I Admire My Mother

My mother celebrated her birthday on 26 August every year until her untimely passing in 1992. It wasn’t the day of her birth, but rather the day she believed her spirit was born. On that day in 1968, a young, British Special Opps soldier risked his life and his career to smuggle the young girl who would become my mother out of Prague. Along with my Great Aunt, whom she never knew, she was one half of the last living vestige of a great diplomatic family. Her parents, brother and two sisters lost their lives at the hands of persons unknown earlier that same week.

Mum spent the next fourteen years in care in England, first in an orphanage and then with a lovely foster family. The young soldier who had rescued her never forgot her, making sure she was well looked after and visiting from time to time. I was born in 1984 when Mum was twenty; Dad had just been decommissioned from the SAS.

This week is the fiftieth anniversary of the Prague Spring and the rout of my maternal family. I grieve when I hear modern historians reinterpreting those times as a minor spat between rival communist factions. I hope that in my life’s work, I represent a more fitting memorial to brave people who wanted to give more to the citizens of their country at a time when the Soviet Bear loomed large over Europe.