Ivan had managed to escape to England and, under Dubcek, I had no difficulty visiting him there. I was planning another trip for the end of that summer.
Now, as I signed the declaration, I thought to myself: I really mean it this time, Rudolf. This was your dream and, if we realize it, you will not have died in vain.
The negotiations in Cierna dragged on and on, and public anxiety about the proceedings intensified every day. Any scrap of news made the rounds of Prague within hours. Mountains of petitions, tons of paper were flown in to Cierna. There were expressions of confidence in our delegation and hope that our representatives would not yield to pressure, would take strength from this well of support from the people at home.
Cierna is a tiny town situated almost directly on the border between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. From its streets one could see the Soviet Army units massed on the Russian side. The negotiations were conducted in special railway cars, and the Soviet delegation had its train taken back across the border every night.
Rumors were rife. I heard that once, when the negotiations had come to a halt, Dubcek had gone alone into the Russian train to have a private word with Brezhnev. The villagers dropped whatever they were doing and gathered at the railway station, standing silently on the tracks behind the Russian train: If you take him away and with him our freedom, it will be over our dead bodies.
The negotiations ended in a compromise. Under intense pressure from the Soviets, our representatives agreed to rein in those aspects of liberalization which most offended Moscow. The Soviets agreed to refrain from interference in our domestic matters. This agreement was immediately confirmed and signed at a conference in Bratislava.
The joint declaration satisfied no one but we were all so exhausted by the build-up of tension that we decided to hope for the best. They will try to push us as far as they can, we told each other. Maybe we will have to give in here and there but at least the danger of armed intervention has been averted. Shortly after our delegation returned to Prague, the Soviet troops that had been conducting maneuvers in Czechoslovakia since that spring left our territory. For the moment, everything was all right we thought. People sighed with relief and took the vacations they had been postponing for months.
At daybreak on August 21, a friend of mine was sitting by a pond fishing. The bait was in the water, the mist was rising, and the birds began to chirp. He made himself comfortable, took out a thick slice of bread and butter, and turned on his transistor radio. He listened for a while, shook his head, listened again. What kind of peculiar broadcast was this? He stuck the rest of the bread into his pocket, secured the fishing rod with a couple of stones, and returned slowly to his cabin where his wife was still sleeping. He sat down at the edge of the bed and shook her.
“Helena, wake up! They’re broadcasting the strangest play. Something about the Russians invading us.”
His wife yawned, sat up, listened. Then she screamed, “You fool! It’s true! Occupation!”
At about that same time I was already behind the wheel of my tiny Fiat, breaking all speed limits between Prague and the Austrian border. The telephone had rung in my apartment at four that morning.
“Heda, the Russians have crossed our borders. Prague is being invaded by airborne troops. Call all your friends. Let them know before they go out.”
I gripped the telephone receiver with both hands. “No. No, it can’t be true,” I moaned. “It’s a lie.”
“It’s true,” said the tired voice. “It would be a hideous lie. But it’s an even more hideous truth.”
I stood by the telephone for a while, my mind a blank. Then I dialed the police. An agitated voice answered after the first ring.
“Is it true?” I asked.
“Turn on your radio.”
I bounded over to the radio.
“The armies of five powers have crossed the Czechoslovak frontiers...”
I returned to the telephone and dialed one number after another. At the other end of the line one voice after another cried out, “No. No...”
At that hour, all of Prague’s telephones must have been ringing.
I was at home alone. My husband was on a lecture tour in the United States. My son was in England. I thought: As soon as the Russians reach the western borders, they will close them. It will be just like the 1950s. I will never see my son again.
I grabbed a small bag, threw in a few necessities and, half an hour later, I was speeding away. Today I cannot recall anything of that 160-mile drive except that, long before I reached the border, it was broad daylight, and, as I neared it, I saw a large sign which warned that entry into the border zone without a valid exit permit was strictly forbidden.
That, of course, was awkward. I had no exit permit. I turned the car around and parked it a few hundred feet back. Then I took my bag and, as casually as possible, strolled into the woods.
They caught me about twenty minutes later. The border zone was several miles wide; the forest was sparse and offered little cover. Two border guards appeared between the trees, ordered me to halt, and then escorted me back to the road. There they put me in their jeep and drove me back to my car. One of them got in beside me and ordered me to drive to the nearest village where there was a border guard outpost complete with a small jail. A rather disturbed-looking man was just being led into it.
The station was manned by a few guards and their young commander, all as upset as myself. I told them who I was and a violent argument ensued: the name Margolius was enough to provoke instant reaction.
But the commander stood by his obligations.
“Please understand,” he said, “I’m a soldier. I have my orders. I really should arrest you for breaking the law. Instead I’m only asking you to return home. Should I receive orders to let people out, I’ll do it with pleasure but, for the time being, it’s impossible. You must understand that if I disobey one order, I can’t be relied upon to obey other orders – for instance, the order to resist the enemy.”
For a time we kept arguing, trying to sort out our thoughts, trying to confront together a situation which was too enormous for us to comprehend. Suddenly I realized that this would not be an easy triumph for an arrogant superpower. We would not surrender without a fight. In the end, the young men all solemnly promised to keep faith with their country and to accept orders from no one but their supreme commander, President Svoboda, and I agreed to return to Prague.
The officer accompanied me back to my car and asked, “Aren’t you afraid to go back alone? I could send someone with you.”
I thanked him, but said I did not feel that any of us were alone now.
The next day the border guards relaxed their surveillance and thousands of people left the country without exit permits. But by that time I was no longer thinking of leaving. The thrill of the struggle had engulfed me.
As I drove back to Prague that morning through the landscape of lakes and deep forests, I picked up three soldiers who had been home on leave. They kept urging me to drive faster so that they could rejoin their units and fight the invaders. But the order to fire never came.
All the towns through which we passed were already covered with posters and proclamations. Local radio stations were broadcasting nonstop, barricades had begun to rise in some places, and in others people with clenched fists lined the streets.
I got back to Prague shortly after noon. I had to make detours through side streets because tanks were stationed in the major intersections, blocking off the main avenues to traffic. Crowds of people surrounded those tanks, trying to communicate with the soldiers in broken Russian.
“What’s your business here?” I heard someone ask. “Do you even know where you are?”
“In Germany,” grunted a soldier.
“Don’t you have eyes? Can’t you see you’re in Prague?”
The soldier sneered and turned away.
Just as I started my car again, I saw a blonde girl dance up to the rear of that tank and toss a flaming torch under it.
At the next intersection another young woman dashed up to my car window and threw in a bag of tricolor ribbons – the colors of the Czechoslovak flag – and pamphlets with the instruction: “Distribute them!”
After that, I stopped at every corner. People crowded around my car, tore the pamphlets from my hands, pinned the tricolor onto their lapels. At every stop, someone would stick another poster or flag onto my car and, before long, it was completely covered with slogans: Murderers Go Home! Death to the Invaders! Bring Back Dubcek! Words. Words against tanks. Fourteen million people tried to defend their freedom with their bare hands while bloodied flags covered our first dead.
At Wenceslas Square at the center of Prague, below the bullet-scarred facade of the National Museum, tens of thousands of people with transistors to their ears milled around in streets filled with crushed automobiles and pieces of masonry that had been shot down from the surrounding buildings. Walls were covered with painted slogans. Trucks draped with Czechoslovak flags rammed into the Russian tanks and the air rang with the sound of intermittent gunfire.
Standing in the crowd, I felt that this was the supreme moment of our lives. During the night of the invasion, when we lost everything, we found something that people in our world hardly dare to hope for: ourselves and each other. In all those faces, in all those eyes, I saw that we all thought and felt alike, that we all strove for the same things.
Prague resisted in every way it could. Street signs disappeared or were turned around so that the invaders were unable to find their way through the city. License plate numbers of Soviet Security cars were painted in large digits on the walls. Radio and, later, television broadcasts were transmitted from makeshift facilities that were moved from place to place, eluding the Russians. At the same time, the train carrying Russian radio station-detector equipment was lost on its way to Prague. For days it was shunted from siding to siding by Czechoslovak railway men. And throughout the city, hungry Russian soldiers who could not get a crumb of food or glass of water from the population wandered through streets where all the traffic signs pointed in one direction: back to Moscow.
On the third day of the invasion, I happened to hear the broadcast of a radio station from a town on our border with East Germany, appealing for volunteers who spoke German and other foreign languages, and who could transmit our news abroad. I called a journalist friend, Jirka, and asked, “Are you coming?”
The Russians stopped us three times to search the car but did not find the stacks of pamphlets I had hidden under my seat and which we passed out along our route. In one of the small towns on the way we were surrounded by a group of young people on motorbikes who were patrolling the roads. They had organized the entire district and were able immediately to identify any stranger or strange vehicle that entered the area. Even old people helped. Grandfathers in wheelchairs sat at intersections, signaling to us
with their canes, indicating the proximity of the enemy and directing us to make detours. In one village an old invalid directed traffic with his crutches.
The young patrolmen persuaded us to stay in their town. They took us to their local National Committee where a new chairman, a smart, good-humored stocky fellow, was trying to cope with the situation as well as he could. My mind skipped back over my dismal dealings with various local National Committees of the past. Where had all the bureaucrats gone?
The chairman put us to work right away. We broadcast over the town’s public address system instructions for the population and bulletins about the movement of troops in the neighborhood. We wrote leaflets and newsletters which the young men on the motorbikes promptly distributed throughout the district. But units of the Polish occupation army were approaching and the mood of the community was grim.
Under a Cruel Star Page 20