There are whispered stories that in escaping from the Nazis, the Czech Government loaded a train carriage with gold and travelled to England. This gold would have been the funding for the government in exile and then, in 1945, for establishing the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. In 1945 my parents were not yet refugees. My father had been arrested when the country was invaded. Per- haps you remember this story? You would find it under ‘Munich Agreement’ in the encyclopedia of your choice. Neville Chamberlain stepping off a plane in London and waving the agreement, signed by Hitler, which was going to guar- antee Peace in our Time but which also granted the annexation of a ‘far-off country of which we know so little’. If you want to see this for yourself, type in ‘Chamberlain Munich Agreement Youtube’. How far-off was the country? How long had the flight there taken? Today it takes barely an hour. Czechoslovakia was a child of the 1918 Treaty of Versailles and the father of the new repub- lic was a philosopher named T.G.Masaryk. My father, Bohuslav G. Kratochvil was born on the 21st. of October 1901. For a thoughtful seventeen year-old the forming of an independent Republic out of two small countries that had previ- ously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a momentous event. Their form of government was going to be shaped by a man who was also a philoso- pher. Some see this time from the end of the First World War to the Invasion by the Nazis in 1938 as having been a period of Benevolent Paternalism. In other words, government by a father who knows best but sincerely has your best interests at heart, and these days that does sound very patronising. Here are 2 examples of the kind of legislation put in place during that period. One, that the cutlery in restaurants should be wrapped in a napkin. It is difficult to know if the fact that the knife and fork and spoon that you were about to use were any cleaner because care had been taken to wrap them in a napkin, but the intention was that they should be. The second example has more of a guar- antee. All doors to public places should be installed to open outwards to the street. This guaranteed that, if there were to be a fire at the this restaurant, or this cinema, or this art gallery, the doors to the street were going to open out and not jam you, and the others trying to escape the fire, inside the building. Bohuslav G. Kratochvil did his PhD. at Brno University, this giving him the title of Dr. This does not make you a Doctor of Medecine, but it does mean that you put a Dr. in front of your name and not a Mr.

(’Psychologie Ditete a Experimantalni Pedagogica’ Knihtiskarna Typia v Brne 1928)

From Brno University and a Doctorate in the Psychology of Children to the Ministry of Education, eventually becoming Secretary to the Minister for Education. It was as a member of the Czech parliament that my father was making his speeches about the AntiSemitism which was very much in evidence just across the border. When those borders fell, he was arrested. Now we need to find the memoir of Herbert Morawetz, and if you are looking for an account of Czechoslovakia in the interwar years, you will find this a fascinating one, but for now, this is the bit that you should read

‘Later, (Bohuslav) told me about the greatest emotional experience of his life. He was to be sentenced by a German court standing next to Ladislav, the former leader of the Czechoslovak conservative party, who had urged not to submit to the Munich dictate and who had become a prominent member of the resistance. First, the judge sentenced Ladislav to death. Then, as he sentenced Kratochvil to life in prison, Ladislav shook his hand,’Congratulations, you will live’.

(Herbert Morawetz ‘My 90 Years’. New York, 2 January 2011)

My father spent five years in various prisons in Germany. His prisoner number was ZWM 1042. He returned to Prague to take part in in the process of Reconstruction. My mother also spent time in prison. She returned to Prague and waited to be reunited with her family. Her grandparents, her Mother, Emilie Guth (nee Weigert) and father, Rudolph Guth (a lawyer, also a Dr. – a JuDr. – a Doctor of Jurisprudence), and her younger sister, Vera. She waited in vain. None of them came home. My parents had known each other before the war. My father was 16 years her senior. He was part of a group of bright young things who read P.G.Wodehouse and gave each other nicknames modelled on characters from the Jeeves stories. My father married. Her nickname was ‘La- dybird’. He never spoke of his first wife, but much years after he had died, I was told that she wrote letters to him while he was in prison, letters that would no doubt have given him heart, but during those prison years, she met someone who she fell in love with and finally told my father when he returned to Prague. Another story that came out years later was that my mother had been disap- pointed when, on one of those tennis-playing weekends in Stehovice, he had announced that he was going to be married. Helen married a young doctor whose name was Arnost Schenk. Arnost died in 1941, in the same year that the rest of her family perished. So it is 1945. The war in Europe is over. My parents meet again in Prague and marry. This will take some of the suspense out of the story, what the International Movie Database calls a ‘spoiler’, but let us go back to page 133 from the memoir of Herbert Morawetz:

‘In 1972 Boha Kratochvil, who had been a close friend of ours in Svetla, came to Belle Isle. He was by now a tragic figure. Soon after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had joined the Resistance, but was arrested and spent the rest of the war in German prisons. After the war he found out that his wife had left him and he married a much younger woman who was the sole concentration camp survivor of her family. As a hero of the resistance, he was named Ambassador to Great Britain from 1947 to 1950 and Ambassador to India from 1950 in time for that country’s Independence. By that time he had grown out of favour with the Communist government of Czechoslo- vakia and was recalled to Prague. Warned by a friend not to return, he wrote an open letter of resignation in which he spoke of communism as being at vari- ance with the spirit of the Czech people. (He sought Political asylum in Great Britain, making his flight into exile by train and by ship and using the names ’Mr. and Mrs. Smith’.) By now he was socially isolated, being blamed by his old friends for having served under the Communist regime for too long. His wife died and he made a poor living by selling stationary. When he arrived on Belle Isle, following Honza’s invitation, he was in a state of terrible excitement and

had a bad asthma attack. He told us that seeing us was for him a return to the Svetla of his youth. After a few days on Belle Isle, Boha was to stay with Honza in Toronto. He lay down in his house on a sofa, but when Honza’s daughter came to pick him up, she found that he had died.’