FLIGHT TO FREEDOM

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As we headed west, out of the high country and its fir-covered slopes, the snow changed to a cold rain, and soon clouds obscured the hills to the north, toward the German border. Northern Bohemia is a place some Czechs describe as having no face, a reflection of the fact that most present inhabitants have no deep roots in the region, having settled there after the expulsion-officially known by Czechs as the "transfer"-of 3 million Germans after the war, in 1945 and 1946. Another reason is that industrialization, avidly pursued during the years of communist rule in Prague, has stripped much of the land of its character. West of Decin, where we had crossed the Elbe, there is a new bridge, but the forest and meadow-the green countryside I remembered-have yielded to smokestack and factory, pipeline and drab worker housing. Lignite mining has left massive scars and transformed vast stretches of land into a moonscape. "This looks like the end of the war," Lubos said, pointing to one jagged excavation. Pollution haze darkened the clouds, and the smell of chemicals was in the air-a far cry from the bright skies 50 years earlier. Was there more promise then than now? I wondered.

We drove for about 250 km along the road Peise had taken. It had been widened and straightened but in parts was still lined by ditches and fruit trees. We looked for the valley where the hospital train had been shelled and, halfway through our journey, came on a place I thought resembled it: the railway track was there, though the slope was not nearly as steep as my child's memory had recorded. Other landmarks from the past must have been there; I spotted none but nonetheless felt oddly content just to be on the road I had first traveled so long ago.

Toward dusk we reached Jindrichovice, the place where the truck journey had ended and the long walk begun. The village lay quiet in the rain. In its midst, just below the church, we came across a marble slab with a gilded, five-pointed star and the Czech inscription in eternal memory of those who died in the second world war. The little monument looked new-apparently erected after communism fell in 1989. The words embraced all: winners and losers, soldiers and civilians, the innocent and the guilty. To Lubos and me, men whose people had been at war with one another not all that long ago in the century's greatest tragedy, it seemed the appropriate, conciliatory epitaph.