For the first year or so after I arrived in America, I had a recurring nightmare. I would find myself in Prague, walking through familiar streets, meeting friends, everything feeling completely normal — as if I had never left. And then, gradually, the realization would set in. I was not supposed to be there. I needed to get back to Austria, but there was no way out of Czechoslovakia. The borders were closed to me the same as they had always been, and this time I had no bus tour, no plan, no Kudibal to advise me. I had nothing.

And then I would think about my papers. If the police stopped me, all I had was my Austrian political asylum card. In Czechoslovakia, that card was not protection — it was a confession. It proved exactly what I had done and what I was. I would spend the rest of my life in prison.

So in the dream I was desperately trying to figure out how to get back to Austria, knowing it was impossible, hiding from the police, ducking into doorways, taking back streets through neighborhoods I had known since childhood. And just as I was about to be caught, I would wake up.

The dreams were almost nightly during my year in Austria, since I was still close to the border and the escape still felt recent and fragile. They continued into my first year or 2 on Babcock Street and then gradually, with no single moment I can point to, they became less frequent and eventually stopped. I later found out talking to other refugees that they had the same dreams — the same trap, the same wrong papers, the same impossible border. It was not just me. It was something that happened to all of us, a kind of shared nightmare that came with the price of leaving.

It has been 60 years. That chapter is completely closed now. But for a while, my sleeping mind had not yet accepted what my waking mind already knew — that I was free.