Oct. 1st & 2nd - Prague

October 1 – Trip to Kutna Hora

On another absolutely perfect Indian Summer day, we were picked up by our trusty bus for a day’s adventure outside of Prague.

Our first stop was the Castle Sternberg, a castle owned by the Sternberg family since the 1700’s. From the end of WW II to the end of the Communist period (1945-1989), the castle was used by the communists as a garrison and the owner, the current Count Sternberg was allowed to act as a tour guide in his own home. It was considered a place of bourgeois values, and was not maintained by the regimes, but nor did they destroy it.

In 1992, all state-owned properties were returned to their original owners if you could prove your ownership, and so the castle returned to the Count who now lives there again with his wife. The state provides a certain amount of money to retain it as a piece of heritage, and for the rest the count appears to count on: entrance fees; book sales;  three other castles properties; vineyards and other assorted properties which allow him to maintain this building.  In one sense it was delightful to roam around someone’s home, seeing the dining room where he celebrates festive occasions, the men’s den where all the heads of animals he has shot are on display, the children’s playroom with its stuffed bear on a rocking base (who needs a hobby horse, when one can have a hobby-bear)  and the living room with fairly contemporary furniture which we assume he uses when hordes of tourists are not tromping around. We were told that periodically he appears to greet tourists, but we were not that lucky.

My favorite room was an intimate salon where the family tree had literally been painted onto the wall as a large tree with each of its branches displaying the name and a photograph of a member of the Sternberg family.

Trivia word for the day: Credenza.  It was a place where the food of the royalty was laid out and the official taster would  eat it to prove that the guests would not be poisoned. It comes from the word in Italian (or Latin) – Credo (or trust).

Having enjoyed the castle we piled back on the bus and continued to a World Heritage Site called Kutna Hora. In this small village which rivaled Prague as the most important city, there once were the major silver mines which provided a primary source of revenue to the Czech and Slovak public until the late 1700’s. At that time flooding, fire and the Thirty Years War put an end to mining. [We were told that at that time silver from the American colonies and other countries were available more cheaply and suddenly this thriving village went from boom to bust. ... but I think it was floods and war which were the real problem]. 

The village is now primarily a tourist highlight, and on this Sunday as we strolled the streets it was a  ghost town, with even the tourist shops mostly closed. We learned that unlike capitalistic America where stores would be open on week-ends to grab every available tourist dollar, here the citizens and shop keepers take off on the week-ends to be with their families.  What a concept!  

With our very local guide (speaking only a modicum of English which had been learned by rote), we learned how silver was extracted from the mines and minted, how the town kept a wonderful cathedral which competes with the biggest and best in Prague, and how the vineyards on the surrounding hills create great wines. After four hours  of walking on cobble stones under sunny skies, we piled back on the bus for our return trip to Prague.   It was a long day and we got back around 8:30 pm, had dinner and fell into bed.

October 2 -  Czech Economy and Jewish Ghetto

We started our morning at the Hotel Petr, owned by the travel group (Scantravel) that was responsible for our agenda and lecturers in the Czech and Slovak republics for this particular tour.
The lecturer was the owner of Scantravel, Tomas Brychta. He gave a most interesting lecture about life in the Czech Republic during the communist period and now.  He himself was born in 1960, so has lived through the change from state owned, government run society, to the free market economy that thrives today.  He is very proud of what he has accomplished and what he managed to live through, and gave us a very personal sense of what it was to live through this time.

From 1948-1989 the communist state owned 97% of all assets. This was accomplished by simply confiscating all property. The only thing that wasn’t confiscated was your own personal home (where you were asked to be 'downsized' to squeeze  in more people). From your home you were prohibited from running any sort of business. Everyone had to work for the communist state. There were no other choices. This didn’t mean you had to be a party member, but you did have to subscribe to their philosophies and rules.

He felt that the worst time was from 1968 –(when Dubcek tried to create a new kind of “socialism with a human face”, but which was crushed by Russian tanks) until 1989 when the Velvet Revolution occurred. Everything was so controlled during those years that women ( who had to work) were given two hour lunch breaks so they could stand in lines for food for their dinners. Absolutely everything was controlled by the state. And there were shortages of everything. He remembered when toilet paper disappeared for four months, and the editor of the local paper said that never had his business thrived so well, as during those four months.

He described the process of buying a car: one put one’s name on a list and paid for half the car, and after about five years, your name would come up and you went to a dealer and were given a car in the color that had rolled off the factory that month. So if green was the color when your name came up, you owned a green car.  Immediately, you put yourself on the waiting list for the next car because they were so poorly made they wouldn’t last more than five years.  To repair these disasters, you either went to the front door of the garage where you were told to come back in six weeks when they would have an opening for your car, or, if youreally  needed your car for work, you’d go around to the back door and pay in black-market currency to have your car repaired -  that week.

The black market economy was how things really got done.

In 1989 with the Velvet Revolution, the communist party lost and between 1989 – 1995 85% of all assets which had been confiscated, were returned or ‘restituted’ to their original owners. You were provided no financing to repair your property, but you did get back your ownership.  His own family had, at one point, owned the building in which the current hotel exists. It was a multi-family home with his grandparents on the lower floor, and his father, aunts and uncles on the upper floors. During the communist regime it had been broken up into many small apartments for workers. He ‘bought out’ his family members to begin the hotel.

He described the incredibly difficult time he had starting his business. Because there was no automation of banking, it took nine weeks for money to transfer from the Czech republic to any other nation (or vice versa).  So while he wanted to cater to groups traveling to the newly free Czech country, he had to find a way to do things more rapidly. So he discovered that just across the borders in the more modern countries of Austria and Germany he could set up  bank accounts and transfer money more rapidly….but that still meant traveling with tons of cash in his pocket as he crossed country borders. The same issues were associated with getting loans to re-build the structure.

Getting workers was equally hard. Under the communist period people were paid whether they did a good or bad job. The work ethic was non-existent and it took a while to train his maids, cooks and waiters in the dining rooms how to perform to the standards expected by foreign visitors.  As he built up the business, every step was a challenge since there was no infrastructure in place.  So one had to admire his entrepreneurial spirit which found solutions to each new problem where he could easily have felt defeated with every step of the process. 

He then went on to describe how, at the beginning of the new economy, there were plenty of thieves and black market experts who took advantage of the gullible. There were Ponzi schemes not unlike Madoff, there were more things done under the table than above. And things are still not perfect, but it has been a very short period.

He pointed to the primary industry which has thrived since 1989: the automobile industry where VW chose to invest in plants in Czechoslovakia rather than East Germany because the Czech people were prepared to work for lower wages, and were happy just to have a job, while East Germans were not prepared to accept these conditions.  The three main car manufacturers currently building cars in the country are Skoda, Toyota and KIA, but it is still a very expensive proposition to own a car – both to purchase it and to pay for the gasoline.

The steel industry, while in the past it had done well, can no longer compete, and beer breweries which did alright have been bought up by other countries. The newest industry -  tourism - has been a boon to the country  and as a result WI-FI is now offered everywhere, ATMs exist everywhere and they have large shopping malls – their newest pride and joy. In twenty short years they have come a long way....but still have a long way to go.

When asked about their participation in the EU, his feelings were that he wasn’t yet  sure of the benefits of being part of the EU. Suddenly there were a new layer of standards put on their  food production and restaurant quality which removed some of the traditional foods that Czech love. In addition their soldiers found themselves suddenly assigned to Kosovo and Kuwait which they didn’t really appreciate.  They have not yet converted to the Euro, and he's not sure they want to.

The remaining fear in all Czech citizens is fear of "the East", by which they mean Russia. They have seen the impact that communism had on their lives, they see the wealth of the new Russia coming in to buy industries and property, and they hope that by being part of the EU they will be protected in the future.

These were themes that we heard repeated over and over: the communists when they were in the country built shoddy products from buildings, to roads to clothing to cars, they sapped the energy out of the people, and they could come back at any time.  There is a real sense of insecurity and of being always put upon by others be it international treaties in which they, the Czech, were not able to negotiate, (Munich, Warsaw Pact etc) , tanks that rolled into their country (Germans, Russians), or simply government regulations that made life impossible. The current corruption in government is depressing, and the single citizen feels that there’s nothing they can do.  Victim-hood is strong in the Czech Republic along with cynicism.

After lunch we went to the Jewish Ghetto – where victim-hood was writ large.  Prague had, at one time,  the largest Jewish population in Europe, but with every changing monarch they were either put into ghettoes and persecuted or  were allowed to thrive and be part of all the professions of the city. Until WW II, that is,  when the population of Jews went from 750,000 to less than 7,000. Most were  either sent to camps and exterminated, or fled to other nations.

 The entire Ghetto area, which is surrounded by the old town, is called Josefov. Its architecture  reminded me of the elegant streets of Paris, and is huge. It contained at one time four synagogues and thousands of businesses. Now it is a shadow of itself and more a museum than a living community.   We went in to the Pinkas Synagogue which is no longer used. On all the walls of what would have been the main congregation, were written the names of  the 78,000 Jews who had been exterminated. It included their name, their dates of birth and death, their concentration camp number, and each was color coded to identify the area of the country from which they came. During the time of the communist regime, these names had been removed, and were painstakingly re-painted on to the walls after 1989.

In the Maisel Synagogue, now a museum,were pictures done by the children who were in Terezin, a holding-camp outside of Prague. They have over 15000 drawings done by children, of which only a small fraction were on display.  All the synagogues, along with the old Jewish Cemetery are now considered part of the Jewish Museum.  One couldn’t help but be moved by these simple buildings with their horrid messages. After three very depressing hours we walked back to our hotel.  Our group consists of 25 people, and about 1/3 are Jewish. I don’t know who was more affected: those of Jewish heritage, or the others in our group, some of whom seemed to only now grasp the horror of Shoah.

Our evening was a free one where we were allowed to do what we wanted and were given Czech Krone to cover our meal. Gay and I having had a little too much of our new 25 best friends, chose to go off alone to a small restaurant on the other side of the river. The restaurant was Tri Stoleti  (three centuries).  A lovely, elegant intimate restaurant. We had a fabulous meal where with every bite our tongues said thank you, and we washed it all down with what was considered to be fine Czech wine. We fell into bed at 11:00pm, mentally and physically exhausted, but very sated.