Fifty-seven years ago today, on April 15, 1968 (March 18, 1968 in the lunar calendar), Czechoslovakia implemented a policy of liberalization. On April 15, 1968, in Czechoslovakia, winter came and went faster than the snow melted. In Prague, there is now a fresh sense of political freedom. Hope refreshes the faces of the Prague people. In the squares of the city center where people used to walk slowly, people talked, hugged and argued with each other. Teenagers too young to remember what the emperor looked like wore buttons with the head of Franz Joseph. Students cheered and applauded the moderate policies of the Communist leader Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek believed that Marxism and individual freedom could be fused together, so-called "socialism with a human face." The most welcome and striking change was the restoration of the face of newspapers, which were no longer content to reproduce Communist propaganda. Kafka's memoirs told horror stories about the brutality of the secret police. One of them involved transporting prisoners in coaches to labor camps where they extracted uranium from the ground. But none of them were protected from radiation damage. The Czechoslovaks are now trying to rewrite history. "The last few years have been a stain on our postwar history," said President Novotny.