How to relate to the Nazis in Czechoslovakia in 1939

János Székely (Budapest, 1901–Berlin, 1958) was a conscious and sophisticated anti-fascist. A journalist, screenwriter (first in 1920s Germany and later in Hollywood), and novelist, he went into exile from his native Hungary when reactionary power was born. He later settled in America, fleeing a Europe occupied by Hitler's armies. It is curious, in this sense, that the protagonist of his short novel This is not done to Svoboda. (1940) is the complete opposite: a primary, pre-ideological, instinctive anti-fascist.

Set in a small town in Czechoslovakia in early 1939, when the Nazis had only just annexed the Sudetenland months before establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Székely's novel focuses on how the various inhabitants—a venerable colonel, a lawyer—receive the appearance of the Nazi invasion and, above all, the abusive and arbitrary exercise of their new power and authority. "The occupation of Czechoslovakia had been carried out with the speed of a gigantic robbery": this is how the author-narrator sums it up in one of the many strikingly striking sentences that flash through the book.

Skill and finesse

Among the rich and lively cast of characters, the Svoboda of the title stands out above all. He's a station boy "born in the darkest Slovakia, where peasants live year-round on potatoes," a bastard and fool, a veteran of the Great War (he returned with his chest full of decorations and his body riddled with shrapnel), who speaks in a slurred and sometimes incomprehensible way. "fat and good-natured," something that already suits Svoboda because "he was always in a good mood and completely satisfied with the order of things." But, paradoxically, all this almost animal simplicity, which makes him incapable of interpreting the facts of the world as he should and which leaves him defenseless against the evil intentions of those who want to mock him or want to harden crimes he has not committed, is also what, when the Nazis choose him as chief Turk, allows him to see things more clearly and ask the impertinent and important questions: "How the hell can a man who does not know Czech," he asks himself, referring to the Nazi leader of the people, "exercise authority in Czechoslovakia?"

Along with the highly accomplished tragicomic tone and frenetic narrative pace, the novel's great virtue is the skill and finesse with which Székely shows how Svoboda relates to the Nazi authorities. At first, he relates with a sense of stupor, meekness, and conforming servitude, but finally, when he can no longer bear it, he suddenly explodes and begins to relate with the pure, naive, yet reckless and powerful indignation of an innocent who stands up to evil without being able to conceive of it as a monster.