March 29, 2024
My Dear Travelers <3,
I write you today with an installment from the Journey to 197, a place I wanted to visit for years before I heard of traveling to every country in the world. The One That Got Away.
She is Prague.
In her mornings, I glowed with the brilliant rays of the sun. I woke energized, springs under my feet even though, if given the choice, I’d sleep like the dead until 10. My muse is a night owl—her wings flutter when the world has gone still and the blanket of stars is over my head.1 I wake with the moon. But in Prague, I was both a morning and a night person. Before the city was ready for the day, I was ready for it.
Our last afternoon in Prague was a grey-tinged sky of drizzly mist. I can’t say I blame her—I, too, was feeling the melancholy. However, just as I like it, I felt at peace with never returning. On a journey as vast as this one, with money and time in ever-so-limited supply, this is the feeling you want to have as your back turns to a place, gaze forward on the new.
A proper farewell, we saved the best for last—a tour of New Town. Everyone goes on Old Town tours, where thousand-year-old architecture and 10-euro Pilseners live side by side. But New Town was another experience altogether, a small group seeing tidbits of history hiding amongst regular buildings. Without our guide, I could have walked past every single one of them none the wiser.
They came in the dead of night. Parachuted down from planes, like madmen. If they truly were mad, none can judge—for years, they lived under the perfectly shined boot of the SS, ever since Czechoslovakia was invaded and practically handed to the Germans by other countries, without any of their own government officials present.2
During World War II, occupied countries had some form of Resistance network.3 The most well-known network to this day is the French Resistance, but many others were also incredibly brave—the Danes, the Dutch, the Poles, the Belgians. And, our subject today: the Czechs. It was common for these guerrilla fighters4 to receive training in England by the SOE, an intelligence agency created to fight the Axis powers.5
After a short time in the U.K., Czech fighters went back behind enemy lines, back to their homes, fire in their eyes for freedom. These people were often ill-equipped, lacked enough weapons, had little training. Their time with the SOE was far too short to keep them safe. But what is safety when you live in a surveillance state? What is flourishing when no one can get food? When human beings are shipped away to “work” and whispers of the rumor mill allude to things unbelievable?
Operation Anthropoid was a suicide mission. The SOE knew it and so did the Czech Resistance. None knew it better than Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. But they still climbed on a plane idling on a rural English runway. In the dead of night somewhere over Czechoslovakia, they still jumped out. When one of them was injured, they still pushed on towards Prague. After months of laying low and blending into quotidian life, they still walked out into broad daylight, armed and ready, and put The Butcher of Prague6 in the hospital. They are two of many that were willing to give everything so that occupation would one day end.
During our New Town tour, we walked the streets they walked, past the literal spots they died. All over this area of Prague, there are memorials with a hand sculpted in the symbol of the Resistance. The three fingers raised in salute represent all three Czech political parties of the time coming together against the Nazis. The words on each placard have the name of the person, and their date of death. Each one is placed where that person’s body was found, most of them during the days that the Czechs fought the Nazis on their own as the Soviet tanks were about 2 hours east in Pilsen, bound for Prague.
After passing a few of these, we made our way to the apex of the tour: Saint Cyril’s and Methodius. After completing their mission, the six Resistance fighters who carried out Anthropoid were hidden in this church. Once they were finally found, Nazis stole fire trucks to blast water into the basement crypt, attempting to drown them. They shot God knows how many holes into the building, trying to assassinate their targets. Eighty years later, the building still has pockmarks and scars from their bullets. The crypt of St. Cyril’s is now a free museum with an exhibit of each man who died on those fateful days in 1942.
Even as I admire these fighters and those who hid them knowing the steep risks they were taking, I can’t help but wish there were no museum, no movies, no plaques, no walking tours. Nothing to write home about. No heroes, no villains, no lives lost, no martyrdom. No pockmarks in the walls. No rocks on the memorial,7 no candles to commemorate loss. Just a city. But you and I both know this place wouldn’t be what it is without its real history. Telling the story is part of the travel experience for that exact reason—without seeing a place for all its scars, are we choosing not to see it at all?
There’s a line in The Odyssey that resonates: “But you must long for the daylight.” This city knows what it is to long for daylight when the deep, dark night stretches before, seemingly into eternity. As the Germans were defeated (at the cost of many, many lives within Czechoslovakia and beyond) and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, liberation and self-governance grew ever farther into the distance.8
To walk in the city today is to witness a place where beliefs live side-by-side, where deep, dark scars and secrets are laid bare before the warm August sun. Where religious pluralism and peace at differing beliefs are completely normal. Where the Jewish Quarter has an ancient cemetery on a hill and an Orthodox man smiles warmly at outsiders, greeting with a soft, kind Shalom. Where Christians sing with acoustic guitars a few feet from the famous astronomical clock. Come one, come all, Prague is a kaleidoscope of memory and that more-than-solar, deep with meaning sunlight that people fought hard keep can be shared with you.
I wish a solemn Good Friday to all who observe, and the potent reminder that empire in all its forms is eager to quench the flame of resistance by and for the people. May we remember, may we notice, and may we persevere to see the sun rise on Sunday morning.
Until next time,
Sarah
P.s. To see where we stayed, what we ate, and the other places we went in Prague, here’s the guide.
P.p.s. I’ll be back (very) soon with a reading challenge update. :-)
From the Aisle Seat has been written almost entirely in the middle of the night.
An excellent movie on the “peace talks” that led to this is Munich on Netflix.
Including Germany—one of my favorite books about German Resistance efforts is Jennifer Chiaverini’s Resistance Women.
Some were members of the military in their home countries, but many were civilians with no experience or training in warfare.
I could go on and on with book and movie recommendations about this aspect of the war, but here is one of each. A book: The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn. A movie: A Call to Spy.
The local nickname of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office and “Protector” (quotes mine, because what a joke of a title when you massacre people)
The rocks on the memorial are a custom of honoring the dead in Jewish culture. Rocks are placed instead of flowers because flowers die, but rocks do not. In this instance, I am lamenting that there is any need to mourn at all, that any of these events ever happened.
It is worth noting that Czech people at the time were not morally or legally opposed to communism as a form of governance, but were highly, highly opposed to the Soviet form of repression that came with it. Milada Horáková is one martyr of many from Czechia whose show trial and execution were part of this political transition.