The Velvet Revolution of 1989 was undoubtedly a turning point for Czechoslovakia. After more than four decades the Communist regime finally fell, without any bloodshed or violence. Grand. But what did I know. I was a decade and three years old and if you ask me, the Revolution was the greatest injustice perpetrated on my young life.
I was a sheltered child. My parents had all the time in the world for me and my sister. I never wondered why, that's just how things were. Every day we spent hours in the garden that my parents built on a former dumping site. Every weekend we went on a trip, hike, or a mushroom hunt to the nearby Carpathian range forests. I knew that my parents don't work in what they studied for. I knew my dad was a 'political writer', a 'dissident' - words that I was forbidden to utter at school. I only told my favorite teacher, Mrs. Tomíková, because I saw her in the church around the corner from my house. Teachers were not allowed to go to church. Thus we had a shared secret. It had a taste of adventure to me, for that is all I knew.
My mother went out of her way to make things easy and exciting for us. When the police would stop us on the road while we were trying to go see their underground friends in Prague or Brno, she often had to spend hours with us in front of a police station in the middle of nowhere. While my dad would be interrogated, we sang songs and recited poems under the policemen's windows, so that they let dad go already. Same we did at home once we discovered bugs in the wall and telephone. I would bring a friend over, and we'd stand on the washing machine, singing school songs for the green men on the other end. It was fun. House checks were just pure excitement. Police would come at the break of dawn or earlier, and start searching every inch of floors, walls, furniture for manuscripts. By the time I was ten or so, I knew what to hide. I would run around with a laundry basket smuggling videotapes from London to the areas they already searched. They found one, but I saved the others. What adventure! I also asked the policeman to confiscate my math and physics textbook as I didn't like them one bit. He didn't find it funny at all, but I sure had a blast.
At the same time I was trying to be the best Pioneer of the school. For some reason it did not seem to be at odds with my family's life at all. I was the only fool to voluntarily recite in the Room of Revolutionary Traditions (all the other students were there for punishment), I was in every last silly school activity (collecting old paper from people's houses and recycling it, helping to clean up parks, singing in choirs at the Communist Party meetings, standing in uniform during apparatchik functions...you name it, I was there)... I was dying to go to Artek - an international Pioneer summer camp in the Soviet Union. For the best of the best. I could however not go. My parents didn't have the right 'cadre profile'. They were sacked from the Party and I was doomed.
In 1981 my father's best friend, Milan Šimečka, was taken to Ruzyň prison. He and others were busted for smuggling samizdats out of the country and forbidden books in. He was in prison for some 15 months, without even a trial. My father, in order to preserve some sanity, started digging a hole in the backyard. We didn't know what it will be and I thought it was all hillarious. It took him almost the whole 15 months, as it grew and grew... it was to become a swimming pool, but eventually turned into a wine cellar. When uncle Milan was released, we spent every fall in the Vineyards picking grape, pressing, making wine. Nothing but good times in my memory.
I was not blind forever. When I was about twelve, I joined my father at a two week gathering on a horse farm near Prague. They filmed a movie about revolutionary France, with a parallel story from their lives. Vaclav Havel played some famous revolutionary who fought against Cardinal Mazarin (played by Milan Simečka), Karel Pecka got executed by Zdeněk Urbánek. Or was that Petr Pithart? I played what I was - a clueless child. My role was to observe the execution with fascination and hold the chopped off head, asking what it was, and also to accompany the postman played by Ludvík Vaculík. When we weren't filming, my role included feeding horses and cutting grass at 5am, pulling drunk and singing Václav Havel out of thorn bushes at about the same time, and then some riding, cleaning, and such. Who'd imagine all these people would be Presidents, Prime Ministers, University Presidents and such less than a year from then.
Shortly afterwards we had the last house check. It was on the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, thus to be expected. But from the looks on my father's face I knew that this is not fun anymore. When they were taking him, it was one of the only two times in my entire life that I saw tears in his eyes. The other time was his best friend's funeral one year later. He said :"I love you, take good care of yourself," which frightened me to death. He doesn't say those things. Later I learned (mom concluded I'm old enough to be in the picture) that the trial they are preparing for him was seeking to sentence him to ten years or more in prison, for 'subversion of the Republic', libel and whatnot. Now I knew that house checks, and police stations were terrifying. I got quite familiar with the Primatial Palace in the back of which the detention cells were. We were allowed to visit him once a month. He's lost a lot of weight, but still tried to convince us that he's generally happy. Has time to exercise, read, write... what more could one wish for. Somehow that wasn't all that convincing any more. I looked up to his friends with much greater awe, trying to understand their murky philosophical talk.
That's when things started moving. Poland and Hungary already denounced the monopoly of the Communist Party. Polish representatives of Solidarnosc, former dissidents, visited us while father was still in prison. It pissed off the state security, parked in three or four cars in front of our house, to no end. And brought tremendous joy to Adam Michnik and others. Alexander Dubček brought roses for my mother. I finally knew who is who, even if just barely so. Amnesty International from Vienna, led by Duke Schwarzenberg and International Helsinki Federation, organized protests in front of the Primatial Palace when the trial was about to start. It didn't. They released my father just two weeks before the Revolution, as the case would not stand even in front of the Communist court at that point in time. Now that was bloody exciting. I realized how lucky I was to be surrounded by all those people this entire time. There they were, under my nose, and all I knew was that these funny uncles who talk all the time and get drunk quite a bit.
The Revolution whisked all of them, along with my father, away. They were on the public squares, holding roundtable talks with the Communist Party government about the handover of the power. Havel became the President. My father the federal minister of information. I knew this was the end of that era. An era that I just got a sniff off. I knew they will be so busy that even if they do manage to meet in one spot ever again, it will all be state talk, and money issues, and all the charm will just be gone. Sure it was. And it was for the best for everybody, of course, except for me. (And the apparatchiks, I suppose). I felt it could have easily waited some five years, while I get just a wee bit older and am able to actually take part in some of that action. Or understand a little more. What would that be in the grand scheme of things? Forty or forty five years, what is the big difference? I could have been one of those young rebels, just like Placák who led the environmental platform flooded by teenagers. I was robbed. As my father was busting his back in the high politics in Prague, I vowed to never be interested in politics. I was bitter and angry about my fate. Then I got a masters in political science... but that of course, is quite another story. The Revolution robbed me, and robbed me good.
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