From the last part of my trip, in Prague.
I had such a great experience with the tour guide in Bratislava that I did the same thing in Prague. This time I was able to get two half day tours with Vilma, another woman about my age. On the first day we rode the tram across the Vltava River and up the hill to the Prague Castle. Prague is so easy to get around – the tram, bus and subway were all a block from my hotel, they all ran frequently and were clean and all take the same fare card.
After we saw the castle complex, the St. Vitus Cathedral and St. George’s Basilica, we walked down Golden Lane, which is lined with very small houses that were originally built for the castle guards. Franz Kafka is big in Prague, and apparently he stayed in one for a bit. Then we slowly made our way back down the hill on foot, admiring the spectacular views over the whole city. And of course the replica of the Eiffel Tower. They are very proud of that. Vilma insisted on taking a picture of me with it in the background, though I really didn’t care.
“I still love to stop at this view because I’ve only been able to see it for the last part of my life. It was a secret place.” Vilma pointed out that you could see the French Embassy, the back side of the American Embassy, and I think also the German embassy from the walkway through a small vineyard. “The secret police, they saw those too, and so this was open only to them. They could watch everything, all the time. No one else was ever allowed up here. I didn’t even know it was here. Not until after the Velvet Revolution.”
Now there are restaurants, cafes (even a Starbucks, I’m ashamed to say), nice benches to sit on, and small souvenir shops all along the path down.
It was a beautiful sunny day with blue skies, though still cool even in the sun. Vilma stopped again and pointed out a few more landmarks in the city. “I think I would like to have that job they had. To sit here in the sun all day, watching everything. And to get paid while doing it. I think maybe that was a good job. The first time I came up here, I couldn’t believe this was kept from us all those years.”
I wondered how I would feel if a treasure like this was off limits to citizens. I also spent a lot of time wondering what I would have been like if I had been either Vilma or Eva, my age, but living in Czechoslovakia during communism. I don’t think I would have had the courage to be a dissident.
The next day Vilma and I toured on the east side of the Vltava River, where my hotel was. We went first to the Jewish quarter and saw the spectacular Spanish Synagogue and the Old New Synagogue and were able to go inside both of them. We also went inside the Pinkas Synagogue, which has the names of all the Holocaust victims from Bohemia and Moravia inscribed on the walls. There is also a very good database of all those families kept up. If you know your family name and what village in Bohemia or Moravia they were from, you can contact the Center and chances are they will be able to track down some information for you. Apparently it is one of the best Holocaust databases around, but it does only cover the Bohemia and Moravia area.
Prague has one of the most extensive collections of treasures that Nazis stole from Jews. During World War II, the Nazis in Prague took up residence in the apartments in the Jewish quarter because those were some of the nicest buildings around. So while the Jewish sections of many other cities were completely destroyed, the Jewish quarter in Prague was protected because the Nazis enjoyed living there. They also stored treasures there that they brought from other cities, and much of that survived.
Outside the Pinkas Synagogue is the Old Jewish Cemetery with headstones all crammed in tightly and resting at awkward angles because of age.
“Each headstone is for a family, not just for one person,” Vilma told me. “They were not allowed to buy any more land to expand the cemetery outwards as more people died, the government would not let them. So they had to expand vertically.” She pointed out the symbols on many of the gravestones that showed which of the original tribes the family was descended from. “Most of these graves have twelve people buried one on top of the other.”
Then we headed back toward Old Town, and went to Wenceslas Square, which is several blocks long and has the National Gallery at one end. There was a huge picture of Vaclav Havel hanging on a banner down the front of the building. Havel was the first president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution. He was a dissident writer, poet and philosopher and one of the driving forces behind the revolution for Czechs.
Vilma said “He is still a big hero. You can see how big that picture of him is. For a long time I didn’t like him, before the revolution. All that I knew about him was what I read in the newspapers, but they were controlled by the communists and the communists did not like him. He was always shown as a bad, evil person out to destroy the country. And I believed it. After the revolution, when I found out about him, I liked him. But the first time I saw him in person at a parade, I was not happy. He was a big hero, he beat the communists, so I expected him to be very tall and very strong. But he was small and looked weak. I was disappointed.”
Just as I had with Eva, I asked Vilma if her life changed much because of the revolution, and whether it had changed for the better or the worse.
”Oh, yes, my life definitely changed right away. I immediately quit my job and I went to school.” Vilma had had a factory job that she didn’t like, similarly to Eva, and her first moves had been exactly the same as Eva’s.
“For me, it was better after the revolution. But for many of my friends, they had jobs like mine in the factory and afterward they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t have another job. They were not happy and felt they were better off under communism.” I don’t remember what Vilma said after that, but I got the impression that she quickly became estranged from those friends.
As we were walking along, she pointed out a museum she thought I would enjoy.
“Do you see right there, that big casino? On the second floor is the Museum of Communism. It is in the same building as a casino! And it is next door to the McDonald’s! We are very happy about that.”
Much of Vilma’s family still lives in rural Slovakia, while she moved to Prague at a fairly young age. She said they, too, complain that life was easier under communism. She said when she goes back to visit them she gets annoyed with the conversation about that, and also with how rustic everything is.
I told her I did not enjoy Bratislava all that much and she said “I can tell you why you didn’t like it. It is nothing. When Slovakia chose to become a separate country, they had to make a capital city. But Bratislava was really just a place where a few rich people lived, everyone else was way out in the farmlands. There was no culture there. So they tried to build a culture where there was none. Prague already had a culture.”
Vilma went on to say that the people running the communist party in Slovakia are now running the government in Slovakia, and that’s why things are not that different there. I told her what Eva had said about all the bribery and she nodded, and I told her about how many things seemed in disrepair. She said that Czechs really look up to Germany as being the most modern and up to date in technology and try to emulate them.
She said “When Germans talk about something or someone that is not sophisticated, or not very modern, they say ‘to me, it is like a Czech village.’ When Czechs talk about the same sort of thing, we say ‘to me, it is like a Slovakian village.’”