Читать книгу Czechmate - Michael Condé-Jahnel - Страница 5

The papers had been sitting in the bottom drawer of my night table for nearly ten years after the death of my mother. I had only glanced at them briefly now and again. They had not seemed relevant; life had trumped family history. But that had begun to change over recent years; not as in ‘when I get up in the morning’, but more subtly, from the inside out.

Along with the manuscript, there were scores of barely legible letters, official documents with seals, old photos, identification cards, faded clippings, scribbled notes and a journal. The letters were held together by a yellow silk ribbon. Written neatly in what I recognized to be mostly my mother’s handwriting, they were either single page or several sheets of onion skin paper, twice folded. Some were in faded, smudged envelopes without stamps, bearing traces of an insignia, marked ‘Feldpost’ and the black swastika. Letters from my mother Hedi to Walter, my father, had been written between the time he was drafted in early 1944 and late 1945, just months following Germany’s surrender. They were opened - had gotten through to him somehow - and presumably he had read them. They were mostly her letters to him – few coming back to her.

I was six years old by then, could remember little, except once, much later, when my father had told me about the letters. They had been his reason for living, to keep fighting, he said. Then there was my mother’s extensive journal of the escape from Reichenberg with myself. Clearly written after our escape, I marveled at how she had found the energy to keep notes for it during our perilous and exhausting refugee trek; perhaps that’s what had kept her going. My father had almost lost his life when it was no longer relevant to the outcome of the war, if indeed, it ever had been. His slow recovery from severe injuries had been agonizing for me to watch. I remembered glimpses of him writhing in pain, the trips to hospitals to remove more bone splinters, the crutches followed later by a walking cane.

I placed the letters back in the bottom drawer, and pulled out my father’s unfinished manuscript. There were more than a hundred pages of yellowed and darkened coarse letterhead, many frayed and torn at the edges, type written, single-spaced on both sides. Among all the papers, it was the manuscript that fascinated me the most. A few pages had minor additions. Other passages were revised several times but never completed.

The letterhead read: Freunde Italians • Amici d’Italia