Ivan Klíma - My Crazy Century - A Memoir

At the beginning of 1948, the year of the putsch, my classmate Polívka came up with the idea of organizing an election. He brought to class an old margarine box, cut an opening in it, and gave everyone who wanted to vote four pieces of paper, each of which bore a stamp of one of the authorized political parties.

I participated not only in the voting but also in the tallying of the votes. Unlike the actual parliament, the Communists in our class suffered a defeat that would have been described as “crushing” by the press. Apparently, our class was full of opponents of socialism.

The election took place sometime around the middle of February. During recess we were expending our pent-up energy by playing soccer in the classroom, even though it was a breach of school rules. Instead of a ball, we kicked around chunks of coal. It was neither hygienic nor pragmatic because after every kick our ball would break into pieces, so after a while the front of the classroom was strewn with coal rubble. At the peak of our competitive frenzy and as fragments of heating fuel, which was then still in short supply, were whizzing through the air, the principal walked into the classroom and, as fate would have it, received a blow right in the face.

The mere look from our walloped ruler, a man of venerable appearance and with a name worthy of a principal — Fořt — froze us on the spot. He undertook to write down the names of the culprits in the class register. When he finished he said he would consider our punishment. At best we would get the principal’s paddle and a C in behavior, at worst conditional expulsion.

The prospect of such serious punishment devastated me. Even though the others claimed that such a triviality would result in a B in behavior at the worst, I couldn’t sleep for several days and lived in perpetual fear of retribution. I was completely unaware that elsewhere a fateful event was beginning to unfold, one that would utterly overshadow my petty deed.

Like most of my wiser and more hard-bitten fellow citizens, I had no idea of the impending changes. Whenever Father came home, he didn’t have much time to talk to me. But I knew that he disapproved of the national managers who thought of nothing but getting rich. Here he differed from those in charge of the recently nationalized businesses. He believed that the economy would begin to function only when all businesses were in the hands of the people.

In the middle of the week, Father unexpectedly arrived to inform us that the day of reckoning with the reactionary forces was close at hand. The workers had had enough of the theft of property that belonged to everyone. He turned on the radio to listen to a broadcast from the trade union congress. Passionate and bombastic words blared from the radio along with even more enthusiastic applause and sloganeering.

“Sons of the working class, sons of poverty and struggle, sons of unbearable suffering and heroic endeavors, at last you are declaring: No more!” bellowed the speaker.

Excitement coursed through my body.

Then another speaker declaimed: “The reactionaries would gladly drown your movement in blood. They have forgotten, however, that we are in Prague, not Athens or Madrid. We will not learn democracy from those who form public opinion with the assistance of the atom bomb.” To the ecstatic assent of the crowd, he went on to declare that when the workers in Paris demand bread, they are fired upon, but that this kind of democracy has come to an end here in Czechoslovakia. Our democracy was now under the protection of our big brother, faithful to the workers, our magnificent Slavic brother, our deliverer from the Fascist pestilence, the almighty Soviet Union, which was the guarantor that nobody would again ever fire upon the workers.

“With the Soviet Union forever!”

Father exulted, but Mother was frightened and asked if we could finally have peace and quiet and a normal life.

“Only now,” explained Father, “will everything begin to move forward, when we have gotten rid of all those parasites who have bled us dry. And you shouldn’t forget,” he reminded her, “what your brothers gave their lives for!”

Then everything came to pass that would ensure a Communist future for our country forever. Everything happened so quickly and without bloodshed that in my naïveté I succumbed to the illusion that this was merely the will of the majority being fulfilled. I even asked Father if I could borrow his Communist badge.

He was surprised and wondered what I needed it for, but he finally lent me this metal talisman. The next morning, to show on whose side I stood at this historic moment, I pinned it to the lapel of my jacket, in fact just a little higher than where I’d previously been forced to wear the Star of David. For several days I proudly wore this metal badge bearing the letters KSČ until Mother rebuked me and told me not to pretend to be something I wasn’t.

If someone had told me at the time that wearing the Communist Party badge was just as deplorable as wearing a swastika when the Reichstag was burning and Hitler was installing his dictatorship, I would have been astounded and offended by this base comparison.

*

It didn’t seem to me that any big changes were on the horizon during the first spring of Communist rule. Father looked satisfied; Mother cried because the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, so the papers told us, had committed suicide by jumping from the window of his apartment in the Czernín Palace. “Why did he do it?” she asked.

“I’m sure he accepted the new government,” declared Father. “He was a decent man of the people.” And he repeated what he’d most likely heard at a meeting or on the radio: that the sensitive minister was shattered by the reactionary forces and had taken the side of the workers.

The principal who had threatened us with the dreadful punishment was removed, and a severe-looking woman took his place. She announced over the public-address system that a new era was at hand. As in the magnificent Soviet Union, we were creating a more just society. This required a new and progressive intelligentsia. She demanded that we devote even more diligence to our studies. It was no longer merely in our own interest, she pointed out, but in the interest of all working people who, through their Socialist endeavors, were making this possible for us.

To me the speech seemed appropriate during this epochal moment, but most of my classmates did not share this opinion, as they demonstrated by coughing and snorting. Toušek even whinnied (he could imitate a horse perfectly), and the end of the principal’s speech was drowned out by raucous laughter.

Soon after that, our homeroom teacher informed me that I was to go immediately to the principal’s office.

In light of my recent offense, this unexpected order frightened me.

The principal, however, welcomed me and asked me to have a seat. For a moment she browsed through some papers and then she said, “I’ve heard you’re a good comrade.”

I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever called me comrade before.

“I heard,” she continued, “that you’re related to the Synek brothers.”

I said they were my uncles.

“They were genuine heroes. You must be proud of them.”

I agreed.

“And are your parents in the party?”

I said that only my father was.

“And you,” she said reproachfully, “aren’t even in the Union of Youth.”

Then to my amazement she suggested I call her comrade. A new era had begun, after all, and everyone struggling to build socialism was equal. Teachers and students had to trust and help one another. She rose and offered me her hand. “I wanted to tell you, Comrade Ivan, that we’re counting on you. Apply for membership in the union.”