'Object' of my affection

Those who don't know their past are bound to repeat it," reads the billboard in the entry hall of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. When I first came here, it was for an interview with two institute researchers who co-authored the book Victims of the Occupation about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.

After the interview, I asked one of the researchers, Milan Bárta, to find my parents' old communist secret police (StB) file. I wanted to see if there were any pictures of their wedding Jan. 13, 1979, just days before they emigrated to West Germany. My family has no pictures of that day, but my father had always joked that the StB had taken some.

A month later, I was invited to the institute to take a look at my parents' documents.

Visitors have to X-ray their bags, pass through a metal detector and obtain a pass that opens the gate to the facilities within the institute. Inside the archive, I told the librarian what I was there for and, a few signatures later, found myself sitting down, leafing through a detailed account of my father's activities in January 1979, in the week before he married my mother.

To the communist regime, my father wasn't Eduard Borufka, but "the object."

From 11:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Jan. 9, 1979, he was followed by seven StB agents, three of them in cars positioned in the vicinity of my mother's apartment. It apparently took a lot of manpower to find out that all my father did that day was to go drink coffee, eat sausage and, later, enjoy some wine at the Winery Rotisserie with my mother. Or, in the words of the StB: "The object, dressed in a green jacket, blue pants and brown shoes, went to Café Arco at 11:45, where he stayed until 11:55 and left carrying nothing in hand."

When my father recently read through this bit, he shook his head. "I am amazed at the thoroughness and the resources they applied," he said. "It must have been terribly frustrating to them that all I did was trivial stuff."

It's no coincidence the StB started following him days before my parents' wedding. My father, who had already become a West German citizen in 1969, had met my mother on one of his rare return visits to Prague in 1977. It was obvious that their marriage would lead to my mother's emigration. "I think they did it to scare us and maybe to get us to change our minds about emigrating," my father explained.

Attempted escape

The story actually begins March 19, 1969. Though my father had family who lived in West Germany and who had filed a family reunion visa for him and his relatives, he nevertheless decided to escape on his own. "After I saw how the Prague Spring movement was beaten down and all our hopes were shattered, I knew I needed to leave," he said.

On March 19, my father went to Prague's Masarykovo nádraží, bought a ticket to Sofia, boarded the train and got off in Belgrade. His adventurous escape involved an all-night walk, hitchhiking and an arrest in Austria, but ultimately ended with a successful arrival in Germany, where he was granted citizenship and tried to start a new life.

Four months later, he returned to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) by accident. An old friend from school, Josef, approached him asking a favor. He was trying to get to the ČSSR to meet his fiancé, but lacked travel documents. My father had the necessary papers and decided to help. They drove to the Italian-Yugoslav border, where my father attempted to cross over on foot, leaving his ID with Josef so that he could cross by car. When the Yugoslav police stopped him, my father was unable to present ID. Put on the spot, he invented a story of how his papers and wallet had been stolen. He told them he was going back to the ČSSR because he regretted having emigrated. Meanwhile, Josef, unable to speak a word of German but equipped with a German ID, encountered similar difficulties. Both were arrested separately and returned to the ČSSR.

This first unsuccessful escape attempt is well-documented in the StB file. It even contains the original German ID my father had lent his friend. While this would seem something actually worth investigating, the secret police did not question my father's hastily fabricated story and wrote everything down the way he told them it happened.

Success

Just a few months later, he was able to successfully emigrate on a West German family reunion visa. However, my mother was still in Prague, and the two would not meet until 1977 on one of his rare return visits. After he met my mother, on each subsequent visit to the ČSSR, the StB would invite him for questioning, and he always obliged. "I was trying to get your mother over to Germany. I felt like I had to cooperate with them on some level," he says.

The STB was largely plying for information about other Czechs who had left the ČSSR.

"I don't even remember saying some of this stuff. I guess I was trying to stay general and buy some time," he explained, looking over his file.

Once my parents were married, my mother was able to emigrate, as well. In her file, I read that Helena H., a co-worker of hers, had passed on information about my mother after she left for West Germany, and, on one occasion, called her "lazy, not willing to work or learn German."

When I tell my mother this, she sighs and says, "[Helena] was a single mother and didn't have it easy. They probably put her under pressure, so she told them some stuff." My father reacted similarly when he learned, almost 30 years later, that a friend of his brother's, with whom he'd had a dinner in Nuremberg in 1982, worked as a spy.

"As you can read, I didn't tell him anything of interest," he says dryly.

What was most surprising to me was that an apparatus as huge as the StB failed to uncover any of the spicy stuff like my father's illegal border crossings or the fact that he smuggled the exile magazines Listy and Svědectvi (Pages and Testimonials) into the ČSSR in the 1980s.

What's most surprising to my father is that "the file ends in 1982, but the StB operated up until 1989, and I am positive they continued to keep tabs on me."

In the end, the file actually did contain negatives of pictures taken at my parents' wedding. However, I didn't feel they did justice to the colorful anecdotes that I had long heard about my parents' wedding day. They were taken from a distance, blurry and lacking detail.

In a way, much like the files.

Sarah Borufka can be reached at
news@praguepost.com