"Behind the Iron Curtain II"

The next stop on our itinerary was Prague, Czechoslovakia or, more correctly, 'Praha'. I was sad to leave Hungary, especially after we'd been warned that the Czechs were not likely to be as friendly toward us as the Hungarians. Where the people in Budapest had been warm and generous in spite of their hardships, we were told we might find the people in Prague at best stiff and formal. One of the reasons was a lingering resentment from World War II. It was also said that the Czechs were more prosperous but completely under the thumb of the Soviet Communists. (But as I've said, five years later that would have changed enormously.)

I don't remember which members of our party traveled by air and which by auto. Almost certainly Gil Cates, Don Ameche and his wife Honey flew in, but I rode cross-country with our advance man, Axel Glasner, in his Mercedes. I was always impressed with Axel's knowledge of language and custom wherever we went in Europe. I suppose he was well into his fifties then, but he had a youthful attitude and a mischievous twinkle in his eye most of the time. I remember him laughing so hard we almost ran off the road when I told him the penicillin story.

The border crossing was a bit tense. The Czech border guards, who resembled the dreaded East German VoPo's, carefully examined our visas and passports and thoroughly searched the car and our luggage before allowing us to proceed. As had been the case entering Hungary, our arrival had not been communicated and the guards knew better than to make a mistake. But as with everything he did, Axel carried it off with great panache. It was only later that I learned that the drivers of our camera and videotape trucks had far more harrowing border crossings than ours.

For the life of me, I cannot remember the name of the hotel where we stayed in Prague. My memory is that it was on a side street just off Wenceslas Square, but looking at contemporary maps and visitor's guides I can't find a hotel that matches my memory of it. The problem is further compounded by many of the hotels having been re-named after the founding of the Czech Republic, the traditional eastern bloc 'Grand Hotel Potemkin' sort of names largely discarded. Unlike other nearby hotels, there was nothing especially memorable about our hotel except for the dark storefront directly across the street, from which men in hats and long overcoats would emerge and follow us any time we left.

Architecturally, Prague was an old and beautiful city, far more bright and colorful than Budapest had been. It had suffered significant (and unnecessary) damage from bombing raids in the last days of World War II, possibly having been mistaken in bad weather by Allied pilots for Dresden, Germany 100 km to the north. Although occupied by the Nazis, Prague had never been bombed before February 14, 1945. All the casualties had been civilian, hundreds of homes and several historical landmarks destroyed and not a single factory damaged. The Americans had apologized many times and helped pay for reconstruction, but nearly twenty years later there was still great bitterness about it.

But by 1964, the 'golden city' had been rebuilt into what some described as a sprawling "fairytale village", the most beautiful time in the city's thousand-year history. Saint Vitas' Cathedral is considered one of the most breathtaking in the world. Wenceslas Square in the city center is anchored on the southeast by the imposing neoclassical Czech National Museum and the sculptural centerpiece of the boulevard (it isn't really a 'square' at all) is the statue of Saint Wencenslas astride a horse. The boulevard was lined with picturesque hotels, office building and sometimes visually incongruous department stores. Wencenslas Square had been the traditional scene of demonstrations, celebrations and other public gatherings. But in 1964, protests seemed the farthest thing from anyone's mind.

But for all the city's beauty, none of our party seemed very happy in Prague. As predicted, many of the people we encountered, especially in the hotel, were very correct and more than a little wary of us. A few were downright hostile. Even Don and Honey Ameche, who usually had a good time wherever they went, seemed put off by their attitude. After the faded grandeur of the Hotel Gellert, where Don and Honey could drink champagne in the dining room as the throbbing violins played well into the night, this hotel felt like a well-appointed maximum security prison.

The Czech circus was organized differently than we'd seen elsewhere and it was a shock to the system after the permanent buildings we'd found in Munich and Budapest. Instead, the Kouzelny Cirkus and 'Letni Letna' had formed an amalgamation of circus troupes from all over Bohemia. They erected a tent village on a broad field outside the city center. It was a virtual city unto itself, a hodgepodge of food tents, and beer tents, and makeup and costume tents, and animal cages, and caravans and, of course, the enormous performance tent that could accommodate nearly 1,000 people.

It was still very cold in March, normally too early in the year for tent shows and it appeared this was being done mostly for our benefit. The performers were generally first-rate but, as we'd seen in Budapest, the production values were limited by lack of funds and resources. But what the circus lacked in flash and glitter it made up for with showmanship, imagination and theatrical flair. We learned this was an attempt to restore the luster to traditional circus that had suffered a decline with the advent of a home-grown Czech art form called 'Laterna Majika', a clever, innovative theatrical combination of film and live performance.

While in Prague, I struck up a friendship with a handsome young Czech student whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (or blocked). He was studying economics at Charles University in Prague, spoke nearly perfect English and seemed interested in me and in all things American. (It only occurred to me later that he might have been assigned to keep an eye on me.) I thought that we were bridging the cultural and political Cold War divide, 'hands across the sea'. That is, until he said he wanted to have sex with me. I was suitably outraged and he seemed mystified by my attitude. He said he and his friends did it all the time, that it didn't make you homosexual. I insisted that Americans didn't do things like that. He said it was proof of what a provincial and puritanical society we were. I felt hurt, betrayed and never spoke to him again. But I'll confess that I've wondered ever since what that 'adventure' might have been like.

We managed to get only two one-hour programs and a few 'banked' acts from the Czech circus. There were some technical problems but the greater limitation was coming from the NBC censors back in New York. After reviewing shows we'd completed and delivered, the Standards & Practices Department was expressing serious concern over content. They felt some of the humor of the European clowns was too bawdy, that some of the acrobats' performances were too overtly sexual, that there was just too much skin showing in general. At one point, they wanted one performer's act cut because the man's nipples were too dark. It sounds ridiculous, but they had the 'please delete' power and could not be ignored.

Before we left Prague, as a kind of follow-up to my visit to Dachau, I visited the Old Jewish Cemetery, Pinkas Synagogue and Holocaust Museum. As I said earlier, not being Jewish I cannot account for my need to see these places, just that I did. I learned that before the Holocaust, Prague had been one of the largest and most important Jewish enclaves in Europe and had been for centuries. At the outbreak of World War II over 92,000 Jews lived in Prague, roughly twenty percent of the city's population. By the end of the war, an estimated 80,000 of them had been rounded up and murdered. Throughout the country as many as 250,000 Czech Jews had been exterminated and over 60 synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.

The Old Jewish Cemetery is the oldest in Europe, dating from the 15th Century into the late 18th Century. For 400 years, roughly 200,000 Jews from the Prague ghetto were buried there, far beyond the cemetery's capacity. As a result, the tombstones were packed tightly together and stacked in layers, in one section as many as twelve-deep. It was customary for visitors to place a small stone on the top of the tombstones, not always an easy task since over time and frequent flooding they had become tilted at odd angles.

The Renaissance-style Pinkas Synagogue dates back to the 1490's and has also required regular repairs and renovations due to flooding. Likewise, its Holocaust Museum, although built only fifteen years before my visit, had suffered similar damage. But I was confused when I entered the museum, thinking perhaps I was in the wrong place. The 'nave' was composed of five or six rooms, end-on-end like a railroad flat. The rooms were completely empty. The walls and ceilings appeared to be painted a dull gray - until you got closer and realized that the walls and ceilings were white but covered with names, each one no more than three inches long. It's only when you can touch one name and think about the life it represents that you can then step back and feel the full weight of it. Over 77,000 names, from Prague alone.


NEXT: "Back to the West"