Aysén Fjord Editions · Memorias de un Refugiado
The memoirs of Václav Nový,
chapter by chapter
Václav Nový was born in 1933 in Mariánské Lázně, Czechoslovakia. At sixteen he crossed the border on foot, and on 17 January 1950 his ship reached Chile. He spent the rest of his life in the fjords of Patagonia, where a refugee with nothing became the captain of his own boat. At the end of his life he wrote it all down in Spanish, for his grandchildren. I am translating it and publishing it chapter by chapter.
New chapters appear first in the Sokol v Patagonii newsletter on LinkedIn, every other Thursday morning, and then here. About the book and how it reached me →
· Chapter 1
Memories of My Childhood
A tuberculosis sanatorium, a truck that started rolling, and a house called the Golden Harp. The first chapter of Václav Nový's memoirs.
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· Chapter 2
Hitler
Six years old, a ski run outside the window, and twenty-four hours Václav doesn't know about yet. Autumn 1938 in Mariánské Lázně.
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· Chapter 3
Písek
Twenty-four hours to leave and half a truck per family. A new town, a frozen river, and lorries that drove out onto the ice.
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· Chapter 4
Grandfather
The brightest part of the whole book. A train of two carriages, a farmstead behind wide gates, and a bread oven you fell asleep on.
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· Chapter 5
My Father and the War
“The uniform or the camp. Choose.” A choice that was no choice at all, and beside the great war, the small one, with a goose traded for torch batteries.
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· Chapter 6
The End of the War
Chocolate for discarded weapons, a Panzerfaust on a boy's shoulder, and one explosion behind a tree that Václav still remembered seventy years later.
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