Sketches from Childhood

Title Page

Milan Svanderlik

SKETCHES FROM CHILDHOOD

Contents

Title Page

Imprint

Prologue

THE BEGINNINGS

AN AGE OF INNOCENCE ?

OF NUNS, RABBITS AND RAILWAY TRAINS

THE WORLD BEGINS TO CHANGE

BEFORE THE STORM

INNOCENCE TARNISHED

AT SCHOOL

PREPARING FOR BANISHMENT

EXPULSION

A NEW HOME IN YUGOSLAVIA

EPILOGUE AND HISTORICAL NOTES

About the Author

Imprint

SKETCHES FROM CHILDHOOD

Copyright © 2021 Milan Svanderlik, London, UK

Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.de

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The glamour of childish days is upon me,

My manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance,

I weep like a child for the past.

from Piano, by D H Lawrence

Prologue

Sketches from Childhood is essentially the memoir of an early childhood that simply happened to coincide with matters of great political moment: Milan Svanderlik was born on the very day that the Communist Party effected a coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth, transforming a struggling, post-war, liberal democracy into a brittle, Stalinist dictatorship, under the heel of the Kremlin. Overarching what it is hoped readers will find a happy admixture of childhood recollection, juvenile imaginings and engaging whimsy, shot through with a thread of pathos, evoked by a family where burgeoning discord reflects the gathering storm that will soon engulf the body politic, is this simple truth: we none of us choose when or where we are born, and inevitably, we must all be products, to a greater or lesser degree, of the manner in which the inexorable tide of history impinges upon the conditions of our home life, our upbringing and our education. Tragically, we are, every one of us, prisoners of circumstance.

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.















CHAPTER 2

AN AGE OF INNOCENCE ?

My very first childhood memory dates from when I was still in the pram: I remember experiencing great pleasure as my mother drew on to my tiny foot a newly-knitted sock, trying it for size. The warmth and softness of the new wool generated such an intense feeling that it has stayed with me for all these years. I was later told that I protested vociferously when the sock was slipped off my foot, in order to be finished. I just never wanted that exquisite pleasure to end and, apparently, I kept poking my foot out of the pram for days afterwards, no doubt in the hope that such a delightful, comforting experience might be repeated. It is surely strange how such small, almost insignificant experiences can stay lodged at the back of our minds for a lifetime, when memories of much greater importance seem almost carelessly discarded.

I also remember quite distinctly my first Christmas - a roaring fire, a beautifully decorated tree, lit with real candles, and dressed with glinting pendants and chocolates wrapped in colourful tinfoil. For many years afterwards, I associated the magic of Christmas with the excitement of presents, a warm, comfortable home, and the smell of cinnamon, vanilla and oranges. This wonderful, cosy interior contrasted markedly with the inhospitable world outside, where the air was biting cold and the garden was thickly blanketed with snow.

While Winters in that part of Czechoslovakia were bitterly cold, usually with large amounts of snow, Spring and Summer were generally warm and beautiful. I have a lucid memory of being taken to a nearby pine forest, to collect the blueberries that grew there in profusion. To me, the trees looked gigantic, and the smell of resin and pine needles was almost overpowering. I simply ate most of the blueberries that I managed to collect, and I still have a distinct recollection of how delicious they were and how dramatically they stained my lips and tongue a ghoulish purple hue. They tasted so good to me that to this very day, whenever I eat blueberries, which is quite often, I find myself transported back to sunny days spent in Bohemian woods. Sadly, today’s blueberries never seem to taste quite so good as they did then; doubtless the newly-experienced tastes and smells of childhood are registered with an intensity that can never be surpassed.

Once I’d graduated from crawling and was up and about on my own two legs, I remember exploring our cavernous house - for that’s how it seemed to me - with its wide, unforgiving, marble staircase that proved such a cruel obstacle to my little legs and knees. I have a clear picture of the grandeur of my father’s library, with its dark, heavy, leather furniture and the books that lined the walls. I also recall sunny days in our garden, a safe space filled with trees and shrubs; it was almost our very own miniature arboretum. I well remember playing inside the garden’s gazebo, in the shade of large trees, and that life there felt secure and good - there were high walls all around, with an impressive, wrought iron gate to keep us safe from the world. Little did I know that these walls, gates and fences would soon acquire a quite different function, to keep us all locked in.

Amongst my happy, garden memories, I can still picture the large, fenced plot where my mother grew most of our fruit and vegetables, and where she also cultivated flowers for the house. Summers were quite short, so strawberries, gooseberries and redcurrants were all grown to ripen rapidly. Needless to say, having acquired an early passion for blueberries, I had to be restrained from eating all the garden fruit myself! The beds of poppies I remember particularly, with their bright, fragile blooms, waving gently in the breeze. Their fragrance was stunning and, to me, they looked very beautiful too, though my mother grew them primarily for the seeds that are such an important ingredient in traditional Czech cuisine. Since that time, and throughout all my years, I have always retained a love of poppies.

The less romantic amongst the readers of this memoir might dismiss the above descriptions as mere trivial sketches from a privileged, over-indulged, almost fairy-tale childhood and they would, at least in part, be right. But sadly, as we grown-ups all know, where there is light, there are shadows too, and the brighter that light, the deeper and darker the shadows become. And during those years, there were shadows growing all around us.

I was much too young at the time to understand the struggles my parents were grappling with, but I did have a definite sense that not all was well, that they were fending off some kind of storm, coping every day with circumstances that worried them both and made them unhappy. Clearly, good parents will always seek to protect their children from anything that is dangerous, unpleasant or distasteful and, with painstaking care, my parents endeavoured to shield me from their fears and give me as normal a childhood as possible. But I shall not forget the people in uniform who used to make regular visits to our house and, almost without exception, the loud exchanges that ensued between them and my father, exchanges that would reverberate frighteningly from the library throughout the entire house. After such visits, my father was nearly always in a rage and my mother’s disconsolate expression would betray her own deep concerns. I had not the least idea about what was happening, of course, but even I could discern that these visitors were never the bearers of glad tidings. Oddly, what has stuck in my mind particularly is that I never recall a single one of them smiling, ever, at anybody, not even at cute little me, so, in my childish imaginings, I associated people in uniform with Bad Things.

Apart from weekend visits by my grown-up brother and sister - they were both much older than me and no longer lived at home - mine was a rather solitary existence; hardly anyone ever visited our house, apart from the nasty folk in uniform. Some years later, I discovered to my surprise that most children normally played with other children, but no children ever came to play with me. What I didn’t quite realise at the time was that no-one could; no other child was permitted to come. But during those early years, I suppose that I could not have missed what I had never experienced and so, to be entirely frank, I confess I have retained only happy memories from that period of my life.