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.

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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.

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CHAPTER 3

OF NUNS, RABBITS AND RAILWAY TRAINS

At that time, there must have been a convent nearby because, once a week, a group of nuns, dressed in the flowing, sombre habits of those days, would walk past our house on their way to the local church. Watching them through our iron gates, I was fascinated by these strange beings. One day they caught sight of me and stopped; they asked me a few questions about my name and age and suchlike - the sort of questions adults always put to small children they don’t know - and, as I responded, they looked at me in what I felt was a kind and friendly way - several of them even smiled at me. I didn’t see many people passing by like this, close to our house, and even when they did, they most assuredly did not smile; they usually turned and looked away. The nuns were completely different: they might all have been draped, head to foot, in black habits and pure white wimples, but they almost seemed to radiate goodness and light. One Sunday, seeing them make their usual weekly progress towards the house, I ran out to meet them; to my great surprise and delight, they passed through the gate to me a little parcel of what proved to contain vanilla crescent biscuits (Vanilkové rohlíčky) - in English, they are called ‘Viennese Fingers’. The smell of vanilla was wonderfully exotic and the taste of the soft, sweet, crumbly hazelnut pastry I shall never forget. (I still have a soft spot for these particular biscuits!) Anyway, I was in heaven.

After that, every week, when the sisters came past our house, they would always slip me the same little parcel of deliciousness - they must have made them fresh every week. But nothing lasts: one week, to my bitter disappointment, they failed to make their customary visit and I was heartbroken; I never saw them again. Many years later, I learned that the convent had been dismantled by the state and who knows what happened to the sisters. I hope they were safe and were able to keep on making Vanilkové rohlíčky for many more years. Religion was to play no part in the building of a bright, Socialist future, of course, but I for one will never forget the kindness of these nuns, their smiling faces and their tender touches through the garden gate. Even more, I shall never forget the delicious biscuits they brought me every week. Was I not a lucky little boy?

Despite my gifts of scrumptious biscuits, I gradually became aware that my parents were having difficulty obtaining certain foodstuffs, though I wasn’t sure exactly why. Luckily, my mother grew most of our vegetables herself, together with some fruit; she also kept rabbits in the basement, not as pets, of course, but as our only source of fresh meat. At one time though, we did have one of these large, tame rabbits living with us in the house, and he was definitely a family pet. He was big and beautiful. I loved to stroke his gorgeous, soft fur and to feed him carrots, which he consumed with amazing gusto. I think his name was Bimbo and my brother, Mirko, adored him. Whenever Mirko came to the house, Bimbo would bounce on to his lap, where he would settle happily, occasionally managing to chew off completely one of the buttons on Mirko’s shirt. If Mirko found this amusing, my mother was not pleased at all. Bimbo was certainly no saint: he loved to chew through anything that looked interesting and vaguely edible, so no shoelace was safe from his voracious appetite and his destructive incisors. His nemesis came on the day he succeeded in gnawing his way through an electric cable; my mother finally lost patience at this wanton destruction and decided that Bimbo’s end was definitely nigh. His fate was to come in the form of a ‘Bimbo stew’, a delicious, heartwarming dish much enjoyed by everyone around the table, in blissful ignorance of its grim ingredients. Searching for Bimbo some time later, my brother discovered the terrible truth about his beloved Bimbo’s end; he refused to speak to our mother for weeks afterwards. No mention was ever made of Bimbo thereafter, but I don’t think my brother ever quite forgave my mother for the slaughter of his darling rabbit.

One day, long after the cooking of Bimbo, my parents were summoned to attend some official meeting in the administrative capital of the region, Liberec, and I was allowed to go too. As this was my first trip on a railway train, I was really excited. I remember vividly boarding the train, with its four carriages pulled by a big, black steam engine that to me looked huge, noisy and rather frightening, but somehow also magnificent. There was so much steam, so much smoke and soot, but so much raw power. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, I noticed two uniformed railway staff locking the doors at each end of our carriage. I could also see armed guards at either end of the train. As I know now, this part of Czechoslovakia shared a frontier with Germany and Poland and to get to Liberec, the train had to cross international borders. There were high, barbed-wire fences, with watchtowers, as we travelled through East German territory (DDR) and I was fascinated at being in a foreign country for the first time. The people at stations we passed through were foreigners, I suddenly realised, yet they all looked just the same as us. And certainly one might have justly wondered, if these were our “friendly Communist neighbours”, why exactly were there such high fences? Curiously, the thought that actually came into my mind was entirely different, something much more akin to the interests of a child: I remember naively asking my mother, “Surely the deer can't like these fences; they won’t be able to roam, will they?” It was only years later when I understood that these fences were there, not to frustrate the local deer herds, but to keep the people in.

The train only stopped when we reached Liberec and we had arrived back into Czechoslovak territory. Though I can still conjure up in my mind many details from that exceptional journey, I remember little about our destination itself. My parents found their way to, and entered, some vast, dreary building; they waited to be seen in dull, grey, nondescript interiors for what seemed like forever; and they eventually had a meeting with some official-looking people, who were every bit as grey as their surroundings. Though not in uniform, these officials struck me as hostile, for like the uniformed personnel who came to our house, they never once smiled, and I knew I did not like them. This was my first train journey, my first experience of travelling through a foreign country, and my first encounter with the bureaucracy that would, before too long, change my entire life.

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CHAPTER 4

THE WORLD BEGINS TO CHANGE

I have a clear recollection of the day when the usual tranquility of our home was disturbed by workmen mounting a set of large loudspeakers on the telegraph pole in front of the house. From that day onwards, day in and day out, we were woken up with loud, martial music interspersed with endlessly repeated speeches and news bulletins, ardent talk that seemed to last for ever. The noise was utterly relentless: it penetrated every wall and could be heard in every room in the house - you could not even savour peace and quiet in the bathroom. The whole of Jiřikov had to endure these broadcasts, onslaughts on the ears that only ended in the evening. Sunday was the sole day when there was peace; on every other day, there was no escaping it. I remember seeing my mother, sometimes in despair but more often moved to anger, as she railed against these broadcasts, calling them just lies and propaganda. My father would often disappear up to the top of the house where, tucked away in the loft and covered with a heavy blanket, he would listen to Yugoslav radio stations, to Radio Free Europe or to other stations in western Europe. I was under strict instructions never to mention these radio broadcasts to anyone, and thus I began to understand that there were some things in life that even honest little boys had to keep secret. Often, after these broadcasts, my parents would discuss the latest news, discussions that sometimes developed into heated arguments.

In addition to the intrusive loudspeakers, there were the workers’ marches that always seemed to have to pass our house. What was strange to me was that they generally paused in front of our gate, when they became suddenly noisier; the reasons for this behaviour I could never comprehend. One day, during one of these noisy, vociferous interludes, one of the marchers threw a stone that crashed into our front door, nearly breaking the glazed panel. Without exception, my parents kept themselves invisible inside the house on these occasions, so as not to provoke further hostility, but I used to observe the marches with both interest and puzzlement. The marchers usually carried large banners and flags, and sometimes what looked like giant pictures. Many years later, from contemporary photographs, I discovered that these were images of Lenin, Stalin and Klement Gottwald, the icons of the Czech Communist revolution.

At some point, though my memory is vague about when exactly, new people moved into the property next to ours and these neighbours would never speak a single word to us. My parents maintained that they were put there to spy on our every move and I was never allowed to go anywhere near them. While the cloistered life I led as a child seemed perfectly normal to me - I had had no other experience, after all - the same could not have been true for my parents; they knew themselves effectively ostracised from the local community. Not that, in Jiřikov, they were the only ones to have been targeted. After the coup, when the Communists took over, the country’s new political masters nationalised all the industries and confiscated the private property of anyone they considered rich. When the new government in Prague decreed that the bourgeoisie should be eradicated from Czech society, this was understood in some provinces as an order to eliminate anyone seen as belonging to that class. The proletariat had won and all those who had been the prime beneficiaries of the ‘old order’ were to be swept away. This was a golden opportunity for old scores to be settled and deep-seated envy to be assuaged: both individuals and entire families would simply disappear overnight. The Communists were determined to wipe the slate clean and anyone who did not support the new order, or who was suspected of harbouring what were now seen as degenerate views, had to be purged from society.

My family’s name was on the list of those under suspicion. Though born in Yugoslavia, my parents were ethnically Czechs and they had latterly acquired full rights to reside in Czechoslovakia; however, they had also clandestinely retained their Yugoslav citizenship. After 1948, almost overnight, they were labelled as outsiders, particularly as this was the time when Yugoslavia’s President Tito chose to navigate a more individual course for his country, declining to follow the political diktats imposed by Stalin on the nations of Eastern Europe, the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Instead, Tito steered Yugoslavia towards what later became known as the League of Non-Aligned Nations. From a Czech Communist perspective, this had to be seen as a betrayal, a move that set a dangerous and infectious precedent in that large area of Eastern Europe now seen as a legitimate sphere of Soviet influence. It is therefore unsurprising that my father’s association with Tito’s Partisans immediately made him a suspect. Ironically, as Yugoslav citizens, we were technically foreigners, and thus we were spared the brutal treatment meted out to many amongst the local Czech bourgeoisie. Having been protected from elimination, we were simply labelled as ‘undesirables’, and we lived under what was effectively house arrest for a number of years. Born on the very day of the coup d’état, I was but a small child and wholly ignorant of what any of these things meant. There is a saying in English that goes: ‘when ignorance is bliss, t’is folly to be wise’; how very true that was for little Milan, growing up in Jiřikov.

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CHAPTER 5

BEFORE THE STORM

I was still a small boy when my sister and brother were entering adulthood, starting out to forge independent lives for themselves. This is a fraught process in most families and in ours it often led to noisy debates with my parents about what careers they wanted to pursue and what my parents thought was appropriate. Such discussions over the dinner table were always lively, and somehow politics often seemed to get involved - as you would expect, I was deeply bored having to listen to any of it. Though I didn’t understand most of what was said, I was conscious of rising voices and flashes of temper. I come from a family whose members always held strong opinions, and friends here in London will testify that I have inherited the same character trait myself.

There wasn’t only heated debate: there was a lot of joviality too and, despite the great age difference between my siblings and me, I very much enjoyed being in their company. My sister was training to be a photographer, so she often used me as a subject to practise on. My brother, who inclined towards electrical engineering, was always constructing some electrical or electronic gadget or other and to me, his creations were endlessly fascinating. I adored both of them. Věra seemed so handsome and striking, some might have said beautiful, but she was also strong, determined and admirably confident. Mirko was a young man full of ideas, clever and inventive; above all, he seemed to radiate something that once I was older, I recognised as charisma, an attribute that never left him. People were always attracted to him, and responsive to his ideas, even in his old age. Both my sister and brother were always on the go: they spent lots of time together, exploring the countryside, skiing, and taking photographs. They shared lots of interests but, perhaps surprisingly, they always found time for me too. They were already teenagers when they were transplanted from Croatia to a new country, a land completely unknown to them, so for them, the move must have been quite disorientating Though