Part Three of Four
A pickpocket in Prague; memories of a painful epiphany in Prison; and a Klezmer dinner in Krakow
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure,
whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are
of good report; if there be any virtue,
and if there
be any praise, think on these things. ( Paul
to the
Philippians, chapter 4, verse 8…King James and also
the New International version)
A memoir by Robert R. Schwarz
Mary Alice and I
arrived in Prague as fatigued tourists .With two knee replacements, my wife had
wielded a cane from the start, and I , who had been lugging a
heavy camera bag in and out of
crowded churches and up and down castle
ramparts , had been slowed down to her pace during our half-day walking
excursions . All 24 in our group had
also been suffering the nuisance of
having to constantly fidget with
the excursion communication
devices hung around our necks with dangling
earplug wires. But we did learn
much from comprehensive lectures given by our guides
, lectures which never seemed to pause
even when we were crossing busy intersections or entering an
elevator or when we scattered into
smaller groups. ( I had to zone out occasionally from listening to a never-ending liturgy of history dates . )
 |
| One of five guides we had... |
I can think of only one really bad thing that happened to us during the entire trip… Mary Alice and I one morning hopped on a tram to do some exploring of this culturally dynamic Czech Republic city . We were observing how the city center appeared as gray cement, a mammoth of rectangle-shaped buildings looming with similar architecture. Our guides in Berlin , Dresden, and now Prague had told us how Russian authorities , when restoring these severely bombed cities after the war, imposed their constrictive Socialist philosophy of art and architecture, often choosing only one—likely unimaginative—architect to design the entire city's reconstruction . One of our guides here had pointed to a large area blanketed with five-story, identical apartment buildings: "We call these Commie Condos, " the guide had said with muffled mirth.
Back to that bad thing…At our tram's first stop , a somewhat shabbily dressed , heavily whiskered
man got on at the rear door and stood
close to where Mary Alice and I were
standing while looking out a window. At the next stop, the man got off quickly, in sync with the jolt of our stopping tram and
disappeared into a dense web of streets and pedestrians
. A minute later, responding to a conditional
reflex that acts up whenever I am traveling with foreign crowds, I brushed a hand across my left pocket. My wallet was gone, along with $150 in Czech money ,
driver's license, and debit and credit cards ! ( My passport was in a safe on
our hotel room , and within an hour ,
the bank and credit card companies had
cancelled my passwords . I
managed to satisfactorily take care of the rest when I got home.)
I was angry about
losing my wallet to someone whom I imagined was now amused by a vision
of my anger as he bragged to a cohort about his criminal skills . I knew I needed an infallible antidote for this anger.
Thought-blocking would not work. I did something an hour later which I alone was not capable of; I asked God to
stir this criminal's heart into empathy for me and his past victims and that this be followed by a permanent change of his heart
about all his criminal behavior .
 |
| Teenagers from South Korea and their nun music director ( center ) on a European concert tour, stopping over at our hotel in Prague |
That same day Mary Alice and I visited the church and monastery of Our Lady of the Snows, founded by Emperor Charles IV in the mid-14th Century. Here I now thanked God for giving me the willing spirit to pray for that man on the tram . I recalled the Apostle Paul's words of perennial comfort for those who hit hard bumps on life's road: All things work for the good for those who love God.
Before
retiring that night , I shared all my
thoughts with Mary Alice, a true Christian. " You know something, dear, maybe the whole
reason for me taking this tour was to …"
".What
, Bob? To have your wallet stolen ? "
I tried to smile as she turned off the bed table light.
***
 |
| A Czech family in Prague kindly poses for my camera |
There had been no road sign saying "You Are Now Czechoslovakia ", nor would we see any such signs border-crossing signs during any of our bus rides. Had two world wars made many Europeans dislike hateful of new, imposed national border signs ? Reflecting on border crossings as we exited the Czech Republic rekindled in me a life-changing epiphany which occurred in August of 1950 while in a maximum penitentiary cell in Bratislava, the capital of what was then named Czechoslovakia .
I was a 25-year-old freelance journalist who
had been entrapped into illegally
crossing this country's border with
Austria, believing my late wife Judith and I were actually entering our
destination of Hungary . There was no sign, human or otherwise, to be
seen. Judith waited in our car while , I, camera in hand and passport left behind in my jacket in the car, I approached
a weathered , large wooden road block on
an unmarked , deserted countryside
road. I took a few steps around the
barrier and snapped a photo of a quaint
looking shack about two hundred yards
down the road . Immediately armed Czech
( or, likely, Russian) soldiers lunged at me from a thicket of weeds and seized me and the camera.
The main square in Krakow
I was freed after ten days imprisonment , thanks to Judith's prompt drive to an American embassy in Vienna . [ note: my parents received this telegram from the State Department soon after my release: "American Embassy Vienna requests inform your son Robert safe and letter will follow…Allyn C. Donaldson, Director Special Consular Services." ] But a much greater freedom had occurred within that prison cell . Having been intimidated into signing a long confession which contained not a word in English nor any translation, and being acutely aware of the current Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, I feared I was a likely candidate for one of those infamous Siberian concentration camps known as a Gulag. I had continually paced the my cell floor , in a desperation foreign to my senses . I can only describe it by comparing it--as I would later--to the wild mink who, when snared by a trap--has been known to chew off a leg to gain freedom.
Here I report that epiphany:
For the first time in my life , I cried
out to God in a voice with all the
honest and sincerity I could muster. " God," I cried, "I promise
that if You free me, I will keep all Your Ten Commandments all my life .
"
The epiphany pierced me
so suddenly and deeply that I was
senseless for a long moment. Then,
with labored breaths of fear and
shame, I realized I was actually trying
to con God ! Hiding in a cloud of self-denial, I had reverted to my childhood
strategy of getting my way: say anything and make it believable! My promise, my sincerity before God , was as
unreliable as those "proclamations" of alcoholics I had written
about as a newspaper reporter. Those men and women who believed with their might--as did I in my cell--when they said , ,"Me an alcoholic ? Hey, I can stop drinking anytime
I want ! ."
Worse though, I now realized
an awful truth about Bob Schwarz , this fairly well-behaved
journalist with a passion for facts and truth: He was absolutely incapable of keeping his promise to obey all those Ten Commandments for the rest of his life ! Not
today or tomorrow nor, maybe, even by next year.
Coming to terms with that particular dark side
of my humanity (we all , in part. struggle with) I felt a pang of a radical change in my human essence. My life-long path demanding me to take a step forward was learning how
to walk with an omnipresent, omniscient,
and omnipotent God--dying to self..
***
 |
| Perhaps one of the cutest images among the more than 500 taken |
Our Viking group spent most of the next day in Krakow's Jewish quarter and inside the Wawel Castle cathedral where Pope John Paul II delivered homilies as a cardinal. We took photographs of homes where cosmetic titans Max Factor and Helena Rubenstein had lived. We learned, sadly, that the pre-war Krakow Jewish population before the Holocaust was 65,000 , and today is 150.
That night we sat
down to a Klezmer dinner and heard a trio play
life-celebrating Yiddish music. We ate only feet away from the
musicians (a woman violinist, a bass fiddle player and an accordionist ) in a
small dining room with window views of
narrow cobblestone streets. Our
small room pulsated with a surreal
rhythm of animated conversations, a
swaying violinist, and waitresses constantly trotting back and with steins of beer and plates of turkey
meat, cold cabbage covered with a purple vinaigrette, and chicken broth with matzo balls. Fingers
drummed table tops in beat with Klezmer
music. When we heard the Fiddler on the
Roof melody , " If I Were a Rich Man," there were murmurs of
nostalgia.
I left my table for a few minutes to get a close look at the photographs on one wall; two were autographed by actors Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley from the move shot on locations in Krakow,
Schindler's List . Also
autographed was a photo of the movie's director, Steven Spielberg. When the conversation at our table turned to
the group's morning excursion to
Auschwitz, I mentioned the name of one of my favorite martyred saints, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe , who at that death camp prevailed upon the guards to execute him by starvation
in a cell rather than Fr. Kolbe. .
On other walls were maps showing how the different borders of Poland and the Czech Republic were often changed by the whim of power and ambitious kings and dictators. Such events always forced resettlement of Jewish populations, we learned. " It made misery and a mess, " the restaurant manager told me.
On other walls were maps showing how the different borders of Poland and the Czech Republic were often changed by the whim of power and ambitious kings and dictators. Such events always forced resettlement of Jewish populations, we learned. " It made misery and a mess, " the restaurant manager told me.
 |
At the Klezmer restaurant |
A wave from my wife Mary Alice
Mary Alice and I the next day attended a Mass in the St.
Francis Basilica, a 17th Century church with soul-stirring beauty of
enormous oil paintings of religious
scenes, stone and wood carvings
of Biblical saints , and many interior chapels adorned for centuries with different, beautiful sacramentals. The knees of
countless number of worshipers through
the ages had worn the wooden pew kneelers into concave shapes. At least fifteen people were waiting outside a confessional
for their turn with a priest. ( One could only imagine how long this line
was when peoples' virtues were repeatedly tested during the horrors and
daily stress of Nazi and Russian occupations. )
 |
| Our Viking group at a holy place in the Krakow Jewish quarter |
Mary Alice leaned her cane against a pew and suggested we sit for a spell. She was still perturbed from being mooned (exposing himself ) a few minutes earlier by a man at the church entrance. At the time, I had moved ahead of her and did not see the incident but heard her shout—it echoed through the basilica—" Stop it, you dirty old man!"
We left Krakow ,
which had become our itinerary
favorite . Our first stop before our
300-mile ride to our tour finish line at Warsaw , was the Jasna Gore monastery
, Poland's holiest shrine and home of
the well-known Black Madonna painting. While in the monastery, I became quite impatient with my heart and
intellect. I still didn't know exactly why I was here--and there were only a few days left to find out. I yearned deeply to come
home with something important to write about for my readers.
 |
| Wawel cathedral ( and castle ) where Pope John Paul II spent several years as a cardinal in Krakow |
It didn't help that I was discomforted here by the holiday-like scene of literally thousands of tourists streaming in and out of the monastery taking photographs; I was , at first , conspicuously one of them. I also had been bitten by some petty scrupulosity: I didn't like the several "ticket office " windows here where people were lining up to leave or record their written prayers with "prayer agents."
Our thoughts that night turned to Warsaw, our next stop.
End of Part Three.
Part Four and the
scars of communism
will appear next week.
All comments are welcome.
rrschwarz71@comcast.net
© 2022 Robert R. Schwarz
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