It's been nearly ten years since I performed for this feast day, back when I played guitar in Coro Ángel based in Cape Charles on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Back then, we went on two separate years to play at St. Gregory the Great in Virginia Beach. We'd process from the gym of the school down a long hallway as we played instruments including a requinta (a smaller guitar tuned at a fifth above), and a six-string acoustic bass with a gourd-like body. People in festive outfits would clap and sing as we made our way into the vestibule, then the sanctuary.
The evening Mass was followed by a reception of about 500 people back in the gymnasium, replete with the chocolaty-spicy mole sauce, among other special tastes from Mexico.
This year was my first occasion to celebrate the feast day as an organist, and largely in English, though I did sing the bilingual hymn "Pan de Vida." I also composed the setting for the responsorial Psalm - in this case a short reading from Judith - as there is little in the way of published music for the English-language verses. Quite proud to have played my part.

Ludwig van Beethoven's baptismal record of 17 December 1770 does not state his date of birthday, and Beethoven himself never was sure of the exact day. My local classical station, WHRO of Hampton Rhodes, Virginia celebrated on the 16th.


Anyway, it's hard to come up with a fitting tribute to a composer who gave us so much. I remember learning "Für Elise" and "Moonlight Sonata" as a child. In college I became enamored of his symphonies, especially his Ninth - all the more so as I was learning German and the final choral movement had that awe-inspiring verse by Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller, "Ode an die Freude." I revelled in the paean to human brotherhood: Alle Menschen werden Brüder -"all men become brothers."

I was aware of many of Beethoven's struggles in life, his abusive father, his rejections in love, and the deafness of his final years. And this "Ode to Joy" represents such a triumph over those difficulties. Never lose hope, it reminds me.

It was about this time that the Berlin Wall came down, and the unity expressed in the Ninth seemed poised to finally take over the world. I finished my college graduation requirements that fall of 1989 and felt like I was joining the throngs in the chorus, marching forward, feuertrunken, "drunk with fire," in Schiller's words.

For New Year's 1990, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at the Berlin Wall, quite fittingly. And in October I departed for Europe, for the former East Bloc, to assist with the adjustments to newfound freedoms, on the day Bernstein died. I learned of it on a CNN broadcast projected onto the plane's movie screen. On a flight to Vienna, appropriately enough.

As I spent most of the 1990s in Central Europe, I sang in choruses and visited sites where various composers had lived, worked and died: Mozart's and Smetana's birthplaces, concert halls in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, the Prague cemetery in Vyšehrad where both Dvořák and Smetana are buried. 

Somehow I never have made it to Vienna's Centralfriedhof, site of Beethoven's grave. But I have been to the Beethovenfries in the Secession Building, that palace of art nouveau. Gustav Klimt painted his visual interpretation of the Ninth in the basement, with one movement taking up each wall. That was in the summer of 2000, when I also visited Beethoven's old apartment in Heiligenstadt, today a Viennese neighborhood.

Since Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim is one of today's leading proponents of Beethoven's legacy. He also founded, along with Edward Said, the West-East Divan Orchestra, a group composed mainly of instrumentalists of various Middle-Eastern backgrounds. What could be a better paean to peace and our common humanity than their playing the Ninth together? I've embedded a YouTube video of the final movement, as well as one of Barenboim's commentary on Beethoven's genius.

The last couple of weeks have contained four somber anniversaries: the RFK assassination, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Trianon Treaty, and the Czech retributions against ethnic German civilians in Postoloprty. It’s not my desire to emphasize the negative, so I’ll try to emphasize the lessons that can be learned.
 
Personally, I don’t have much to say about RFK, so I’ll leave that to others. On Tiananmen: I was nearing the end of college, full of hope that the student protests would lead to serious reforms. My college job was as a bellman at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, and I learned about the suppression of the protests as I was “on the floor,” wandering between the reception desk and restaurant entrance, where a large TV in a lounge area carried the sad news. But there was a glimmer of hope globally: Poland had conducted its first (reasonably) free elections, and non-communist candidates had done surprisingly well at the polls. Hungarian officials had begun cutting down the border fence with Austria, which helped lead to the Fall of the Berlin Wall that autumn.
 
The Czech press reported on an event of 75 years ago: in a town called Postoloprty, about an hour northwest of Prague, at least 763 Germans were tortured, killed and thrown into mass graves. Much of the Czech population had harbored a simmering grievance, as the town was annexed to the Third Reich, along with the rest of the Sudetenland, in 1938, and the German-speaking population had mostly welcomed the move. Of course this sort of vengeance solves nothing. But the fact that Czechs are willing to examine this history is encouraging. There had been an inquiry into the massacre in 1947, as well as exhumation of the bodies, which gives us the 763 figure. Czech and German historians conducted a joint study of the issue in 1996, and a committee from the Louny region of Bohemia examined the event yet again in 2009.
 
This leads to the Treaty of Trianon defining Hungary’s post-World War I borders, which was signed a hundred years ago. The former Kingdom of Hungary lost 72% of its territory, including all of present-day Slovakia and considerable portions of Croatia, Serbia and Romania. Even Austria was awarded a strip of western Hungary, including the town of Eisenstadt/Kismarton and Sopron/Ödenburg. Only after locals forced authorities to allow a plebiscite did Sopron become reattached to Hungary, in accordance with the will of the people. This was the only town that managed to do so.
 
While most of those areas were majority-non-Magyar, some of them, such as a swath of southern Hungary, remain majority-Hungarian to this day. Hungarians became Europe’s largest minority living beyond the borders of the mother country. This became a major source of resentment among ethnic Magyars. There are questions about why Hungary should have lost so much territory; however, I give no quarter to Magyar revanchists. I also have little patience with Hungary allowing ethnic Magyars in neighboring countries to vote in Hungarian elections, which has encouraged the growth of nationalist parties with revanchist agendas.

Another concern is that the successor states respect the rights of the Hungarian minorities. Since 1990, Slovakia has passed a number of language laws asserting the use of Slovak as the official tongue. Most have been too sweeping in my opinion. One from the mid-1990s could have been interpreted as calling for the punishment of two bus drivers speaking Hungarian just between themselves from the windows of their vehicles. Many Slovaks insist that it should be prohibited to use Hungarian names for Slovak towns, such as Pozsony for Bratislava and Kassa for Košice. I would say that forcing them to speak their language incorrectly is a violation of human rights.
 
It's a rather long complicated history. I have covered these issues in a series of three articles on the downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy.

The End of World War I and of Austria-Hungary: But the Tragedy Continues

The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire

Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation?

I just belatedly learned that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Paul II. About the only thing I can say that hasn’t already been said, is how my life has been affected by him.
 
No one knows how long the Cold War might have continued were it not for his influence in bringing down the regimes of the Warsaw Pact. But it was precisely in his native Poland that the first free elections in East-Central Europe were held in May 1989, leading rapidly to waves of emigration and protests in other countries that culminated in the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution. So it is doubtful that I would have ventured to then-Czechoslovakia in 1990—a highly influential time in my life, coming on the heels of college graduation—had it not been for his role in inspiring Polish Catholics to struggle for religious freedom and a government more responsive to the needs and will of the people.
 
In addition to befriending both Lutherans and Catholics in Slovakia, and coming to understand the struggles they had faced with the old regime, I observed a tangible resurgence in faith, a new flowering in the cultural sphere. One that was also necessary to counteract the freight train of consumerism, with its spiritual nihilism, barreling their way.
 
The one time I got so see that pontiff in person was in October 1994, when I took a bus trip with a Slovak chorus – a civic rather than religious group, but one with a considerable repertoire of sacred music. And we travelled on a shoestring, nearly 40 of us on a bus, travelling from 6 AM on a Saturday morning, sleeping as the vehicle rolled through the Alps and down the Apennine peninsula, finally arriving before noon to sing in a side chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica. The Mass was celebrated by a Slovak priest, who would also be our guide during our five days in Rome. We visited sites including the Institute of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, a Slovak organization founded by refugees of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.
 
But the highlight was seeing John Paul II on St. Peter’s Square, at a Wednesday audience. He rode in the Popemobile down the aisles arranged among the thousands of folding chairs, waving to the crowds. After ascending the white steps under the front façade of the basilica, he gave a brief homily. Then he greeted various groups, acknowledging each country and nationality in each given language. Many other choirs had come. When an English group gave a particularly enthusiastic response, standing and cheering, he said, “I encourage you to sing.” And so they sang a hymn.
 
And then our Slovak group got its turn, singing the stately “V sedmobrežnom kruhu Ríma,” the Slovak papal hymn. The bishop of Banská Bystrica was present, along with other clergy and seminarians, and I felt oddly privileged to be among such a group of Slovaks – even if many choir members, like me, were not Catholic.
 
At least I wasn’t yet Catholic, but still discerning. Despite my Slovak connections, the most inspiring thing I witnessed at this event was the multinational crowd, each group singing and cheering in its own tongue, each proud of its own identity. Yet all relished their roles as part of an organic body.
 
I continued my discernment until John Paul’s death in 2005. I got up at 4 AM to watch his funeral live from Columbus, Ohio. I’d read in the days since his passing about how Poles had travelled to the Eternal City in trains and buses, on sleepless journeys with little money, and recalled the similar way I’d gone there with the Slovak choir. As the crowds held aloft signs in various language, the Italians with their “Santo subito!” banners and white-and-red Polish flags everywhere, I reveled in the universality of the display, transported back to St. Peter’s Square as I’d seen it on that day in 1994. It was then I knew I had to become a Catholic – and I did so the following Easter.
 
In the years since, I’ve learned more and more about the underground Church in Eastern Europe, about the life of John Paul, including his efforts to clean the stains of historical anti-Semitism. I’ve read his Memory and Identity—in both English and Polish—and understand his desire that Europe might “breathe with both lungs,” that is, overcome its East-West divisions.
 
Those projects have never been completely fulfilled, but I hope that, by my writing and music, among other endeavors, I can do my small part in bringing about the understanding among peoples that was so central to John Paul II’s life.
 

The current lockdown atmosphere offers a chance to reminisce about travels past. In this post, I recall a quiet journey to Győr, a provincial town between Budapest and Vienna, and the nearby Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma.
 
It was spring break 1995, when I was teaching with the Soros Foundations in Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. Trains ran regularly to Budapest, about a four-hour trip back then. I went with a Frenchman from Annecy (a wonderfully picturesque town I’ve unfortunately never managed to visit), who lived down the hall from me in a dormitory with other foreign lectures.
​
He’d never been to Budapest, and I’d been several times already, so we developed separate itineraries, he seeing the typical sites and I seeking out more obscure locations. We did hike together up the Gellért Hill on the Buda side, up to the citadel, followed by dinner in the hotel restaurant. But our lodgings were in the much more modest pension run by a stout, vigorous woman of about sixty named “Kati.” A hostel where as many as ten students and backpackers slept in a single room. Seven bucks a night per bed, a wonderful tip from the Let’s Go Guide.

That book also suggested Győr, a couple of hours to the west of Budapest, on the main line to Vienna, and closer to the latter. The German name for the town, Raab, comes from the river—called Rába in Hungarian—which flows among embankments as the waters finish their journey from a source near Graz, Austria, to its confluence with the Danube on the northeast outskirts of Győr.

I settled in modest lodgings, the railway motel, which housed out-of-town personnel and also rented rooms to non-employees, another suggestion from Let’s Go!

Exploring town on foot, I found it a charming Austro-Hungarian locale, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century facades of imperial yellow and some pastels, though not all the architecture had recovered from its socialist-era pallor. After the noise and grit of Budapest, it was nice to stroll the quieter streets, with large pedestrian zones, though mid-March was still cold for café life. Inside a baroque library turned museum, my tour guide happened to be one of those ethnic Hungarians born in Slovakia. He had come here as part of a voluntary and peaceful population exchange (as opposed to brutal ethnic cleansing – the Slovak border is four miles away) at the end of WWII. And so he led me around speaking Slovak, not quite native, and a bit rusty after nearly a half-century.

Győr had been an important center of education for centuries. Ľudovít Štúr, who would go on to standardize the Slovak language in the mid-1800s, attended secondary school there, back in the days when he had little chance to acquire and education in any other tongue beside German or Hungarian. Curiously, Josef Dobrovský, a Catholic priest instrumental in codifying modern Czech, also had connections to the town.
Probably the greatest contribution to learning came from the Benedictine order, which is responsible for both the St. Ignatius church and the adjoining gymnasium (college-preparatory secondary school) on the large square in the center of town.

But the Benedictines are probably best know in northwest Hungary for their stately Pannonhalma Archabbey, the destination for my second day’s excursion. I checked and double-checked the bus schedule with locals in an English-Magyar-Deutsch cacophony. I finally decided that I could reliably get a bus out there. And back – not getting stranded was the ticklish point. After a stretch of highway, the hill came into view. That was the -halma of the name, a Germanic borrowing. The first part comes from “Pannonia,” as the central Danube region was known in Roman times.

A central dome rose above it all, its patina topping three sections of cream-colored cylinder, gently telescoping upward. Nervous I might pass my destination, I hopped out at a small stop in the village of Pannonhalma. When the bus continued to wind up the road to the monastery, I felt foolish for having gotten off too early. How I’d have to huff it uphill. But I was rewarded by the sight of a wooden cart hitched to two horses. Old-World charm spoiled only by rubber tires. Right in front of a vendéglő, or tavern – guess the driver had stopped in for a drink. But I was going to save drinking for afterwards – if I had time before the last bus back to Győr.

I trudged up, and finally reached the entrance where a handful of eighties-model Ladas were parked. Tourists were few, and I saw no monks wandering the grounds. But I found the ticket office and was soon touring the church and library. I read from a tattered English-language brochure while the guide spoke Hungarian. One of the curious items in the library is a document, mostly in Latin, which is also the oldest writing to contain both Finnish and Hungarian words, a remarkable thing, given that no one recognized the relationship between those two languages until the late eighteenth century. (Hungarian belongs to a family called Uralic, with no clear ties to Indo-European, which includes Germanic, Slavic and Celtic languages, as well as ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. The ancestors of the Magyars migrated to Central Europe in 896, leaving them linguistically isolated.)

But the most impressive thing the Benedictines have done here is to run a school, with few interruptions, for a thousand years. It was part of the project of establishing Christianity in the region, an undertaking that had strong support from King St. Stephen, who was baptize in the year 1000. The secondary school, a kind of collegium, has long attracted boys from aristocratic families. In the 1930s it focused on Italian language. It was closed under Communist rule in 1948, but remarkably reopened in 1950, one of the few Catholic schools permitted to operate in the former East Bloc. It was undergoing renovations at the time in 1995.

After the tour, I strolled outside, taking in a view of the surrounding countryside. The abbey looked to be in decent shape after forty years of state atheism, but one could imagine things being cleaner, masonry repaired, walls repainted. I had the feeling things would get better under a government less hostile to religion.

A quaint historical town in central Slovakia now offers, in addition to its traditional outdoor architectural wonders, a museum dedicated to the world’s longest love poem – complete with a bank for lovers to deposit tokens of their affection.

​The poem in question is Marína, penned by Andrej Sládkovič (1820-1872), is nearly 3,000 lines long, and celebrates a young woman of that name. The two fell in love at 14, but under family pressure she married someone else. Sládkovič became a Lutheran pastor, for the last 16 years of his life in Radvaň nad Hronom, which is today a section of Banská Bystrica, one of Slovakia’s most important towns. I lived in the Radvaň neighborhood just a block from where he used to preach.

Sládkovič completed the poem in 1844; two years later it was published in Pest (back then Slovakia was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, itself part of the Austrian Empire). When I left Slovakia in 1992 after two years there – I was to return for another four years – I was given a copy as a parting gift. This was a 1991 edition from Bratislava with illustrations by a modern artist. The author, an important Romantic and founder of the Slovak national movement, compares his love for his darling with that of love for homeland.

The town with the House of Marína, is Banská Štiavnica – the first part of the name, like that of Banská Bystrica, is derived from the word for ‘mine.’ Indeed, it was such an important mining center that in the late-18th century that it was the third largest town in the Kingdom of Hungary, after Pozsony/Bratislava and Debrecen. Under Empress Maria Theresa, academies of mining and forestry were opened there. Today it has only a population of 10,000, but it is a significant tourist draw, having been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.

I visited in the spring of 1996 as part of a group of Soros Foundation English teachers gathering from various parts of the country we’d been assigned to. The “Love Bank” was created much later, and I must confess I’ve not been back to see it. Bucket list!

You can read more about the attraction in this BBC article. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43043291

In this post, I recall my visit to Auschwitz for the 50-th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

I arrived at Birkenau II on a bus from the nearby Oswiecim train station, free transportation provided for the fiftieth anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. This was the famous gate with the now unused rail line feeding into the brick “mouth” of the facility, which once had swallowed arrivals. I had travelled overnight from Central Slovakia, where I was living at the time, having to change trains three times, waiting at outdoor platforms in the bitter January cold. Many of the 70 thousand Jews deported from Slovakia had taken the same route – and had suffered far harsher conditions.

I trudged toward the monument where the ceremonies were to be held, taking in the endless rows of concrete posts, curved at the tips. They were strung with barbed wire like lines on sheet music, left there to play an eternal dirge.

The wind gusted, perpendicular to my path, as snow flurries swirled. The icy air stung my cheeks and made my eyes water, all of me that was exposed between my woolen toboggan and scarf wrapped twice around my neck. Hadn’t the prisoners run around in little more than pajamas? Wasn’t my London Fog overcoat the sort of thing the camp guards wore?

I mouthed the lines of a poem I’d learned in a German class two years before, the German-Romanian Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” or “Death Fugue.”

            Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinking sie abends
            wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
 
            Black milk of the early morning we drink it in the evening
            we drink it at noon and morning we drink it at night
 
The unpunctuated verses go on like the monotonous routine of work, minimal sleep, roll calls, and physical exams, with repeated images of guard dogs, whips, shovels, golden hair, and ashes.

Brick chimneys rose at the far side of the complex. The wooden barracks they had once been part of had been burned down by the Nazis as the Red Army approached, leaving only these bare esophagi that had once belched victims into the sky.

Between two of them stood a monument, built in 1967, of rough, chunky dark stones resembling a jumble of graves. This is where the main ceremonies were to take place.

Still a hundred yards from the structure, I passed through a checkpoint, since several heads of state were to be present. I opened my backpack and showed the contents: a change of underwear and socks, a quarter loaf of grainy bread, hard salami and a bottle of mineral water. Provisions for the overnight trips here and back, still luxurious by the standards of the transports.

On this morning there were tribunals, interpreters’ booth, and bleachers. Former prisoners, now mostly in their seventies, sat in wooden folding chairs near the monument, wearing scarves and armbands with blue and white stripes, like the prison uniforms. Most of the scarves had a red triangle with the letter “P,” the designation for Polish political prisoners.

A dozen teenage Polish scouts went around with pump thermoses, handing out Styrofoam cups of tea and coffee to the waiting crowd, one simple comfort.

The foreign dignitaries filed in to marshal music. After a moment of silence, a cantor chanted in Hebrew. Then a priest read scripture in Polish. Prisoner # 31, who’d survived the longest of any remaining inmates. Former prisoner and lifelong Nati-hunter Elie Wiesel soon followed with his message: “Close your eyes, open your heart… and listen.”

Another former prisoner, now a Knesset member, spoke, followed by a “Message to the Nations,” drafted several days before the event. Polish President Lech Walesa addressed the crowd last. Finally, representatives of thirty-eight countries lay wreaths at the monument.

From fifty yards I could spot Václav Havel, architect of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Hungarian President Árpád Göncz, and German Federal President Roman Herzog. How wonderful that this event was taking place after the fall of communism, when a reunited Europe could recall hardships overcome.

We spectators the trickled down from the stands into the monument area and began to mix, young and old, former prisoners and those who could only begin to imagine the horrors they had endured. One elderly man told a group of a half-dozen who’d gathered around him in an arc that he was there for the first time in fifty years. I wondered how many others there were like him – and how many survivors continued to stay away from the memories of that time.

“I lost my parents. And my fifteen-year-old sister,” said a woman of seventy. It couldn’t have been easy for her to come here.

Two elderly Polish women told their stories to a man in his twenties with dark, curly hair, laden with cameras, though he wore no press badge. A long-haired German man, a bit older, with anti-Nazi patches on his jacket listened in silence. By this time, groups like this had formed spontaneously throughout the camp.

“There was no warm water to bathe in,” said one of the ladies. “Sometimes we wanted to wash in the moats near the fences, dirty as that was. But if you approached them you were shot.”

Other survivors showed the barracks they had stayed in. “Up there, on the bunk,” said one man, pointing, “was where six of us slept.” The “bunk” was just boards wedged in between brick dividers. Each “shelf” was strewn with hay. Often they would sleep on their sides – for warmth, and just to fit a half-dozen people into the spaces.

Another line from Cezan’s poem speaks to this point: “wir shaufeln ein Grab in den Lueften da liegt man nicht eng“ – „We shovel a grave in the air one has more room for lying.” Death brought comfortable rest.

Survivors, on this day at least, showed no anger or sadness. They related their experiences in stoic-to-friendly fashion. We observers asked no questions or names.
While many survivors do tell their tales to other audiences, on that day, anonymity seemed to have been appropriate; these people spoke for all who had been there, for all the nameless, and for all whose names have been recorded.

Ten years later, I was contacted by a Columbus, Ohio synagogue to work on a project of compiling names of Holocaust victims from a Czech congregation. That community, destroyed, of course, was adopted by the American one, to keep the records of their members’ deportations and, where known, of their dates and places of deaths. Though neither Jewish nor East European, I felt a connection, however vague, to these people. Most had perished in Auschwitz, others had been sent to Dachau or Sachsenhausen or elsewhere. We found no indication that any had survived.

The other essential point of the project was to list their names, in flawless Czech orthography, to be engraved from a PDF onto a silver Torah breastplate.

The words at the top of the breastplate say it all: “MAY THEIR MEMORY BE FOR BLESSING.”

In the Russian tradition, following the Julian calendar, January 14 is the start of the new year, just like January 7 is Christmas. The calendar was changed for secular purposes after the Bolsheviks seized power - hence the event is referred to as October, even though it was in November by the modern or Gregorian calendar.

Of course, all this could be seen as an opportunity to celebrate things twice, and no doubt some people use it that way. 

I'll use the chance to get caught up on blogging and present you with a video, widely associated in Russia with a New Year's movie that original aired as a two-part series in the 1970s. Here's a brief clip from when I played at a Jewelry store back in December. 

I also played "Moon River," so appropriate for a jewelry store - think Breakfast at Tiffany's! - but unfortunately I have no video.

In my ongoing review of the events of 30 years ago in East-Central Europe, today is arguably the crowning anniversary: Vaclav Havel’s elections as president of Czechoslovakia. The Czech/British website Britské listy presents eye-opening commentary on how it happened (in Czech with English subtitles).
 
Recent weeks have marked various anniversary milestones in the reverse domino effect of 1989. I have posted on Polish elections, Hungary cutting the barbed-wire fence with Austria, and the exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia. I've also reflected on my own travels as related to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the beginning of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. As regards Czechoslovakia, while November 17 is the date typically cited, the revolution was an arduous process of negotiations with the old Communist cabinet, the party’s reluctant and partial concessions, followed by more demands, strikes, and demonstrations. And of course, Havel’s eventual election.
 
I heard a Deutsche Welle radio story about Romanians recalling the 30th anniversary of their revolution. It began in mid-December when an ethnic Hungarian pastor was holed up in his parsonage in Timisoara, after the government tried to have him removed from the provincial town to a country parish. He’d become “dangerous” after giving a TV interview in the summer in which he complained of Romania’s dismal human rights situation. Protests spread rapidly to Bucarest, where General Secretary Ceausescu gave a speech condemning the demonstrations on 21 December. The scene became a fiasco when, on live television, many members of a crowd of nearly 100,000 turned against the dictator, who then ducked back inside the building from the balcony. Violent repressions soon followed, but when the military and factory workers joined the resistance, the game was up.

I remember the day, 25 December (not Christmas in Orthodox Romania), when CNN announced that Ceausescu and his wife had been executed by firing squad following a speedy trial. I felt in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong – a show trial, even for a brutal tyrant, didn’t bode well for democratic development. (This intuition proved largely right when, a year later, the new regime bussed in workers from the countryside to bully students calling for real reform.)

So, as I suggested at the beginning, it is good to remember Havel’s election as the crowning achievement of 1989.

​Ironically, as all these breathtaking developments were happening in East-Central Europe, the Russian/Soviet human rights activist Andrei Sakharov died. 14 December was the 30th anniversary of his passing. This face came to attention when I received a request to translate a passage of a tribute to him. I was honored to contribute to the memory of this Russian Havel. You can read it here.

​

As Prague is celebrating the 30 years since the protests, led by students, artists and intellectuals, that led to the resignation of Czechoslovakia's Communist government in 1989, I bring to you my impressions of the 1st anniversary, when I was living in Slovakia teaching English with Education for Democracy. A fellow teacher, Rachel - like me a recent university grad - got me a seat on the bus with her colleagues from a different school. This was a month after my arrival in the country - I'd already lucked into seeing Havel at a much smaller commemorative event in the town of Martin two and a half weeks before. I include a video with some of George H. W. Bush's speech at the end. Also, here's a link to coverage by radio.cz.


C​hom-chom-chom-chom, whirred a black helicopter overhead as sharpshooters in black patrolled the roofs of the four- and five-story buildings overlooking Wenceslas Square. Several stern-faced Czech police officers swung open a ten-foot section of waist-high steel barricades, whose steel looked so new and shiny it must have been ordered for just this occasion. Rachel and I shuffled ahead, jostled from every direction and swept along with the crowd, through the gap in the make-shift railing. A few people were pulled aside for random searches of their bags.

“My God,” said a Czech lady, recovering her balance as the surge subsided, “there was nowhere near this much security when Gorbachev was here in eighty-seven!”

Now, even with some aggressive pressing forward, we had to settle for a spot half-way up the square. Some young people opted to swing from trees and lampposts for a better view.

The late-afternoon sun lit the face of the National Museum. At the foot of the Wenceslas monument stood a new white structure with blue and red trim, much like a booth at a Fourth-of-July fair, but surrounded by blue-tinted glass, presumably bullet-proof. Czechoslovak and American flags hung from buildings all around.
​
Suddenly, a group began shoving its way up the square, chanting angrily, carrying a fifteen-foot-long banner stretched between two thin poles: “Velvet Revolution = Puppit Show.”