From a Faraway Country

by Peter Tegel

PETER TEGEL was born into a Catholic German-speaking family in Czech Sudetenland in 1932. In 1936 his widowed mother’s marries his Jewish stepfather. The Sudeten Territories were ceded to Nazi Germany in the 1938 Munich Treaty when a British Prime Minister – referring to ‘a quarrel in a far-away country among people of whom we know nothing’ – presented that country to Hitler on a plate. The family, now under threat of the Nazi race laws, flee to England.These memoirs deal with family relationships against the background of the annexation of the Sudeten Territories, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the flight to England, schooldays and importantly, life in the wartime and post-war refugee community in London.The Sudeten German branch of the mother’s family become refugees in their turn during the 1945-46 expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. The mother’s brother, who had served in the Nazi administration, dies during the expulsions. The stepfather’s family have died in the Holocaust. The Czech branch of the family will be deemed kulaks under communism and expelled from their farms which become collectives.These memoirs deals also with the refugee community in the early years after the war when many had to come to terms with the fate of loved ones who had been unable to flee. Demands for compensation cause conflict within this community. One of its members, Herz, who as mentor and guide plays an important role in the author’s adolescent life, accuses other Jews of 'accepting compensation for anything from the loss of a button to murder.'For the author, a ‘foreign’ boy, a German-speaking refugee in wartime Britain in an all-boys’ English school, there are questions of identity, national, religious and sexual. On a first return to his hometown in Moravia, in search of the family home and his natural father's grave, the author meets his Czech relatives and learns of their dispossession under communism. He recovers memories of his early childhood and of his natural father in a process of self-discovery where private life and history come together.From a Faraway Country brings us to the present. The Czech relatives, after the collapse of Communism, recover their property.ABOUT THE AUTHORPeter Tegel is a playwright, novelist, and the author of many radio plays for the BBC. Richard Wortley, producer of 3,000 radio plays, in Reflections of a Lifetime in Radio, “Peter Tegel has his multi-focus European background, his dramatic escape from Sudetenland as a Czech-German boy of six, fleeing to Britain from the Nazis with his hat-making mother and Jewish step-father.Next stop the graduate in modern languages from Balliol College, Oxford, then the translator of German, Russian and French writers for The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others, then the increasing interest in Russian literature and now Committee Member of the Pushkin Club at the Russian Cultural Centre.”

179 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2013