A Bridge To Long Ago

Reprisals began. There was no bloodbath, but there was a tightening in every aspect of life. Borders were closed. Public meetings were forbidden. People were purged from the Communist party. The signers of the Manifesto lost their jobs. Simple as that. Czechoslovakia suddenly had some of the most educated menial workers in the world.

Emil was dropped from the army. He was expelled from the party. He could not find work in all of Prague. The drawer was closed. "I kept looking and looking, but no one would hire me," he says. "I could not understand. Finally a man told me that everyone in Prague was afraid to hire me. He said I would have to find work outside the city."

The greatest distance runner of all time became a member of a geological survey team, which searched for minerals and water in the backlands of the country. The job basically was digging, doing construction. He dug. He lifted 110-pound sacks of cement. He left home and lived in a trailer for stretches of 10 and 14 days. The work began at seven in the morning and ended at eight at night. When he came home for a fortnight, he was exhausted. Dana mostly was alone in their house on the hill, worrying.

"I did not want him to go to jail," she says. "My father was in jail under the Germans. The Gestapo came in the middle of the night and took him away. He was at Dachau, Buchenwald, later in a prison in Brno. He was a colonel in the Czech army. The Nazis kept him as a hostage. He lost all of those years in jail.

"I did not want this to happen to Emil. I told him I did not want him to be a hero. What good is it if someone says five or 10 years after you are dead that you are a hero? Maybe don't be such a big hero. Maybe be alive, instead."

Perhaps Emil misinterpreted the signals Dana sent him. He was under pressure from the Czech sports authorities. They called him an ingrate. Who was he to go against the government? The government had made him a champion. He lived two times, three times better than most people. Where was his gratitude? The secret police visited. There never were any physical threats, but there always were requests to sign a public statement. Why not? Sign. The pen was offered again and again.

Finally, in 1971, Emil signed.

A story appeared in the Communist daily, Rude Pravo. It gave the impression that Emil had repudiated the Manifesto. All he had done by signing, in fact, was to voice a qualified acceptance of the current system. But Rude Pravo did not carry any qualifications. The act was what mattered. The only importance was Emil's signature at the bottom. The reader would nod and say, "Ah, yes, he signed." It was not a happy moment.

"Emil made two mistakes," Dana says. "First, he did not read what he signed. The journalist who wrote the story was not able to capture Emil's—what is the word? Heart? Maybe not heart. He did not capture the meaning of Emil. Second, Emil did not talk with me before he signed. If he did, I don't think he would have done it.

"You have to understand, though, it was a time—oh, it's just hard to explain. Emil is a Communist. You have to know that. He wants the Communist system to work the way it is supposed to work. His father was a Communist. There are people who think he got something for signing that piece of paper. Let them think what they want. We got nothing. Our lives were not changed one bit."