Two days after my chat with my brother, I was awakened before dawn by the telephone. It was Miguel’s wife, Florinda. She was distraught. Miguel’s heart had stopped and he had died during the night. He was forty-four. On the day when our father was attending his own brother’s funeral, I had to call him in Switzerland to tell him that he must return to Caracas at once, because his only son was dead.
Still stunned, I arrived in Caracas and spent that afternoon and evening with my brother’s widow at the funeral home. Early the next morning, I crossed the awakening city to collect my father from the airport by the coast. Together we drove to Miguel’s funeral through a torrential rainstorm that bowed the strongest palms and roiled the mangoes, ceibas, and oaks. At the graveside, we leaned into each other under our umbrella and watched the handfuls of dirt being tossed down onto the glistening wood casket. I scarcely dared look at my father, and when I did glance up, I could see only his tearless profile deformed by grief. I clasped his hand and tried to steady it as it shook with the same force that had swayed the fence at Bubny. I have never witnessed a person in such torment. As we headed back home in the car, I told him I would pack my things in Boston, cancel my plans, and come back home to be with him. There was nothing more I could say.
After a fitful night, I found my father standing at the foot of my bed.
“You are always asking questions, so here you have some answers.”
I sat up startled but still half-asleep. He handed me a clutch of white pages and sat down on the edge of my bed. It was a typed translation of a letter addressed to My dear ones. It was signed by Lotar.
Bewildered, I read through it. There were references to Hans, Otto, and Ella, but the pages seemed filled with the names of countless other people and places, none of which I had heard before. I tried hopelessly to make sense of it. All I could discern was that most of the people mentioned had not survived the war. My father, ashen, looked at me expectantly.
“It’s a letter that I brought back from Lotar’s house. He wrote it after the war. Do you understand now?” he said almost defiantly. “Do you understand why I cannot talk about it?”
Before I had a chance to answer, as suddenly as he had appeared, he swept the pages from my hand and left the room. I scrambled into the first pair of jeans and T-shirt I could find and went out to look for him. I walked from room to room, calling out, past the huge jagged paintings in the hallway, onto the checkered terrace edged with sculpted nudes and abstracts in bronze and limestone. The garden door was still locked, so he had not gone farther. I headed to the kitchen to ask if they had seen him there and was told that he had taken his car and left for the office. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
My father never showed me that letter again. I looked for it that day, but he had not left it on his desk in the library or on the counter in his study. I wanted to ask questions about it, but it was clear to me that day that showing it had not been an opening. It was an attempt to close a door on my questions.
I lived in Caracas for the following months so that I could be with him. I worked as best I could but spent most of my free time at home with my father. Even when he was not at the office, he buried himself in work. He was always busy with business issues or new projects or research for something he was writing. When he was not writing or on the phone, or being visited or interviewed, he was alone with his watches in the long, narrow room.
Although we lived together in the house, we each faced our sadness in quiet solitude. Occasionally, we would stir ourselves to respond to the invitations that arrived from well-wishers. I would accompany him to the opera or a concert or drinks party. The latter were a little embarrassing because, on my father’s insistence, we always arrived perfectly on time. Venezuelans always expect guests to show up about an hour after they are invited. It is an unspoken but unbreakable social rule. Despite his fifty years in Caracas, my father still refused to adapt to the more relaxed Latin American timings. He was relentlessly punctual. So we would arrive at our host’s house as the clock turned seven and would bide our time in an empty living room. My father and I would sit on our own with matching highballs, listening to the piercing songs of cicadas and frogs until our flustered hosts eventually appeared. My initial embarrassment gradually faded. I grew to enjoy these moments of quiet rebellion and complicity with my father, as we marked time together, alone in other people’s houses.
The evenings when we stayed at home and he did not have guests for dinner, we resorted to our usual habits while spending time with each other, solving word or number puzzles or discussing books, art, or the news. We never really spoke about personal matters. He seldom asked about my life outside our shared routine, and as a result, I never really asked about his. Perhaps this was his objective.
My father’s second effort to draw back the curtain on his past came a few months later. He had asked about my plans. I explained that a creative writing course that I had taken at university had led me to think that I wanted to be a writer. He reacted with his characteristically cool scrutiny, carefully testing my thinking rather than expressing a clear view. Then he did something different. Without a word, he disappeared into his office and returned with a single sheet of paper. For a moment, I thought it might be Lotar’s letter, but when he handed it to me, I saw that it was a typed page in Spanish, his fourth language.
It told the story of a train journey to Berlin.
He said he had not finished it. I read rapidly down the page and noticed immediately a reference to his friend Zdeněk, the man he had met up with on our trip to Prague. My father had written many articles on social issues, government, and economics for Venezuelan newspapers but never anything like this, never anything that was remotely personal.
He explained that he was thinking of writing his own story of the war and rather solemnly asked me to help him. I asked if I could keep the document to edit it, but, taking the page back, he said that he would give me the whole manuscript once he had finished it. At that point, all I really knew about his experience of the war came from my glimpses of Lotar’s letter and that typed page. A train journey to Berlin, the loss of many lives in his family, and, above all, a sense of abject despair.
He showed me only that first page and never again raised the subject of the others. Whenever I asked him about this memoir, he always replied that he was working on it and would let me read it one day. Time passed, and the pages never appeared. He had a first stroke some years later that paralyzed his legs and an arm, and I assumed he had not written any more.
A decade later, after his death, I found a clipped bundle of papers at the bottom of the box he left for me. It was a retrospective diary of his escape to Berlin, written in 1991 and 1992. The first page was the one that he had shown me. This was the story he had asked me to help him write.
These reminiscences must have been wrested from wherever they had been buried by the man I thought I knew so well. They represented my father’s first and last articulation to me of what had happened to him. They gave a voice to the “unfortunate boy” whose carefree youthfulness had been sacrificed so that this new and tirelessly disciplined man, Jan Šebesta, might survive.
I now know that my father took the night train to Berlin on May 3, 1943, the “Elite 147” train that departed Hybernské Station in Prague at 1:44 a.m. and arrived in Berlin nearly eight hours later, at 9:23 a.m. In the spring of 2018, I traveled alone along the same route. It takes four and a half hours today, and there is no longer a night train. Even if there had been, I would not have been brave enough to take it. I bought a ticket for the noon train on a May morning.