Forgotten War.(Review)

Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, by Joseph Hurka (Pushcart Press, 220 pp., $24.50)

Throughout the Cold War, there was resistance in Soviet-occupied Europe to the imposition of Communism. Sometimes this involved spectacular and violent assertions of national identity, as in the 1953 uprising in East Germany, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956. In the face of secret-police repression, the struggle was more usually invisible. In Ukraine, in Poland, in the Baltic states especially, a few die-hard individuals and small groups kept alive the hope of armed resistance, and were sometimes in touch with emigres and Western secret services. The history of such resistance lies in closed archives, and we have to make do with sketchy anecdotes.

At first, the Czechs appeared the most supine of the Soviet satellites. Numerically insignificant, the Communist parties of central and eastern Europe could not claim mass support. Dependent on the victorious Red Army, local Communists were further suspect as tools of a foreign power. The sole exception was Czechoslovakia, where the party gathered a third of the vote in elections. Even so, the Communists seized the country only by mounting a police coup, murdering such opponents as Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister, and imprisoning or forcing into exile tens of thousands of people. Notoriously, the St.B., or secret police, matched the KGB in deviousness and brutality. Yet under the surface, the will to repudiate Communism and reassert the national identity survived, as demonstrated by the Prague Spring of 1968, Charter 77, and finally the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

One who played his part in ensuring the continuity of Czech national identity was Josef Hurka. Born in the provincial town of Radnice, he had experienced firsthand the successive invasions of Nazism and Communism, escaped the country, and settled finally in Vermont. Evidently a masterful character and still very much alive, he told his son, also named Joseph, enough of this to root in him the allied emotions of Czech nationalism and love of freedom. Fields of Light is the son's tribute to the power of his father's stories. Beyond that, it reveals a brave man among the other hitherto unknown Czechs prepared to fight Communism in the aftermath of its illegitimate take-over.

It was already 1991 when Joseph Hurka, then in his twenties, left Vermont to visit the Czechoslovakia about which he had heard so much. His father's sister Mira had stayed behind the Iron Curtain, and she was in Prague to welcome him. This aunt and her friends showed him the city, with journeys farther afield to such well-known attractions as the castles of Karlstejn and Konopiste. The resulting guidebook passages and historical snippets are unfortunately banal, and sometimes downright silly. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived at Konopiste, to give an example, and until he was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914 he was one of the few people to advocate greater fairness for the ethnic minorities within the Habsburg empire. Hurka sees fit to ridicule him on the grounds that the castle is full of his hunting trophies.

When the Germans marched into Radnice in 1939, they entered the Hurka house. Some soldiers borrowed a mandolin for ...