Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 10 ·
Chapter 10:
The Escape
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 7 min read
A sixteen-year-old boy escaped from a camp by a uranium mine. He walks for days through the forest, sleeps on pine needles, eats cheese his friend stole from a manor house where his own father works.
He has no map and no compass. He walks west and hopes that Germany is somewhere out there.
I picked a scene I had to stop at while translating, because the whole rest of his life hung on it.
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 10: The Escape
After about half an hour's walking we came upon a road, and on it tyre tracks typical of an American military jeep. We started shouting, we were so happy, because we thought we were in Germany, which the Americans occupied at the time. We almost broke into a run out of sheer joy and followed the tracks.
Shortly afterwards we reached a bend, and beyond it a house appeared with a jeep parked in front of it. We walked straight up to the house, openly, but as we came closer, surprise paralysed us. There was a sign, and on it stood: Border Police, Czechoslovakia.
There wasn't a sound, so we crept a little closer, and when we looked inside we saw several policemen sleeping wherever they had dropped, snoring loudly. It was plain that the previous night's drinking had been heavy.
The surprise didn't last long, it was overtaken by the fear that came after it, and that drove us back into the forest very fast.
In the end they crossed the border in broad daylight, across the open strip of no man's land. His friend had explained beforehand that you have to run in zigzags like a hare, because whoever runs straight is an easy target. How that run turned out, who shot at them, and what Václav only discovered once he was sitting in a lorry on the other side, that is in the book.
My take
I translated this scene three times, because I kept not being sure I was reading it right.
He sees the tracks of an American jeep. He and his friend shout with joy, because it means they are in Germany, that it is over. They run along the tracks. And around the bend stands a house with a sign: Border Police, Czechoslovakia.
Inside, drunk policemen are asleep and snoring.
Ten metres closer, a few minutes earlier, one drink less the night before, and he would never have reached Chile. That whole life in the fjords, the boat, the family, this book. All of it hung on those men getting drunk that night.
It made me think how many such moments every family tree contains. How many of us are here only because someone somewhere turned left instead of right.
And one more thing about this chapter won't let me sleep. Throughout the text Václav repeats that he owes his survival to that friend. He always knew what to do. I did whatever he said. Without him I'd have been lost. Nowhere does he write that he himself was brave.
And yet in the entire chapter he never once names him. The man to whom, by his own words, he owes his life, is left in the book without a name. I don't know whether it was caution, or whether after all those years he simply couldn't write it.
But I know this: a sixteen-year-old boy crossed the border with nothing. Within a year he was standing in the port of Valparaíso. And a few years later he was the captain of his own boat in the fjords of Patagonia.
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 11: Germany. They get a heap of banknotes for a revolver and think they are rich. It buys them one bowl of soup.
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