In Europe

seconds. In 1959 the
New Statesman
published a cartoon showing an old man staring blankly at moving images on a round screen. ‘No, grandpa,’ a little girl is telling him, ‘that's the washing machine, not the TV.’
    In 1948 most Europeans looked a great deal alike. In the countryside especially, they lived and worked in more or less the same way their parents and grandparents had. Ten years later, Western and Eastern Europeans had grown far apart, both materially and intellectually, and another ten years later the alienation was complete.
    While giant sunbeams enter his old, spacious Prague apartment, Hans Krijt (b.1927) tells me the story of a life ruled by dissent. Krijt was the son of a plumber in the city of Zaandam, a normal Dutch boy who found a job after the war in the packaging department of a factory that made flavourings for puddings. In early 1946 he decided to include a few letters along with the rum flavourings, in the hope of finding a pen pal. He received two replies: one from Berlin, from a ‘
sehr hübschen Verkehrspolizistin
’, the other from Czechoslovakia, from a serious boy who had thought Hans was a girl. He ignored the traffic policewoman from Berlin, but became friends with the boy. And now he has been living in Prague for almost half a century, his wife Olga Krijtova is a translator, and their sideboard is covered with photographs of all his Czech children and grandchildren. That is how things go sometimes for the son of a plumber from Zaandam.
    ‘I came here in February 1948, as a deserter,’ he tells me. ‘Holland was carrying out its last colonial police action in the Far East. My army comrades thought that was quite the thing, a war in the Indies, it would give them a chance to see something of the world. But the officers confiscated my copies of the left-wing weekly
De Groene
, that's the kind of guy I was, and Czechoslovakia was the only country where I knew people.’
    He found work with a farmer. Less than two weeks later the Czechoslovakian communists seized power and arrested a great many non-communists. On 10 March, the popular minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk, was found lying dead in the square in front of ćernín Palace, which still houses the country's ministry of foreign affairs. The communists claimed that Masaryk had committed suicide ‘because of the many false accusations in the Western press’. For most people, however, it was clearly a case of ‘defenestration’, a method used more than once in Prague to solve a political problem.
    For the second time in ten years, the promising Czechoslovakian democracy had been brutally crushed. The reactions in the West bordered onpanic. Now ‘Ivan’ had shown his true colours. New security alliances were forged, the start of NATO (1949). America stopped its withdrawal from Western Europe and would continue to watch over the security of the Western European countries for more than half a century. The Soviet Bloc reacted in 1955 by setting up the Warsaw Pact.
    Hans Krijt noticed little of the communist coup. ‘Only when a neigh-bour would come to have his cow covered, they would talk politics, always very excitedly.’ But during the purges that followed, the secret police had little trouble finding him. ‘They picked me up, simply because I was Dutch. In our cell there was a doctor who had just come back from a sabbatical in America, they pulled him right off the plane and put him in prison. No one knew why. I was locked up for ten days in an underground cell, with no light. We all slept on the floor. On the very first night some guy tried to molest me … I didn't even know things like that existed.’ He was released after promising to report to the intelligence service any contact he had with foreigners. ‘At first I thought: I never see any foreigners, so who cares? But it put me in their hands. I couldn't sleep at night because of it.’
    In summer 1950 the first four opponents of the ‘new social order’, all former victims of the Nazi camps, were hanged in Prague. On a hill across the Vltava arose a huge graven image of Stalin. Today it has been replaced by a gigantic metronome, ticking away the years.
    The Cold War was a forty-year battle of threats, of economic sanctions, of words and propaganda. No shot – with the exception of the popular revolts in the DDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – was ever fired in Europe. It was a textbook example of a long-lasting and extremely successful policy of