Mason Stephen
Two weddings
Steve Mason, member of the V Corps
On June 26, 1948, a wedding was held in St. Bartholomew's Church in Pilsen, and the whole town came to see it. The American soldier who liberated Pilsen in May 1945 married a Czech girl.
Not long after the liberation of Pilsen by the American army, an eighteen-year-old girl named Marta met a black-haired American named Steve, who lived with his comrades in battle in a house on Jablonsky Street with grateful Czechs. Marta burned her hand on an iron and sought help from American medics. Among them was Steve, then 28. However, she had already met him on the sidewalk in U Bachmače Street and, like many others, asked for his autograph for her memorial book. Gradually, a strong emotional bond developed between the young people, which was not broken even by Steve's departure for the ocean, where he wanted to put away his uniform and finish college.
Marta, meanwhile, became a student at Charles University in Pilsen and continued to correspond with Steve. Even the onset of communism after February 1948 did not change this. When Steve finally graduated, he decided to propose to Marta, marry her and take her overseas. Perhaps to make things a little more difficult for the young newlyweds, the local authorities did not give Marta a passport in the Czech Republic, so she was forced to travel to the USA on Steve's. Many Pilseners at the time saw their wedding as a kind of protest against the new political regime.
Marta did not come to visit the Czech Republic for the first time until nine years after her wedding. By then she and Steve already had two children. After 1990, nothing prevented them from returning to Pilsen together. In 1998, a famous wedding took place in the St. Bartholomew's Cathedral in Plzeň. The same one that took place in the same place half a century earlier. Marta and Steve celebrated 50 years of life together with dignity. The union of an American and a Czech woman in matrimony and the love of two people from two continents was triumphant that day.
From the book 500 Hours of Victory by Karel Foud, Milan Jíša, Ivan Rollinger
