Read Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia for Free Online

least to be sent the bill of indictment. To no effect.
    Although the trial was a typical Stalinist show-trial, it failed to prove collaboration by means of production: all factory owners were forced to manufacture for the Germans, and he had not even been in the country. It also failed to recognize the comical idea involving Patagonia as treason.However, the court did reach the conclusion that failing to support the underground resistance movement in Bohemia was a form of collaboration.
    The Brazilian authorities quickly exchange Bata’s permanent residency card for citizenship, thanks to which they can protest: their citizen has not been tried according to international procedure. This is to no avail.
    Forty-five years from now, one of Jan’s grandsons will conduct a private investigation in order to rehabilitate his grandfather. In 1992, a report will be found in an FBI archive recording that the Americans had wanted to cross the name Bata off their blacklist, as there was no proof of collaboration. However, the communist authorities in Prague did all they could to keep the name on the list, because otherwise it would have been impossible to prosecute him in Czechoslovakia or to confiscate his property.
1949: SVIT
    In honor of Comrade Klement Gottwald, a faithful disciple of Stalin, who a year earlier had led the total takeover of power by the communists and announced: “With the Soviet Union forever and ever, never otherwise,” Zlín is renamed Gottwaldov. Bata shoes are renamed Svit (meaning “dawn”) shoes.
1949: IVANA
    In what is now Gottwaldov, a daughter, Ivana, is born to a worker at the plant, a Mr. Zelníčkov. Twenty years from now she will become a model, and after that, Ivana Trump, wife ofthe billionaire Donald Trump and one of the richest women in the United States. She will live in a fifty-room apartment in the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower in New York, famous for its rococo interior.
    The American press will call her “the spiritual heiress of the capitalist genius from Zlín who injected an Anglo-Saxon mentality into a Slav body.”
    The couple will divorce because—as her husband will claim—his biggest mistake was to let a Czech woman from Zlín join the company. Instead of a wife, he got an indefatigable business partner.
    One of the most interesting thoughts expressed in the bestseller that Ivana T. will write about herself fifty years later is this: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”
1957: NOBEL
    For years now, everyone in Prague has been saying: “With the Soviet Union forever, and not a moment longer!”
    They also say that Bata will get the Nobel Prize—so rumor has it.
    In fact, the Brazilian press writes that sixty-year-old Jan Bata is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his plan to relocate Czechoslovakia to Patagonia, in other words, the modern concept of migration. The Brazilian president has put his name forward for the prize—for invaluable services in changing the world. (However, the prize is awarded to Canadian politician Lester B. Pearson for solving the Suez crisis.)
    Goethe said: “More light!” and then died. Beethoven’s lastwords were: “The comedy is over,” and Heine’s were: “God will forgive me—that’s his profession.”
    What might the last words of a Nobel-prizewinning Jan Antonín Bata have been?
    “MY SHOES DO NOT CHAFE THE FEET”?
1957: AN EXPERIMENT
    According to the press, Jan Bata initiated an experiment in Brazil to find ways of increasing the surface area of a cow’s hide.
    He gave the following instructions: “We will put horsefly larvae in small openings all over the cow’s skin. They will cause blisters, the skin will stretch, and as a result its surface area will increase by 60 percent.”
    The experiment was suspended after the death of the first cow.
    Bata’s next experiment, involving a wooden railroad, was halted when the wooden rails came apart under the first