Sketches from Childhood

By Milan Svanderlik

Milan Svanderlik, author of Sketches from Childhood, was born in Czechoslovakia on 27 February 1948, the day its democratic government was overthrown by the Communist Party. The ensuing doctrinaire regime, committed to a more just and equal society. Focussed first on dismantling the bourgeois establishment, and what had been the post-war ethnic cleansing of non-Slav peoples metamorphosed into the persecution of anyone failing to espouse Stalinism – once-free citizens soon found themselves imprisoned within borders that bristled fiercely with barbed wire and armed guards. Milan's Czech parents were born in Yugoslavia, where his father fought with Tito's Partizans to liberate that nation from the occupying Nazi forces. After the war, he moved his young family to Northern Czechoslovakia, seeking a congenial new life amongst fellow Czechs. Such dreams were shattered when the Czech Communist coup coincided with Marshal Tito's growing intransigence towards Stalin: because of Milan's father's past links with Tito, he was immediately suspect. The family was ostracised, with social exclusion quickly morphing into several years of virtual house arrest; categorised as 'undesirables', they were finally deported in 1955. These Sketches, the story of a childhood lived through turbulent times, comprise both written memoir and some 36 contemporary photographs, focussing in detail on the period, 1948 to 1956.

Born in Czechoslovakia, the author, Milan Svanderlik, grew up in Yugoslavia, worked briefly in Switzerland, and has lived for almost 50 years in London. A photographer, artist and writer, he is a veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people and life in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: epubli
• Release date: Apr 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9783754114162

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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