Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 9 ·
Chapter 9:
Prisoner
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 6 min read
This is the shortest chapter in the whole book. And I think the hardest.
They came for him at work, in the middle of the day, while he was getting his tools ready. Without explanation.
One of the reasons they gave him afterwards reaches all the way back to chapter 5. As you read, remember his father.
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 9: Prisoner
One day I was in the shop preparing the tools so we could set off to work with my master, when the secret police came and, without any explanation, took both the master and me to the police station.
There an endless interrogation began. In the night my mother came, but they wouldn't let her in to me and wouldn't allow her to speak to me. I was locked up for five days without knowing why; according to them it was high treason and similar things that made no sense. On top of that I was the son of a German officer. They needed prisoners for forced labour and invented whatever came into their heads, just to get hold of people.
After those five days they simply told me that all of us who had been in the cell had already been sentenced by a people's court, which had not needed our presence in order to pass judgement.
At no point could my mother learn anything, not even after they took me away. It was only years later, from Italy, that I was able to write to her. By then she considered me dead.
Where they took him, what the closed lorries carrying thirty men at a time were like, the wooden barracks with bunks, sackcloth instead of clothes and food that was just enough to keep a man from starving, Václav describes all of it on the following pages. And also how, within days, he met a boy his own age and they began planning an escape. The full chapter is in the book.
My take
Remember chapter 5? The Nazis came to Václav's father and gave him a choice between a uniform and a concentration camp. It wasn't a choice. His father went, they made him an air force captain, and he was killed.
Seven years later they lock up his son. And one of the reasons they give him is that he is the son of a German officer.
That got me. The father had no choice. He paid for it with his life. And then his son paid for the same thing a second time, to the second regime, the one that came after the first.
The rest of the chapter is factual to the bone. Five days in custody without explanation. Then they inform him that he has already been sentenced by a people's court that did not need him there to pass judgement.
Historically it fits. Penal labour camps at the Czechoslovak uranium mines were set up from March 1949 in the Jáchymov, Horní Slavkov and Příbram areas. Radiation, insufficient food, wooden barracks nobody was allowed to leave at night. In 1953 more than sixteen thousand prisoners passed through them at once.
Václav got there at a time when the guard towers were still being built and the barbed wire was only a single row. A few months later he would not have got out.
And then there is one sentence I read three times.
His mother could learn nothing, not even after they took him away. He could write to her only years later, from Italy. “By then she considered me dead.”
A sixteen-year-old boy had his name, his address and his future taken away in five days. At home there remained a woman who did not know whether she still had a son. She found out from a letter that came from somewhere she never expected.
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 10: The Escape. Days in the forest, cheese stolen from a manor house, sleeping on pine needles, and finally a run across the border strip under fire.
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