Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  Before the Germans catch the assassins, the authorities force the manager of the Bata store on Wenceslas Square to display in the window an overcoat, hat, briefcase and bicycle found at the site of the attack and an announcement offering a reward of ten million crowns for finding the assailants.

  (For communist propaganda, the display in the window will later be part of the evidence that Bata collaborated with the occupying forces.)

  1945: FAME AND INFAMY

  First, Zlín is bombed by the Americans (they destroy 60 percent of the town’s factories), and then it is liberated by the Red Army. The Polish government-in-exile refuses to reach a compromise with the USSR and remains in London forever. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile creates a coalition government with the communists in Moscow and announces its own program.

  The directors of the Bata plants are arrested. Their deputies are forced to sweep the streets of Zlín publicly. In the course of two months, 13,000 inhabitants flee from the town of 50,000.

  Ivan H. and Josef V. make a speech from the factory broadcasting center. During the war, they worked for the firm and were informers for the Gestapo. Now they have signed up with the Security Service—the secret police. “Jan Bata’s fame has ended in infamy,” they say.

  Jan is living in Batatuba (duplicate number three in Brazil), where he finds out that by decree of the president of the republic the state has taken over the joint-stock company of Bata A.S.

  The famous Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg visits Czechoslovakia, and writes: “Bata, who remained in Zlín, praised the Führer and supplied the Reichswehr with footwear. On the eve of Munich, he changed his coat of arms. Until then, it was three shoes, but Bata painted in a fourth, so that the crossed lines would form a swastika.”

  Did Ehrenburg really go to Zlín? (After all, Bata had left the country and had no coat of arms.) This quotation from his article is distributed all over Czechoslovakia, and the communists prepare a lawsuit against Jan Bata, who is charged with betraying the nation.

  Meanwhile, he demands compensation from the Czechoslovak state for the nationalized town of Zlín—the greatest fortune owned by a single man in Central Europe.

  If the court can prove that he collaborated with the Germans, he isn’t owed a thing.

  APRIL 28, 1947: THE VERDICT

  “My God, we created Zlín purely in order to give the Czechs wings,” says Jan Bata when he finds out that the national court in Prague has sentenced him to fifteen years in prison and ten years’ forced labor. And has confiscated his property.

  He demanded to be allowed to appear before the court and to be given a chance to defend himself. “I do not believe the accused would really want to appear in court,” said the chairman of the prosecution team during the trial.

  So the prosecutor declared: “An indictment can take place in the absence of an accused man who refuses to come to the country and will not be coming.”

  The accused asked at least to be sent the bill of indictment. To no effect.

  Although the trial was a typical Stalinist show-trial, it failed to prove collaboration by means of production: all factory owners were forced to manufacture for the Germans, and he had not even been in the country. It also failed to recognize the comical idea involving Patagonia as treason. However, the court did reach the conclusion that failing to support the underground resistance movement in Bohemia was a form of collaboration.

  The Brazilian authorities quickly exchange Bata’s permanent residency card for citizenship, thanks to which they can protest: their citizen has not been tried according to international procedure. This is to no avail.

  Forty-five years from now, one of Jan’s grandsons will conduct a private investigation in order to rehabilitate his grandfather. In 1992, a report will be found in an FBI archive recording that the Americans had wanted to cross the name Bata off their blacklist, as there was no proof of collaboration. However, the communist authorities in Prague did all they could to keep the name on the list, because otherwise it would have been impossible to prosecute him in Czechoslovakia or to confiscate his property.

  1949: SVIT

  In honor of Comrade Klement Gottwald, a faithful disciple of Stalin, who a year earlier had led the total takeover of power by the communists and announced: “With the Soviet Union forever and ever, never otherwise,” Zlín is renamed Gottwaldov. Bata shoes are renamed Svit (meaning “dawn”) shoes.

  1949: IVANA

  In what is now Gottwaldov, a daughter, Ivana, is born to a worker at the plant, a Mr. Zelníčkov. Twenty years from now she will become a model, and after that, Ivana Trump, wife of the billionaire Donald Trump and one of the richest women in the United States. She will live in a fifty-room apartment in the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower in New York, famous for its rococo interior.

  The American press will call her “the spiritual heiress of the capitalist genius from Zlín who injected an Anglo-Saxon mentality into a Slav body.”

  The couple will divorce because—as her husband will claim—his biggest mistake was to let a Czech woman from Zlín join the company. Instead of a wife, he got an indefatigable business partner.

  One of the most interesting thoughts expressed in the bestseller that Ivana T. will write about herself fifty years later is this: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”

  1957: NOBEL

  For years now, everyone in Prague has been saying: “With the Soviet Union forever, and not a moment longer!”

  They also say that Bata will get the Nobel Prize—so rumor has it.

  In fact, the Brazilian press writes that sixty-year-old Jan Bata is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his plan to relocate Czechoslovakia to Patagonia, in other words, the modern concept of migration. The Brazilian president has put his name forward for the prize—for invaluable services in changing the world. (However, the prize is awarded to Canadian politician Lester B. Pearson for solving the Suez crisis.)

  Goethe said: “More light!” and then died. Beethoven’s last words were: “The comedy is over,” and Heine’s were: “God will forgive me—that’s his profession.”

  What might the last words of a Nobel-prizewinning Jan Antonín Bata have been?

  “MY SHOES DO NOT CHAFE THE FEET”?

  1957: AN EXPERIMENT

  According to the press, Jan Bata initiated an experiment in Brazil to find ways of increasing the surface area of a cow’s hide.

  He gave the following instructions: “We will put horsefly larvae in small openings all over the cow’s skin. They will cause blisters, the skin will stretch, and as a result its surface area will increase by 60 percent.”

  The experiment was suspended after the death of the first cow.

  Bata’s next experiment, involving a wooden railroad, was halted when the wooden rails came apart under the first cast-iron locomotive.

  Of course, this has no connection with the fact that Bata’s shoes are still selling like hot cakes.

  THE 1950S AND ’60S: WAR

  Now Jan Bata is at war with Marie Batová and her son Tomík. Wherever there are Bata branches and organizations (in over thirty countries), his sister-in-law and nephew accuse him of illegally seizing property left by Tomáš Bata. Their fight is described by the entire Western press. As a result of the legal and media intrigue, Jan is even arrested in New York for two weeks.

  He is worn out. He is in bad health and has no money. The court cases go on for fifteen years. Finally, in 1962, Jan Bata renounces a large part of his property in favor of Marie and Tomík. He dies in 1965 in São Paulo.

  The Canadian Bata (Tomík’s branch) takes over worldwide command from the Brazilian Bata. In several dozen countries there are several different Bata companies in operation; for example, in France alone there are eight, each of which has daughter companies that it controls. Tomík’s son Thomas Bata supervises the entire organization.

  For its own purposes, the Bata Shoe Organization publishes a journal cal
led The Peak.

  1959: VENGEANCE—THE NEXT ACT

  The poster painter has already committed several acts of vengeance. He has re-issued The Shoe Machine, and published The Treachery of the Bata Family and also Bataism Abridged. Now he brings out The True Face of Bataism, in which he has collected the accounts of former Bata employees.

  “I worked in building No. 31. The foreman called us rude names, unrepeatable names. When I received a telegram saying that my little daughter had died, I asked the foreman for some time off to go the funeral. ‘What would you do there? There’s fuck all you can do—you’re hardly going to bring the child back to life. Get lost—nobody’s going to meet the production target for you.’ I don’t know how I got back to the machine because I couldn’t see through my tears. Despite his threats, I went to the funeral. What I then suffered for the next three years is impossible to relate” (A. Wagner).

  “Bata approached our parents, asking them to sell him their beloved orchard. They refused, because they’d waited twenty years for it to produce fruit. My brother, my sister, and I were already supporting ourselves—we were all working for Bata. The head of personnel threatened us, saying that if we didn’t force our parents to sell the land, we needn’t bother coming to work the next day. So we put pressure on our poor father, who wept as he sold the land for a fifth of its value, just because Mr. Bata had a whim” (Josef and František Hradil).

  In analyzing the documents, the author reveals that in the period from 1927 to 1937 not a single worker went from Bata into retirement. The workforce was systematically rejuvenated. Workers were laid off for any reason at all at least ten years before retirement.

  “This was how the era broke people, this was how the old regime debased them,” adds Turek.

  1959, CONTINUED: MOSCOW

  Another author (who probably bears no grudge, but is a historian) points out how, at the linguistic level, refined Bataism is now blurring class divisions and tempering the system of exploitation.

  He writes that Bata cunningly calls its employees “co-workers” and their wages are “a share of the profits.”

  On the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Gottwaldov and Svit, the press quotes the words of a certain communist who, as early as 1932, told Bata: “Moscow is doing away with human envy, while Bata uses envy as a driving force.”

  MARCH 1990: THE RETURN

  Gottwaldov is called Zlín again.

  Sixty years on, Tomáš Bata (Tomík) arrives triumphantly in the city. He is greeted by 100,000 people.

  “Come and oppress us, Bata!” they shout.

  He visits his former stores. In one of them, he sees a customer trying on some shoes. “My customers are my life,” he says. “I’m upset when the buyers have to do up their own shoelaces in one of my stores.” He gets down on his knees and starts tying the man’s shoelaces for him.

  * * *

  * In fact, the family name is spelled “Baťa,” but as its customers became used to “Bata,” I decided to leave it in this, its globally familiar form.

  † Tomík Bata died on September 1, 2008.

  ‡ Švejk is the eponymous hero of the classic Czech satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek about the absurd adventures of an incompetent soldier serving in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War.

  § Afterwards, a village called Ležáky would also be destroyed, where the telegraph operator from the group was hiding.

  LUCERNA PALACE

  It’s 1906.

  Vácslav Havel, a Czech engineer from Prague, is planning to build a latter-day palace downtown, on Wenceslas Square. It will be the first building in Prague to be made out of reinforced concrete. He shows his wife the design. “What a lot of windows,” says his wife. “It’ll look like a lantern.”

  The Czech word for “lantern” is lucerna.

  “And that’s an excellent name for the entire building!” says her husband excitedly. “But best of all,” he adds, “it’s a Czech word which any foreigner can pronounce easily.”

  JUST A WOMAN

  “I was just a woman,” she said.

  “In the end, she’s just a woman,” said those who loved her.

  We don’t know what she said as she was dying. We do know what her best friend revealed on her own deathbed.

  “After cremation, I don’t want a funeral or any sort of ceremony,” said her friend.

  “Where are your ashes to be scattered?” asked the notary recording her will.

  “Nowhere!” she replied. “I don’t want to spoil the flowers in someone’s garden.”

  She sat in her bedroom in Salzburg (538 square feet), watching videos of herself in leading roles, and waiting.

  In 1995, as she sat on the sofa in calm anticipation, Helena Třeštíková from Prague asked her: “What is your greatest wish, Miss Baarová?”

  “The only thing I’m looking forward to is death,” she replied.

  Unfortunately, death did not come for her until five years later.

  First, she was cremated at Europe’s biggest crematorium. Then the urn was placed in the family grave. She was laid on top of her mother (who had lain there for fifty-five years), her sister (who had been lying on top of their mother for fifty-four years), and her father (who had been lying on top of the two of them for thirty-five years).

  Her mother had been killed by a heart attack at the very moment she was asked about Lída’s jewelry.

  Her sister killed herself, when she was refused admission to her favorite theater because of Lída.

  Her father died of cancer. Lída had nothing directly to do with his death. But even so he suffered: he hadn’t seen her for seventeen years, and never did, to the day he died. The state had deprived him of the right to see his daughter in perpetuity.

  She was already a student at drama school when a movie director saw her and invited her to the studio. That was when her father, Karel Babka, head of the municipal council in Prague, came up with the idea that she would be called Lída Baarová. Ludmila Babková sounded too ordinary for an artist. Her father didn’t think long about what her name should be, because he had a writer friend called Jindřich Šimon Baar.

  Her old first name didn’t suit her new surname.

  In those days, in neighboring Germany, a man was gaining absolute power who—as somebody once noted—was most grateful to his father for dropping the common, rustic surname Schicklgruber.

  It goes without saying. The greeting “Heil Schicklgruber” would have been too lengthy.

  They made a movie, but the director realized that he should entrust seventeen-year-old Lída Baarová to better hands. He took her to see a younger colleague. It was 1931, and for two years the Bio Lucerna, the country’s first movie theater with sound, had been up and running in Prague. “When it comes to the talkies, I’m helpless,” the director confided to his colleague. “In the silent pictures, everything was simpler. When I didn’t know how to shoot a particular scene, I added a caption to say what the actress was thinking at that moment, and the audience could read it themselves.”

  The younger colleague (the director Otakar Vávra, who was born in 1911 and died in 2011) took Lída on and directed her best Czech movies. He always used to say (well, perhaps not always, but in the 1990s, as he couldn’t have said it earlier) that she quickly became a star of a kind that the Czechs still don’t have, to this day. “Compared with Baarová, today’s actresses look like slatterns,” he wrote.

  In the late 1930s, one of her fans named a new variety of rose after her. The flower had dark red petals in the middle, and delicate pink ones on the outside.

  As someone wrote of her: “She knows how to act sincerely—hers is a face which only shows pure emotions.”

  At a theater premiere in Prague she was spotted by the head of the German studio UFA, which the Germans regarded as Europe’s equivalent of Hollywood. It was September 1934, and Lída was sitting in the auditorium with her mother.

  From the next day on she was only
allowed to eat three apples a day, and nothing else. “She has to slim down at any cost to get rid of her Slavic chubbiness,” the producer kept saying.

  The movie was called Barcarole. They were looking for an actress to play the most beautiful woman in Venice. “I was twenty, and I was in heaven,” she said. “The leading role in a German movie. No Czech actress had ever achieved that before.”

  There was one topic on which Lída said one thing to her friends, something else to the American investigators, something quite different to the Czechoslovak Security Service and something else again to the reporter who wrote a book about her called The Curse of Lída Baarová.

  The way she spoke about this topic when she was drinking water was quite different from the way she spoke about it when drinking copious amounts of champagne mixed with Fernet.

  The topic was love.

  From here on, most of what we know about Baarová should be labeled with the first sentence from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which goes: “All this happened, more or less.”

  • • •

  One day during filming, the gondolas on the artificial canals suddenly stopped moving. She saw the face of her costar Gustav Fröhlich—who for some days now had been her lover—take on a new, radiant expression.*

  “The Führer is coming!” everyone kept saying excitedly.

  She wanted to hide, but Hitler’s eyes came to rest on her.

  “His eyes were blue-gray,” she later explained at her interrogation. “Eyes like the coldest steel. He was staring at me insistently, as if he were literally boring into me with those eyes of his.”