A witness to a crazy century: remembering writer Ivan Klíma

Czech writer, playwright and former dissident Ivan Klíma has died at the age of 94. One of the most widely translated Czech authors, he spent three and a half years of his childhood in the Terezín concentration camp. In the decades that followed, he joined the Communist Party, only to be expelled after the Soviet invasion.

Ivan Klíma was born in Prague in 1931 as Ivan Kauders. On the threshold of adolescence, he was deported to the Terezín ghetto because of his Jewish origin. His family spent three and a half years there before the ghetto was liberated by the Red Army. He later set the stories of one of his most successful collections, My First Loves, in that very place.

My First Loves|Photo: Mladá Fronta Praha

The traumatic experience shaped his decision to join the Communist Party some six years later, as he told Radio Prague in an interview in 2009.

“I tried to explain how it could happen that after this horrible experience in the camp, so many people joined the party. So I tried to explain that I was very young, that I was partly influenced by my parents and some of my relatives, but it was mainly an expectation that it would improve the life of everybody. For me and many of my friends – a part of my generation, we were liberated by the Soviet Army. So we linked the Soviets with freedom, which was of course nonsense, and we found this out very soon.”

My Crazy Century|Photo: Academia

In his memoir My Crazy Century, Klíma revisited his wartime childhood as well as the personal and social upheavals he lived through in the twentieth century. The book earned him the Magnesia Litera Award in 2010. In the interview for Radio Prague International, he explained the choice of the title:

“There were so many wars, killings and murders, and so many stupid dictatorships. And it was the whole century – it started in 1914, with this crazy war, the First World War; then it continued in Germany, Italy, and then in the Soviet Union of course. The communist era lasted nearly till the end of the 1980s. And in between, there were so many killings in Africa, in Cambodia, and in China of course. So it was really in some ways the cruellest and craziest century in history.”

He left Terezín at the age of fourteen, returned to school, and went on to study at the Faculty of Arts. From there, his career led him into editing and writing. In the 1950s and 60s, he was a member of the Communist Party, but his faith in it soon began to crumble.

Ivan Klíma|Photo: David Konečný, ČTK

Three years after he joined, his father, also a party member, was arrested and sentenced for crimes he had never committed. This experience, Klíma later said, was one of the first clear signs that something had gone terribly wrong.

Ivan Klíma|Photo: Profimedia

“I found out that it was really a criminal organization, with criminal aims. I found this out some time in the early 1950s. We found out about the horrible lies, and how many people were murdered, and how many people were sentenced to concentration camps. My own experience with my father, who was also a party member – he was also put in the prison and sentenced for entirely invented crimes. When he came back from the prison, he told us about the details, about how secret police behaved, and so on.”

Klíma himself was expelled from the Communist Party in 1967 after criticizing censorship and became one of the leading banned authors under the regime.

Despite the ban, he was still able to write, thanks in part to chance. His neighbour was the artist Zdeněk Miler, with whom Klíma helped create the beloved cartoon character Little Mole.

After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he was finally free to return fully to writing. Over the years, he received the Franz Kafka Prize, the Magnesia Litera Award, and in 2013, the Ferdinand Peroutka Award for his lifelong work as a journalist.