Headed for Bohemia...

I was going to send out a mass email to friends and family describing the last several weeks, but seeing as we’re in the CyberAge I decided to discover the world of blogging. I’m staying with my friend David now and his family in a small Czech town south of Prague. We met trekking the Langtang section of the Himalayas in Nepal several years back. He was just called away on business for the day, so I decided to jot a few of my thoughts down until I eat lunch— some traditional Czech sweets served by his grandmother. :)

Why did I end up in the Czech Republic for two weeks plus? Here is an email my mom wrote several months back:

My husband Don's father was a bomber pilot in World War II and killed in action a few months before Don's younger brother was born, and only two months before the war ended in Europe. Don was himself only a toddler at the time. He and his brother discovered last month, just after their mother's death, that there is a memorial to their father, who was the pilot, and to their father's plane, in a small town (named Slany) outside of Prague in the Czech Republic at the site of the plane crash in which only one man of the entire crew survived.

As soon as we got home from the funeral in Utah, with the information Don had acquired, he telephoned three WWII vets, one in Seattle, one in Dallas, and the lone survivor of the crash of his father's plane who now lives in Sacramento...vets who are still alive and who served in the same unit as his father. The lone survivor was the tail gunner who was able to parachute out as the tail separated from the rest of the plane; he was picked up by the Germans and was a POW until the war ended.

This information has us spinning, as one can well imagine. Via the internet, on a Czech site, we could view a photo of the crash (which occurred in March of 1945) and read the witness accounts that were in English. We are trying to get the remainder of the information translated from Czech into English. We are stunned. Don has been searching for years for information and now he has more than he can comprehend. To see his father's name engraved in stone on a memorial is riveting. (A photo of the memorial in the Czech Republic is on the website and we now have received photos of the ceremony at the memorial in the year 2000.) Czechoslovakia apparently could not honor Americans while under communist control. This memorial was initiated in 1996.

In May of this year there are many observances for the 60th anniversary of VE day, and the airfield at the small town of Slany, where the "Christensen Memorial" is located (Don's last name is Christensen) is holding its own celebration in June. Don was told that if he as the son of the pilot were to attend, he would be met at the airport and escorted. So...we are planning to travel to Prague and I want to add train travel to Auschwitz, which will be a most sobering tour. And our sons Jeff and Joah are also trying to make flight arrangements to join us at the memorial celebration.

Time will tell how this all sorts out...

As time sorted it all out, Don, Jeff, my mom, and another family member, Don’s grandson Jake, were to complete the fellowship. For me it has been one wild ride. I finished my studies at the School for International Training in Vermont in May and spent the first two weeks of June at the Vipassana meditation center in Massachusetts. From there I immediately flew to Prague to meet my family, who started their trips in Colorado and California.

Thanks to my Czech friend Michaela (Misha for short) who I met in Mexico, we secured very affordable accommodations in the Zizkov district of the city, on the fourth floor of the dormitory for the University of Economics. It was far from what has become an incredibly touristy and commercial (not to mention expensive) downtown, but accessible by a pleasant 20 minute tram ride. My impression of Prague in June 2005 seemed as the French say tout-a-fait different from my memories of December 1997. I wondered if this could be because the city now had twice as much time to work within a capitalist model, because the season was different, or if I saw things differently due to how I had changed internally. Maybe a combination of the three, but I think the first is quite important. I have distinct memories of restaurants and streets from my earlier visit that I not only never saw this time around, but couldn’t even imagine existing in the city I did experience. Even the places I did revisit, such as the castle, Charles Bridge, and the Astronomical Clock seemed quite different.