The Courage to Say No: Prague Spring 1968 and the Music of Freedom

There is a photograph I have known for a long time.

I suppose everyone sees something different when they look at it.

Some will notice the Soviet soldier first, his uniform, and shaved head, with the crowd pressing in around him. Maybe they imagine the tanks sitting somewhere just beyond the edge of the frame.

I see the young woman.

Her name was Miluše “Mila” Šašková.

She was twenty years old.

And on August 21, 1968, her country had been invaded.

During the night of August 20 into the morning of August 21, armies of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact crossed into Czechoslovakia. Tanks rolled through Prague and soldiers occupied streets that only hours earlier had belonged to people simply going about their lives.

The extraordinary experiment remembered as the Prague Spring of 1968 was being crushed.

And somewhere amid all that machinery, noise and confusion stood a twenty-year-old college student in a little checked headscarf.

She had no weapon.

She commanded no army.

All she had were words.

And she used them.

That may be why, fifty-eight years later, I still cannot look at that photograph without complete awe.

When Prague Began to Breathe

For a few extraordinary months in 1968, Czechoslovakia had begun to breathe differently.

Under Alexander Dubček, reforms loosened some of the suffocating restraints of communist rule. Censorship diminished and newspapers became more liberated. Citizens began speaking more freely and artists, writers and intellectuals were given space they had not known for years.

Dubček famously spoke of creating “socialism with a human face.”

Whatever one thinks of that political experiment now, something much more basic was happening beneath it.

People had begun to hope.

And hope can be extraordinarily dangerous to a government built upon fear.

The Soviet leadership understood that.

So the answer came on tank treads.

On August 21, Prague awoke to foreign soldiers occupying its streets.

Imagine being twenty years old and watching that happen to your home.

Not watching it on television from another country or reading about it decades later in a history book.

This was literally watching soldiers stand on streets you had walked since childhood.

Watching tanks pass buildings you recognize.

Knowing that men hundreds of miles away had decided that your people had become a little too free.

And then deciding to walk toward one of those soldiers.

The Young Woman in the Photograph

According to the Nebraska Alumni Association’s account of that famous photograph, Mila was translating another Czech citizen’s explanation of the Prague Spring into Russian for a young Soviet soldier.

She was trying to make him understand.

The Czechs were not asking to be rescued.

They were not traitors or enemies, they simply wanted the right to shape the future of their own country.

I keep looking at Mila’s face.

She does not look fearless.

That may be exactly what makes the photograph so powerful.

Because courage is not the absence of fear.

Courage is often what remains after fear has made its perfectly reasonable argument for keeping quiet.

The soldier had the military power of the Soviet Union behind him.

Mila had words.

And somehow, looking at the photograph now, she does not appear to be the powerless one.

Her message, even without hearing the conversation, seems unmistakable:

You have been told something about us that is not true.

This is our country.

What you are doing is wrong.

You should leave.

The photograph soon traveled far beyond Prague. It appeared in Western publications, making Mila suddenly recognizable.

Under an authoritarian government, recognition of that kind could be dangerous.

Eventually, she would have to leave the country.

But I do not want to hurry there yet.

Because there is something worth preserving about this particular moment.

A twenty-year-old woman.

A soldier.

And the decision not to remain silent.

Sometimes Courage Is Simply Saying, “This Is Wrong”

We tend to make courage grander than it really is.

We like it better after history has finished with it.

Then we can build statues.

Name streets.

Put photographs in museums.

Teach schoolchildren about brave people who stood against oppression.

Courage is considerably less comfortable when history is still happening.

Because in that moment there is no monument waiting for you.

There are consequences.

After all, a soldier is standing in front of you.

There are tanks nearby, a government keeping track of who is saying what, and every sensible reason in the world to lower your eyes, walk home, close the door and hope somebody else speaks.

Mila spoke.

That is the part of her story that stays with me.

And whenever I think of Prague in August 1968, another sound begins playing somewhere in my memory.

A piccolo.

The Bird Over Prague

For anyone who has spent much time around serious wind-band music, Karel Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 is difficult to forget.

The piece begins almost out of nothing.

A piccolo.

High.

Exposed.

Fragile.

A bird call.

Husa deliberately used the bird as a symbol of freedom—a freedom that, as he understood Czech history, Prague had possessed only fleetingly through the centuries.

There is something almost painfully beautiful about choosing a bird to represent freedom.

Because there is nothing militarily impressive about a bird.

A tank can crush things.

An army can occupy streets.

A government can close newspapers, arrest dissidents and frighten people into silence.

But it is very difficult to command a bird not to sing.

Karel Husa knew exile himself.

Born in Prague in 1921, he left Czechoslovakia after World War II, studied in Paris and eventually built his musical career in the United States.

Then came August 1968.

Husa was at his cottage on Cayuga Lake in New York when radio reports brought the terrible news that Warsaw Pact troops were invading his homeland. The story of how that night became Music for Prague 1968 is beautifully preserved in Ithaca College’s remembrance of Husa and his masterpiece.

He listened from thousands of miles away as his homeland was occupied.

I can only imagine what that must have felt like.

There are particular kinds of grief known only to emigrants.

You can love the country that welcomed you.

Build a life there.

Raise a family there.

Become profoundly grateful for it.

And still carry another landscape somewhere inside you.

Another language, another church bell, another street; another word for home.

That August night, Husa could not stand in Prague.

He could not push a tank backward.

He could not change Soviet policy.

But he could compose.

So he did.

When Heartbreak Becomes Music

Husa had already agreed to write a work for the Ithaca College Concert Band.

After the invasion, that commission became something entirely different.

Over approximately six weeks, Husa poured his anguish over what was happening in Czechoslovakia into the work that became Music for Prague 1968.

The piece received its official premiere on January 31, 1969, in Washington, D.C., performed by the Ithaca College Concert Band under Kenneth Snapp.

It would go on to become one of the monumental compositions of the modern wind-band repertoire.

But calling it simply a piece of music never seems quite adequate to me.

It is memory.

Grief.

Anger.

Defiance.

Prayer.

And beneath everything is the same longing visible in Mila’s face.

Let us be free.

Husa filled the score with sounds and symbols of Prague.

There are bells—the bells of the City of a Hundred Spires, military fanfares, and siren-like cries.

Then there is percussion that moves from distant uneasiness toward something almost terrifying.

Creating moments when Music for Prague 1968 does not feel like something you listen to but like something you survive.

And through it all, somewhere, is that bird.

Small.

Vulnerable.

Still singing.

An Older Czech Voice Beneath the Tanks

There is another melody buried within Music for Prague 1968.

It is much older than communism.

Older than the Soviet Union.

Older even than the country of Czechoslovakia.

The fifteenth-century Hussite chorale “Ktož jsú boží bojovníci” — “Ye Who Are Warriors of God and His Law.”

For centuries, that melody carried associations of Czech resistance, religious identity and national memory.

Husa knew exactly what he was placing into his composition.

And to understand why that matters, one has to understand something about the peculiar persistence of Czech history.

I wrote about some of this recently in my reflection, “Jan Hus: A Martyr for Truth Before His Time.”

Hus lived more than five centuries before the Prague Spring, yet there is a thread connecting these stories.

It is the thread of conscience.

The insistence that truth does not suddenly become false because someone powerful tells you otherwise.

The Czech lands have repeatedly found themselves answering that question.

What survives when someone stronger tells you who you are allowed to be?

Sometimes the answer has been faith, sometimes language, sometimes music.

And sometimes it has been a twenty-year-old woman standing in front of a soldier.

The tanks belonged to 1968.

The Hussite melody belonged to centuries.

Empire comes and goes.

The song remembers.

The Road Away From Prague

Mila could not have known where that photograph would lead.

That is another thing about courage.

Courage never gets to read the final chapter first.

Her involvement in the demonstrations and the publicity surrounding the photograph made her future in communist Czechoslovakia uncertain.

She left.

First came Vienna.

Then Belgium, where she continued her education.

Eventually the road crossed the Atlantic and brought her to Lawrence, Kansas, where she pursued doctoral studies at the University of Kansas.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s account of Mila’s remarkable journey from Prague Spring protester to professor tells how, in 1989, she came to Nebraska to teach Czech and Russian in what was then the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Think about that year for a moment.

1989.

Twenty-one years after tanks had crushed the Prague Spring, communist governments across Eastern Europe were beginning to fall.

And Mila Šašková-Pierce arrived in Nebraska to teach.

She worked with students, advised the Czech Komenský Club, and helped strengthen relationships between Nebraska and the Czech lands.

And she became one of those people who kept a language alive in a place thousands of miles from where it began.

Which is where this enormous historical story becomes, for just a moment, very personal to me.

Thirty-Four Years Later, I Sat in Her Classroom

Some thirty-four years after that photograph was taken, I had the immense privilege of becoming one of Mila’s students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Even now, writing that sentence feels strange.

Because history usually keeps a respectful distance from us.

The Prague Spring was something that happened in 1968.

The Warsaw Pact invasion belonged to black-and-white photographs and grainy television footage. and the Cold War belonged to history books.

Until your Czech professor is the young woman in the photograph.

Then the distance collapses.

The voice explaining Czech grammar to me was the same voice that had once translated Czech words into Russian while standing in an occupied Prague street.

The woman teaching another generation the Czech language was someone who had been forced to leave the very country where that language had first become hers.

I was a student.

I certainly did not understand the full weight of all that then.

Most of us rarely understand the importance of the people sitting across from us while we still have the privilege of sitting across from them.

Years later, we begin putting the pieces together.

And suddenly we realize:

My God, look who was teaching me.

Yet even this is not really the point of today’s reflection.

It is merely one of those strange gifts history sometimes hands us.

Because Mila’s story is much larger than the fact that, decades later, I happened to sit in her classroom.

What matters is what she carried into that classroom.

Language.

Memory.

Culture.

And freedom.

The Language They Could Not Take Away

Perhaps that part of Mila’s story strikes me particularly profoundly because of my own Czech-American family.

I have written before about how the Czech language slowly disappeared from my Grandpa Svagera’s everyday life in “The Language That Never Left Him.”

Grandpa grew up hearing Czech.

His father, Jan, had carried the language from Moravia to America.

Yet like so many immigrant families, English eventually took over.

The old language faded.

Or at least everyone assumed it had.

Then, much later in Grandpa’s life, something remarkable happened. Czech words that had apparently been buried for decades began finding their way back.

That story taught me something I have never forgotten.

Language goes deeper than vocabulary.

It carries memory, belonging, and people.

Authoritarian governments have always understood that more clearly than comfortable societies sometimes do.

If you want to erase a culture, you attack its language.

If you want to preserve a people, teach their children how to speak.

Mila was forced from Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of an invasion meant to stop her people from determining their own future.

Yet decades later, in Nebraska, there she was teaching Czech.

There is something wonderfully defiant about that.

The Soviet Union could remove her from Prague.

It could not make Prague disappear from her.

The Blessings History Never Intended

I hesitate to call exile a blessing.

We should be careful with that word.

Suffering does not become good simply because something beautiful eventually grows from it.

Neither the invasion or the loss of freedom was good.

Being driven from one’s homeland was not good.

But grace has always had an irritating habit of refusing to let evil write the final paragraph.

The invasion scattered people and those people carried things with them.

Language.

Music.

Memory.

Stories.

Culture.

Mila eventually carried Czech language and culture to Nebraska.

Karel Husa carried the heartbreak of Prague into American concert halls.

Thousands upon thousands of musicians who had never walked across the Charles Bridge, or stood beneath the towers of Prague, found themselves breathing the anguish of that city through their instruments.

There is something almost sacramental about that.

Suffering transformed into sound.

Memory transformed into teaching.

Exile transformed into preservation.

Not because the evil was necessary.

But because human beings have a remarkable ability, with grace, to make something living from what was meant to destroy them.

The Toccata and the Chorale

The final movement of Music for Prague 1968 is called “Toccata and Chorale.”

It is overwhelming.

The music drives forward with almost uncontrollable energy.

The percussion section erupts.

Brass instruments cry out.

Rhythms collide.

The entire soundscape seems to be approaching some terrible breaking point.

And then the old chorale returns.

The Hussite melody.

Still there.

That is what moves me most.

After all that noise, all that violence, all that fear, the old song has not disappeared.

Twenty-one years after Soviet tanks entered Prague, hundreds of thousands of Czechs would again fill the streets during the Velvet Revolution.

This time the communist government would fall.

Mila would eventually return to Prague to visit, as would Karel Husa, although they would both return to live in the United States.

Perhaps this is what exile eventually teaches us, sometimes we end up with more than one home.

One that formed us.

Another that received us.

And somehow both become part of who we are.

I have thought about that same mysterious pull of homeland in my own family, especially when imagining Grandpa Svagera returning to the country of his father in “Under the Linden Tree of Memory.”

There are places we leave.

And there are places that never entirely leave us.

Freedom Is More Fragile Than We Like to Admit

Perhaps that is what I most want to remember on this anniversary of the Prague Spring.

Freedom feels permanent right up until it does not.

Institutions feel permanent.

Rights feel permanent.

Nations feel permanent.

Then history changes overnight.

The people of Prague went to bed on August 20 living inside one future.

They woke on August 21 inside another.

That should humble us.

Freedom does not sustain itself.

It certainly depends upon laws and institutions.

But underneath those things it depends upon people.

People willing to defend truth.

People who understand that silence can sometimes become a form of consent and are willing to say: No.

Sometimes those people are presidents.

Other times they are soldiers or priests.

Sometimes they are composers sitting beside radios thousands of miles from home.

And occasionally they are twenty-year-old college students wearing checked headscarves.

I Still See My Teacher in That Photograph

I suppose that is why the photograph will never merely be an image of the Prague Spring to me.

Because I know what came afterward.

Vienna, Belgium, Kansas, and Nebraska.

A classroom with students learning Czech in Lincoln.

A lifetime spent preserving the culture an occupying force had tried to suppress.

But today I try not to look too far ahead.

Today I want to remain in Prague on August 21, 1968.

Before Mila knew any of that, before she knew Nebraska existed somewhere in her future, or that she would become a professor.

Long before she knew generations of students would pass through her classroom.

Or that thirty-four years later one of them would be sitting there trying to conjugate Czech verbs while having little idea just how extraordinary the woman teaching him really was.

I want to remember her as she was that morning.

Twenty years old.

Her country occupied.

A Russian soldier standing in front of her.

And the simple conviction that somebody needed to tell him the truth.

The Bird Is Still Singing

There is one final reason I keep returning to Husa’s bird call.

Birdsong is easy to overlook.

Compared with tanks, it seems insignificant.

Perhaps that was exactly Husa’s point.

The twentieth century was filled with governments that believed power ultimately belonged to whoever possessed the largest army, the strongest police state or the greatest ability to frighten human beings into silence.

For a while, they often appeared to be right.

But the tanks that entered Prague in August 1968 are museum pieces now.

The Soviet Union itself is gone.

Karel Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 is still performed.

The old Hussite chorale is still heard.

Czech is still spoken.

Prague is still Prague.

Mila Šašková-Pierce spent decades teaching new generations the language and culture she had carried away from an occupied homeland.

And that photograph of a twenty-year-old woman looking directly at an occupying soldier still asks us something fifty-eight years later:

When you know something is wrong, will you have the courage to say so?

Perhaps that is the real monument of the Prague Spring.

Not simply remembering the freedom that was crushed.

Remembering the people who refused to pretend that they no longer desired it.

Mila spoke.

Husa composed.

Countless others resisted in quieter ways history never photographed.

And somewhere beneath the tanks, the shouting, the church bells and the terrible noise of August 1968, something fragile survived.

Listen carefully.

That little bird is still singing.