Barbara Day: Forty years later, there are still lessons to be learned
[Barbara Day is a senior fellow and founding member of The Prague Society for International Cooperation.]
Conferences on 1968 are stretching back-to-back across Europe this summer, offering retrospectives on the meaning of that year — what was gained, what was lost.
I know what I lost. A scrap of tri-colored ribbon, pinned to my jacket as a talisman to see me through a train ride across occupied Czechoslovakia. I had spent 1965-66 as a student in Prague on a bilateral exchange program. In 1968, I was in search of a job in the theater, hoping to stay in this dynamic city.
I lost a talisman but I kept a diary. I started it at the beginning of that long, hot summer of swimming in reservoirs and lying in the long grass of hillside meadows, watching fireflies at dusk and picking cherries by moonlight. There were dreams and romance — but also intense political discussions, veering from elation to anxiety. No conversation was too private for someone not to interrupt with their own views.
I caught something of the times in a letter I wrote to a fellow student on July 15 of that year...
Read entire article at The Prague Post
Conferences on 1968 are stretching back-to-back across Europe this summer, offering retrospectives on the meaning of that year — what was gained, what was lost.
I know what I lost. A scrap of tri-colored ribbon, pinned to my jacket as a talisman to see me through a train ride across occupied Czechoslovakia. I had spent 1965-66 as a student in Prague on a bilateral exchange program. In 1968, I was in search of a job in the theater, hoping to stay in this dynamic city.
I lost a talisman but I kept a diary. I started it at the beginning of that long, hot summer of swimming in reservoirs and lying in the long grass of hillside meadows, watching fireflies at dusk and picking cherries by moonlight. There were dreams and romance — but also intense political discussions, veering from elation to anxiety. No conversation was too private for someone not to interrupt with their own views.
I caught something of the times in a letter I wrote to a fellow student on July 15 of that year...