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Two weeks ago, we announced the overall winner of Radio Prague’s annual listeners’ contest and we read the entire winning entry by our French listener Claire le Bris-Cep. Today you’ll have a chance to listen to excerpts from the entries by Michael Elcock from Canada and James Stafford from Ireland, the two finalists for the English section of Radio Prague.
“Blackbirds are singing all around the car park. The day is warm and sunny; everything is clean, and green with vegetation. The taxi driver cracks jokes as he drives us into the city. A change like this was unimaginable three years ago. Emanuel sees the smile on my face and asks what is amusing me. He knows I can’t understand the taxi-driver’s jokes.
“‘All this,’ I tell him, waving my arm out of the taxi window. ‘It’s wonderful. It just makes me feel good.’ Prague rises up in front of us, possibly the most beautiful city in Europe. It has plenty of bad Soviet-era architecture, but most of that lies in the suburbs. In the old city centre there has been little development for nearly fifty years; a benefit of the communist regime perhaps, which unintentionally preserved the ancient city by leaving it alone, in many places to crumble.
“When I was here before, the people were depressed and drab and sullen, and hardly anyone would speak in public to foreigners. Moneychangers and black marketers stood on street corners, and green and white police cars drove up and down the streets, the people inside staring suspiciously at passers-by. But now Prague is flowering again, its people dressed in bright colours and fashionable clothes. Red-tiled roofs spill over the city’s hills like a Disney fantasy, and streets open out to squares of little shops and cafés full of people; people everywhere, walking, talking, savouring the warm spring air.
“The city flows upwards from the banks of the Vltava River, which saunters languidly through the city, crossed by ornate bridges, and adorned with beautiful white swans. The castle and the great, gothic St. Vitus Cathedral sit up on the crest of the ridge, watching over it all.”
And now an excerpt from James Stafford’s entry:
“On the night the Soviet tanks rolled their way into the country’s defenceless capital, a young, scared Czech student, huddled by the shaking window of his Prague flat, recorded an emotional monologue which was picked up by the world’s media.
“These simple, humble words, uttered nervously onto a primitive tape recorder in a harsh, clipped East European accent, do more to reveal the true scale and horror of the Soviet invasion than the study of countless newspaper articles, text books and government files ever could.
“The recording, now readily available on the internet and since identified as being made by Oldřich Černý (who later went on to become part of Václav Havel’s post 1989 government) states the following:
‘I am a Czech student, 22 years old. At this very moment, as I am recording, Russian tanks, prepared for any action, are standing in a big park just under my window. I don’t know whether I will ever finish my studies or meet my friends abroad again. And I could count and count, but at this moment everything somehow loses its sense. At 3 a.m., 21st August 1968, I woke up to a completely different world from the one I went to sleep in…The only way how you can help us is this: not to forget Czechoslovakia. Don’t forget Czechoslovakia.’
“It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of studying history mechanically and to view everything purely through the prism of diplomatic relations, government statistics and military movements. What Oldřich Černý’s recording gives us is a priceless human element to this major world crisis. It is a vital, almost sacred, link to the emotions of that grim chapter in Czech history and nothing else in my encounters with Czech history has ever had such an impact on me.
“For all the beauty of Czech architecture, the lyricism of its writers and poets and the melodies of their great composers, it’s difficult to find something more poignant or more touching than the sound of an ordinary student worried his nation may be on the brink of being swallowed whole.”
Our time is up so let me just repeat our monthly competition question.
This month we are looking for the name of the Austrian composer born in 1797 whose parents hailed from the German-speaking areas in North Moravia. His father was born in Neudorf (now Vysoká, part of Malá Morava near Šumperk) while his mother came from Zuckmantel (now Zlaté Hory).
The address for your answers is Radio Prague, 12099, Prague or [email protected]. Thanks for listening today and Mailbox will be back next week, same time, same frequency.
