”I got sick on the way there. Like, on the boat, right? Yes, some stomach bug. And I had fever, very high fever. Obviously, they were horrified. That if it spread that there is an infection on the boat, they won't be allowed to disembark. And that they would sit in quarantine. And the ship was desperately crammed, they used her only to ship people to America. So they boarded about three times as many than she… It used to be an army vessel, General CC Balou. It was meant for 600 soldiers but there were 1800 of us … So we took turns on the bunks and it was really nice. And then I got sick, I don't know any more what it was. But, so that they would not quarantine the whole ship, two sailors supported me, one on each side, and they moreless carried me. And when we passed the border control, who had been told about the situation, they just waved me away and said 'He's drunk again'. So I got to the U. S. Without being checked.”
„One day, I returned from school and the door was open. And I started entering, and mom ran out to the hall and told me not to go home. That I go and meet my sister. And that I bring her first to grandma and then to uncle. They knew that this would happen so they had planned it in advance. But I did not know until the last minute.”
“So you took your sister and went to your uncle.”
“I went outside, to the street, I met my sister, told her to turn around and to keep silent, that I will tell her everything. So I told her everything I knew – which is usually very little with me. And I took her to grandma. Uncle Václav picked her there. It was mom's brother. And I was taken in by uncle Rázník, that was dad's father from Kostelec nad Orlicí. So I spent the rest of the war in Kostelec nad Orlicí.
“And when the Victorious February won over me, so, dad told me after the Victorious February that he would need to leave. What I did not know then: that he had decided to leave, that he had left everything there. Career, position, reputation – he was not entirely unknown. But this just fell away. And he left it all there. And mamy years later, he told me that he had done it for me, so that I could go and study. And I could live as a free man.”
The most unsettling thing about America was how obvious freedom was.
Erazim Kohák was born on the 21th May of 1933 in Prague in a family of active members of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren. His father, Miroslav Kohák, was a forefront social-democrat intellectual. He was the secretary of the Central Committee for Inland Resistance [Ústřední výbor odboje domácího – ÚVOD] and as such, he was arrested by the Gestapo and spent the rest of the war in the Pankrác prison and in Mauthausen concentration camp. In 1944, mother Zdislava was imprisonedin the Small Fortress in Terezín and Erazim and his sister were raised by their relatives. After the liberation in 1945 the four members of the family encountered again but the February Victory [the 1948 Communist coup] was an utter defeat for Miroslav so in March 1948, the whole family escaped in Germany and soon after to the United States. In the USA, Erazim worked as a farm hand but later on, he was able to get a doctoral degree in philosophy and religious studies at the Yale University. In 1977, he became a tenured professor at the Boston University. At about the same time, after his marriage fell apart, he went to live in the forests of New Hampshire. He contemplated, wrote and regularly went to read lectures at the Boston University. This contemplation of the “moral sense of nature” formed his ecology ethics. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, he returned to Czechoslovakia and taught at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. He lived in Prague and he was active as a philosopher, social democrat, Christian and, first of all, an ecologist.
Erazim Kohák died on the 8th February of 2020.
