Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (5 page)

Before the Germans catch the assassins, the authorities force the manager of the Bata store on Wenceslas Square to display in the window an overcoat, hat, briefcase and bicycle found at the site of the attack and an announcement offering a reward of ten million crowns for finding the assailants.

(For communist propaganda, the display in the window will later be part of the evidence that Bata collaborated with the occupying forces.)

First, Zlín is bombed by the Americans (they destroy 60 percent of the town’s factories), and then it is liberated by the Red Army. The Polish government-in-exile refuses to reach a compromise with the USSR and remains in London forever. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile creates a coalition government with the communists in Moscow and announces its own program.

The directors of the Bata plants are arrested. Their deputies are forced to sweep the streets of Zlín publicly. In the course of two months, 13,000 inhabitants flee from the town of 50,000.

Ivan H. and Josef V. make a speech from the factory broadcasting center. During the war, they worked for the firm and were informers for the Gestapo. Now they have signed up with the Security Service—the secret police. “Jan Bata’s fame has ended in infamy,” they say.

Jan is living in Batatuba (duplicate number three in Brazil), where he finds out that by decree of the president of the republic the state has taken over the joint-stock company of Bata A.S.

The famous Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg visits Czechoslovakia, and writes: “Bata, who remained in Zlín, praised the Führer and supplied the Reichswehr with footwear. On the eve of Munich, he changed his coat of arms. Until then, it was three shoes, but Bata painted in a fourth, so that the crossed lines would form a swastika.”

Did Ehrenburg really go to Zlín? (After all, Bata had left the country and had no coat of arms.) This quotation from his
article is distributed all over Czechoslovakia, and the communists prepare a lawsuit against Jan Bata, who is charged with betraying the nation.

Meanwhile, he demands compensation from the Czechoslovak state for the nationalized town of Zlín—the greatest fortune owned by a single man in Central Europe.

If the court can prove that he collaborated with the Germans, he isn’t owed a thing.

“My God, we created Zlín purely in order to give the Czechs wings,” says Jan Bata when he finds out that the national court in Prague has sentenced him to fifteen years in prison and ten years’ forced labor. And has confiscated his property.

He demanded to be allowed to appear before the court and to be given a chance to defend himself. “I do not believe the accused would really want to appear in court,” said the chairman of the prosecution team during the trial.

So the prosecutor declared: “An indictment can take place in the absence of an accused man who refuses to come to the country and will not be coming.”

The accused asked at least to be sent the bill of indictment. To no effect.

Although the trial was a typical Stalinist show-trial, it failed to prove collaboration by means of production: all factory owners were forced to manufacture for the Germans, and he had not even been in the country. It also failed to recognize the comical idea involving Patagonia as treason.
However, the court did reach the conclusion that failing to support the underground resistance movement in Bohemia was a form of collaboration.

The Brazilian authorities quickly exchange Bata’s permanent residency card for citizenship, thanks to which they can protest: their citizen has not been tried according to international procedure. This is to no avail.

Forty-five years from now, one of Jan’s grandsons will conduct a private investigation in order to rehabilitate his grandfather. In 1992, a report will be found in an FBI archive recording that the Americans had wanted to cross the name Bata off their blacklist, as there was no proof of collaboration. However, the communist authorities in Prague did all they could to keep the name on the list, because otherwise it would have been impossible to prosecute him in Czechoslovakia or to confiscate his property.

In honor of Comrade Klement Gottwald, a faithful disciple of Stalin, who a year earlier had led the total takeover of power by the communists and announced: “With the Soviet Union forever and ever, never otherwise,” Zlín is renamed Gottwaldov. Bata shoes are renamed Svit (meaning “dawn”) shoes.

In what is now Gottwaldov, a daughter, Ivana, is born to a worker at the plant, a Mr. Zelníčkov. Twenty years from now she will become a model, and after that, Ivana Trump, wife of
the billionaire Donald Trump and one of the richest women in the United States. She will live in a fifty-room apartment in the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower in New York, famous for its rococo interior.

The American press will call her “the spiritual heiress of the capitalist genius from Zlín who injected an Anglo-Saxon mentality into a Slav body.”

The couple will divorce because—as her husband will claim—his biggest mistake was to let a Czech woman from Zlín join the company. Instead of a wife, he got an indefatigable business partner.

One of the most interesting thoughts expressed in the bestseller that Ivana T. will write about herself fifty years later is this: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”

For years now, everyone in Prague has been saying: “With the Soviet Union forever, and not a moment longer!”

They also say that Bata will get the Nobel Prize—so rumor has it.

In fact, the Brazilian press writes that sixty-year-old Jan Bata is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his plan to relocate Czechoslovakia to Patagonia, in other words, the modern concept of migration. The Brazilian president has put his name forward for the prize—for invaluable services in changing the world. (However, the prize is awarded to Canadian politician Lester B. Pearson for solving the Suez crisis.)

Goethe said: “More light!” and then died. Beethoven’s last
words were: “The comedy is over,” and Heine’s were: “God will forgive me—that’s his profession.”

What might the last words of a Nobel-prizewinning Jan Antonín Bata have been?

“MY SHOES DO NOT CHAFE THE FEET”?

According to the press, Jan Bata initiated an experiment in Brazil to find ways of increasing the surface area of a cow’s hide.

He gave the following instructions: “We will put horsefly larvae in small openings all over the cow’s skin. They will cause blisters, the skin will stretch, and as a result its surface area will increase by 60 percent.”

The experiment was suspended after the death of the first cow.

Bata’s next experiment, involving a wooden railroad, was halted when the wooden rails came apart under the first cast-iron locomotive.

Of course, this has no connection with the fact that Bata’s shoes are still selling like hot cakes.

Now Jan Bata is at war with Marie Batová and her son Tomík. Wherever there are Bata branches and organizations (in over thirty countries), his sister-in-law and nephew accuse him of illegally seizing property left by Tomáš Bata. Their fight is described by the entire Western press. As a result of the
legal and media intrigue, Jan is even arrested in New York for two weeks.

He is worn out. He is in bad health and has no money. The court cases go on for fifteen years. Finally, in 1962, Jan Bata renounces a large part of his property in favor of Marie and Tomík. He dies in 1965 in São Paulo.

The Canadian Bata (Tomík’s branch) takes over worldwide command from the Brazilian Bata. In several dozen countries there are several different Bata companies in operation; for example, in France alone there are eight, each of which has daughter companies that it controls. Tomík’s son Thomas Bata supervises the entire organization.

For its own purposes, the Bata Shoe Organization publishes a journal called
The Peak
.

The poster painter has already committed several acts of vengeance. He has re-issued
The Shoe Machine
, and published
The Treachery of the Bata Family
and also
Bataism Abridged
. Now he brings out
The True Face of Bataism
, in which he has collected the accounts of former Bata employees.

“I worked in building No. 31. The foreman called us rude names, unrepeatable names. When I received a telegram saying that my little daughter had died, I asked the foreman for some time off to go the funeral. ‘What would you do there? There’s fuck all you can do—you’re hardly going to bring the child back to life. Get lost—nobody’s going to meet the production target for you.’ I don’t know how I got back to the machine because I couldn’t see through my tears. Despite his
threats, I went to the funeral. What I then suffered for the next three years is impossible to relate” (A. Wagner).

“Bata approached our parents, asking them to sell him their beloved orchard. They refused, because they’d waited twenty years for it to produce fruit. My brother, my sister, and I were already supporting ourselves—we were all working for Bata. The head of personnel threatened us, saying that if we didn’t force our parents to sell the land, we needn’t bother coming to work the next day. So we put pressure on our poor father, who wept as he sold the land for a fifth of its value, just because Mr. Bata had a whim” (Josef and František Hradil).

In analyzing the documents, the author reveals that in the period from 1927 to 1937 not a single worker went from Bata into retirement. The workforce was systematically rejuvenated. Workers were laid off for any reason at all at least ten years before retirement.

“This was how the era broke people, this was how the old regime debased them,” adds Turek.

Another author (who probably bears no grudge, but is a historian) points out how, at the linguistic level, refined Bataism is now blurring class divisions and tempering the system of exploitation.

He writes that Bata cunningly calls its employees “co-workers” and their wages are “a share of the profits.”

On the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Gottwaldov and Svit, the press quotes the words of a certain
communist who, as early as 1932, told Bata: “Moscow is doing away with human envy, while Bata uses envy as a driving force.”

Gottwaldov is called Zlín again.

Sixty years on, Tomáš Bata (Tomík) arrives triumphantly in the city. He is greeted by 100,000 people.

“Come and oppress us, Bata!” they shout.

He visits his former stores. In one of them, he sees a customer trying on some shoes. “My customers are my life,” he says. “I’m upset when the buyers have to do up their own shoelaces in one of my stores.” He gets down on his knees and starts tying the man’s shoelaces for him.

It’s 1906.

Vácslav Havel, a Czech engineer from Prague, is planning to build a latter-day palace downtown, on Wenceslas Square. It will be the first building in Prague to be made out of reinforced concrete. He shows his wife the design. “What a lot of windows,” says his wife. “It’ll look like a lantern.”

The Czech word for “lantern” is
lucerna
.

“And that’s an excellent name for the entire building!” says her husband excitedly. “But best of all,” he adds, “it’s a Czech word which any foreigner can pronounce easily.”

“I was just a woman,” she said.

“In the end, she’s just a woman,” said those who loved her.

We don’t know what she said as she was dying. We do know what her best friend revealed on her own deathbed.

“After cremation, I don’t want a funeral or any sort of ceremony,” said her friend.

“Where are your ashes to be scattered?” asked the notary recording her will.

“Nowhere!” she replied. “I don’t want to spoil the flowers in someone’s garden.”

She sat in her bedroom in Salzburg (538 square feet), watching videos of herself in leading roles, and waiting.

In 1995, as she sat on the sofa in calm anticipation, Helena Třeštíková from Prague asked her: “What is your greatest wish, Miss Baarová?”

“The only thing I’m looking forward to is death,” she replied.

Unfortunately, death did not come for her until five years later.

First, she was cremated at Europe’s biggest crematorium.
Then the urn was placed in the family grave. She was laid on top of her mother (who had lain there for fifty-five years), her sister (who had been lying on top of their mother for fifty-four years), and her father (who had been lying on top of the two of them for thirty-five years).

Her mother had been killed by a heart attack at the very moment she was asked about Lída’s jewelry.

Her sister killed herself, when she was refused admission to her favorite theater because of Lída.

Her father died of cancer. Lída had nothing directly to do with his death. But even so he suffered: he hadn’t seen her for seventeen years, and never did, to the day he died. The state had deprived him of the right to see his daughter in perpetuity.

She was already a student at drama school when a movie director saw her and invited her to the studio. That was when her father, Karel Babka, head of the municipal council in Prague, came up with the idea that she would be called Lída Baarová. Ludmila Babková sounded too ordinary for an artist. Her father didn’t think long about what her name should be, because he had a writer friend called Jindřich Šimon Baar.