“Adventurers Against Their Will” highlights fate of people displaced during WWII
During the Second World War, millions of people lost their homes, family and friends, and were forced to start new lives elsewhere. The book Adventurers Against Their Will traces several such stories, based on wartime correspondence between a Czech Jewish physician who found refuge in China, and his friends and relatives scattered around the world. The award-winning book by Joanie Schirm has just come out in Czech.
In a few months, he found himself in mainland China. There he served as a doctor for several years before moving to the United States with his American wife whom he met in Beijing.
After her parents’ deaths in 2000, Joanie Schirm came across 400 letters her father exchanged with friends, relatives and other people in the wartime years.
Joanie Schirm had the letters translated from Czech. Captivated by the stories revealed in the correspondence, she decided to share them with the world. After years of meticulous research that included getting in touch with some of the people writers and recipients of the letters, the book Adventures Against Their Will came out last year.
This week, Joanie Schirm came to Prague to launch the Czech edition of the book. I sat down with Ms Schirm after a lecture she delivered at one of Prague’s high schools.
“I can’t think of anything more grand. I always knew from the beginning it needed to be published in his native land. One of the students came to me after [the lecture] and told me he hears a lot about the Holocaust but he doesn’t hear a lot about displaced people. So I feel this was a confirmation of what I thought.”
Although Joanie Schirm knew some facts about her father’s wartime life, she only learned about the details after she opened a red lacquer box with her father’s letters. She says she felt puzzled when she browsed through the yellow pages.
So I wondered about that. But now I really feel I understand. They would have been very painful for him to bring out and tells us what they were about.”
Oswald Holzer corresponded with 78 people during the war. Some were his friends and relatives who also managed to escape the Nazi threat, while others remained home. Joanie Schirm explains how difficult it was to choose which letters to include in her book.
“It was so hard to have one chapter per person. For the reader, you had to take that person almost from the point of their birth so that they knew something about their background, all the way to what happened to them.
“I searched for them or their descendants, and I found them all over the world. Two of the original writers were still alive. And I had to have a thread that would take you to the next person, and I also wanted the reader to get to know my father.
So even though I knew I was going to write his whole story, I still felt like they were his friends, and you had to have excerpts from my father. It was extremely difficult.”
Some of the people Oswald Holzer exchanged letters with remained in the Nazi-occupied Czech lands, most notably his parents. They were able to communicate through various channels even during the early stages of the war.
“The International Red Cross had a programme that the German Red Cross administered. There was a form, very much like the modern-day tweet, where you could write 22 words. I have three of those that reached my father with one of them arriving after his parents were dead which he didn’t know. That was their last correspondence.
“But the Argentinian family put it away and didn’t send it to my father until 1968. So I found that among the letters. I think of my father receiving that in 1968 out of the blue.”
Oswald Holzer’s parents both perished in the Holocaust. They only spent a few days in Terezín before they were deported to the Lubin Ghetto in occupied Poland where they died. They kept in touch with their son until their deportation from Prague, telling him about what was happening in their letters.
“When you read them, there were many instances where they know that people are being taken away. My grandfather describes it as dragged away to concentration camps, that’s what he calls it. I was surprised when I saw that.
“They also used code in the letters; for instance, they said someone had to go to a spa when they were really taken to a camp. One researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took the letters and found 22 human rights abuses they mention.
“But they didn’t write about them in a complaining way; it was more like, ‘lucky you can listen to the radio, we can’t, and we can no longer go to the U Fleků pub’”.
After the war, Oswald Holzer and his wife settled in Florida where Joanie Schirm was born. She interviewed her father about his past but says the darkest and most difficult parts of his story only came to light after reading the letters.
I knew he was Jewish but he didn’t really go into detail about it. In some of the letters that I have from 1940 when he was in the interior of China, he was pouring his heart out to his friends, I call them testament letters.
“He says that after a year in China, he sees that the assimilation didn’t work in his country and that he was always treated as a second-class citizen. He says he would rather be recognized for his work than for his curly hair.”
“As soon as I started writing, every friend and every archive I went to would say, ‘have you read this book and have you read that?’ I now have a great library of Holocaust-related literature, and I really feel like the stories of the displaced people get lost in it.”
You can read survivors’ stories, or those of the people who perished. But rarely about the people whose lives were blown apart.”
