Balkan Exiles in Prague
After I left the quiet and pleasantly cold interiors of Prague Castle where I had an interview that morning, I found myself on the courtyard, already warm from the first rays of sun. The tired faces of school kids traipsing round the castle brought back memories. They were sitting on benches suffering from an obvious lack of sleep, while the tourist guide was so uninspiring that even the teacher was beginning to doze off.
After I left the quiet and pleasantly cold interiors of Prague Castle where I had an interview that morning, I found myself on the courtyard, already warm from the first rays of sun. The tired faces of school kids traipsing round the castle brought back memories. They were sitting on benches suffering from an obvious lack of sleep, while the tourist guide was so uninspiring that even the teacher was beginning to doze off.
I could have guessed that they were from my native country - Croatia - just from their gestures, even without hearing the guide's broken Croatian. I imagined that he probably learnt it during summer months spent on Adriatic islands. I imagined him being there with Czechoslovak tourists during the 1980s, and then sporadically going for a visit during the 1990s, when many Czechs decided to exchange traditional Adriatic resorts for more exotic destinations. He also brought back memories of my first visit to Prague eight years ago, short before the end of the war in Croatia.
At that time we spent nights in stuffy and overcrowded bars in downtown Prague, hanging out mainly with English and German-speaking tourists. Like everybody else, we used to stay until dawn when we left for home, all stinky from cigarette smoke. In the crowd, I noticed that many waiters had typical South Slavic dark complexion, and I tried to overcome my shock when some of them began to talk to me in Serbian, the language I hadn't heard since the beginning of the war, which remained in my mind as the language of enemy. Our first contacts were shy, they usually began by asking for a cigarette, and they all ended up with farewell tears, kisses, and long embraces, promises that we would see each other again in our own countries. During those nights, I got to know the suffering from the so called enemy, and my image of the war, where all enemies were almost equally guilty for our own tragedy, was broken into pieces.
Through all those years of coming back again to study or to work, I realized that Prague was a place where emigrants from the former Yugoslavia were able to meet, since all borders were closed between their homelands, and contacts were almost impossible to establish. I met many Croats who came to Prague desperate because of the horrible economic and political situation in their war-torn country. I came across many Bosnians, healing their trauma after surviving massacres and killings, and after spending months in convoys and refugee camps. I also met a lot of young Serbs who had run away from the Yugoslav Army, which at the time was occupying large parts of Croatia. We all found ourselves in Prague, and tried to communicate, or at least to learn to live together.
My colleague Emina is a Bosnian Muslim who fled with her entire family to Prague, escaping the planned massacre of the entire Muslim intellectual elite of her hometown. My friend Mira was a painter who came during the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999, and lived with her husband in a rented attic apartment on the verge of poverty, sometimes having nothing to eat except potatoes and water. After the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 she went back to Belgrade.
I still see her waving at me from her window on a day when I was leaving for Croatia. That time I left Prague with a broken heart, feeling that going back to Zagreb was a return to a dark post-war reality. At that moment I also realized how the times had changed. During the Soviet regime, many Czechs had escaped to freedom through the former Yugoslavia, coming first as tourists and then crossing the border illegally to the West. And then the tide turned. Yugoslavia, the country which had so often been praised during the Cold War as a bridge between East and West, began to tear itself apart. Many Czechs told me they were ashamed because during the war they didn't do as much for us as we did for them during the Soviet times. And I thought, oh yes, you did, you gave us a place to meet at least, and to realize that we all were the victims of the same horror.
