“I spent a great night with my tour group, led by a Professor friend of mine, in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, right before the revolution (1988).”
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It would have been interesting to visit the east during communism.
I see only a few monuments to it.
One is at Devin Castle ruins near Bratislava. It is a very small point where Austria is on the other side of the Danube.
It was a popular point for Slovaks trying to escape by swimming over to the Austrian side.
Unfortunately, their was a two story concrete building with three ramps for the Commie sharpshooters.
About six years ago, a monument was erected to commemorate
those that were shot, trying to escape. The building is now a bar.
One fun story is that of a man who built a hot air balloon to launch during the middle of the night, carrying him and his family over the river to freedom.
“It would have been interesting to visit the east during communism.”
I have two more tidbits from our tour of Czechoslovakia in 1988 while still a Communist State. The first one was when our tour minibus reached the Czech border on the way in. One of our tour members, an older gentleman (in his 70’s), was of Czech heritage. We were held up for over two hours while the Commie border guards first questioned him, and then were doing, I assume, background research on him to make sure he wasn’t some infiltrator or whatever, before we were allowed to proceed into the country. The whole thing was ludicrous in light of the age of our tour member. What did they think, that he was a 76 year old freedom fighter in the making?
The second incident was with our assigned tour guide. We figured he was a Commie also, although he looked rather a bookish sort. Sure enough, he was a bookish sort. One of our tour members had brought a paperback copy of the book The Incredible Lightness of Being with her, the plot of which was set in Czechoslovakia with the fight against the Soviets as background. The book was banned in Czechoslovakia. We didn’t know that. Our tour guide at one point had us out in a secluded forested area, where he opened up with his story of being kicked out of the Communist Party because he wouldn’t toe the party line, and how he went from a good job to being a tour guide (because he spoke fluent English) in order to make a living. He hated the Commie gov’t. Our tour member with the banned book, gave it as a present to our tour guide, and you would have thought she had given him manna from heaven. He was delighted, and little did he know that one year later his country would be liberated from Commie rule.
I might add, that there were a bunch of Commie guards out front of the main gov’t building in downtown Prague roaming around with machine guns, making their presence known. One year later, pouf, all gone.
If that is the same story I recall, the platform/basket of that hotair balloon was on display at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in West Berlin when I visited there in 1979. That was also during the time I got to experience Czech beer (the original Budweiser) in a Czech restaurant in Wiesbaden.
Geez, I almost forgot the best Commie Czechoslovakia story from our trip there in 1988. We were heading up into the rolling hills where the spa towns were located when our tour bus got a flat tire. While we were waiting for the bus to get fixed, a small group of us took a hike up a hillside to see what was at the top.
Well, were we in for a surprise. We got up there and looked down upon what appeared to be a military installation of some sort out in the middle of nowhere, with barbed wire around it and guard dogs at the perimeter. At which point we skedaddled right back down the hillside as quickly as possible. I’ve always wondered what exactly that was that we happened upon. Will never know, but it really creeped us all out at the time.