Читать книгу Sketches from Childhood - Milan Svanderlik - Страница 5

Chapter 1

THE BEGINNINGS

Throughout my long life (I am now 73) I have always been aware of certain events in my distant past but, for all sorts of reasons, chose never to dwell too long on these first memories. To be honest, while I believe that we must all build our lives on foundations laid during our earliest years, I am also strongly of the view that our desires and our vision are probably the more important determinants of how we progress through life. Of course, there is also the significant question of luck - Fortune was never known to smile upon everyone!

Though now retired, I am still active, but having exceeded Mankind’s allotted, 70-year span, I have begun to feel that I am living on ‘borrowed time’. It is, I suspect, partly because of this perception that I have recently started to look backwards more, to delve into and to reflect upon the past, in an endeavour to understand better that distant, formative time of my early childhood. I find I now have an urge to explore more precisely how the experiences of those years have influenced the person I am today, and what effect they have had on how I interpret the contemporary world.

For the first time ever, I shall endeavour to sketch out some of the most memorable events I recall from my childhood. With almost seven decades having intervened, these will be more like ‘snapshots of times gone by’ and they will not always be sequential. As children, we remember certain things vividly whilst many other events are entirely forgotten; there is not always any apparent logic to it. But in order for these sketches to make sense, I need to place them in a historical context, explain something of the circumstances surrounding them, and mention at least the key individuals who feature in them - the dramatis personae of my tales, so to speak.

Allow me first to tell you something about my parents. Both my parents (Bohumil Švandrlik & Růžena Sladeček) belonged to the first generation born in Yugoslavia to émigré Czechs who had settled in Veliki Zdenci, in Croatia, during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father served as an officer in the Royal Yugoslav Army and, once married, my parents resided in Bjelovar, where my sister (Veronika - Věra) and brother (Miroslav - Mirko) were born. From Bjelovar, the young family moved to Zagreb, where they lived for a number of years before the outbreak of WWII, when they relocated to Petrinja. From there, my father left to join the Partisans. He was not the only Czech to enlist in Tito’s army of resistance; indeed, a large number of his fellow countrymen from Daruvar and the surrounding towns and villages took part in the struggle and, sadly, many lost their lives in the conflict. Thankfully, my father survived to witness the liberation of Yugoslavia, and for his contribution to the war effort, he was decorated with the Spomenica medal. I mention this detail solely because his creditable involvement with the Partisans helped determine the fate of our family only a few years later.

Like much of the rest of the Europe, Czechoslovakia was not spared from the disastrous consequences of war: the major cities suffered extensive damage, many villages were destroyed, the economy was wrecked and, on a rough estimate, out of a population of 14.5m, over 350,000 were killed. Many of the dead were civilians (277,000 were Jews) with many more wounded or incapacitated. To add to this misery, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans from the Sudetenland, mostly during 1945, added a very dark, closing chapter to Czech war history: over 1.6m Germans were expelled to the American Zone (subsequently West Germany) and 800,000 to the Soviet Zone (subsequently East Germany). And tragically, many thousands of people of German descent died during this ruthless expulsion, either in violent circumstances or from hunger, illness, or disease. From Slovakia, almost 100,000 Magyars were relocated, under duress, to Hungary, in exchange for the return of around 70,000 Slovaks. Overall, as a result of this heinous catalogue of slaughter and displacement, the Czech lands became almost nationally homogeneous, with the proportion of Czechs and Slovaks growing from 64% to 94% of the total population.

All this was happening at the same time as Czechoslovakia was embarking upon a coordinated effort to rebuild its cities, revive its industry, and replace the housing and infrastructure lost to the conflict. To achieve this, the country needed a legion of professionals, labourers and other energetic young workers that Czechoslovakia simply did not possess. Thus it was that the Government appealed to the Czech minority in Yugoslavia, beseeching them to return to their ancestral homeland and to help with the post-war reconstruction. To enhance the response to this plea, returnees were offered attractive incentives by the Government - resettlement grants, housing, and farmland were all offered as inducements. In a country that had lost around 2.5m of its German citizens, there were plenty of employment opportunities and almost all returnees were exempted from paying any state taxes for several years.

Many responded, mostly idealistic young men and women, eager to make their way in the world. They were drawn from the first generation of Czechs born in Croatia to parents who had themselves migrated from the old Bohemia and Moravia and who had retained nostalgic connections with their original homeland. Life for Czechs in Croatia had not always been easy and it must be acknowledged that not all Czech settlers felt entirely comfortable as a tiny minority in the new Yugoslavia. Records indicate that several trainloads of Czechs from the region around Daruvar took advantage of the Czech Government’s attractive offer and moved to Czechoslovakia. These new arrivals came, as settlers often do, filled with optimism, hope for a better future, and in the expectation that their new life might be easier, both for them and for their children. It is hard to imagine that any of them foresaw the dramatic regime change that, but a few years later, was to have such a profound and dismal effect on all their lives.

Like lots of others, my own family relocated to Czechoslovakia immediately after the War. They settled in a small town called Jiřikov, in the extreme north of Czechoslovakia, close to the border with what was then East Germany (DDR). The state border actually ran through the town itself, dividing it into two. Not surprisingly, as Jiřikov was in the region known as the ‘Sudetenland’, it also had a German name, Georgswalde. In other ways an unremarkable place, Jiřikov was unusual in having several very well-known factories producing luxury goods - pianos, chandeliers, carpets and bone china - and these well-established enterprises provided most of the employment for the local populace. There was even a railway station, although the line terminated there. My parents and their two teenage children settled into an imposing house, surrounded by its own gardens, set amongst tall trees, and with extensive land and coniferous forests behind it. That was where I became a late and, I suspect, rather unexpected addition to the Švandrlik household.

By unhappy coincidence, I was born on 27 February 1948, a date forever remembered as a momentous day in the history of Czechoslovakia, for that was the day when, in a Soviet-backed coup d’état, the Czech Communists overthrew the legitimate, democratic government and took over the state. A little longer was required to gain absolute power but after the last minister from the old regime, Jan Masaryk, was killed and his body flung from a window in Prague, the takeover of power was complete. As we now know, Communist rule in Czechoslovakia was to prevail for the next four decades.