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Destination: Czech Republic

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Don’t Call Me Adolf

Traveling through the Czech Republic, you realize how, for Central Europe, the 20th century was a dominated by the battle between far-left and far-right politics — communism and fascism. The communist school system drilled home the evils of fascism. Honza, my Czech friend, said, “Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, you’d think Nazis killed more communists than Jews.”

I imagine “Adolf” was a popular name once upon a time. I asked Honza about it. He said his grandfather, born in 1905, was an Adolf. He was a soldier in the Czech army. As early as 1934 (just a year after the infamous Adolf came to power, and several years before the rest of Europe realized what was cooking), this Adolf was so disgusted by the fascist German leader that he changed his name to Bob.

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Honza’s father-in-law, on the other hand, was a Czech born in 1942 in the Sudetenland — Czech territory mostly inhabited by ethnic Germans, annexed by Hitler in 1938. To get along better in that German-ruled land, he actually changed his name to Adolf.

As we drove out of the Czech Republic, I could sense we were nearing the border — we seemed to be cheered on by yards full of tacky garden gnomes for sale and topless dance clubs. Suddenly we were showing our passports (which seems so archaic now in Europe). The woman in a crisp Austrian customs uniform greeted us with a terse, “In Austria, you must turn on the car lights at all hours.”

The border surprised us, as we were still hoping to shoot a couple more “drive-bys” for our Czech Republic TV show (that’s a shot of a car driving by a nice bit of local countryside to give the editor a transition between towns in a show). For a moment, we considered cheating — shooting a “drive-by” a few miles over the border in Austria. But it was clearly a different country. When you study the landscape, the visual contrast is night and day from the rustic Czech Republic to pristine and fertile Austria. The soil, roads, buildings, even the color of the grass is all distinctly richer in Austria.

Our first stop in Austria was the concentration camp at Mauthausen. Even after countless visits over the last decades, concentration camp visits are always powerful experiences for me and give me new things to ponder. In the basement next to a shower room where inmates were gassed, I noticed a German family deep in conversation. Standing in front of an exhibit showing a big photograph of a gas canister with its lethal pellets spilling out, the father was patiently explaining things to his wide-eyed children (ages about 9 and 11).

I never considered this parenting chore and responsibility, unique to German moms and dads: to tell your children what your parents did in the Holocaust. As what the USA has termed its “Greatest Generation” passes away, so does Germany’s counterpart.

[I realize this man’s father probably had nothing personally to do with the horrors of Hitler’s gas chambers, but a society must live with (and take responsibility for) what they allow their government to do in its name. I believe that if, for instance, some day history proves that the US was wrong to make war in Iraq that it is not the generals or President Bush who are to blame but the American people. In that sense, I don’t think an electorate can claim to be “innocent civilians.” I believe that as a tax-paying American citizen, every bullet that flies and every bomb that drops–whether right or wrong–has my name on it.]

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They Fry Sperm in Trebon

On the main square in the Czech town of Trebon, the bank has a statue of a man holding a big fish over its door. The city is all about fish — farmed here in manmade lakes for centuries.

Another statue honors the town’s 15th-century megalomaniac lake-building hero, Jakub Krcín (now considered a “hero” since his medieval lakes absorbed enough water to save Trebon from the 2002 flood that devastated Prague).

At dinner, my beer glass says, “Bohemia Regent anno 1379.” It occurs to me that I’m consuming exactly what people have been eating and drinking in Trebon for over 600 years: fish from the reservoir just outside the gate and the local brew. And they are good at fish.

Just like the French have words distinguishing triple the kinds of kisses we have in English (can a French-speaker help send in a few examples, please?), the Czechs of Trebon cook fish with both passion and variety.

For maximum experience, we ordered all the appetizers on the menu tapas-style (a good trick when trying to eat your way through another culture): “soused” (must mean “pickled”) herring, fried loach, “stuffed carp willet sailor fashion,” cod liver, pike caviar, and something my Czech friend and guide Honza translated as “fried carp sperm.”

I said, “You can’t fry sperm.” And everyone at my table insisted that, while female fish have a whole trough full of eggs (caviar), the males have a trough full of the male counterpart — and it’s cookable. Fried carp sperm tasted like fried oyster…same texture, too.

For my main course, I had to try the rest of the carp. I thought carp just swam in hotel fountains. It was the cheapest fish for good reason — bottom-end…muddy weed-eater…mucky mucky carp.

Trebon’s other claim to fame is its spa, where people come from near and far to soak in peat. Envisioning the elegance of Germany’s Baden-Baden, I had to give it a whirl. Besides, I thought it would make good TV. Stepping into the huge institution, we checked in. Immersed in a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestambiance, we were ushered through.

My attendant didn’t really understand why I had an entourage (local guide/translator, producer, and cameraman). She just treated my like some deaf-mute she was assigned to bathe and massage. She pointed to room number 8. I stepped in to see a huge naked lady climbing into a stainless-steel tub. She must have meant number 9.

Number 9 was a tiny shared cubicle — someone else’s clothes already hung there — which led to a big steel tub. (I never saw my cubicle mate.) She mimed to take off everything. I kept my military-green swim suit on (afraid of a prankish combination of high-definition footage, my producer Simon’s sense of humor, and YouTube). She snarled.

Camera work is slow. She was anxious. The peat muck only flows at the top of the hour. I climbed into my stainless-steel tub, she pulled a plug, and I quickly disappeared under a rising sea of dark-brown peat broth (like a gurgling sawdust soup).

Then, my tub was full and all was silent. My ten toes looked cute poking out of the hot brown and glassy-still sea. She kept acting like I would overdose if I stayed in too long. But we filmed our sequence (one of the stupidest-looking show opens we’ve ever done — I looked like a naked Al Jolson).

Finally we were done shooting. Standing in the tub, I showered off the sludge. She ushered me into the massage room and laid me face-down. It was like a nurse’s office with a pile of dirty sheets stacked in the corner. Honza translated it in our guidebook as “hand massage.” That sounded redundant at best…vaguely kinky at worst. Honza said that’s literally what massages are called in Czech (rucni masaz).

We just wanted to film my shoulders. But she insisted on ignoring the camera’s needs and giving me a hand massage from my shoulder to just about where I didn’t want the camera to go. When the crew had what they needed, they left. I tried to go, too, but she wouldn’t let me. She had to complete the massage that every patient at the Trebon spa is entitled to. (Most people at the spa were there at their doctor’s orders, with expenses covered by insurance.)

I walked out with a mucky massage cream causing my shirt to stick to me, and without a clue what soaking in that peat soup was supposed to accomplish.

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Yellow Lampposts and Czech Flypaper

The honey-colored flypaper spirals down from a thumbtack, anchored in midair by its now-empty canister. Speckled with lifeless flies, it swings each time the violin bow pokes it.

It’s very tight quarters as the string quartet plays everything from Bach and Smetana to Czech folk favorites and 1930s anti-fascism blues. The string bass player grooves like a white Satchmo — his bow sliding in and out between diners under the table. My sweater is just in the way.

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The bandleader plays a 100-year-old black wood flute. During a break, I finger its mouthpiece — worn like an ancient marble relic by countless nights of music-making. The flautist sports a big bushy moustache just like the emperor — Franz Josef — who looks down from a yellowed poster.

Above the quartet is a high window. Teenage heads bob into sight — straining and craning on tiptoes to look in. Each time a song ends, beers giggle golden on rough wood tables as the roaring crowd claps and cheers for more. As the night wears on, there are fewer tourists clicking photos and more locals singing along. As the quartet sways together like seaweed in a nostalgic musical tide, it occurs to me that in little towns all over the world, no-name bands are causing strangers to smile…and drink more beer.

Crossing the Czech border, I stow my love of wine away, and become a beer-lover. Here, the beer hits your table like a glass of water does in the States. On my early trips — before I learned Czech beer is more powerful than the beer your father drank — I used to have a big beer at lunch and spend the rest of the day wobbly…sightseeing on what I called “Czech knees.” Now, when in the Czech Republic, I resist a momentum-killing beer at lunch and finish each day with a fresh draft beer (tonight’s is still trying to kill my momentum as I type).

Honza, the co-author of my Prague guidebook and my sidekick this week as we film a TV show on “The Czech Republic Beyond Prague,” told our camera, “These days, with the EU opening things up, so many Poles and Hungarians are going west to France and Germany to get jobs. But not the Czechs. We can’t find good enough beer anywhere but here. This beer keeps us glued to these bar chairs.”

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Back in my hotel, I climb to my attic room — careful not to bean myself on a medieval wooden beam. (I feel like I’m sleeping in a playground structure built before the age of steel piping.) I lean out my tiny dormer window, the sound of the boisterous bar small in the distance.

I am so happy for the freedom, peace, and prosperity countries like this are enjoying. The new, sturdy roof tiles around me are slick with a light rain. The street, wet and shiny, is as clean as a model-railroad town. Cars, while not expensive, are new and parked tidy as a jukebox. The scene is lit by cheap yellow lampposts. After forty bleak years of communism, the lampposts seem to be intentionally cheery…like a fashion accent decorating the line of pastel facades that arcs out of sight.

In small Czech towns, the facades are humble. Three centuries ago, each was given an individual personality — with far more variety and fun designed into them than even the famous gables of Amsterdam. And today — after a grime-filled 20th century — they sport new paint jobs: A mellow rainbow of simple solid pastels, with lines that accent the individuality of each facade. And behind each facade lives a family.