When My Grandfather Cried Velvet Tears: A Story of Hope

Tears of Hope, Tears of Pain

It had been a year that had vacillated between agony and ecstasy. There were tears of hope and bitter tears of anguish. My youngest brother had been born in May. Six weeks later my Grandmother died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-one. Although I was only seven years old, a part of my innocence died that summer as well. For months my mother merely went through the motions of existence. Without her mother, a shell of her former self. As I was searching for my own identity and trying to decipher how I fit into this new existence, it seemed that hope had possibly vanished. To distract myself, I clung to the rock, which was my Grandpa Svagera.

Removing the Innocence of Youth

At seven years old he was still only Grandpa to me. I didn’t really know a lot about him, only that he loved me dearly. He was an expert baker of kolacě and he always had his accordion with him. I knew that he had been to Czechoslovakia before, but I did not inherently know why. His frequent trips to me were merely fun trips to the airport. Special presents when he returned. I did not truly understand the magnitude of what he was doing. Nor did I understand the danger that he was exposing himself to. What an Iron Curtain was or why it was in Europe was far beyond anything I could comprehend.

The summer waned and the fall of 1989 approached. I began my second grade year of school in a blur of emotions. The face of Central and Eastern Europe was radically changing by the day. I was, however, engrossed in trading baseball cards and watching cartoons. In a world a far removed from today’s instantaneous news and information, I was totally oblivious to life outside of my hometown.

Reclaiming Hope

Days had turned into weeks and my family, little by little, settled into a new pattern of normalcy. Life without Grandma was hard and seemed void of happiness. My baby brother was sick-all of the time. Mom and Dad were so worried and distraught. Day after day, it seemed that everyone was simply going through the motions in their own way. I was fed and clothed but left largely to my own seven and a half year old devices, soothing myself with tears of hope that things would magically return to normal.

I can not remember what the weather was like that Friday, November 17th, nor what I learned in school. All I remember is the sheer elation of seeing Grandpa Svagera’s conversion van parked in the driveway as I ran home from school. Grandpa being there meant it was going to be an amazing weekend!

The Velvet Tears of a Hero

There is nothing that could have prepared me for what I was to find as I entered the house though. Still to this day I feel that passing through the front door that day, I unknowingly had the weight of history dropped upon me. In that instant I became part of my family’s story. Becoming wise beyond my seven years, I felt like I was part of history. I became proud of my last name that afternoon.

I never knew my Grandpa to watch very much television. He was a doer, always busy painting, woodworking, practicing accordion. To see him stretched out on the floor meant only one thing, he was napping. “Taking ten,” as he called it. Yet there in the family room that afternoon lay Grandpa, not sleeping, but actively glued to the television, tears streaming down his face.

At that tender age I was not accustomed to seeing grownups cry. Sure, Mom had been doing lots of crying since Grandma died, but the men closest to me I could barely ever recall seeing cry. So why would Grandpa be crying about a television show? Especially a show on CNN? That was definitely not a cartoon channel! I had been anxiously awaiting the chance to watch Disney shows all day, and now Grandpa was watching CNN?

Witnessing History Being Made

Looking at the screen all I could make out was people on a dark street, holding candles and waving what looked like red, white and blue banners. Where was this I wondered? In an age where protests were not currently in style, I had never seen a mass of people gathered like this before. Then it hit me. The television reporters were not speaking in a language I had ever heard before. There were red, white and blue flags being waved but they were not the star spangled banners I was familiar with from school.

After retrieving the obligatory snack from the kitchen, I had assumed my position next to Grandpa. It was time for questions; “What are we watching, why are you crying, and what are you doing here today?” I received only a four word answer, “we are free Karličku!” Which of course raised a host of other questions. Who was free, I thought we already were free? Then the family story started pouring out.

The Blood That Runs Through My Veins

As a little boy it’s hard to imagine your grandparents as anything but old. Then to find out that your grandpa was once your age and had had a father too is mind blowing. Yet as I listened to Grandpa tell his story, through tears of hope, about his own Tatá (Czech for Daddy), I couldn’t help but to hang on to every word. Not only did Grandpa have his own Mamínka and Tatínku, but I was, by default, part of a vast history which I’d never known.

His was just a name to me, John, just like my own Daddy’s. I had seen it on his headstone before. He never lived long enough to know that he had grandchildren, he never even saw all of his own children graduate from high school. Yet his heroics were the stuff of legend, not just in the Svagera family, but in the history of a great small nation as well.

The Defining of a Man

It’s an epic story of an escape from tyrants and a return to defend a country which did not even exist. A rise to the ranks of an officer in the Czechoslovak Foreign Legion and a glorious return to a liberated homeland. He could have been an officer in the newly formed army of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The offer was declined in the name of love. As he farmed the fields of Nebraska though he never forgot the beloved fields of his homeland. The land his father was buried in, the land where his mother, four sisters and a brother still lived.

The Weight of The World: Velvet Tears of Hope and Rage

My Grandpa was fourteen years old when he sat with his father and heard the radio report that Tomáš Mašarýk had died in office. John had personally interacted with him, in Connecticut in 1917, in Prahá in October of 1918. Grandpa was fifteen when he sat with his father alone in a dark kitchen. It was 1938 and the Anschluss had absconded with Bohemia and Moravia. The radio reported that the Nazis had systematically executed a slew of Czech officers, John’s friends. He would have been one of them had he stayed. John sat and bitterly wept on the shoulder of his eldest son. The next day he once again enlisted with the United States Army. Sick and crippled though he was, from being gassed in World War I, he felt bound by duty and honor to help redeem his homeland.

Grandpa was still in the South Pacific when Edvard Beneš had triumphantly returned to Prague in May of 1945. He had called his father at the earliest available time to rejoice, sharing tears of renewed hope, albeit over the phone. Perhaps mercifully, John passed away in 1947, months before the communist regime would once again darken his homeland for 40 years. Four sisters, brother in laws and multiple nieces and nephews were locked behind a seemingly impermeable iron curtain.

Home To a Place He’d Never Been Before

After thirty years of letters and infrequent phone calls, Grandpa made his first trip to Czechoslovakia in 1980. Communists still ruled with an iron fist but he simply could not wait any longer to visit the family homeland. He would make three more trips before 1989. Grandpa was his father’s son, part of his soul was imbedded in the soil of the Czech lands. Embracing his aunts, uncles, and cousins fulfilled a lifetime of yearning.

Now, laying on the floor next to Grandpa on this otherwise nondescript November Friday, I understood his tears. Not as a seven year old, but as part of a lineage that wanted nothing more than a free homeland. As I listened to shouts and cheers of “Havel na hrad!” on the television, the deep significance of Grandpa’s tears struck me. They were his tears, they were the tears of his father, they were the tears of a homeland which was finally free. Velvet tears for a bloodless revolution that at last had liberated his own father’s tears for a country which he loved more than life itself.