My great-great-grandfather Jan

We walk on a forest road.  A mischievous dog runs around, the daughters sing camp songs, I use my mobile phone to check the right direction and compare the display with a historical map.  The landscape has changed a lot in sixty years.  Entire villages have disappeared.  They flew into the air after the Germans, the Czech one was flooded by a water reservoir.  The barbed wires also disappeared, and marked hiking trails meander instead.

In the gazebo by the gamekeeper's lodge, his wife Lenka pours tea from a thermos and distributes small goodies.  Before we set off again, we take turns reading excerpts from old logs like an adventure novel.  We follow the same path.  Into the past.

In the darkest corner of our family history, age-old specks of wrongs, cobwebs of fear are swept away, and only a thin, addition to it is a tangled thread of an incredible story.  I'm trying to unravel it.

In addition to innate curiosity and stubbornness, I have a few witnesses, archives and also the Internet with tentacles spread all over the world.  I take this search as a duty.  Personal matter.  Return to the roots.  I want to know the truth about my great-uncle.

His name was Jan Chochola and he was not talked about at home.  All that was left was a box of photographs and a few yellowed envelopes with letters, from which I also cut out stamps as a child.  In fact, there was almost nothing left.  And even today, some relatives suggest to me that it should rather stay that way.  "Don't get me right, let it sleep," I heard my uncle Fanosh's picturesque Hanoi after a long time.

But why?  Isn't it time to find out how it all was?  Why didn't they even want to take my mother to an apprentice?  Who owned the dusty motorcycle on the kiln?  Why did the family lose the house and the field?  I'm a little afraid of what might emerge.  But curiosity is stronger.

Young boy with a gun
"We will smuggle across the border!" Shouts the younger daughter Terezka joyfully, and the older Maruška agrees with her.  On the one hand, I enjoy the carefree with which the children enjoy an ordinary trip for them, at the same time I am sorry that they do not understand what they are going on here.  So I pour out of myself:

State Security Protocols in the document
"Imagine walking this way, all your things on your back, and you know you only have two options.  They'll either catch you and lock you up in jail.  Or you'll run away, but you'll never be able to go home again. "

We move on in silence, girls a little taken aback.  The forest is thinning, a meadow shines through the trees.  We are approaching the border with Bavaria.  Suddenly a figure appears in front of me.  It goes in the same direction, with a suitcase tied with string on its back.

The young man holding a gun in his hand!  He growls at me.  I look at the others.  Apparently he doesn't see anyone.  At the same time, we approach each step.  The man is familiar to me.  It rotates.  I already know him!  It is…

My great-uncle John was in shock.  That's not true .... suddenly I heard a shot when I turned around my family was gone. How?  I didn't understand it at the time.  We were in forbidden territory.  Today is: 9/2/2025  And I'm trying to find my family.  Whether life or dead.  Mainly that I will find them.