When I sit down to write a piece for “The Blues News”, I have every intention to analyze current events, muse about our struggle to regain liberty from medical fascism, or, as the title of my little corner of Substack suggests, reminisce about my life in music. Yet, almost every time, my mind is drawn to the seminal event of my life, the night of August 20 - August 21, 1968, the end of my life in Czechoslovakia and the genesis of my incurable rootlessness. I don’t always give in to the temptation and write about those events but this time I did. I was a kid of 15 but with a fairly well-constructed life plan which included playing music professionally and becoming a doctor. One of these two goals did materialize, albeit many years later and thousands of miles away from my birthplace.
I hope you will indulge me yet again as I write about the oft-humiliated city of my birth and about my own pain, whose roots I understand but for which no treatment has worked thus far. It’s a short story about the events of that fateful night
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Every night, as I stretched on my big comfortable bed, drifting off to sleep, I listened to the sounds around me slowly fading: the trolleys outside the window, sparks arcing on the overhead wires. The odd truck rumbling down the street, the occasional drunk whistling as he staggered home from the tavern. Blue shadows slid on the wall and a lone streetlight cast a pale-yellow beam into my window. As I fell asleep, I often imagined myself on a stage, fronting my band, performing in one of Prague’s music clubs, which had been flourishing recently with a fresh crop of great bands. Like everything else in the city in mid-1968, the arts bloomed. The giddy atmosphere of the “Prague Spring”, as our period of liberation was known, infected everyone. There was hope and joy and good will that had sprung among the people after 20 years of oppressive Communist ennui. No one had dared believe freedom was possible and when it suddenly burst into the open, everyone became drunk with it. Drunk and oblivious to the dangers that freedom faces everywhere – but much more so in the middle of an implacable Soviet empire.
When I went to sleep on the night of August 20th, nothing seemed remiss. It was a quiet, late summer night. The air was mild, but the mugginess of high summer was gone. I had plans to meet with my band the next day for a rehearsal. But that night, I soon learned, was anything but ordinary. As I was falling asleep, Soviet planes were landing at Prague’s Ruzyne airport and top party and government officials were being dragged out of their offices by KGB agents.
It must have been around 3 in the morning when I opened my eyes. Blue shadows danced on the wall across from my bed. The streetlight outside my window aimed its weak yellow streak through the lacey curtain. The street was silent.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I shuffled quietly as I walked through my parents’ bedroom. I expected to hear snores but instead saw my parents sitting up, huddled together, ears pressed to a transistor radio. Half asleep, I tiptoed through the room and into the hallway. Every Prague apartment had its obligatory hallway, a mudroom where you’d hang your overcoat, your scarf and hat, where you took off your street shoes and put on your guest slippers. Prague winters are wet and windy. Dirty snow sticks to shoes and no hausfrau would permit dirty street shoes on her floors. A small rack with guest slippers sat by the entrance.
In almost all apartment buildings, toilets and bathrooms were two separate rooms. In our apartment, the toilet – a tiny claustrophobic cubicle– was at the far-right end of the mudroom. It always smelled foul, no matter how much effort my mother put into cleaning it. The smell came mainly from the ancient, inefficient plumbing, but also from the fetid air wafting through the hatch on the back wall which opened to a dark, malodorous shaft running the height of the building.
There was a little table by the toilet door, upon which rested our heavy, black, rotary phone and an ashtray. My mother would not go to bed with a single cigarette butt left in an ashtray or with a single dish in the sink. It was therefore peculiar that not only was there a cigarette butt in the ashtray, but it was still smoldering. The phone must have rung just a few minutes before. As was his custom, father would have automatically lit one of his Lipa cigarettes as soon as he picked up the receiver: my father lit a cigarette when he talked on the phone, or when he took a sip of coffee. He lit a cigarette when he hung up the phone. He lit a cigarette when he finished his coffee. Each and every situation was an excuse to light up. And there it was: a half-stubbed out butt in an otherwise spotless ashtray. A phone call in the middle of the night. Could not have been anything good.
I finished my business and went back to bed. My parents’ ears were still stuck to the tiny radio.
“What’s going on? Did someone call? A cigarette butt is still half-lit in the hallway ashtray”
I waited. They were listening intently. Finally dad looked up: “We’re being occupied by the Russians”
“Pfft. Yeah, right”
I didn’t believe it despite the evidence - the phone call, the cigarette, the radio. I crawled back into bed. Looking back, I don’t understand why I wasn’t alarmed or panicked despite the obvious signs of something momentous going on. Maybe I was just too sleepy. Or maybe I could not admit such a horrible truth to myself. “Occupied by the Russians”? No way! I was going to wake up the next day, put on my white Lee jeans and a blue, red, and yellow hippie shirt sewn by my friend Zora - so loud you could see it all the way to San Francisco. I would grab a quick breakfast, get on a bus, and meet up with my band for a rehearsal, as planned. Summer was coming to an end but our beautiful town, our Prague, a dusty Communist backwater just a few months before, was still alive with excitement. None of us believed the Prague Spring, that period of freedom and possibility, would ever end.
I closed my eyes and shut out the blue shadows and the yellow streak of light. There were no trolleys at this hour. It was three o’clock in the morning and all was quiet.
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I awoke a few hours later. Dawn had broken. The shadows were gone. A terrific thunder was shaking the house. Jets screamed overhead. Columns of tanks were advancing down the street, where the overhead trolley wires had sparked just a few hours before. There would be no rehearsal. In fact, I never saw anyone from my band again until 34 years later. I never performed in a Prague music club. I would never get to see most of my friends again. I would not attend my new high school - something I had been looking forward to all summer. I would not attend medical school at Charles University as had been the plan since my childhood. My father’s career as a successful screenplay writer was over. None of us had any idea what the future held. But we did know this: ten armored divisions and the combined air-forces of Warsaw Pact armies were making sure that our experiment in freedom, our time of hope and joy and liberation known throughout the world as the Prague Spring, was now definitely over.
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(pictured is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek with Soviet strongman, comrade Leonid Brezhnev, the man who killed my dreams)
For a moment and first thing this morning reading your header, I fretfully assumed that Youngkin had lost the Virginia Gubernatorial! Very poignant piece, George. That's a cross to bear that few of us could reconcile, and its no small wonder that the August morning you recall with such dreaded detail will relentlessly haunt you for decades. That said, your description of a 15 yr old George G. in white Levis and some boho garish shirt on his way to a rehearsal may yet haunt me for years to come!