Tomas Vachuda - return to a fairytale city
Tomas Vachuda was four years old when his family went to America in 1968 on what was to have been a vacation. In August Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and the family stayed. They didn't see their homeland again for over twenty years. Now Tomas is in his late thirties and is back in his hometown. He runs the Prague office of an international consultancy firm, coming and going between the United States and the Czech Republic. Here he recalls his return in 1990 and how his early childhood memories were confronted with the reality of post-Velvet Revolution Prague.
"I kept with me during my time abroad some very vivid memories from my young childhood in Prague, in particular Slovansky ostrov - also known as Zofin - a small island in the middle of the Vltava with a sandbox and a slide. It's been a children's park for a long time. And I remember the Old Town Square - Staromestske namesti - which I would walk across, back and forth many times, especially to go and see the "orloj", the Old Town clock. And then the tanks came in 1968. I remember we were in San Antonio, Texas, at the time. My father smashed the radio when he heard the news. And we came back, my mother and I, in 1990. My father had passed away the year before. For my mother the return was very difficult, but in some ways it was simple, because she looked around and she felt like really nothing had changed. Everything seemed to her a bit more run-down and decrepit than it was before, but pretty much the same. For me it was like walking into a fairytale. I had dreamed of Prague, I had dreamed of walking through the streets. My parents had described it as the most beautiful city in the world, which I sometimes thought to be caused by a bit of Czech patriotism on their part, but when I came to Prague I discovered that it really was the most beautiful city, but yet it still seemed to me like a fairytale. The sandbox on Slovansky ostrov, that seemed so vast when I was young, is really not much bigger than my conference-room table now. Staromestske namesti - the Old Town Square - that was such an effort to cross on three-year-old legs, could now be crossed in a minute, and the Old Town clock, that I would look up at, that seemed like a skyscraper, in fact was quite small as well. And so, to this day when I walk around Prague and when I compare it with my memories, it still seems a bit like a fairytale."
