Like most writers, I get inspired by the people I observe and the stories I hear. Nothing strange there. This is what most writers do.

What spooks me is the way in which I seem to attract the people who tell me these stories.

I was at a social gathering the other day sitting next to a gentleman I had never met before. We were chatting and after a few minutes he began telling me about his childhood in post-war Vienna.

I could not believe my ears. How could he have known about my obsession with what went on in Vienna during that time?

I know this might have been nothing more than civilised pre-theatre chit-chat. But you have to admit…it is a little strange.

The gentleman kept talking and I began seeing him in my mind…I was there… following him through the streets of what looked like an endless repetition of a scene from The Third Man.

This English boy in short pants (were boys still wearing short pants in those days..?) was not afraid of the horrible destruction surrounding him… Every house in ruins contained unlimited potential for adventure (as a young girl, I was insanely drawn to deserted buildings).

The house in the centre of Vienna where the boy lived had a concierge whose husband had been badly traumatised by the war. At night, the poor man would run out and disappear into the night. The wife would run upstairs and beg the boy’s father (“the only can-do person in the building”) to help her look for him.

I could picture some of the horrible memories that were chasing the concierge’s husband though the darkness of gutted Vienna.
The gentleman sitting next to me read my mind: “Everybody had a story in those days…”.

Would I have had the courage to listen to those stories? I know from my years in Czechoslovakia just how difficult it is. You have to be able to marshal strength and compassion from the deepest corners of your character.

And would I have had the courage to write them down? For what purpose? I cannot stand war voyeurism. I would only have done it to help heal memories. But how do you heal memories?

I was back in the foyer of a London theatre…and could not wait for the performance to start….

Photo: thanks to criterioncollection.blogspot.com

The Russian models at Jack’s parties were getting younger and younger.

Jack (not his real name) was a refugee. He had managed to escape to Prague from the wreckage of his American life and the many cousins who had lent him money over the years.

Jack’s parties were a good place to go to, if you were looking for oblivion.

Nikita had stretched out on the piano and was looking out of the window into the sultry night of a Prague summer that had arrived too early.

His blond hair was so fair, almost transparent. His pale blue eyes resembled ice-coated marbles. Nikita would have been at home in a Russian winter tale, next to vermillion birds with silvery feathers and ermine-clad snow queens.

Nikita and I were holding hands, without much conviction we were just holding on to the childhood we had never had.

From time to time, reality would intrude into Jack’s parties in a brutal way.

A portrait of the Czech prime minister was hanging on the wall overlooking Nikita and the piano. It stretched like a big yawn across the entire length of the living room. Jack had accompanied the prime minister on some of his travels.

Slumped in a chair on the other side of the room, Ben (not his real name) was nursing a piece of a creamy Bohemian cake.

He had returned from his exile to Canada and had launched the first talk-show ever shown on post-communist Czech TV. His mother had been a famous Czechoslovak actress of the 1930s. She had escaped after the war and had never been able to return.

‘Prazdne bity’, that’s what my mother used to repeat. Ben was talking to me through a layer of shattered dreams.

‘Prazdne bity’ means ‘empty flats’ and I imagined a beautiful woman elegantly dressed looking at Prague from the distance of her exile.

In my mind, she was so much like Libuse, Prague’s mythical founder.
Libuse had stood by the river Vltava one day and had had a vision of the glory of Prague.

But Ben’s mother had seen no splendour. Only empty rooms inhabited by disturbing memories populated by countless objects scattered across the floor by terrified hands with little time left.

Don’t let this memory follow you, my mouth recited as if an oracle was speaking through me. The time has come to forget.

I don’t know what made me say this with so much conviction.

Later on that evening, the reflection of my face in the window of a night tram didn’t look familiar.

Prague is the perfect place to go to, if you are looking for oblivion.

Photo: thanks to Suzanne Salvo and salvoatlarge.blogspot.com

According to an old Prague legend, Emperor Franz Josef used to take walks on the Charles Bridge late at night.

His hand clasped behind his back, he would walk up and down trying to soothe the heaviness in his heart and a lingering suspicion that something utterly horrible was about to befall his people. Like the children of a disgraced mother, they would soon be left at the doorstep of history and at the mercy of a madman with demonic ambitions.

My friend Wolfgang (not his real name) and I were following in those disheartening footsteps that evening.

I was walking and looking down at the frozen cobblestones of Mala Strana at the polished winter boots my friend was wearing. All of the sudden, like in a scary fairy tale, it was not his boots I was seeing but the tattered summer shoes of a young boy. Blood had been dripping over his socks designing peculiar flowers.

It was the summer after a terrible war and the little boy had been forced to march for hours, leaving behind his bedroom, his wooden toys, his schoolbooks, his sledge. He was also leaving behind everybody he had ever loved, but that was too painful to think of, so he preferred to fix his mind on the books, the sledge, the toys.

We continued to walk up the hill towards Malostranska Kavarna and the different parts of that horrible journey kept coming back to my friend’s mind like jinxed worry beads which you cannot stop reciting.

The icy coldness of the ancient stones was shooting straight through the soles of my feet and into my bones.

It would be another year before the floods hit Prague, but I was already sensing behind my back the damp embrace of the Vltava.

It had left her bed and regurgitated into Kampa all the horrible memories it had been forced to swallow for more than 50 years. Its waves shaped like spectral art deco silhouettes, high on absinth, were whispering into my ears how futile it is to try to forget the road that had taken us to hell and back.

Will we ever be able to leave that road? The waves-turned-art-deco-sorceresses were vomiting obscene laughs: “Once touched by evil …”

This is why I liked walking at night with my friend Wolfgang. Evil had touched him but the light his round face emanated was as comforting as the Moravian spring sun that used to illuminate his bedroom, his wooden toys, his school books.

He did not seem to have to wrestle with the horrible fear that Prague nightmares sprinkle over your bed at night, sending you tumbling into a world where there is no comfort, no parental love, no hope, no past or future only the sound of marching boots and glacial darkness.

He was not afraid to look at the faces of the passengers in a crowded Prague tram. They would not remind him of the obscene glow hatred had so skilfully painted on other people’s faces.

We were almost at the top of Nerudova, so I asked Wolfgang what he thought had made the difference. I needed to hear about the secret that can make you deaf to the alluring murmur of revenge.

He stopped and turned around “I can feel their pain.”

I kept walking until I reached the Castle, the city was at my feet wrapped in its milky winter sleep. I knew that night my Prague nightmares and their gory goons would not visit me. A little boy from Moravia and his sledge were guarding me.

Many thanks to my friend Daneeta for giving me the courage to write this story.

Photo: thanks to EEIP

I was trying not to fall from a bar stool in San Francisco’s Castro district after a series of cucumber martinis, when my friend Steven asked me why I had not written about my years in Prague.

It would have been a long answer and not one you want to give when you are holding on to a bar stool for your life.

But once I had slept off the martinis the next day I started thinking

It was the spring of 1992. I had moved to Czechoslovakia a year earlier to work as a journalist. And I had just moved into a new flat that looked and felt as if it had been neglected for 50 years.

My possessions did not do much to dissipate the air of neglect. I hadn’t had time to buy furniture, so my bed was a mattress and my clothes were not so neatly arranged in a series of plastic bags on the floor.

I was enjoying an unseasonably warm spring evening in my luxurious pad when, out of the blue, I felt a horrible cramp in my lower belly. A series of stronger cramps followed.

I managed to get hold of the only friend who had not left town for the weekend. In my then very limited Czech, I tried to describe the pain to her.

Her first question was whether I was drunk. I was after all a journalist!

We cleared that out of the way and she proceeded to call an ambulance.

A call from a doctor and a lot of negotiation in my bad Czech followed. I tried to get the point across that no, I could not drive myself to the hospital. I could hardly walk, let alone drive.

My Czech must have been convincing enough because after what felt like an eternity a doctor arrived.

I remember her being very thin, with long, tired blondish hair. A strict face with old-fashioned glasses.

After throwing a disapproving look at the mess in the make-shift bedroom and at the odd woman twisted on her rather pathetic mattress, she uttered what sounded like a death sentence: “I cannot treat you. You are a foreigner. You don’t have insurance.”

Pictures started to form in my mind of friends finding me dead the next day on what must have been ages ago a rather nice wooden floor.

“I can pay you. You can have whatever you like. Everything you see in this room is yours” I realised how unappealing that offer was the very moment it left my mouth.

But it had an impact on her. With reluctance she sat down on the mattress and began inspecting my belly.

It did not take long to find out that I had kidney stones and needed a strong injection.

The drug mixed with the pain filled my head with cotton and made me feel totally vulnerable.

In a surreal way, I started bonding with this stern, sad woman.

And that’s when she began to tell the story of her life, how she had always wanted to travel abroad but was never able because of communism. She had always wanted to make something out of her life and now she was old.

“Does my life make sense?” The question hung in the air like a half-dreamt dream at the end of a troubled night.

The injection was working. I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The blondish woman picked up her worn-out plastic bag, told me that I would soon fall asleep and began walking towards the door.

“Waaait! I have to pay you!” I managed to scream.

“No, that’s ok. You don’t need to pay me” and she was gone, like a haunting character from a Kafka novel.

I still have the receipt she left on my kitchen table. I keep it in an old book. I hold on to it as the only proof I have that it was a real person who came to rescue me that night.

But what do I know Prague is a strange place.

Have you ever cried under water?

What was meant to be a lovely afternoon on the shores of an Italian lake turned into one of the most unsettling experiences of my life.

The strange feeling started when I was walking up the hill to my friend’s house. The beautiful oleanders and olive trees that I’ve always found so soothing did nothing to chase the lingering fear that was setting in.

My friend was sitting around the old breakfast table in the veranda nursing an empty coffee cup. Her face that I expected so luminous in the early Italian autumn sun was as grey as the scarf she was wearing. And her eyes had a twist that petrified me.

I sat down and slowly realised that we were not alone at the table.

Someone was there someone my friend had been spending the last weeks with someone who won’t be moving from her side someone who has been replacing her warm glow with a chilling halo.

The longer I sat there, frozen on an old garden chair, the more I realised that that someone was flirting with me…

I could feel its skeletal fingers between mine. Its glacial breath down my neck.

A surreal fog was rising between me and my friend, like thick incense smoke in a dark, forsaken temple.

I don’t remember how I left the house.

By the time I began the descent into town, the sun was setting and, normally, the view of the water would have brought back happy memories of the times when I used to go waterskiing on the lake in the evening, when all the boats had left. But it was still very dark and cold around me. I couldn’t wait to board the plane.

Back in London, I went straight to the gym and spent what must have been an eternity on the cross-trainer. I had to shake off that grey shroud.

It was when I went swimming in the pool that I finally gave in to tears.

It is a strange feeling crying under water. And suddenly I was back with my friend swimming in Italy’s biggest lake, the summer after we graduated from high school.

Objects have a life of their own.

That’s what a Croat friend of mine believes and what I have always found difficult to image. But on Monday, everything changed.

I was on a tour of the hurricane Katrina disaster areas in New Orleans and, while trying the take in the horrible devastation, I peeked into one of the houses (or what remained of it). My eyes fell on a toy, two little Panda bears hugging in an attempt to find refuge and forget the devastation. Tears came to my eyes with my mind promptly retrieving a long forgotten image: a rusty key.

It laid on the kitchen table of a friend one evening I visited him in Prague. Bill (not his real name) travelled every summer to Auschwitz with his American family. And it was on one of these trips that he had found the key lying between the train tracks that had been part of a terrible journey.

In my imagination the owner of the key was a girl who had been deported to the camp. She had managed to hide it in the few clothes she took with her. May be, it was the key to her room or that of a drawer where she kept all her favourite music sheets and books.

I don’t know if this story my mind started telling me that evening in the neon-light glow of a drab Prague kitchen is true. And I don’t know what happened to the child who used to play with the little Pandas. What makes these two objects so heart-breaking is the bridge they manage to span between horror and reality. They look absolutely sovereign and unshaken amid sheer dreadfulness and manage to tell a powerful story.

There might be a lesson in this. I have already written about the challenge communicators face when trying to tell the story of human tragedies in a way that makes people relate to them and care. I wish I could find a quick fix but I suspect it doesn’t exist.

The brilliant speech cultural anthropologist Jennifer James made on Tuesday at IABC International Conference gave me hope. According to her, humanity is moving into a compassion phase (after the greed phase of the past years read Enron). We are in a new era of authenticity. People are overloaded with information and do not know whom to trust. In order to get their message through, communicators need integrity and the ability to tell a compelling story that resonates with deep-seated values.

May be some day I’ll be able to master the skills of the little Panda bears…