In October 1997, my father, Kim Wyman, then 59 years old, made a pilgrimage to Prague, the city of his birth. He had spent his childhood there, under Nazi occupation, before emigrating to Australia in 1951 with his mother when he was 13. He hadn’t been back since.
The primary purpose of Kim’s trip was to find the gravestone of a father he had never known. His mother, Truda, had divorced Milan Janota when Kim was 2 years old. In 1948, the Communist Party took over Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet-controlled government had refused to let Milan emigrate. He’d had no contact with his son. When Kim traveled to Prague, he had little knowledge of his father’s life, beyond his name and the fact that he had died.
For a month, Kim scoured cemeteries in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia—the “Velvet Divorce” had taken place in 1993—but with no success. At one cemetery in Slovakia, he left his business card with the caretaker, a Mr. Labuda, printing his father’s name on the back. Then he returned home to Australia, certain he had failed in his quest.
A year and a half later, back in Slovakia, Labuda ran into a former classmate named Zorka Václavová. In the course of their conversation, Milan somehow came up. Astonished to hear his name, Václavová told Labuda that she was Milan’s niece. Equally astonishing, Labuda still had my father’s business card, which he handed over to her.
After this incredible twist of fate, Václavová reached out to Kim. My parents flew back to Slovakia, where they met her in the small town of Čadca, about 250 miles east of Prague. It was here, she told them, that Milan was buried.
This was not the only revelation. During the visit, Václavová handed Kim a small bundle of worn document cases, tied with string like an old parcel. Milan had left them with her in 1956, the year before his death, and she had held onto them for 43 years—waiting, she said, for his son to come to Slovakia to claim them.
“Your father hoped we would meet one day,” she told him.
