Blue Door Press

We’ve arrived in Prague after several months in London, stayed a couple of nights in the flat and are now driving west along Radlicka to the cottage.

This road is ugly. It’s too wide to cross safely, pedestrians use the infrequent traffic lights; a quick check is essential before braving the tram tracks, trams hold no mercy; cars speed towards the tunnel under Strahov.

Behind us are family and London, ahead is the Bohemian countryside. The present is this wide road with its hotels, no trees, a bus station, train tracks and sun beating down on the emptiness. It would be a good road for tanks.

We’ve just left the flat in Ostrovskeho. This is where Ales’ grandparents lived before the Bolshevics took over in 1948 and the State claimed the building with its cinema downstairs. We are surrounded by demolition squads and an ever-expanding construction site.

We first came to the flat twenty three years ago and the view from the windows hasn’t changed. Until now. Workmen, diggers, cranes, hover over the land behind the bus station, constructing a vast development Smichov City.

They are building on the land where soldiers, the Vlasovci, camped in 1945. The men were recovering after helping the Czech Resistance fight the Germans.

The view from this flat at that time was fixed in a watercolour by Ales’ mother, Marta. We’ve hung it beside the sitting room windows but I took it down to check what if anything of the view was left. Her watercolour has only buildings. The houses she painted along Nadrazni on the other side from the bus station, parallel to Radlicka, still look the same.

The soldiers followed General Vlasov and seem more real now that the news is full of war; Russian troops trying to eliminate someone else’s country and refugees trying to find safety. There is nothing in her picture of the exhausted soldiers. Vlasov sounds rather like Prigozhin. He had an eventful war, changed sides, was with the Germans and then swapped, setting up the Russian Liberation Army. Many of his soldiers were Soviet prisoners who faced the sadism of the Nazis. His Vlasovci ended up in Prague to fight with the Czech Uprising. He and his men wanted to escape to the West but most of those who did reach the Americans were handed back and ended up being executed by the Soviets.

Ales’ mother said she would stand at the window and watch. She was about to be pregnant with Ales, or was already. She conceived him that May as she saw the arrival of those men who had saved Prague, saw them camped opposite on the waste ground, waiting.

They lived – Vladimir, Marta, their two small daughters – on the fifth floor. Marta worked in the cinema, in the box office and she painted the posters.

The view from the flat has been the same since I first witnessed it. Except the drunks – the men hauling scrap, stripping copper, sharing beer, arguing – now prop their amputations, bandaged limbs, against a bench opposite Sushi Central, near El Mundo.

The government prescribes austerity. Pensions are frozen. Was she painting that view in May? Did she look out at the exhausted soldiers while you settled in her womb, got a grip, took a tight hold? Did she decide then that if you were a boy they’d name you after her brother? Hadn’t she just heard that he’d died in Ravensbruck?

Those soldiers were mainly Ukrainians. Prague is now full of Ukranians and not just the war-wounded, apparently they are one in seven of the population. There are complaints from the locals about poverty and the price of bread and cost of health care, refugees getting privileged treatment. But to complain or be ambivalent might be risky. It is a criminal offence to be sympathetic, let alone pro-Putin.

We are driving along Radlicka and will turn towards the motorway. Was this the same road the soldiers took to reclaim Prague? The construction site is demolishing the train station, the bus station, all evidence of those soldiers. War brings change and destruction and it has to be covered up. The name of this road resembles the Czech word radlice whichrefers to the part of a plough that digs down and rotates the earth.

We are driving to the cottage and will listen to the radio and Ales will shell walnuts from last Autumn. And the news will be of tragedy. This time we’re with the Germans and are helping the Ukrainians. The Russians are the enemy. Roads in Prague have been renamed, statues of Russian generals removed.

In 1945 Russia claimed they had conquered Prague, but the first troops to join the Czech resistance and succeed in getting rid of the Germans were the men Marta watched from her window.

The new President, Pavel, likes NATO, the present head of NATO has just warned the Russians that they can’t win a nuclear war. That’s good.

The government has announced tax rises and is sending tanks to Zelensky. The people don’t seem convinced; many of the refugees have serious needs, some have TB. Many are homeless, their children need schools. They need help. But how long for?

When we return we’ll put Marta’s watercolour back on the wall. Do not go carelessly, they say. Keep it simple, remember who is the enemy. One view is going, others have almost gone.

Jane Kirwan, July 2023