Honouring the Czech airmen

Wellingtons from the RAF 311 (Czechoslovak) squadron.

Having just passed through the security check for my flight from Prague, I sat down to wait the opening of the gate. As I often do I started talking to the lady on the seat next to me. 

"How long have you been here," I asked.

"Only two days," she replied.

"Not long enough," I said

"No, but I have been here many times. I just came to attend a ceremony for the families of Czech RAF airmen of the Second World War."

We talked and she showed me a picture of her father's name on the plaque just unveiled on the flying lion monument opposite Malastranska Metro station. I was honoured to sit next to the daughter of such a brave man and asked her about him. Here is his story:

He and his cousin left the country in order to fight the Nazis, first they went to Poland to fight, then to North Africa to join the Foreign Legion, before going to France and from there to England. During the war he piloted Lancasters and Wellingtons, until a serious accident put an end to his active service and he moved to training pilots instead. After the war the Czechoslovak squadrons were transfered to the reformed Czech airforce and he returned to his homeland. 

When the Communists came to power and started to purge the airforce, he flew a business man and the man's plane to freedom in the west and came back to Britain. His cousin stayed behind with his family and suffered under the Communists. After all that adventure her father's story should have ended happy ever in England, but it didn't. Still eager to continue flying, he went to Canada. There his luck ran out, his plane experienced mechanical failure and crashed in the vastness of the Canadian wilderness. 

Pin For A Butterfly - Czech film

It is almost two years now since the death of my friend, Hannah Kodicek. As regular readers of this blog will know Hannah was the reason I first came to this wonderful country and then to the area around South Bohemia.

Hannah was a screenwriter and film-maker. Her major work was Pin for a Butterfly - a magic realist film about the life of a young girl in communist Czechoslovakia, which she wrote and directed. The film starred Hugh Laurie, Imogen Stubbs, Alex Kingston and Joan Plowright. But the star is undoubtedly young Florence Hoath, who as the young Marushka steals the show. The film is now on Youtube and you can watch it here:

A Visit to Volary

My posts about the history of this part of the Czech Republic don't usually look at the more recent past, but there is plenty of it around here. A few weeks ago, before the snow, I drove over to Volary. I had been through it many times on my way to the Sumava, but never stopped. This time I did.

If you go the cemetary in Volary you will find a memorial just outside the main cemetary along with ninety-six graves.  When the American forces entered Volary they came upon a barracks and in it over one hundred women, starving (their average weight was 82 pounds), ill and indeed dying. These were all that remained of a group of women who had been made to make a 700 kilometre death march from concentration camps in Poland. A few days later the Americans found the mass grave of women who had died of disease or been shot by their Nazi guards. The local German inhabitants were made to exhume the bodies and dig new graves. They were then made to attend a burial service for the women. An account of the US army's arrival with photographs is to be found here 

The graveyard is incredibly powerful, set on the hillside overlooking the Sumava. The spot was so beautiful and peaceful when I visited, that it is hard to bear the knowledge of what happened here. It is a place, like too many in this country, where angels weep. The names of the graves show that the women buried there come from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, but most moving of all are those that simply bear the word "neznama" - unknown. It is a tribute to the care and work of the US Fifth Infantry Division that so many have names - this is the only cemetary to holocaust victims where there are names at all.

But the last word goes to a survivor Szewa Szeps -

We were sent on the March, some of the girls sick with a fever of 39 degrees. Every day the snow-covered roads became littered with corpses. My sister was in a very bad way. I had to support and pull her along, so that she would not be shot. We marched in the direction of Czechoslovakia and Bavaria. During the march my sister pleaded with me to leave her and continue alone. Frozen, starving and thoroughly exhausted, we managed to drag ourselves along. At night we were packed like herrings in barns or sheds. In the morning those who didn't survive were left behind. Our transport, with its skeletons in rags, caused the local residents in the area to close their windows and to run from us as if from an epidemic. Many of the unfortunate were [simply] shot along our way. 

During the night of 2-3 May, the Germans abandoned us near a forest in Volary (Wallern) in Czechoslovakia. In the morning we noticed that the guards were gone. Me and another person – the only ones who could still continue – left on the first American tank which approached.
The Americans brought us to the local hospital. My sister was in a really bad way, and three days later, on the 9^th of May, 1945, she died. She was buried in Volary. On her tombstone, I requested her epitaph be taken from her diary:

“The day of our liberation should just not be a day of bitter sleep.”

But I added:

“The day of liberation, my dear sister, was for you a day of bitter sleep."

 Extract taken from http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Dabrowa/dab346.html
It is to the soldiers, medics and Jewish chaplain Herman Dicker of the Fifth Infantry Division that the victims buried in Volary are the only victims in any Holocaust cemetery that headstones bears the victims  name.It is to the soldiers, medics and Jewish chaplain Herman Dicker of the Fifth Infantry Division that the victims buried in Volary are the only victims in any Holocaust cemetery that headstones bears the victims  name.

Mystery car

I came across the old car mouldering in a timber yard on the edge of Horni Plana. It looked so neglected, so forlorn and yet you could see that it once had been a fine car. I showed this photo to my husband - who as a boy had swallowed the Observer Book of Automobiles whole and usually can still tell the make of car from a distance. At first he thought it was a Citroen, but then thought better and suggested it was a 1930's Tatra.

I appeal to anyone who knows to let us know one way or another. But, as this is a blog about the Czech Republic, the former Czechoslovakia and all things Czech, I shall assume it is a Tatra - as it allows me to blog about this fascinating car manufacturer. Its story is in some ways a mirror of the history of the Czech people. In the first part of the last century the Czechs were at the forefront of design and engineering. The Tatra is the world's third oldest car manufacturer and its car design and engineering were ahead of their time. The T77 launched in 1934 was the first production aerodynamic car with its dorsal rear fin and rear-mounted engine. It was to be very influential - Ferdinand Porsche used some of its design features in the more famous Volkswagen Beetle.

As with the wider history of the Czech Republic, this flowering of innovation came to an end under the German occupation. Whilst German officers enjoyed the car's speed, the company's
activity was restricted and its designs plundered in favour of German car companies. After the war the company was nationalised under the communists. Even under the communists the Czech company still managed to produce some fine cars; these were not for the proletariat but for the senior officials and Party elite. More recently the company has abandoned car production and focused exclusively on lorries. Despite all the problems of its past, Tatra has survived and is being rebuilt - rather like the country that spawned it.

The Plague Column

The many tourists that throng the Town Square in Cesky Krumlov often ignore the large column set to one side and surrounded by statues. They may sit on its steps and take photos of each other, some may even photograph the column, but most have no idea what it is and what it commemorates.

It is a plague column set up to remember a plague epidemic that hit the town in the early 1680's. At the top of the column stands the Virgin Mary and around it there are saints who traditionally offer protection against the plague. This was not the first time the town had devastated by the plague, the town had also experienced the terrible impact of the bubonic plague in 1585.

It reminds me of an early introduction to Czech culture I had back in 1982 before I met my Czech puppeteer friend. I picked up a book of poetry in a second-hand shop and started to read. It was Ewald Osers' translation of Jaroslav Seifert's book The Plague Column. I was enchanted and bought the book. At the time it was not officially published in communist Czechoslovakia and was only available in covert samizdat versions. The poem is a personal journey by an old man through Prague. What I love about it is the way it moves from the present to the past, from the general to the personal. The plague of the title is not simply the bubonic kind, but a comment on the political plague that Seifert's beloved country was enduring at the time. But this is far from a political commentary, but a personal love poem to that most beautiful of cities.

Seifert received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, he died a year later. He did not live to see the crowds filling Wenceslas Square first call for and then celebrate the end of the pestilence that was communism.

Seifert was a brave man and a true poet. The last lines of The Plague Column read:

But I make no excuse
I believe that seeking beautiful words
is better
than killing and murdering.

The Party

I finally decided to have a housewarming party. It's two years since we bought the house. I know, but it has hardly been in a fit state to host visits from curious neighbours. They all thought I was mad to buy the place - that crazy Englishwoman living in that wreck of a house when she could have a nice new one. But it is now looking pretty wonderful and the vision I had for it two years ago is now beginning to be visible to all.

I wrote out an invite and hand delivered it to all the houses in the village, where either there was a letterbox or there was someone at home. The first response by those who opened their doors to me was bewilderment (clearly this sort of thing is not done out here) and then as they read the invitation it changed to delight. Thank you, they would come. I wasn't sure whether this was the usual Czech way of saying no, but hoped rather that curiousity would get the better of them.

I laid down a stock of sausages and beer and waited the day, hoping that the summer night storms would not hit us that evening. I needn't have worried. A stream of visitors arrived throughout the evening - bearing cakes, home-made slivovic (plum brandy), wine and flowers. The weather held and we sat outside and drank and ate. There were regular guided tours of the house at the request of my visitors - "Jesus, Maria!" was a regular exclamation at the changed house and in particular at the central heating water tanks taking up the space of a small ship's boiler room. Fortuanately one of my neighbours turned out to be a heating engineer who explained that this was, actually despite its size, not an extravagence but the most effective way to heat the house.

I had cut and sharpened some hazel sticks and the kids stuck sausages on the end of them so the sausages could roast them over the fire. The sausages had been split in four at both ends, and curled back like an octopus' tentacles in the flames. There was clearly a nack to it, one which I and the younger children had to be shown. One neighbour arrived with a jug of burcak - the young cloudy wine still in a state of fermentation, which you can buy in unnamed bottles from roadside stalls. I had seen it but never tasted it before and it is lovely - how any wine gets to its final state in Czecho escapes me!

Everyone chattered and talked with each other; new arrivals came and old ones went throughout the evening and at the end the hard-drinkers were singing. A major topic of conversation was of course the wild mushroom harvest, gazing at the full moon they commented that the moon would be good for the mushrooms, which were as they spoke muscling their way through the leaf litter and pine needles in the forest on the hill behind the house.

At the end of the day I had invitations to go and eat at various houses in the village, and am now waved at every time I drive or walk through the village. One neighbour commented to me -"It is good you do this, we Czechs never do this, we do not meet as a village. It is funny it takes an Englishwoman to do it." So there you go, even when I don't try I am being a community development worker. I think I will make this an annual thing - a summer party for the village - my present to this small community that has allowed me to join it.

First Impressions - the train

As is the case for most people my first impressions of the Czech Republic were of Prague. Well, actually no, my first impressions were from a train window as I entered the country on a slow train from Germany. It was a few months after the Velvet Revolution, just before Easter, and the number of planes flying to Prague had not yet increased to take account of the number of people wanting to fly there. And so I flew to Frankfurt, took the train to Nurenburg, changed on to a smaller train and so on to Prague. It was a wonderful way to arrive, in that it gave me time to watch the changes, to feel the transformation.

Even now I recommend to anyone coming to Cesky Krumlov that they make the journey from Prague to Cesky Krumlov by train rather than hire a car and come down in a hermetically sealed pod. You will meet Czechs that way and you will see some wonderful countryside. The last part of the journey, after you climb on the little train at Ceske Budejovice, is particularly magical as the train winds its way through the forests of the Blanksy Les past a series of small villages.

But back to my first journey into Czecho. The train was full of Germans - a bunch of Bavarians with a large hamper of food and beer who talked very loudly and were on their way to flash the mighty deutschmark in Prague and a Prussian couple who talked to me in English. At the border our papers were checked first by the German border guards, then the train moved a few yards and the Czech guards arrived. Although it was about three months after the collapse of communism, many of its structures, mentality and behaviours were alive and strong, and these included those of the border guards. They arrived grim-faced, together with rifles, inspected the passports and papers as if certain we were enemies of the state, and slowly made their way through the train.

I was relieved when the jolt of the train indicated we were moving again and so we entered Czechoslovakia. My first impressions were not entirely favourable. As the night was drawing in I could not see much beyond the immediate environment of the railway line, but here everywhere looked run-down - the station buildings in need of repairs, long trains with coal, timber and other goods trundled past. The only countryside I could see was where the forest dark and mysterious pressed in. I felt a frisson down my spine. The fairytales of my childhood came to mind, somewhere out there were the woodcutter and hunter, bears, foxes and big, bad wolves.

At last we arrived in Prague Station. There standing on the platform was my puppeteer friend. She was buzzing with excitement, glad to be back in her homeland after 20 years, glad to have renewed acquaintances with ex-student friends now bigshots in the brave new world of post Velvet Revolution Prague. "Come," she said, "We have time for a coffee to Cafe Slavia."