Installment #3, 1/10/06:  Czech Lessons (Part Two)

  Installment #4, 03/06/06: Czech Lessons (Part Three)

10/14/05:

Prague Autumn

   Barb and I were married in August 1980. We've traveled together a lot in the years since then, but our trips have seldom been just for the two of us. There's almost always been some sort of business or family obligation involved.

   Now, for our twenty-fifth anniversary, we've decided to go somewhere just because we want to go there. And since we both have Bohemian ancestors, where we want to go is the Czech Republic. So for this year only, we've bumped our anniversary celebration to the fall in order to avoid the crowds that supposedly infest Prague throughout the summer.

   Some of Barb's Bohemian ancestors came from Plzen, so we're thinking of making that side trip . . . although we're not sure just what to investigate there beyond the Pilsner Urquell brewery. And we're pretty sure we'll hop a train to Kutna Hora at some point, because we both want to see the church in Sedlec (a mile from Kutna Hora) that's decorated with human bones from the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

   But we'll be spending six or seven days just in Prague, staying in an apartment in a 400-year-old building (one of the newer structures in the area) just down the hill from the Castle. We'll walk the same streets that Kafka and Capek walked.

   Which were also the streets that my great-great grandfather Frank Koci, Sr. walked. He was born in Prague in 1832 and spent the first thirty-three years of his life there. He was a tailor, and the story is that he had his own shop in Prague. But in 1865, he packed up and moved his entire family -- lock, stock, and tailoring iron -- to America.

   Life under the rule of the aristocratic German Catholic Hapsburgs must have been pretty tough on non-aristocratic Protestant Czechs to make an America just emerging from its Civil War seem like the Promised Land. My theory is that at age 16, Great-Great Grandpa Koci had witnessed the bloodshed of the Prague Upheavals of 1848, in which proponents of full civil rights for Czechs had been crushed by the Hapsburg military -- and that he had decided at that moment to save his money for as long as it took until he could get the hell out.

   So I may have the iron fist of the Hapsburgs to thank for my existence . . . because if the Czechs hadn't been second-class citizens in their own country, many of those Czechs who wound up emigrating would have stayed in Bohemia and Moravia instead. Great-Great Grandpa Koci, as a tradesman with hopes of getting ahead, might have been one of them.

   In this reality, though, he came to the United States along with his wife Josephine and their four children -- two boys and two girls. (There had been seven children altogether. Two died in Bohemia, and one died on the passage across the Atlantic. That child was buried at sea.) The family settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where Frank Sr. established his own tailoring shop again.

   But things must not have been ideal for the Kocis in Cleveland, either, because they moved to rural Shawnee County, Kansas, in 1878. Frank Sr. opened yet another tailoring business in Topeka while his teenage sons, Joseph and Frank Jr., farmed the new family homestead.

   Frank Koci, Jr. was my mother's grandfather. He was born in Prague in 1862, so he was only three years old when the family came to America. But he still may have thought of himself as both American and Czech -- because when he married (in 1888), his bride, Elizabeth Stach, was also a child of Bohemian immigrants. So their ten children -- including my maternal grandfather, Edward M. Koci (1895-1956) -- were all full-blood Czechs.

   Ed Koci married Nellie Ginter, who was half German and half Welsh. So their children (including my mother, Virginia) were half Czech, and I and my brothers and cousins are one-quarter Czech.

   I mention all of this to point out that I'm not Czech; rather, I'm your basic mongrel American. Only twenty-five percent of my heritage is Czech, and there's no question that when I'm walking the cobblestones of Prague in a few weeks, everyone who's a real Czech will look at me and instantly recognize a foreigner in their midst.

   Yet I'm far more excited to be going to Prague and to the Czech Republic than I would be if I were going to any other city or nation for the first time. That's because the Slavic inhabitants of Bohemia and Moravia, although they've lived there for centuries, are only now free to be what they've always wanted to be. It's only now that they're free to be Czech.

   The Hapsburgs ruled for 400 years, sometimes asserting their power by cutting off the heads of Bohemian patriots and hanging them from the towers of the Charles Bridge. This may be why present-day Czechs have largely rejected Catholicism -- and Christianity in general. It's difficult to believe in a loving God when His most powerful representatives in your region spent 400 years suppressing your rights and hanging your countrymen's heads from the central bridge. Even four decades of grim, atheistic Communism couldn't inspire a religious backlash in Czechoslovakia the way they did in Poland. (In fact, a 2005 poll indicates that only 19% of Czechs currently hold any religious beliefs at all.)

   The Czechs and Slovaks were briefly free after the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved at the end of World War I. But Czechoslovakia enjoyed only a twenty-one-year taste of liberty before the Nazis invaded in 1939. And the Nazis made the Hapsburgs look like mollycoddlers. When Czech commandos assassinated SS honcho Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, Hitler wiped out the entire village of Lidice in retaliation.

   The end of the brutal Nazi occupation should have resulted in another shot at Czechoslovakian self-rule. Unfortunately, the "liberating" troops that rolled into Prague in 1945 belonged to the Red Army, and the next forty years belonged to the Communist secret police. And when, in the "Prague Spring" of 1968, Czechs demonstrated for a little more fairness and freedom (just as they had in 1848), the Soviets crushed them much as the Hapsburgs had. Except that the Soviets had tanks.

   Then, in November 1989, Czechs by the tens of thousands filled Wenceslas Square, demanding the resignation of the Communist government. And lo and behold, it turned out that the Communists had become almost as sick of their own regime as everyone else was. So without a shot being fired or a drop of blood being spilled -- an utterly unique moment in Czech (or human) history -- a lousy, unpopular government simply gave up and quit. Playwright and former political prisoner Vaclav Havel addressed the throng in the Square and told them that their Velvet Revolution was a success. They had won. Czechoslovakia was free again.

   But freedom doesn't grow without growing pains. We've been working on the whole liberty-and-justice-for-all thing here in the U.S. for almost two hundred and thirty years now, and we've had some pretty serious growing pains ourselves: the genocide of indigenous peoples; the slavery of African-Americans; the lynchings of freed African-Americans; the denial of women's right to vote (or to do much of anything else); Japanese-American internment camps; the beatings and shootings of citizens who have peaceably assembled; chronic poverty; persistent racism . . .  The list goes on and on.

   And yet. Some things on the list are getting better. A few others are almost gone. But we seem to have backslid on a few as well.

   So, given what I know about the long-term difficulties inherent in securing unalienable rights, I'm not expecting to find a perfect Utopia of Liberty when I visit the Czech Republic. Not just yet, anyway.

   For one thing, I've been reading news from the Czech Republic for months now -- so I know that on July 30, 2005, "Czechtek," a legal music festival held in a field in western Bohemia, was broken up by 850 riot police swinging billy clubs and firing tear gas into a crowd of 3,000 or more. The police say they were protecting nearby private property that the techno fans were damaging; the techno fans say the police attacked them indiscriminately for no good reason. One festival-goer was reportedly killed, struck by a police van -- although reports vary as to whether he was drunk and stumbled in front of it, or whether he was run down on purpose.

   Dozens of Czechtek attendees were injured, and so were a number of police officers. In fact, authorities have announced that more officers than festival-goers were hurt -- which, if true, seems to indicate that more music fans beat up riot-gear-clad officers than vice versa.

   The facts of what really happened on July 30, and the truth about who was to blame, may be impossible to sort out. The Czech Prime Minister has insisted that the police were justified in their actions, while the Czech President has said that what they did is "hard to excuse." Czech public opinion seems to be split along similar lines.

   And yet. The day after the debacle, hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Interior Ministry and were joined by former President Havel. They presented their grievance about what happened at Czechtek, and they were able to do so without being met by guns or tanks. That's something. Given what happened in 1848 and 1968 (and many other times as well), that's a lot.

   Of course, there's always more to do. For example: Even the Czech Republic has ethnic and racial difficulties. Slovakia didn't split off on a whim (although the split was peaceful), and the Romany people are still discriminated against in many quarters. But from all reports, the Czechs are addressing their nation's problems with remarkable speed . . . especially considering that they've had only sixteen years of freedom to work with.

   I think they're working fast in order to make up for lost time. After the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, and the Communists, the Czechs don't want to waste a single minute of what they've waited so long to possess. That's why the huge crowd protesting the Czechtek incident showed up at the Interior Ministry the very next day.

   Like all people, Czechs may disagree on the mechanics of freedom (and on how their new membership in the European Union may affect it). But they know they want and deserve their liberty -- and at last, after centuries of foreign oligarchies and dictators, they have it.

   That's why I'm so excited to be going there. Sure, Barb and I will have a lot of fun, and we'll be able to enjoy some just-the-two-of-us time that we've been needing for quite a while . . . but we'll also be able to experience something that I imagine my Great-Great Grandpa Koci would have loved to experience himself:

   Prague as the capital of a free Czech Republic.

   Pivo, prosim. So I can drink a toast to my Bohemian ancestors and to the achievements of the Czechs who now walk where they once walked.

   Na zdravi!

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