RETURN TO OLYMPUS
by
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In less than three minutes, Alexei gathered, they‘d be face to face with these men, on whose convictions and collective conscience their very lives might depend. Up ahead, the guards joked and got fresh with the three Italian beauties, good-humoredly. "We‘re in luck, baby", mumbled the Swede schizophrenically to a petrified and deaf Alexei Dobransky. The gate gave way to the van, as the grateful Italians waved and blew kisses, much to the delight of the two caricatures with the automatic rifles at the exit. This was it. The guards signaled to the Wartburg, and Ragnar complied, as Alexei said the fastest prayer he‘d ever improvised. The dark-haired guard smiled politely and asked for their documents. Ragnar handed over his passport and consular I.D., along with Alexei‘s "Dutch" passport. The red-haired guard asked for the key to the trunk.
"Svensks, ah?", smiled the guard, "You‘re not taking out any state secrets, are you?" Alexei''s heart sunk. Ragnar, on the other hand, recognized the remark as an ill-joke.
"Only the secret formula to make Kubasa", he chortled. Seeing that the other one was "Dutch", the guard poked his head in the car, to compared his face with the photo on the passport. "Why you not consul like him?", he said.
"I only grow tulips", joked Alexei, not knowing what else to say, in such state of nerves. The guard was somewhat amused, but the knot in Alexei‘s throat was still there. The other guard had checked the trunk and under the car - as if anyone could be thin enough to escape that way! - and returned the keys. "Any Czech currency? Anything to declare?" "Ne", said the Swede. The red-haired guard asked the other one something which Alexei perceived as trouble, but by now Ragnar was less skeptical. The dark-haired guard turned to him, with a smile, and returned the documents. The other guard motioned, and the gate swung open once more, ten yards in front of them. Alexei froze. "Well, then", quipped the handsome, befreckled, 22 year-old green eyed guard, "we won‘t be needing you anymore; enjoy the capitalistic West." Dobransky felt as though his kubasa was going right through him. The more perspicacious Ragnar Bjelke wistfully smiled back at the guard, whose eye-contact conveyed the most sincere wishes for the lucky escapees; and Bjelke could not help but wonder if perhaps the young soldier was too attached to the motherland to contemplate fleeing himself. After he stamped their papers he returned them with a polite dekuje vam and a tilt of his cap. Alexei sat motionless, expressionless, frozen, and too panicky to even look up and say thank you; the red-haired guard motioned to the other one, who lifted the gate at the touch of an automatic button. Ragnar saluted the contact again, and started the Wartburg. Alexei remained with his eyes closed, fervidly praying. Could anything go wrong at this very last minute?!? Not likely. The system was this corrupt everywhere behind the Iron Curtain, which was precisely why it had been a disastrous failure from its very Bolshevik beginnings. At last, even tough at a price, they were free. Even as the Wartburg rolled under the grotesque steel gate that gave access to the Jihlava Bridge Alexei, with his huevos in his throat, felt dread, terror, upon seeing the gargantuous red, white and black billboard twenty five feet ahead, the last nefarious reminder of the total hell they were about to leave: CAUTION! YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE CZECHOSLOVAKIAN PEOPLES COMMUNIST REPUBLIC, in four languages. They looked into the forbidden grey waters of the Jihlava, and no doubt wondered and angonized at the very same thought: how many victims of this hideous gerontocracy must have been shot to death and dumped into its murky waters while attempting to escape. Alexei felt ad nauseum. By now they had crossed three-fourths of the bridge, as Ragnar sped out of this forbidden no-man‘s-land; only fifty odd yards ahead a more heart-warming sight welcomed them to
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About the Book
Very few books have been written about the 100 million or more human lives that have been lost around the planet since the inception of Communism-Marxism-Leninism (and its Gulags) in 1917. With the notable exceptions of Velikovsky’s “We” (1920’s), Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World” – all fiction – only a handful of Czech and Cuban works have expounded the eyewitness realities of the hell that is totalitarianism, among them Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”; Vaculik’s “A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator”, and Armando Valladares’ “Against All Hope.”Bohdan Wytwycky’s “The Other Holocaust” and Miron Dolot’s “Execution Through Hunger” also shed a much needed light on the barbaric and oft-forgotten, heinous crimes committed under Lenin, Stalin, (who could easily be accredited with 40 million or more deaths, just Russians and Ukrainians alone), Mao Ze Dong (50 million), Pol Pot (2 million), Fidel Castro (100,000 or more).Collectively, ten times more millions than Hitler’s several million gays, Gypsies, Jews and Baltic and Slavic peoples.Along with Romania, Cuba and Czecho slovakia were the most brutal and repressive societies (Cuba is still on the very top of the list), and this book vividly documents the cloak-and-dagger, conspiratorial nature of communism while at the same time detailing the length to which the “dissidence” and basic survival instinct will go to escape the firing squad or the country at any cost.Albert De Leon’s book takes us into the private life of two of his closest friends and the fear, the humiliation, the psychological torture and constant harassment to which they – and 25 million Czechs and Slovaks – suffered since 1948 – and 11 million Cubans are still subjected to.For both Alexei and Gregorio, the only option was to escape a well-planned escape.
About the Author
Albert De Leon was born in the old colonial city of
From altar-boy to boy-scout/pioneer through an adolescence filled with athletics and spartacades – a must in any and all communist countries – he was rubbing elbows with Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish and Russian athletes, effectively getting caught up in the frenzy of coin, stamp and Olympic pin collecting that would define his private world years later.
During trips to
Having been lucky enough to escape Castro’s firing squads merely two weeks before the October missile crisis, he settled in Chicago, where he graduated from high school with many kids of Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, German, Russian and Italian descent, and was voted top student in his French class.
After graduation and a very short visit to
In
Albert currently lives in