Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 8 ·
Chapter 8:
Communism
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 6 min read
This instalment looks light at first. A trip to Prague, a cousin with an electric train set, bobsleighing on an icy run with a curve they called the death curve.
And right in the middle of it, two sentences about the NKVD and the deportations to Siberia.
I picked out a single scene. It's a job a fifteen-year-old apprentice carried out and never commented on with a word.
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 8: Communism
The following winter an enormous amount of snow fell, and one morning I woke up and everything was buried. The only way to get to work at the shop was on skis. Since I was fairly good at it, I had no trouble, but there was news waiting for me there.
In the preceding days we had been mounting loudspeakers on poles in the town centre, so the government would have some way of telling people things; they used them for political propaganda.
We had worked for over a month laying the cables and hanging the speakers. Well, in that heavy snowfall the cables didn't hold and broke in many places. Because we hadn't handed the job over yet, we all had to go out there, but on skis, or we'd never have got there. It was hard work and it took a whole week to repair all the damage the snow had done.
The rest of the chapter belongs to two worlds that existed side by side. On one side Prague of a hundred spires, a cousin who was a doctor with an electric train set, and bobsleigh races on a run they called the death curve. On the other, arrests, forced-labour camps and deportations to Siberia. And at the end, the day they came to Václav's mother and took the house. How it happened and what it did to her is in the book.
My take
There is one sentence in this chapter that Václav wrote entirely in passing, and I can't get away from it.
For a month he and his master hung loudspeakers on poles in the town centre, “so the government would have some way of telling people things”. And he adds at once: they used them for political propaganda.
A fifteen-year-old apprentice hung, with his own hands, the equipment the regime then spoke to him through. He doesn't comment. He describes it as a job he later had to repair on skis after a snowstorm.
That, I think, is usually what it looks like. Not dramatic. A system doesn't arrive with fanfares; it arrives as work you get paid for.
The second thing is the layout of the chapter. A mother and son walk through Prague, a cousin has an electric train set, there is bobsleighing. And exactly in the middle of it are two sentences about forced-labour camps and deportations to Siberia. As if they belonged to a different text. Except they didn't. They belonged to the same city and the same year.
And at the end of the chapter they come to his mother's home and take the house.
It was the second time that house was taken. The first was in 1938, by the Germans, twenty-four hours to pack and half a railway wagon. The second was in 1948, by their own state, which then let them live there as tenants.
A woman who had not needed to work before the war began paying rent in her own house and going out to work in all weathers. Václav is fifteen and he is watching it.
A year later they will lock him up. But that comes next time.
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 9: Prisoner. They came for him at work, without explanation. Five days in custody and a sentence passed without a trial.
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