E s c a p e
f r o m
B R A T I S L A V A
“With three escorts and a gun in my side, I was taken, blindfolded, out to a parked car. We drove for a half hour and stopped. I could hear the Danube flowing below us. I was led into something, turned right, then left, then right again. My blindfold was removed and I found myself in a cave, lighted by a tar torch. I watched the bats fly out of the cave.”
“The captain said, ‘Now, Mr. Hvasta, either you sign a confession like Dusek and Sporka or you won’t see daylight again.’”
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Last week, after eighteen months of wondering, I finally decided to go to the library to search for an article I was told was published in the Saturday Evening Post in May of 1954. I rolled the microfiche film through the months and suddenly, there it was in front of me on the screen: John Hvasta’s story of his escape from Leopoldov Prison and his twenty-one months on the run as a fugitive behind the Iron Curtain.
Eighteen months ago I was in East Central Europe where Jerry introduced me to John Hvasta over dinner. I really had no connection to his story but little pieces of it were so familiar and his narrative so riveting, I felt like I had stepped into a John LeCarré novel set in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Even before the story began, I was lost in the Old World atmosphere of the little Hungarian restaurant we had found just a quiet block from the streetcars of Bratislava, Slovakia. We had ordered plates of Hungarian goulash and in a corner there was a man playing a cymbalum, a hammered dulcimer-like instrument that, along with certain gypsy music and a Liszt rhapsody, is Hungary.
Jerry and John were friends from their Pell days, and Claiborne Pell plays an important role in the story. When I had met Pell several years earlier I had never heard of his connection with Czechoslovakia. Like everyone else, I knew him only as the man behind student loan legislation . . . Pell Grants. But Pell’s father had served as a foreign envoy for FDR and Pell himself spent several years in the Foreign Service serving at the United Nations, in Italy and in Czechoslovakia. Many years later Pell had become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Jerry had been his staff director.
But now, Jerry and I were in the Slovak Republic on behalf of the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava to work with the new parliament on management and parliamentary procedure issues. It came to be an experience from which I think Jerry, and certainly I, gained much more knowledge and insight into democracy than we ever imparted. And as in John Hvasta’s story, it was also an adventure into the dark world behind the Iron Curtain made all the more powerful by the bones of the old regime still floating to the surface everywhere we turned.
Not only had many of the actual events mentioned in Hvasta’s account taken place just blocks from where we were sitting, but the story took on a certain immediacy by the fact that under the country’s controversial Prime Minister, Vladimir Mečiar, Slovakia is the one former Soviet satellite whose transition from Eastern Bloc communism to Western democracy is not going well. In many respects the country has begun to slip back toward the authoritarian system it escaped with the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
As an example, Mečiar had been in a long-running battle to discredit his nemesis, the president of Slovakia, Michal Kováč, to force him to step down. It was so serious that President Clinton had sent Mečiar a letter reportedly stating that he was “anxious” about the conflict between the Slovak government and President Kováč.
Shortly before we arrived in the country, Michal Kováč, Jr., the president’s son, was abducted on his way to work. Several cars blocked his way and a man in an army uniform made him step out of his car. He was grabbed by other men in civilian clothes who overpowered him with gas and electric shocks, and then poured two bottles of whiskey down his throat. Then they took him 12 km across the border into Austria and deposited him, beaten and unconscious, in front of a police station. The incident was ordered by Mečiar to intimidate and embarrass the president whose son was wanted by Interpol for business fraud against some German firms, and it would place Kováč in Austria where he was subject to arrest and extradition. Later there was the mysterious death of a former policeman named Remias who had assisted journalists with the investigation into the kidnapping.
Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, a former boxer, threatening a reporter.
I got a taste of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that existed in the country after a business breakfast one morning. I was discussing the work we were doing at the new Slovak parliament with an American Air Force colonel who was stationed in the country in some liaison capacity with the Slovak military. When I began to talk about Prime Minister Mečiar, almost in a panic the colonel’s head jerked over his left shoulder, then his right, to see if anyone was listening, then he quickly changed the subject.
Experienced at recognizing vestiges of communist cloak and dagger, Jerry brought to my attention the three men in the lobby of our hotel on the Danube River. These men stood unobtrusively near the entrance of the hotel seeming to have nothing to do but watch faces . . . which is exactly what they were doing. And there were a number of them at the entrance to the new parliament building where Jerry and I would exchange our passports for ID tags each day. They were usually wearing dark, nondescript suits, but occasionally we would spot one dressed in “Soviet Bloc lavender.” We’d both seen them before, in other countries of the former East—those shiny suits in various shades of purple and lavender which for some inexplicable reason had become fashionable in communist East and Central Europe. So while our interpreter sat behind us in the parliament chamber balcony interpreting the floor speeches, Jerry and I were leaning over the railing pointing out to each other yet another lavender suit. Of course, we figured the Slovaks were saying the same thing about us . . . “look, today both of them are wearing those silly navy blue blazers!”
* * *
The Slovac National Council building where we worked.
Jerry and I spent our days meeting with members of Slovakia’s new National Council to discuss parliamentary rules of procedure as practiced in the U. S. House and Senate. Their old parliamentary rules stemmed from practices going clear back to the late 1960’s written for a largely ceremonial body which existed only to ratify and legitimize decisions made by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Even as we were explaining the importance of verbatim legislative proceedings for a transparent legislature—the need for recorded votes and the timely publication of the record of debates—I was gaining an appreciation for the fact that when a legislature is uncertain of what it has done, it leaves a lot of leeway for an activist government to interpret the law as it sees fit. Even with our open government, we have problems defining legislative intent.
Because our systems are so different, much of what we would have been able to explain wasn’t directly applicable. And I think the State Department knew that. I believe they recognized that for these new legislators, most of whom spent their childhood schooldays learning the Russian language and the evils of capitalism, any dialogue with individuals steeped in the principles and traditions of American representative democracy would be beneficial. We shared our observations with Ambassador Russell in an embassy meeting at the end of our stay.
* * *
Hungarians, who make up 11% of the population of Slovakia, are viewed as a minority problem. More troublesome for the Slovaks is that it is a minority associated with a neighboring country which has a history of dominance in the region. Separated by cultural differences and especially by language, the Hungarians justifiably have three of their own political parties.
As with the other factions, most or our meetings were held in committee rooms resembling those on Capitol Hill. What was strikingly different for us was that we were always seated on the dais along with the legislators. To congressional staff who are best unseen and unheard, it was like having Sandra Day O’Connor invite us to sit in one of the big leather chairs in the Supreme Court chamber.
The Slovak National Theater in Bratislava was featured in the James Bond movie," The Living Daylights", where the cellist was shot by 007.
In a comment that speaks volumes about the changing borders and troubled history of the region, one of the Hungarian legislators told us that her father had lived in five countries in the same house! As our hosts’ discussion digressed toward Slovak injustices, I sat there looking across the horseshoe-shaped dais amazed at how much the handsome Hungarian men looked like my Uncle Fred. I had learned that Uncle Fred was Hungarian when, as a boy, I asked my parents about his exotic and mysterious name. Later, I was a little disappointed to learn that Uncle Zoltan Frederic Balazs was born in Indiana. But the fascination returned when I discovered that he was in the Ardennes Forest in December of 1944 fighting the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge. In Slovakia and Hungary I came across a number of Zoltans and a number of Balazs’s.
* * *
Most of our discussions involved an interpreter and I’ve learned a lot about interpreters over the years. Many do a little of their own editing to shorten the turnaround time. In one country one of our interpreters was let go because she kept injecting her own political commentary as she translated. The best I’ve witnessed was a young Japanese woman who took lightning-quick shorthand. When the speaker paused after each unusually long passage, she would continue to write for exactly three more seconds to catch up. Her head would give a perfectionist’s nod as she finished her line and lifted her pen, then she would deliver a crisp, beautifully spoken English translation that left no one in doubt that it was as clean and precise as the workings of the Nikon camera she carried.
Word selection, however, is always a problem, especially when it comes to political ideology. One morning when Mrs. Dubrovna was discussing her recent election campaign with us in the dining room of the Slovak parliament, the word “manifesto” kept popping up – a word full of connotation for Westerners. Finally, our American handler asked a few clarifying questions of Dubrovna, in Slovak, and after a short discussion we all agreed that “platform” was the more accurate word.
The best example of an unfortunate word selection (and I’m not making this up) came from a seminar in Hamburg, Germany in which one of the items listed on the agenda for discussion read, “Germany After Reunification: Challenges and Opportunities for the Fourth Reich”. A new agenda was typed up after we explained to Dr. Schierwater (who in fact had been a member of the Hitler Youth) that, although to him, “reich” simply meant the next government, it was a dirty word in America and we really didn’t want to leave Germany with a document in our briefcases containing the phrase, “Opportunities for the Fourth Reich.”
This was the second residence of the ruler of the Hapsburg Empire, Maria Theresa, at the time of the American Revolution.
* * *
I had read that this part of Europe -- Bohemia, Moravia and the Vah Valley in Slovakia -- was famous for its health spas and for some foolish reason a mud bath had risen to the top of my list of things to do while in Eastern Europe. I had seen these spas in the movies – old European castles converted into lavish health resorts where I could pretend that I had lots of old money and little more to do with my time than walk the halls in a five-pound terry robe between massages.
Before we moved to the hotel on the Danube, Jerry and I had been lodged at Pension No 16, a B & B the State Department had selected. When I explained to the owner’s wife, a beautiful local movie star, that I wanted “to go to a spa, a legitimate spa,” she said her brother was the manager of the Balnea Splendid Grand Spa in Pieštany and as her guest she would arrange a mud bath and a massage at no charge. So on our day off, while Jerry shopped for souvenirs in Bratislava, I took a bus halfway to Poland and the Tatras Mountains for my mud bath.
What I had forgotten was that I was in the former East . . . Soviet East, and what I found in Pieštany was the “State Medical Sanatoria,” a shockingly grim institution . . . and probably Moscow’s flagship for “unproven methods.” They treated me to a lunch of potato soup in a 1960’s lime green cafeteria, then walked me the three hundred yards of hallway to the mud bath area. I sat down on a bench in long, narrow hallway with the most bizarre cast of characters in all of Europe suddenly feeling like I was Woody Allen sitting in a Turkish bath in east Cairo. At the end of the bench sat a straight-backed Indian in a turban who looked just like Walter Mathau in Hopscotch. When my turn came I entered one of the compartments separated by curtains, stripped down and hopped onto the table. Eventually an out-of-work Russian soldier-type came in and, with a giant fuel nozzle, squirted black mud the consistency of warm fudge and the smell of late-summer swamp all over me, then wrapped me up in old army blankets. After a half-hour I showered 25 pounds of mud down the drain and left, feeling not a bit healthier than before. When I made my way back to the manager’s office to tell him I was ready for the massage, he said it was too late – all the prostitutes had gone home.
* * *
Jerry was 60 going on 45 and had spent a good part of his career in the Foreign Service. He and his wife spent their honeymoon aboard the ship that took him to Australia for his first posting as a Foreign Service officer. He had lived in a number of countries, spoke several languages and was conversant in most any subject. Each evening we would wander through the winding medieval streets of old Bratislava to find another quaint restaurant. Crossing streets with names such as “Leningradska” - revealing the legacy of the last fifty years – I commented on my sudden insight that all the beautiful women of Bratislava happened to be from Hungary. Both of us had been to Hungary and agreed that there were so many attractive women in Budapest that, as Jerry put it, “the Gabor sisters had to leave Hungary to get noticed.”
By far the most rewarding aspect of our work in Bratislava was the occasional informal meeting with one of the new Slovak legislators in which we recognized that, in effect, we were speaking to a “founding father” and at least one “founding mother” of the new Slovakia. Some, like Milan Ftáčnik, who spoke excellent English and was one of the architects of the new Rules of Procedure was inspiring in his grasp of democracy, in the rule of law, and in his understanding of the revolutionary changes he and his colleagues were trying to bring to the old Czechoslovakia.
In spite of this, however, Slovakia is so far a stark example of a democracy fallen flat. Prime Minister Mečiar, a Moscow trained lawyer (and former boxer), has systematically taken steps to purge the ministries of disloyal bureaucrats, stifle academic freedom, muzzle the media and take control the state secret police. The previous November, shortly after the elections, the state television and radio council found its membership gutted during an unusual night session of Parliament. By the next morning, 17 of the 18 members had been replaced. And in 1995, ten newspapers across the country published nearly blank front pages to protest threats from members of Mečiar’s party to impose sharply increased taxes that could force them out of business.
There was also a “Universities Law” adopted which transferred final decision making power regarding curriculum, the establishment of departments, faculty promotions, and the granting of degrees from individual universities to the Ministry of Education. Students and rectors were screaming. One reporter wrote, “For any Western journalist, it’s hard to understand what is going on here. This doesn’t happen in a democracy.”
One new law jumps right off the page for any American. Called the “Protection of the Republic” law, it forbids demonstrations with “subversive intentions” and the “spreading of false information damaging to Slovak national interests.” Now if the U. S. president or the Congress were to suggest that public demonstrations, and all criticism against Washington should be declared illegal . . . well, in the American tradition, Sam Donaldson’s toupee would catch on fire, Utahns would be pulling out their Constitutions, and Texans would be unlocking their gun cabinets.
The facts of life in Slovakia are that there is almost no concept of a party playing the role of the “loyal opposition,” and that the important check of a free press is not functioning. More insidious is that there is a reluctance to criticize the government for fear of some form of reprisal and worse, criticism of the government and its policies by the press is seen by the populace as criticism of their country and unpatriotic. I have had my own run-ins with the U. S. media, but I gained a profound new appreciation for a free press after what I saw in Slovakia.
* * *
We took a boat trip 10 km up the Danube River toward Vienna, Austria to visit Devin Castle. This particular piece of ground has a remarkable claim on history because, for centuries, it has created a line on maps that divided Europe. This very point on the continent seems to have always marked the farthest advance of the waves of conquering empires from both the east and the west. At one time or another it marked the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation, the Mongul Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, and the Soviet Bloc. This rock, towering high above the confluence of the Morava and the Danube has been built upon for thousands of years and the castle is mentioned in records as early as the 9th century. In the 1500’s it was rebuilt by the Hungarian king of Poland and prince of Transylvania, Stephen Bathory, and in 1809 it was almost completely destroyed by Napoleon’s troops.
Describing Europe after World War II, Churchill marked the opening of the Cold War with the words: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.” Here at Devin Castle, the Iron Curtain ran right down the middle of the Danube River. Rising from the bank of the river was a narrow strip of dense forest which formed the no-man’s-land between Austria and Communist Czechoslovakia. Those who attempted to flee into Austria were imprisoned at Devin Castle. It wasn’t until the heady days of November 1989 that the Soviet barbwire at Devin came down.
From the high cliffs and ramparts of the castle I looked west, across the Danube into Austria at a panorama that is possibly the most serene and pastoral sight I have ever seen. Like a background in a Gainsborough painting, the rays of the sun were shining through the autumn clouds onto gentle green meadows and small stands of forest, with Strauss’s Blue Danube snaking away toward the Vienna Woods, Linz and Germany. It seemed like I could see all the way to France. Looking downstream, back toward Bratislava, the river narrowed and disappeared into Hungary to flow past Budapest, past Belgrade in Yugoslavia, and finally through Romania and into the Black Sea. For all its turbulent history this was one of the most peaceful and beautiful spots I’d ever experienced. But beyond that indelible image, having witnessed Mečiar’s charge toward the past, I will always associate Slovakia with the infamy of the Iron Curtain and John Hvasta’s escape from behind it.
Yesterday, Jerry told me that he didn’t think John Hvasta ever saw Gabriela again. Unfortunately, the article is not yet in a form I can post.
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