With the present war in Ukraine and the suggestion that Russia’s invasion has much to do with Vladimir Putin’s humiliation with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day in 1991, I’ve been thinking about my own trips to a few of the former Warsaw Pact countries in 1993.
I went alone on both my trips, with no real itinerary other than to see what it was like at that time in Eastern Europe. I didn’t speak anything other than English and a very, very little bit of German and Spanish.
At one point on one of my trips I was taking a train from Krakow, Poland to Prague, the Czech Republic. As my travel plans then and now tended to be spur of the moment, I arrived at the train station in Prague at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM, tired and sleepy, and with no place to go to sleep for the night. This was before the time of ubiquitous cell-phones, I didn’t speak the language, and the only resource I had was a guide book to cheap places to eat and spend the night.
I decided to stay the night in the train station and venture out after the sun rose in the morning. As I sat on the floor alone in the train station with my back against the wall next to my bag, I noticed a group of three or four boys, perhaps young men. Very few other people were in the station, and those few were walking with a purpose, going from place to place. But these young men were just seemingly meandering aimlessly. After a while a couple wandered purposefully near me and started play fighting. I remember one of them trying to take a karate kick to the head of another.
At that point I started to get concerned. I was tired. I was sleepy. I was sitting on the floor in a train station in a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one. I started to get scared.
Then I saw a very old, very frail looking woman shuffling along, alone. She didn’t seem to know those young men and they didn’t seem to know her. And she didn’t seem concerned, and she didn’t seem fearful. I imagine she had seen a lifetime of hardship. She was old enough that she undoubtedly lived through World War II, the Nazi and then Soviet Occupations, and then decades of communist rule. But she survived.
I began to be embarrassed by my fearfulness, even ashamed. If this old, frail woman is not afraid, how could I be? I survived that night unscathed and made it to a hostel in the morning.
I’ve thought of this experience as I’ve watched from home, like so many others throughout the world, the frail and the elderly, and children, coming from their hiding places and cellars in villages like Bucha and Staryi Bykiv , and cities like Chernihiv and Kharkiv. Only God knows the hell that has befallen all the people of Mariupol.
I think its time again to repent and have courage.