Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 6 ·
Chapter 6:
The End of the War
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 6 min read
Last time was the last time Václav saw his father. This chapter is about what came after, and it starts almost cheerfully.
The Germans were retreating so fast that they threw away anything heavy. Weapons were left lying along the roads. American soldiers gave the local boys chocolate and cigarettes for them.
To twelve-year-old Václav there was nothing strange about it. Weapons were the one thing there was plenty of.
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 6: The End of the War
After that the American soldiers offered us chocolate and cigarettes for weapons, so we started bringing them in, including Panzerfausts, an anti-tank weapon, the forerunner of today's rockets. Once we found one and I volunteered to fire it. A tube about a metre long went on your shoulder and you pressed the trigger. I didn't know the recoil was so terrible. I fired, and the blow stunned me for a good while. Needless to say, I never tried a Panzerfaust again.
Another time we were coming back loaded with weapons to trade for chocolate and stopped to rest, leaning against a tree.
Suddenly a powerful explosion shook the tree down to its roots. When we had recovered from the shock, we went to look at the other side of the tree, and that sight, I think, I will never forget.
What Václav saw behind that tree, he describes in the book in a single sentence, without one adjective more than necessary. What follows is the end of that carefree time: the cake his mother baked for the American soldiers, the day the demarcation line moved, and the arrival of the Red Army, soldiers who had never seen a wristwatch and travelled on horse-drawn carts. The full chapter is in the book.
My take
This chapter took me longer to translate than any other. Not because of the language.
It begins like a boys' adventure. Soldiers hand out chocolate for weapons. A twelve-year-old puts a Panzerfaust on his shoulder and fires it, because it doesn't occur to him that he shouldn't. The recoil floors him. He writes about it almost cheerfully.
And a paragraph later, behind the tree they had been leaning against a moment earlier, the thing happens that by his own account he still remembered seventy years on.
Václav describes it without one adjective more than necessary. No “tragically”, no “sadly”. Only what he saw and in what order. I think that is exactly how he remembered it, and that this is why he could still write it down after so many years.
The dates fit. The combat group of Captain Kermit G. Bernard of the 4th Armored Division of Patton's Third Army reached Písek on the afternoon of 6 May 1945. The Red Army arrived on 10 May, after five in the afternoon. The demarcation line then ran along the western edge of the town, so the Americans stayed literally around the corner for months. Two armies, four days, one town.
What struck me most, though, is the last sentence of the chapter, which I won't give away in full. In it Václav describes the Russian soldiers without varnish, and then adds that Czechoslovakia had been occupied by the Germans and that they themselves were no enemies of the Russians. And that this was what those soldiers failed to understand.
He is twelve, and he already understands what could not be said out loud in Czechoslovakia for the next forty years.
That sentence isn't a complaint. It is a diagnosis. And knowing what comes in chapters 8 and 9, it reads like a forecast.
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 7: Back to the Golden Harp. The house came back, life came back, first love arrived. And then they found her dead in the woods.
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