Ladislav Mňačko, Death Is Called Engelchen, trans. George Theiner (Prague: Artia, 1961).
After a string of rather dreary contemporary Slovak novels wallowing in the meaninglessness of it all, I was happy to return to Ladislav Mňačko, whose The Taste of Power and The Seventh Night I’d enjoyed previously. It’s a testimony both to the dreariness of the other novels and Mňačko’s own skill that I’d consider this book an improvement, given that the subject of the novel is military failure and mass carnage.
The setting is early spring 1945. The story opens with the narrator, called Volodia (though this is evidently not his real name), being hauled to the hospital after his legs have become paralyzed in battle. As he lies in bed, wondering if he will ever walk again, alternately flirting with and berating Nurse Eliška, he starts to walk back through recent events, and in time to share them with Eliška. The war is pronounced over during his recuperation, but the plot does not tend toward victory: it recounts the relentless march of death in the final days of this devastating war.
Click on the link to order your copy of my memoir on Amazon!
The key to the story is that it takes place in the aftermath of the much-vaunted Slovak National Uprising of 1944. Nowadays Slovakia is proud of the effort, despite the fact that it did not actually succeed in kicking out the fascists. The failure was largely because the Soviet Army deliberately held back promised support, so that the USSR could be the eventual liberator of Slovakia, not the Slovaks themselves. It’s unlikely that Mňačko could have known this, and the novel subtly suggests another reason for the failure: the inability of the partisans to be as brutally inhumane as the Nazis.
Even though the Uprising didn’t succeed, by the time of Volodia’s tale it’s clear that the war is nearly over and that the Nazis will be defeated once and for all. The problem is that the individual units still occupying Slovakia refuse to stop fighting till the bitter end. So a mixed bag of partisans that refused to give in after the Uprising was crushed hides out in the Beskydy Mountains at the intersection of Czech, Slovak, and Polish borders, sniping at S.S. units whenever possible.
The novel, if not exactly autobiographical, was based on Mňačko’s own involvement in partisan resistance against the Nazis. The centerpiece of the drama is the burning of Ploština—an actual historical event. This tiny mountain village housed the partisans, fed them, encouraged them, and evidently supplied them with very willing young women. The guilt for Ploština’s destruction lies heavy on the narrator/author, because the attack came when the guerilla units left to perform a maneuver, leaving the village undefended despite certain knowledge that there had been two traitors in their midst. Indeed, a great deal of the drama is the uncertainty about any given volunteer partisan’s reliability. Knowing who to trust is not a new problem.
Another aspect of the story is the narrator’s first love with Marta, a double agent who sleeps with Nazis in order to glean tactical details to help the partisans. She, too, is not trusted by many, but Volodia eventually comes to see her as most heroic of the band when he realizes that she is Jewish, having narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz, and is undertaking her dirty work in order to bring down the Nazis, every bit as much as the well-armed soldier.
The novel ends ambiguously. It’s not clear whether Volodia will return to Nurse Eliška, with whom he’s had a hospital romance, or whether he will succeed in his efforts to find Engelchen (“Little Angel”), the vicious Gestapo agent responsible for the burning of Ploština and the death of so many partisans. And that’s probably the point: as Volodia ruminates endlessly on the chain of events that led to the destruction of the mountain villagers, he realizes that nothing can ever atone, not even deaths equal in number and kind exacted of the Germans. Ploština will remain a stone in his heart, a moral burden of failure he can never shed.
Death Is Called Engelchen counts among the tiny handful of Slovak books translated into English and published by Artia in the early 1960s (though, curiously, both the narrator and setting are Czech, and only one character is explicitly identified a Slovak). I presume that it passed the communist litmus test because stories about Nazi atrocities and their persecution of Jews were always a hit—and possibly a distraction from communist atrocities and their persecution of Jews.
The translator this time was not Jean Rosemary Edwards (a.k.a. Rosemary Kavan) but George Theiner, another interesting character. Himself a Czech, his family escaped to England in the late 1930s to get away from Nazi encroachment. After the war he repatriated but refused to join the communist party and suffered forced labor as a result, though the translation of Death Is Called Engelchen suggests that he benefited at least in part from the relaxing of Soviet strictness in the sixties. However, he fled back to England after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. He spent the rest of his life translating Czech literature into English and serving as editor for the Index on Censorship.
The novel was made into a film in 1963 and won a Golden Prize (second place) at the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival.
