The Curator of Forgotten Memories

I was in Prague doing both traveling and researching for a book I have not yet written, but as fate often occurs, I found myself wandering down an unfamiliar street that took me into an area that seemed both blurry in atmosphere and reminiscent of an era the rest of Prague had long since pushed into the cobwebs of its temporal lobe. Before I could turn around and find some place more touristy, I found myself stopped in front of a decrepit warehouse and an old man in a well-worn suit. On the doorway behind this man were words indicating that we were standing in front of The Communist Museum of Czechoslovakia.

Being somewhat of an amateur historian, I was immediately intrigued and asked him if he was the owner of this establishment. He told me that he was.

You see, even though I would hope that no backstory is necessary here, I have been teaching college students for years, and one of the things I have learned is that you can’t make assumptions on knowledge and history. No matter how much history may have been interesting to me, there’s no guarantee that everyone else has been lucky enough to encounter the same information I have, and I would suspect that there is a great deal of knowledge out there that others know that I do not. So, I avoid such assumptions these days.

So, what I did want to disclose is that Prague has not always been part of the Czech Republic. Before that, it was part of a consortium known as Czechoslovakia, a nation of Communism under the firm grip of the Soviet Union, and in its…