Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 2 ·
Chapter 2:
Hitler
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 5 min read
Six years old, a ski run outside the window, and twenty-four hours Václav doesn't know about yet.
What follows is an excerpt from Memorias de un Refugiado, which I am translating from the Spanish original. This is not fiction, it is an autobiography, the true story of Václav Nový. The full chapter appears in the book.
My Life in Europe, Chapter 2: Hitler
Mariánské Lázně, autumn 1938.
I was six. The ski run beside our house was already under the first snow. I had a new medal from June, from a children's race on the flat, and I went to violin lessons three times a week. My father worked at the telephone exchange. My mother kept the house she called the Golden Harp. She had bought that house. She had named it too.
My sister and I understood only half of what was going on in the radio and the newspapers. Hitler was shouting. He sounded like a madman, and in fact he was one. A great many Germans lived in our town. Suddenly they began behaving as though Mariánské Lázně belonged to them.
Then came the SA uniforms. And then the Hitler Youth, boys a few years older than me who a week earlier had been playing marbles in the same courtyard. Now they looked at us differently.
And then the British and the French signed a piece of paper they believed would prevent a war.
They gave the Sudetenland to Hitler.
Nobody asked us.
The day they came to our door began like any other. My mother was setting the table. My father was knotting his tie. My sister was practising scales on the piano they had bought us a few months earlier.
Someone knocked at the door.
I was the one who opened it.
What stood behind that door, and what followed in the next twenty-four hours, is in the book. Here only this: by the evening of the following day we were leaving Mariánské Lázně.
My take
Václav lost his home at six. Someone knocked at the door and by the next day the Golden Harp was gone.
Seventy years later he wrote these sentences as an old man in Chile, in Spanish, because in Aysén nobody would have read them in Czech. On the other side of the world, where he was taken by something that began with that knock.
I came to that end of the world voluntarily. I grew up in Sokolov. In Aysén I chose a piece of land by a fjord, not out of necessity, but by decision. Or Patagonia chose me; the locals speak of it as a living being. At his age Václav was given no decision. I was given an offer.
When I read his manuscript in the evening, in the armchair with my son asleep nearby, I don't feel a century between us. I feel that when people want a home, history sometimes takes it from them and sometimes lets them build one. The difference isn't luck. The difference is who knocks on the door and who opens it.
Václav opened it as a child. I open it as a father.
About the book
Memorias de un Refugiado is being published in Czech for the first time by Aysén Fjord Editions. Chapters appear gradually, first in the Sokol v Patagonii newsletter on LinkedIn, then here. All proceeds go to the author's family in Chile.
Next: Chapter 3: Písek. A strange town, a grandfather, and a stove you could sleep on.
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