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Ivan Klíma
Ivan Klíma (born Ivan Kauders, 14 September 1931 - outside Central Europe his surname is frequently spelt "Klima", without the accent on the "i") is a Czech novelist and playwright. He has received the Magnesia Litera award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honors.[1] BiographyKlíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans. In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma and then, in December, he and his mother and brother, were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until liberation by the Red Army in May 1945.[2] [3] Both he and his parents survived incarceration, a miracle at that time, as Terezín was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East"—to death camps such as Auschwitz. The family adopted the less German-sounding surname of Klíma after the war. Klíma has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, Granta, particularly A Childhood in Terezin.[4] He has written that "anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child, who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him - probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be snapped like a piece of string - that was my daily lesson as a child."[2] With the post-war rise of the Czech Communist regime and proxy Soviet control, Klima became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.[5] Eventually, his childhood hopes of triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often "not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world".[4] The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had begun with this new regime, and Klíma's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. During the Prague Spring of 1968 Klíma was a leading dissident voice. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Klíma was in London, on his way to teaching engagement in Michigan. He however returned to Prague in March 1970. Although he was then deprived of his passport and forced to work in menial jobs, he remained part of the literary 'underground', smuggling books and involved in samizdat. On the overthrow of communism in 1989 Klíma was a leading supporter of Vaclav Havel.[2] WritingIvan Klíma was awarded Franz Kafka Prize in 2002 as a second recipient. His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století ("My Crazy Century") won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010. My Crazy Century was published in English in 2013 by Grove Press.[6] Bibliography
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