Prague in Danger by Peter Demetz

Prague in Danger by Peter Demetz

Author:Peter Demetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-24T00:00:00+00:00


My Friend Hans W. Kolben

In the years of the occupation, people classified as half Jewish had particular difficulties in making new friends because too much had to be explained to “Aryans,” and you never knew whether they really wanted to hear about the troubles of your mothers, fathers, or relatives, endangered by new laws or police decrees. We half Jews moved in rat packs, so to speak, and I fell in with the Alt family, who lived in four or five shabby rooms in proletarian Žižkov. There were Mother Alt, two daughters and two sons, and a loyal housekeeper who lived in the kitchen, all adults and all in a fragile situation. They told me that the father of the family, a minor clerk in the economic section of the Soviet Consulate General, had been an atheist not registered in the Jewish Community, and since he had died some years ago, everybody hoped it was now impossible to discover his Jewish origins, and so the family pretended that everything was “normal.” Maria, the older daughter, worked in Prague’s Social Security Office, Kristina was a dentist’s technician in Karlín, and the boys were busy, I assumed, buying and selling old machinery. Madame Alt, rawboned and imperturbable, ran the household with her aging kitchen help, everybody chipped in ration coupons, and on Sundays coffee and cake were waiting. In the summer we walked through the Vltava woods, collecting mushrooms for dinner (the Alts were expert mycologists), and in wintertime we happily hung around in an extra room at the Vikárka, a rather patrician tavern on Castle Hill, famous then and now because some important Czech nineteenth-century authors had quaffed beer there and because later Václav Havel, after his election to the presidency, liked to sit there between office hours.

Only two outsiders were never asked to explain anything to the Alt family, and they were Hans W. Kolben, grandson of a renowned inventor and mighty industrialist, and I. Both of us had reasons to be lighthearted at the Vikárka, because we were ardent admirers of Kristina, the younger daughter, and wrote weekly poems in her praise. My friend’s poems were far better than mine, but Kristina was not a young woman easily moved by literary predilections, and as time went on, she invited me to join her on her evening walks up Petín Hill, where on a bench near the monument of the Romantic poet K. H. Mácha, who knew about love and the month of May and a few other things, she taught me how really to kiss.

Hans was seventeen when the German soldiers came in 1939, and he was twenty when he died of typhoid fever in a concentration camp quarry. His grandfather Emil Kolben had been an assistant to Thomas Alva Edison, in New Jersey, and had later established Prague’s Kolben industries, which produced locomotives and heavy machinery and competed with the Škoda works in importance. The Kolbens were of Jewish origin, though Hans was a Lutheran, and they continued to live in their palatial villa with a turret as if nothing were happening.



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