August was the 38th anniversary of the Soviet suppression of Czechslovakian Prime Minister Alexander Dubek's reform movement, "Prague Spring."

Aug. 20, 1968, I was on a hut-to-hut hiking tour in the Austrian Alps on a trip to England, Scotland and the Austrian Alps to celebrate earning my master's degree. Word came to us up there in our alpine huts that the Soviets had rolled their tanks into Prague, crushing Prime Minister Alexander Dubek's "Prague Spring."

I remember that a chill ran through my body, raising the hair on the back of my neck. Innsbruck, the starting point of our hut-to-hut trek, is just a few hours by train from Prague. Neither Prague or Vienna were on my itinerary that summer, yet many of my hiking companions and new friends urged me to go before I made my way to Amsterdam in September, to then return to Los Angeles.

But the Soviet tanks and troops beat me to it.

I didn't get to fulfill my dream of visiting Prague and Vienna until June 2003, when I joined an Eastern European Art History "Education Abroad" trip with Napa Valley College.

This anniversary date reminded me of these two events in my life and reawakened the emotions and thoughts I carried home with me from my four beautiful days in Prague three years ago.

It is hard to imagine that not so many years ago, the Golden City was under Communist Russian control. In 2003, the buildings carried lovely pastel tints on their walls (a far cry from the drab grays made even more drab by dirty coal). Today, new modern architecture dazzles the senses, specifically a glass and steel building sensuously shaped to suggest two dancers, and nicknamed Fred and Ginger. There is music everywhere -- street musicians, hourly concerts throughout the city every day of the week, notes from a piano emanating from the windows of a house on a quiet street high on the river banks above the city center. Even the birds singing in the trees along streets and in parks add to the melodic sounds of this enchanting city.

Yet vestiges of the not-so-distant darker days remain, as they should. The Jewish museum, protected by both the Czechs and also the Nazis; the ancient Jewish Cemetery, where graves, one on top of the other, are marked by tombstones practically one on top of the other and engraved with teapots and hands, symbols of hospitality. And there are memorials to those Czechs who died in the Holocaust.

Franz Kafka's birthplace and his other residences are marked. Prague is an artistic city; in fact, in the words of my colleague who led our trip, "Prague is a work of art."

Since my first return to Europe in 1999, I have made visits to memorial sites of the Great Wars a centerpiece of my trips. In France, I visited several times the Normandy landing beaches, and the American, German and Canadian cemeteries nearby. The beaches are tranquil playgrounds for little blue-sailed beach buggies, and the cemeteries lie among thick fields of grains and blue-flowered flax. Roadsides lined with brilliant scarlet poppies evoke the famed poem "In Flanders Fields."

On the sandy cliffs overlooking these tranquil beaches are monstrous relics of D-Day 1944: big guns still point their cannons seaward and heavily reinforced and interconnected bunkers provide playgrounds for children visiting with their parents.

We must remember the past, and never forget. This is the theme of the one kilometer "Avenue of Peace" that leads to La Cambe, the cemetery for about 21,000 German soldiers, most aged between 18 and 21, most of whom were killed in the final days of the war, and whose graves are marked by somber black granite crosses. Students from European countries work here in the summer, to remember the futility of war and its costs both human and otherwise. "Lest we forget" is also inscribed in the little temple in the middle of the 10,000 alabaster crosses of the American cemetery overlooking the landing beaches where so many of those who rest here died on June 6, 1944.

One of the most poignant cemeteries that I visited along the Normandy beaches was the one that holds 2,200 Canadian soldiers just inland from a little seaside town called Beny-sur-Mer. Accessed by a narrow road lined with scarlet poppies that cuts through billowing fields of wheat and flax, its location is signaled by a lone Canadian flag flying in the sea breezes.

Among the crosses were two workers tending the rich array flowers. Beyond stretched rolling fields of grains as far as the eye could see. Since so many of the young men whose remains rest here were from my home province of Saskatchewan, it seemed extraordinarily fitting that this spot should be their final resting place. I shed more than a tear as I remembered these brave lives lost in the futility of war.

Yet we must live in the present and celebrate the cultural richness of the land and its people.

Last summer, I was in Hamburg, Germany, at the beginning of the World Cup. There was "pitch fever" everywhere. Hamburg, one of the world cup venues, was commemorating the event with flat wooden "footballer" figures in its central train station, one in every color of all the participating teams; and throughout the city were spectacular blue goals, which I shall never forget, iridescent blue goals of various sizes, created by glass artist Michael Batz. At night, they were particularly impressive, and to add to the effect, lasers were beamed from Radio Hamburg's broadcast tower to all the goals mounted on top of buildings or construction cranes, forming a network of shooting colorful beams visible for many kilometers beyond city limits. And just about everyone who owned a car was flying the German flag from their car windows. Celebrating the present -- it was wonderful, exhilarating, uplifting, joyous.

I think the Czechs and the Germans and the rest of Europe have got it right. Learn from the past (don't ever forget) and plan for the future, but equally, live in the present.

Rhoda Stewart is a professor emeritus of English at Napa Valley College