Someone sailed
to Aysén before us.

Václav's grandson sent me the book before I flew to Chile. Memorias de un refugiado. Vaclav Novy M. His grandfather's memoirs. A Czech refugee who arrived in Chile in January 1950, at sixteen, without the language and without family. He wrote them in Spanish during his lifetime, for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who no longer read Czech.

When I opened the book, I realized his childhood had played out in Mariánské Lázně - fifty kilometers from Sokolov, where I was born. In forests I had walked with a pack on my back as a Scout from the age of ten.

The family asked one thing of me: that Václav's name not be forgotten. I gave my word. And when I give my word, it stands - man to man.

1933. Born in Czechoslovakia. Childhood in the spa town of Mariánské Lázně, in a house called Zlatá Harfa (Golden Harp). He learns the violin. Winters on skis in the forests behind the house. His father works at the telephone exchange.

Autumn 1938. Hitler takes the Sudetenland. The family is given twenty-four hours to leave, with half a freight wagon for all their belongings. They lose the house and most of what they own. They move to Písek, closer to the grandparents.

The war. One day the Nazis come for his father and give him a choice: the Wehrmacht, or a concentration camp. The engineer becomes a Luftwaffe captain as a photographer. He falls in combat. The body never comes home. The family never buries him.

1945–1949. Adolescence in post-war Europe. The last stop before the ocean is Italy.

January 17, 1950. The ship docks in Chile. Sixteen years old, no parents, no language. The first accommodation is the National Stadium in Santiago - repurposed for three weeks as a reception camp for European refugees. The first cazuela de pollo of his life. In his own words: "como estar en el cielo".

1950–1951. Mozo de casa - house servant for a wealthy Santiago widow. At night he smuggles food to friends in the refugee barracks. One night he escapes by train to the south.

Puerto Montt → Chiloé → Quellón. He begins working in a shipyard. Learns Spanish from copies of El Mercurio. In Chiloé he boards a two-masted sailing ship - a goleta - with an indigenous captain named Manquemilla. They sail into the Golfo Corcovado, waters that lie at the very mouth of the Aysen region.

Fifty years later he would write about that moment:

Václav was born in Mariánské Lázně. I was born in Sokolov. I grew up in Horní Slavkov, with family roots in Hroznětín. Between us lie fifty kilometers of forest - Slavkovský Forest, Bohemian Forest, Ore Mountains. The entire Karlovy Vary region. The part of Bohemia that was annexed in 1938 and taken back from the Germans in 1945. A traumatic landscape with a double memory.

As a Scout, I slept under canvas in these forests from the age of ten. I had no idea I was walking through the childhood of someone who had fled it in 1938 with twenty-four hours' notice.

Seventy years later, the two landscapes connected. Václav's grandson sent me the book - and with it, the family's wish that Václav's name not fall silent.

"Fifty kilometers from Mariánské Lázně to Sokolov. Eight hundred from Puerto Montt to the Aysen fjord. I've walked both on foot - each in a different century."

Václav Nový wrote his memoirs in Spanish - because Czech was of no use to him in Chile. They stayed in the family archive, an artifact for grandchildren and great-grandchildren who no longer read Czech.

Aysen Fjord Editions is now bringing them back. Into the language they came from. For the readers they were originally meant for, before the fate of 1938 took them elsewhere.

The book is being published in a careful Czech translation, in hardcover, with a foreword from the Nový family in Chile. All proceeds from sales are passed to the author's heirs. Production is financed by Jaroslav Sokol as an act of respect. This is not a commercial project - it's a restitution of voice.