When Prague Said Thank You: The Komenský Club, the Gratias Agit Award, and a Long Road Home

There are certain moments in your life that you understand while they are happening.

And then there are others that require twenty years.

In June of 2005, I found myself in Prague standing beside my teacher and friend Dr. Míla Šašková-Pierce as representatives of the Czech Komenský Club at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

We had traveled there to receive the Gratias Agit Award, presented by the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to people and organizations who have helped preserve and promote the good name of the Czech Republic abroad.

I knew it was an honor, of course I did.

And I knew enough to understand that a college student from Nebraska did not ordinarily find himself traveling to Prague to receive an award from a foreign government.

But I am not sure I understood it.

Not really.

Twenty-one years later, I think I understand it differently.

Because when I look back at that ceremony now, I don’t see only two representatives of a university club standing in Prague.

I see Mila, I see my great-grandfather Jan, and I see all my family in the Czech Republic.

And somewhere in the middle of them all, somewhat bewildered by the whole thing, I see myself.

What I understand now is that there were generations standing in that room with us.

A Little Czech Club in Nebraska

The Czech Komenský Club was hardly new when I became part of it.

It had been founded at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1904, at a time when Czech could still be heard regularly in homes, businesses, churches and gathering halls throughout Nebraska.

The purpose was simple enough: preserve the Czech language, literature, history and culture.

But simple things sometimes become sacred when people keep doing them long enough.

More than a century later, students were still gathering.

Still learning words their great-grandparents had spoken.

Still listening to Czech music, watching Czech films, inviting speakers, and learning about the strange little country in the middle of Europe that had somehow planted such extraordinarily deep roots in Nebraska soil.

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs specifically recognized the Komenský Club in 2005 for its long service preserving Czech heritage, language and culture in the United States, as well as its historical support for democratic development in the Czech lands.

The official award booklet identified our representatives:

Academic adviser, Dr. Míla Šašková-Pierce.

President and Czech-language student, Charles Svagera.

Even typing that now feels strange.

Because there are some sentences in your own biography that still feel as though they ought to belong to somebody else.

The Woman Standing Beside Me

Yet the more extraordinary story was standing next to me.

I recently wrote about Mila and the photograph taken of her during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

She was twenty years old then.

A college student.

Tanks had rolled into her city.

The Warsaw Pact invasion was crushing the brief experiment in freedom we now remember as the Prague Spring, and there she was, in a photograph that would travel around the world, confronting the reality of an occupied homeland.

She eventually had to leave.

Vienna.

Belgium.

Eventually landing in America, first in Kansas, and then, in 1989, Nebraska.

There is something almost impossible about tracing that road and realizing where it eventually led.

Because thirty-seven years after that young woman watched foreign tanks enter Prague, she returned to Prague not as a refugee.

Not as someone whose government considered her inconvenient.

Not as someone wondering whether she would be allowed to stay.

She returned as an honored guest of a free Czech Republic.

I don’t know that I fully appreciated what that must have meant for her in 2005.

I was young.

That excuses some things.

Perhaps not enough.

But age has a way of teaching us to notice the weight other people have been carrying quietly beside us.

Imagine it.

The country you love becomes a place you must flee.

You build another life thousands of miles away.

You continue speaking its language.

Teaching its language.

Preserving its culture.

Explaining its history.

Helping generations of young Americans understand that Czech culture is more than kolaches, polka music and old family surnames.

And you do this year after year.

Not because somebody has promised you an award.

Not because history owes you anything.

You do it because somehow the homeland that expelled you never stopped being home.

Then one day that country is free again.

And eventually its government says:

Come home.

We want to thank you.

There is something profoundly beautiful in that.

When the Country That Lost You Finally Says Thank You

The name Gratias Agit itself carries the idea of giving thanks.

And that seems especially appropriate in Mila’s case.

Because I wonder whether governments can ever really apologize adequately for the lives history disrupts.

No award could return 1968.

No crystal globe could give a twenty-year-old girl back the country she expected to spend her life in.

It could not erase Soviet tanks, restore the years of exile, or undo the terrible choices forced upon people when governments decide that freedom is dangerous.

But perhaps gratitude can accomplish something else.

Perhaps gratitude can say:

We remember.

We see what you did.

What you preserved mattered.

And maybe, in some small way:

Welcome home.

That is how I see Mila standing in Prague in 2005 now.

The young woman from the photograph was still there.

She always would be.

But she was no longer standing opposite a Soviet soldier trying to explain why what was happening to her country was wrong.

Now she was standing inside the institutions of a democratic Czech Republic being thanked for spending much of her life keeping Czech language and culture alive half a world away.

History rarely creates circles that clean.

When it does, we ought to notice them.

And Somehow, I Was Standing There Too

Then there was me.

I need to be careful about how I describe my part in all of this because the Gratias Agit Award was presented to the Komenský Club, not to Charles Svagera for some extraordinary achievement.

I was its president, but I was there on behalf of something much older and much larger than myself.

And I think that is precisely why the experience means more to me today than it did then.

There is a particular kind of honor in receiving something you know you did not create.

I hadn’t founded the Komenský Club.

Generations of Czech-American students had kept it alive before I was born.

People had fought to preserve Czech-language education at Nebraska.

Teachers had taught courses when doing so was probably neither fashionable nor particularly profitable.

Families had saved documents.

Immigrants had kept newspapers.

Old people had told stories.

Students had learned songs.

Organizations had raised money.

People like Mila had spent enormous pieces of their lives making certain that the language did not disappear from Nebraska.

And for one brief moment, I got to carry all of that into a room in Prague.

That was the honor.

Not being singled out.

Being entrusted to represent.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

But there was someone else I carried into that room.

My great-grandfather Jan Svagera.

Jan died long before I was born.

For most of my life he existed as many ancestors do: in family stories, old photographs, names and scraps of information.

Only later would I begin piecing together the extraordinary dimensions of his story.

I have written before about the Czech and Slovak immigrants in America who volunteered during the First World War for the struggle that eventually produced an independent Czechoslovakia.

Jan was one of those men.

These legionnaires fascinate me because they were willing to sacrifice for a country that did not yet exist.

Think about that.

There was no Czechoslovak Republic to welcome them.

No Czech passport waiting.

No independent flag flying above Prague Castle.

There was only an idea.

A hope, a language, a people, and a homeland that lived in memory before it existed politically.

And Jan gave part of himself to that dream.

So I cannot think about standing in Prague in 2005 without thinking about him now.

I wish I could somehow have whispered backward through time:

It worked, Grandpa.

Not perfectly.

History never works perfectly.

The country you dreamed about would be born, occupied by Nazis, seized by communists, invaded again, liberated again and eventually divided peacefully into two nations.

But the Czech people would be free.

And someday, one of your great-grandsons would return to Prague.

Not as a soldier.

Not as a refugee, and not because an empire had ordered him there.

He would come as a guest.

He would stand inside a building of the Czech government while that government honored a Czech organization from Nebraska for preserving the language and culture you loved.

I wonder what Jan would have made of that.

I suspect he would have smiled.

Perhaps shaken his head a little.

Maybe said very little at all.

Men of his generation were often like that.

But I would like to think he would have been proud.

My Czech Family

And then, as if history had not folded itself together enough already, members of the family were there.

Olin and Iva.

Jan’s nephew and his wife.

Czech branches of a family divided by an ocean and generations were suddenly represented together in the same room.

That detail means more to me now than almost anything else.

Because I remember how proud they were that a Svagera was there.

A Svagera from Nebraska.

A descendant of the man who had left their homeland and yet had never completely abandoned it.

Family pride can be difficult to explain to people who do not come from families shaped by immigration.

It is not about believing your surname makes you important.

Quite the opposite.

It is knowing how astonishing it is that the surname survived at all.

Oceans intervene.

Languages disappear.

Borders change.

Wars happen.

Letters stop coming.

Older relatives die.

One generation pronounces the family name differently than the one before.

Children assimilate because their parents desperately want them to become American.

And eventually someone looks at an old photograph and asks:

Who is that?

That is how quickly memory can vanish.

Yet there we were.

Svageras from opposite sides of the Atlantic standing together in Prague.

And I imagine that for Olin, seeing me receive that recognition on behalf of the Komenský Club carried something of Jan with it too.

Perhaps he saw more than me.

Perhaps he saw the family coming back.

The Strange Geography of Home

I have been thinking about home quite a bit lately.

Not simply the house where we live, but those deeper places we somehow belong to even when we have never lived there.

Mila understood that.

She once described her life as divided between Nebraska and Czechoslovakia.

I think many Czech-Americans understand some version of that feeling.

Nebraska is home.

Absolutely.

And yet there are place names thousands of miles away that can somehow make your chest tighten.

Prague.

Moravia.

Vsetín.

Villages and roads where people sharing our blood once walked.

Maybe that is why Czech Nebraska has endured for so long.

The old country never entirely disappeared.

It moved.

It appeared in Czech churches and Sokol halls.

In newspapers, songs recipes, and surnames teachers struggled to pronounce.

In grandparents who switched into Czech when they did not want the children to understand.

And at the University of Nebraska, it survived in classrooms and in a student organization named for Jan Amos Komenský.

The Komenský Club was never simply about looking backward.

It was about making sure something could move forward.

What We Carry for the Next Generation

That may be the part of the Gratias Agit Award that matters most to me today.

Awards sit on shelves.

Ceremonies end.

Photographs get placed in albums.

Eventually twenty-one years pass so quickly that you wonder where they went.

But the work remains, someone still has to tell the story.

Someone has to remember both the young Mila standing in a Prague street in 1968, as well as the Czech professor who came to Nebraska and spent decades teaching students a language that could easily have disappeared from the university.

Someone has to remember the young Czech-American men who volunteered for a country not yet born.

To remember Jan, and to remember why his nephew Olin was so proud that day.

Someone has to explain why a little student organization founded in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1904 could matter enough that a government thousands of miles away would eventually say thank you.

Perhaps that is what heritage really is.

Not costumes, festivals, or nostalgia.

Those things can be wonderful, but heritage is deeper.

Heritage is accepting responsibility for something you did not begin.

It is receiving a story from people who came before you and carrying it a little farther.

For one day in Prague in June 2005, I was allowed to do that quite literally.

Mila carried 1968 into that room.

I carried Nebraska.

Olin and Iva carried the family that had remained behind.

And perhaps, in some mysterious way, Jan walked in with us.

The legionnaire who had once given himself to the hope of a free homeland could never have imagined the scene.

His descendant had returned.

His family was there.

The Czech language was still being taught in Nebraska.

The Komenský Club was more than a century old.

And the government of the country he had once sacrificed for was free.

This time there were no tanks in the streets.

No empire to fight.

No country waiting to be born.

Just a room in Prague.

An award.

A teacher, a student, a family.

And a Czech Republic finally able to say two very simple words to people who had carried it in their hearts from thousands of miles away:

Thank you.