October 5 – Bratislava
Our hotel, the Mercure Centrum was our must ‘ritzy’ hotel. Very sleek and modern with all the newest technology in a modern ‘industrial style’ hotel. We all luxuriated in our elegant rooms and commented on how sad it was that we would only be able to enjoy the luxury for two nights.
We began our one full day in this country with a lecture in one of the hotel conference rooms. The speaker was a historian who took us over the same historic dates we’re beginning to know and love, but he did this using a series of old maps which showed all the different ethnic groups that occupied the Slavic world (Germans, Hungarians, Polish, Czech, Slovaks and Austrians) and how the borders ebbed and flowed through time. When the Czech and Slovak were joined together to form a country after WW I, there were very clear discrepancies between the two which would haunt them for the next eighty years: Slovak were primarily small villages with 90% rural, and very Catholic and the Czech more citified and atheistic. With the onset of WW II, the two were separate and the Slovak Republic became an authoritarian/totalitarian state. While the head of this republic was a Catholic Priest, over 70,000 Jews were sent to Germany as cheap labor and ultimately to Auschwitz. Only 1600 lived.
At the end of the war the two countries were once more rejoined and each pretty much expelled all those who were not either Czech or Slovak. All Germans and Hungarians living in the new Czechoslovakia were defined as ‘treasonable’ (since both their countries had fought for Hitler) and were forced to move in a mass movement back to their original countries. (Even if they had little affinity to these ‘homelands’). Eleven million Germans were sent back to Germany and Austria in a manner not that different from the way the Nazis had expelled all non-Aryan people and the Hungarians were simply swapped for Slovak people living in Hungary. This mass movement which was called the ‘wild removal’ set up tensions which exist to this day.
We learned about life under the communist regime, with stories and examples which didn’t sound all that different from that which we’d heard in the Czech Republic: forced shortages of goods; censorship; loss of entrepreneurial spirit. The result being a passive, immoral, corrupt society where files being kept on every citizen over the age of eighteen resulted in a subjugated population.
Finally in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution, communism was crushed, but the more advanced, economically richer Czech citizens were tired of subsidizing their Slovak ‘brothers’ and so in 1993 the two separated - again. Unfortunately, the first Slovak leader, Meciar was as corrupt as some of the communist leaders had been beforehand ( giving plum positions to his cronies and manipulating goods and contracts to favor his friends). This left the Slovak ‘man on the street’ feeling very little trust in their government – a mood which exists to this day.
Two things are slowly helping to stabilize the country: a new generation of people, born since 1989 who are the first true Slovaks without a sentimental attachment to the good ol’ days when they were part of Czechoslovakia; and an improvement in the economy caused by the growth of the automobile industry where the Slovak Republic has now become the biggest producer of cars, per capita in all of Europe putting out 500,000 cars/year.
So we ended our lecture with a positive note. But to look at this country with its graffiti-filled walls, the cheap communist housing, and the visible signs of a decaying infrastructure makes one understand that this country has a steep climb ahead.
In the afternoon, I left our group to go down to the American Embassy where I had an appointment with the Ambassador. It turned out that Theodore Sedgewick, the newly Obama-appointed ambassador, was a fellow student with me during my Junior Year Abroad Program at College Year in Athens in 1967. I remembered Tod as a funny, irreverent, smart young man, and now a mere forty-two years later, having given Obama a good deal of money, he was an ambassador.
Getting into the embassy for our planned visit was no small feat as I forfeited first my passport, then my cell phone and camera, ran a gauntlet of heavy steel security doors and serious guards and policemen to finally reach the office. I had brought copies of pictures of Tod in 1967 when he had a full head of hair and was distinctly younger and these very candid shots broke the ice for our meeting.
He and I chatted about the good ol’ days, about what it’s like to be an ambassador, what I had done with my life, and a bit about what he felt his role was in Slovakia. He is certainly not a career diplomat, and there are no manuals to learn the job, so it will be interesting to see how he does. It’s not like the Slovak Republic is one of the critical nations to our diplomatic strategy, but he could be a fabulous help to this small new nation if he does things right. Time will tell.
In a sense I was mimicking Daddy who on his trip around the world had letters of introduction which opened doors for him and allowed him to meet with various German envoys and ambassadors in strange new lands.
The nicest thing Tod did was to offer to make himself available to meet with future Road Scholar groups traveling to Bratislava. It will be interesting to see if this actually happens.
In the evening, I rejoined the group and we went out for a typical dinner at a wooden ‘chalet’- like building outside of the town where we had a fine dinner to celebrate the end of our very short visit to the Slovak Republic.
I think the only reason we came to Bratislava was to get on a boat to ride down the Danube to Budapest. But that was not to be because there has been very little rain over the last months, the Danube is very shallow in some parts and so instead we were promised that we’d have a small ride on the Danube for an hour but would then continue our journey to Budapest on a bus. The trip would turn out to be faster, if a little less romantic.
October 6 – Trip to Budapest
Another perfect Indian Summer day as we put our luggage into the bus, and hopped onto a river ferry which would take us for one hour down the Danube to the burrough of Devin, on the outskirts of Bratislava. The boat ride was leisurely and boring, and we all were actually quite glad that we would only have a short boat ride since the thought of six hours staring at the wooded shoreline was just a wee bit dull. We arrived at Devin Castle built in the 8th century and located at the strategic confluence of the Danube and Moravia rivers. One could stand on the shore-line and see across the river to Austria, a mere spitting distance away. During the time of the communist regime, this was a highly guarded location since it was an easy swim to escape to the west. There was a monument erected near the water which had listed the names of the 800+ people who lost their lives trying to make their escape from this location. It seemed so incongruous, as we stood there on this lovely fall day looking out at the river, to think that not that long ago there would have been an ominous presence nearby of soldiers with guns and dogs prepared to shoot anyone trying to flee.
Having explored the remains of the castle, we went to lunch at a local restaurant before hopping on our bus for our three hour ride to Budapest.
As we neared the capital of Hungary, there was a sense that this was truly a well to do city. There were familiar signs for Tesco and IKEA, manufacturing facilities on both sides of the road, toll booths that seemed more modern and a lack of the gray stolid communist-era architecture. I know that Hungary was under the thumb of the communists at the same time as the Czech and Slovak nations, but one didn’t have that same oppressive feel.
Our hotel the Carat, is a new hotel created from an old apartment building. It is not as swank as our Mercure in Bratislava, or as modern as our IBIS in Prague and we all felt a little let down, but the city itself on first glimpse looks exciting and vibrant and reminded me a little of Paris.
I’m looking forward to our next days here – not only for the new sites and new history to be learned, but for new foods as well. From our first glimpse of our dinner, it is obvious that this is a country that loves chocolate. Our desert tonight was walnut filled pancakes drowning in chocolate sauce. Yumm.
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