My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  And all of a sudden Prague emerged on the horizon. The truck had to negotiate the narrow gaps in the barricades, the houses were pockmarked with bullet holes, and I saw in the street a group of men and women wearing white armbands toiling away with paving stones, piling them in a heap. According to Jirka, these were Germans who only yesterday ruled over our land and decided who would live and who would die.

  *

  Once again I was sleeping in a real bed. In the evening, for the first time in years, I could crawl into a bathtub full of warm water. I could go outside and take off wherever I wanted down the street. I could select whatever book I wanted to read from Aunt Eliška’s library. That’s how I spent an entire blissful week. Then we received permission to move back into our old apartment.

  A locksmith came with us to open the door, along with our uncle, Pops, to see what we would need. The place on Ruská Avenue was the only home I’d ever known because I never considered the barracks a home. This is where I would return in my thoughts. This is where my Jules Verne novels were, my electric train, the metal bed that I slept on and that wasn’t teeming with bedbugs. And the bathroom, the toilet, running water. Soap. Plates instead of metal bowls. A radio!

  While the locksmith was opening the door, the apartment manager told us that our belongings had been removed, but we were not to worry because the SS man who had lived in our flat while we were away had left behind all of his own furniture, which, as we would soon see, was brand-new. The bastard had lived there barely six months.

  The furniture was indeed new. In the living room stood an enormous writing desk, a large four-section wardrobe, and a couch. But there wasn’t a trace of my Jules Verne, electric train set, or bed. The bed in the master bedroom was even bigger than the writing desk, but the feather duvet was missing. Uncle told us not to worry; he’d find us a duvet. Then he looked at my brother and me and said to Mother that the revolution was over, and schools were operating again. Jan was still too little—he’d just turned six last November—but I had missed so many years that Uncle said I shouldn’t waste a single day.

  Mother agreed and sent me to ask the apartment manager, who had a son my age, if he knew which school I was supposed to attend.

  The next day I set out for the secondary school in Heroldovy Gardens. The principal was somewhat at a loss for what to do with me. “Have a seat, young man. Did you attend school in Terezín?”

  I explained to him that schools had been prohibited.

  The principal asked me how old I was, and when he found out that I’d be fourteen in a few months, he told me that I belonged in the ninth grade. “If we place you in a lower grade,” he mused, “it would look like you’d failed, and that wouldn’t be fair.”

  So he beckoned me to follow him down long, chilly corridors to a door marked 4a. He knocked and walked right in.

  The classroom was full of unfamiliar boys and girls, and the teacher was writing something on the chalkboard. The students stood up, and the teacher hurried over to greet us.

  “Boys and girls,” said the principal, “please welcome your new classmate. Please be,” he hesitated for a moment as if searching for the right word, “kind to him. He was locked up in what was called a concentration camp for four years. Completely innocent people were interned there, and he didn’t have a chance to attend school.” He considered that to be the worst thing that had befallen me. He turned to the teacher, who was peering at me inquisitively, and asked that he and his colleagues take this into consideration.

  The principal left and the teacher showed me where to sit. Then he continued his explanation about something, which I almost immediately stopped listening to because it didn’t make any sense. During recess, one of my classmates told me we had just sat through physics.

  The worst thing for me was that this wasn’t the end. We still had three more classes to go, and tomorrow six more, and in most of them I had no idea what they were talking and writing about.

  It was clear that it would be pointless to test me on anything, except perhaps history and geography, and then only on the material that had been covered in the previous lesson. The teachers agreed that at the end of the year I would be given a certificate so I could apply to a high school. Fortunately, there were only a few days until vacation.

  *

  We waited to see if Father and our relatives, who had disappeared one by one, would return. I was also waiting to see if any of my friends would come back. I refused to accept that they were dead. They couldn’t have killed everyone, all those they had carted off by the thousands to the East, could they?

  Every day the radio broadcast lists of freed prisoners who had reported they were still alive. We sat waiting and listening to the invisible convoy of the rescued and anticipated hearing a name we knew.

  Father’s sister Ilonka reported in. Just before the war she had managed to escape to Canada, and Mother’s sister Hedvika had fled to the Soviet Union, where she had lived a few years earlier. Two of Father’s cousins returned, one of whom had survived Auschwitz; and Aunt Eliška’s husband, Leopold, who had escaped via Egypt to England, where he joined our army abroad. Leopold, a former postman, had never, he assured us, even fired an air rifle, but he had achieved the rank of staff sergeant. He was shot in the leg at the Battle of Aachen and had a limp, though the way he described it, the war seemed to be nothing more than one thrilling adventure after another.

  Finally we found Father’s name on a list of rescued prisoners. He arrived on a flatbed truck with several other prisoners and was so emaciated we barely recognized him.

  Once again we were sitting down together to a celebratory dinner, everyone in the family who had survived. Father, surprisingly full of energy, told us about his travels through the concentration camps and how they had marched from the camp in Sachsenhausen nearly all the way to the sea, thirty kilometers a day without food and almost without rest. When they had stopped for a minute by a farmhouse, a Pole who was being forced to work there gave him a piece of bread with lard, which had most likely saved his life.

  Why did he give it to you, of all people?

  “Because I was the closest,” explained Father. “Life hung precisely on such threads. And on willpower. Your feet were chafed bloody and you didn’t think you could raise your foot, but you went on nevertheless, and every step you thought would be your last. It would rain at night, and there was nowhere to take cover, so I took the single blanket I had and made a tent so I wouldn’t get completely soaked. And the next day I just went on,” he told us, and none of us uttered a word. “If I didn’t get up or if I’d merely stopped, they would have shot me, and right now I’d be rotting God knows where in the ground.”

  Then Father began talking about the future. After everything he’d gone through, he realized our society was corrupt, that it bred inequality, injustice, poverty, millions of unemployed, who then put their faith in a madman. But the future belonged to socialism and finally communism, which would put an end to poverty and exploitation.

  “You make it sound like a fairy tale,” protested Uncle Pops, and he wondered if we too were going to found collective farms and nationalize factories, shops, trades, and finally even wives.

  This question provoked Father, and he warned Uncle not to believe the Nazi propaganda. The only things that would be nationalized were large factories, mines, and banks. Uncle wouldn’t have to worry about his measly cosmetics shop.

  A few days later, Aunt Hedvika and her husband came to visit. She told us she had worked for a radio station in Moscow, but when the German army was getting close, everyone volunteered with picks and shovels to dig trenches on the outskirts of the city. Then she was evacuated to a town called Kamensk-Uralsky. Meters of snow would fall there, so they had to dig passages in the drifts, but there were some days when the temperature sank to forty degrees below zero, and no one went outside if he could help it. During the last year of the war, when she was back in Moscow, she saw Stalin up close. Stalin in the flesh.


  I kept waiting to see if any of my friends would return, my cousins, my aunts, if the Hermanns and their daughters who lived below us would come back.

  But no one at all returned.

  *

  From the beginning of the postwar days, Mother was doing poorly. She was always weak, and now she complained of fatigue and chest pains. Father took her to see a renowned Prague cardiologist, who pronounced a devastating diagnosis. Mother’s heart was so bad that it wouldn’t bear any strain, not even walking uphill or climbing steps. No excitement, not even a fever. (At the time we didn’t know that this was a false diagnosis, and she lived another fifty years.)

  Since we had miraculously survived everything, I was looking forward to setting off on vacation as we did before the war, but because of Mother’s weak heart, this was off the table. Father decided, however, that at least my brother and I needed to get outside the city, and right away he took us to a camp on the outskirts of Prague, which was operated by a new organization that bore an unpoetic name, the Czechoslovak Union of Youth.

  The fact that we had all just been reunited and now we had to part again depressed me so much that to this day I remember that vacation as a sort of exile. Jan took it even harder, and he asked Father to take him back home. He didn’t want to stay in the camp. Father promised he would return to check on us soon, and it was my task to take care of my brother.

  The camp comprised several wooden cabins and a sheltered communal kitchen. I didn’t know any of the leaders or even any of my squad members. I also didn’t know any of the things that all the other kids knew about: war games, rituals such as raising the flag or singing the national anthem. I never sat around the campfire, I didn’t play any instrument, and my singing was awful. Nevertheless, I tried to somehow get acquainted with the others. I attempted to curry favor with three of my roommates by telling them about some of my wartime experiences, but they weren’t the least bit interested. They were interested only in girls and wanted to know how it was with the girls in Terezín. This seemed indecent, even crude, because the girls I had gotten to know there were now dead. So in the evenings I visited my brother, who slept with kids his own age at the other end of the camp. I would go to their cabin, sit on a bunk, and think up a continuation to my fairy tale about a wacky poodle. During this time, Jan was kind of sad or maybe just a little frightened, but the word “poodle” for some reason always made him laugh.

  Since we were in the early postwar period, there was a shortage of food. The supervisors obviously had not managed to obtain any extra allotments or any of the food brought by the UN, so we were always hungry. I was accustomed to going without food, but the other members of my squad were constantly grumbling. One evening when I was already in my bunk, they pulled me out of the cabin and asked me to help them procure some food.

  We went to see the director. He let us in, heard us out, and then told us that he was hungry too, perhaps even hungrier than we were because he was bigger and received the same amount of food as we did. We had just gone through a war, and there were people starving more than we were, and we’d had supper today. Then he instructed us to follow him to one of the cabins that served as a warehouse. He told us that whatever he gave us would be at the expense of the others, and we certainly didn’t want that. Then he took a handful of sugar cubes from a cardboard box and gave each of us two.

  I ate one of the sugar cubes and saved the other for my little brother.

  *

  Life soared upon wings of rapturous celebration of victory and freedom, but in no time it collapsed into hatred and a longing for revenge.

  During the first few postwar weeks, the Germans had to help dismantle the barricades. Sometimes, so I was told, one of them would be killed or even hanged from a lamppost or tree branch. I never actually saw anything like this, but had I come across such an event, I certainly would have stopped and looked on. I never suspected that often those who hanged another without trial were merely concealing their own misdeeds, and they did not care if the hanged were in fact guilty of anything at all.

  At the beginning of the war, several German families lived on our street. In addition to German, they spoke Czech, and we children played together. Later, however, their parents forbade them to even speak with me.

  From the moment I arrived in Terezín, the only Germans I met wore uniforms, and instead of the state symbol on their hats they had a skull and crossbones. Those skulls also adorned traffic signs that warned of particularly dangerous curves, which we called curves of death. The skulls on their hats proclaimed that the wearers were standing in a curve and beyond lay death.

  Their deeds seemed to me so evil that I was convinced it was my duty to remind people never to forget the horrors the Germans had perpetrated. Over the school break I composed an article in which, with maudlin and artless pathos, I recalled my four Christmases in Terezín and concluded with a note about the end of the war.

  The spring brought us peace, the end of the war, which we had so much looked forward to, which we had awaited for six years. The end, however, brought such horrifying news. Of the hundreds of thousands of children and the elderly who were taken off to the East, not a single one returned. I think about my friends and cannot believe they’re no longer on this earth, that the Germans managed to murder hundreds and hundreds of helpless children. I shudder with horror every time I realize that it was only due to a miracle that I survived. But since I have had the good fortune to remain alive, I pledge my word that I will do everything to ensure that what we were witness to during those final years of the war will never happen again. . . . My only wish is that you never feel pity for the Germans, even if they never did you any harm. Do not forget the horrors of the concentration camps and judge fairly and without mercy so that your children will not be forced into German prisons as we were, so that during Christmas, sitting over their bread and water, they will not have to despair over the fact that you were lenient on the German butchers.

  I sent the article to a children’s magazine called Onward, which printed it complete with several mistakes I had made.

  My only experience had been the war, but it was a devastating one. My world was now divided into good and evil, with the Red Army and their allies embodying the good. The Germans embodied the evil. That was it. I knew nothing of other evils, other slaughters. I knew life from only one side, and I mistakenly assumed that I was entitled to sweeping judgments.

  I wasn’t alone in considering the Germans the embodiment of evil. Everyone nurtured in his memory how the Germans had dealt out blows. It was the Germans, after all, who had chosen Hitler as their leader. They had accepted his doctrine that they were the master race even though they had nothing in common with genuine masters. They made their way through Europe and believed they would rule forever. They pounced upon their neighbors and undertook to exterminate every single Jew and execute at least a hundred innocent Poles, Russians, or Serbs for every one German who had fallen outside of battle. And they did not alter their behavior even when they knew all was lost. Even during the last days of the war, they drove prisoners from the concentration camps, executing those who fell behind.

  What had happened was an abrupt departure from the order of things whether human or divine. They went beyond all measure of arrogance, and the people clamored for some kind of justice.

  Six weeks after the end of the war, the president established by special decree extraordinary People’s Courts and a Federal Court to try former German leaders along with Czech collaborationists. The brief news reports of the trials usually ended with, Condemned to death.

  The sentences were carried out immediately.

  Obergruppenführer K. H. Frank, a man with thousands of human lives on his conscience, was even executed in public. I very much wanted to witness such a spectacle, but I was forbidden.

  In a newspaper report from May 23, 1946, I at least found a photo of Frank hanging on the gallows.

  Third Courtyard of Pankrác Prison, 12:58

&
nbsp; 5,000 people—the muffled drone of the courtyard as the sun beats down. The gallows are situated in a corner between two buildings, before which stand the executioner and his two assistants. At 13:02 the tribunal arrives, followed by Frank surrounded by four members of the prison guard. Through a translator, Dr. Kozák once again reads the sentence to Frank. Frank, however, at first simply stares into space, then he looks around. . . . The last question Dr. Kozák puts to him is: “Have you understood the verdict, K. H. Frank?” And a final “Jawohl.” “Do you have any last wishes?” “No.”

  13:31—the just punishment of K. H. Frank is carried out.

  I read the brief article with a thrilling satisfaction: Justice does exist after all.

  *

  When a catastrophe blows over and mortal danger is past, euphoria prevails for a brief time. Not even the sorrow of those deprived of their loved ones, the anger of those who longed for retaliation, the final murders committed by the fleeing SS, or the powerful explosions of the Soviet liberators could wipe out the thrill of newly won freedom.

  From the very first days, flags billowed from windows: Czechoslovak flags, red Soviet flags with some yellow symbols (which my cousin explained were supposed to be a hammer and sickle), American flags with sloppily stitched-on stars, and even British flags. Lord knows where people came by them so quickly.

  Units of our armies abroad were returning, welcomed with ecstatic ovations. Flowers fluttered through the air, and after such long-lasting silence, shouts of rapture erupted everywhere. The mood of exaltation encouraged our dreams of a society in which we would live freely, effortlessly, and more safely than at any time before.

  At the same time, reminders of war lay everywhere. The remnants of the barricades were disappearing only slowly from the streets; automobiles appeared only occasionally; people stood in lines in front of shops. Old Town Square was defaced by debris from the town hall, and bombs had demolished the Emmaus Monastery. This, however, did not last long. Signs soon appeared calling for the fulfillment of a two-year plan to restore everything the war had destroyed. Father added that we would soon have five-year plans just like those in the Soviet Union, and only then would genuine prosperity reign. I was too young, too affected by what I had gone through, to understand that nothing could be as simple, as effortless as it appeared to Father or to the enthusiastic orators on the radio.