MR HORENOVSKY wasn’t the first Czech to arrive in Ballymena when he brought his dog to the local agricultural show in the early 1950s and stayed with Godfrey Fitzsimons’s parents (An Irishman’s Diary, March 22nd).
I like to think my father was. In April 1948 he arrived at my grandparents house in Kellswater, on the road to Antrim, a political refugee from Czechoslovakia, two months after the Communists took power in his home country.
It was the penultimate move in 12 difficult and dangerous years of war, undercover work, journalism and imprisonment in half a dozen different countries. Stephen Pollak had been born in 1913 into a German-speaking Jewish family in the region of Czechoslovakia that would later become famous – or infamous – as the Sudetenland. Growing up in Germany, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, he was one of those “rootless cosmopolitans” – young, multicultural Jews – whom the Nazis took a particularly virulent dislike to in the inter-war years.
As an art student in London in 1936, he volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and was badly wounded in the battle for Madrid. In Spain he became a Communist (although never an actual party member). After he recovered from his near fatal injuries – which left him with a heavy limp for the rest of his life — and carrying false Canadian papers issued by the Comintern, he travelled with a “day job” as a journalist and an undercover role as a courier between local Communist parties in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, he was shipped out – along with other “British empire” citizens – to India.
There he was quickly arrested by the British authorities and accused of being a spy. To his horror they first accused him of being a German spy, a crime whose wartime punishment was execution. Eventually they heeded his pleas that as a left-wing Central European Jew, such a thing was an utter impossibility: he was guilty of something only slightly less heinous, being a Communist spy in a British colony with a paranoid fear of the Soviet Union. He was sent to an internment camp in the not totally unpleasant surroundings of Dehra Dun in the foothills of the Himalayas.
In 1946 my father returned to Czechoslovakia. There he got a job on a left-leaning English language magazine (this was at a time when the Communists were the leading party in a multi-party governing coalition).
On a February night in 1947, after he had worked as a commentator at a match between Czechoslovakia and the USA in the ice hockey world championships, he met my Co Antrim-born and bred mother at a post-match party. The young Jewish Communist and the young Irish Presbyterian had the classic whirlwind romance and within three months were married.
Eileen Gaston from Ballymena had spent the war years teaching in Bray.
After a chance encounter in the Czech legation in Dublin, she got the idea into her head that when the war ended she would go and work in Prague, as adventurous a notion as could be imagined in a devastated Eastern Europe now in the shadow of the Soviet Union.
My father, despite his Communist sympathies, did not last long after the Communist takeover in February 1948. He started to write dangerous things in his magazine such as that Czechoslovakia should adopt an independent foreign policy and accept Marshall Aid from the US. His former comrades soon turned against him, he lost his job and received a threatening visit from the secret police.
He decided to send his wife – by now pregnant with me – back to safety in Northern Ireland. Around a month after she flew out of Prague airport, he walked across the border under cover of night into Austria.
There was one last scare before my parents were reunited at my grandparents’ house: at Heathrow airport, the immigration officers were about to send this limping young man with no entry visa back on the next plane to Prague – to almost certain imprisonment, and given the “show trials” that were to follow, perhaps worse – but a phone call to a Labour peer who was supportive of Spanish civil war veterans saved him from deportation.
For eight months he lived quietly in Kellswater, walking with my uncle Jack every week to sign on at the small local RUC station. Northern Ireland was no place for a Czech refugee journalist to find work, so he headed for London, where eventually my mother and I joined him.
My father wrote a book about his experiences between Spain in 1936 and Northern Ireland in 1948 called Strange Land Behind Me, which one critic likened to that post-Communist classic, Darkness at Noon. Some years ago, not long before my mother died (and 20 years after the death of my father), we went back to visit the farm in deepest rural Co Antrim where her maternal grandparents had lived. When we knocked on the door and introduced ourselves, the new owner looked closely at my mother and asked: "Aren't you the Gaston girl who married the European?" That's what I like to think of myself as now, courtesy of my brave young parents: a European from Ballymena, Co Antrim.