Anna Parker Extract from Cottage
M
y Czech family’s holiday cottage (in Czech, a chalupa) sits halfway up a modestly sized mountain, in front of a pine forest that is so dark green that, viewed from a distance, it looks blue. A low stone wall divides the uncultivated meadows that lie around the cottage from its large garden, in which enormous daisies like fried eggs offer their faces up to the sky. Its brown and white wooden frame is subject to a seemingly never-ending reconstruction project led by my uncles, who come up from Prague on the weekends to mix cement, lay bricks and paint timbers. As they lug power tools back and forth across the porch, they politely greet the stream of passers-by taking the road up towards the mountain’s peak. During these weekends, our neighbours from the cottages on either side of us often appear unexpectedly inside the house, striding uninvited into the cool dim living room to question my uncles about the mechanics of each repair. This mountain region of north Bohemia has not always been a quiet backwater. Located on the edge of the Czech lands, on the border with Germany and Poland, our cottage sits in an area once called the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland had been occupied by ‘ethnic’ Germans since the sixteenth century, when they moved across the border to Bohemia and founded a thriving glass industry in the dense forests. Thus, when Hitler rose to power in 1933, he saw the Sudetenland as an easy landgrab, eventually seizing it in the summer of 1938. From this base he went on to occupy the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939. During the Second World War, the Czech government, safe in exile in Britain, put together plans to rebuild the Czech nation without
100
anna parker
