Searching for Family in the Shadows of War

Jimmy
Did your family try to find out what happened to your granduncle?

Jan
Yeah, I figured it out that they have been trying because there was no confirmed death of Silvestr, right? Basically, he had gone missing in 1942, and then after the liberation in 1945, ‘46, the family has been corresponding with Silvestr’s colleagues and friends, with the Bata company in Singapore, with Czech authorities and even with the British colonial authorities. 

And they were trying to figure out what happened. So I have about a dozen letters, or exchanges from these years. And it was a very sad, tragic story of desperate search. They were still hoping that he would emerge somehow from either the prison camps or somehow come back. 

Two years after the war, in July 1947, they received an official certificate of death. But again, basically the certificate of death says, it is presumed he had died in February 1942 in Singapore, but there is no confirmation. Nobody found it. It’s an open ending. 

[Music playing] 

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating. 

For people of a certain age, Bata is a name that is synonymous with school shoes. In fact, Bata shoes have been worn by so many generations of students here that many people think of it as a local brand. The Bata shoe company, however, was founded not in Singapore but in the Moravian town of Zlín, one of the cities in Czech Republic back in 1894. 

Even though Bata is not a local brand that’s been in Singapore for a long time. The first Bata shop opened in Singapore in 1931, making it close to 100 years old here. Among its early employees was a young man named Silvestr Němec. In December 1938, the 19-year-old came to Singapore to work for the Bata shoe company. 

He was still in Singapore when the Japanese invaded, and he ended up being involved in the fighting. He went missing in 1942 and was presumed to have died. More than eight decades later, Silvestr’s grandnephew, Jan Beránek has published a book, In Search of Silvestr. The work is a fascinating account of the author’s quest to learn about the fate of his granduncle. 

It involved hunting through archives in the Czech Republic, London and Singapore, examining private diaries as well as the archives of Bata itself. This story provides an interesting insight into life in 1930s Singapore, and into the history of a company that many people here have grown up with. Welcome to the BiblioAsia+ podcast, Jan. How have you been? 

Jan
Thank you very much for inviting me. I’ve been very well. 

Jimmy
Where are you now, Jan? Are you now in the Czech Republic? 

Jan
No, I’m now in Amsterdam, because that’s where I am currently based, although we travel to the Czech Republic to visit family and to enjoy some holidays as well. 

Jimmy
Actually you know, I’m very interested in how the whole book came about. So when you were growing up, what did you know or hear about your granduncle? 

Jan
It was quite a mysterious story. I remember when I was travelling to the countryside to my grandmother’s place and they had a house, a small farm, and I would be spending almost every weekend and the summer holidays there. There has been a photograph of a man, with a hat, hanging on the corridor. And, of course, as a boy, I wasn’t very interested, but I recall that my grandmother said this is Silvestr, her brother who died in Singapore during the war. 

And then I also do recall that my grandmother, she has been going occasionally to a small monument of the victims of war in our village, where Silvestr’s name is amongst the 15 names carved on the stone and she has been bringing flowers and tidying it up. 

Jimmy
Was Silvestr her younger brother or her older brother? 

Jan
He was the younger brother. He was the youngest of the siblings of the family. 

Jimmy
So that must have been very painful for your grandmother, I can imagine. 

Jan
Yes, I think it was very traumatising, actually, and that’s maybe why she didn’t talk about it very much and the information has been quite limited. 

Jimmy
Did your family try to find out what happened to your granduncle? 

Jan
Yeah, I figured it out that they have been trying because there was no confirmed death of Silvestr, right? Basically, he had gone missing in 1942, and then after the liberation in 1945, ‘46, the family has been corresponding with Silvestr’s colleagues and friends, with the Bata company in Singapore, with Czech authorities and even with the British colonial authorities. 

Jan
And they were trying to figure out what happened. So I have about a dozen letters, or exchanges from these years. And it was a very sad, tragic story of desperate search. They were still hoping that he would emerge somehow from either the prison camps or somehow come back. 

Jan
Two years after the war, in July 1947, they received an official certificate of death. But again, basically the certificate of death says, it is presumed he had died in February 1942 in Singapore, but there is no confirmation. Nobody found it. It’s an open ending. 

Jimmy
And you mentioned in your book that in 2017, was it your mother who gave you a bunch of documents? 

Jan
Yes indeed. I got my hand on these documents from my mum. And that’s where my curiosity really started and was fueled by, you know, this bunch of letters. 

Jimmy
Because these are all copies. These were copies of letters that your grandmother no doubt had written to the authorities. And the replies from the folks were from these authorities. 

Jan
Yes. Correct. 

Jimmy
What happened in 2017 that, you know, made you interested in investigating this. I mean, you grew up, you saw his face on your grandmother’s wall, and he never struck you to do anything with it. So why in 2017 did you decide that you wanted to do something about it? 

Jan
It’s a good question. I guess I came to an age when I was more interested in my ancestors and actually, before I received this letter, I started to look at some registers of the deaths and births of people and trying to build a family tree. That’s where my interest started and that’s why my mom, when I visited her, gave me these letters. 

But I really became super curious, and I decided, you know, I really want to figure out what happened with Silvestr because his stories are outstanding, you know? The rest of the family was basically born and grew up and worked and died eventually in that village or in the near surroundings. And suddenly there is one member of the family who died in Singapore under mysterious circumstances. 

So I thought, well, I really need to figure it out. 

Jimmy
How big is the town that your granduncle came from, and how did your granduncle ended up in Singapore? 

Jan
Yeah. It’s a relatively small town. It currently has about 800 citizens. 

One of the first things I found out was that the way he travelled to Singapore was that he was actually dispatched there by the Bata shoe company. So I, of course, had to search and discover many things about how Bata operated and what was going on in that company and why they were sending him to Singapore. 

Jimmy
Did he volunteer or did they just appoint him and say “You, your job to go to Singapore.” 

Jan
It was very tough management, so there was no choice. In some aspects he has been the chosen one because the company had, you know, tens of thousands of employees. 

Jimmy
Which was actually a privilege to be sent? 

Jan
In a way, yes. They had a very meticulous and sophisticated system to track the talents and build the talents from all the ranks of the company. So only the best talents actually had the opportunity to be sent overseas but there was no way for them to turn it down. Basically, I was reading in some letters and memoirs of some other colleagues that, you know, basically they were given the option to go or to basically be fired. 

So there was no choice. 

Jimmy
Okay. It’s a different time then, and when your granduncle was sent to Singapore, what was his job? 

Jan
He was working at the main flagship store in the capital building, which also offers that particular services, for the, you know, high-end clients when they were able to, or offered to be taken, also the head of their feet as a basket, [a] full package service. 

Jimmy
But he also had to sell shoes. 

Jan
Yes, he was working both as a seller, but as a part of the selling procedure, he was also offering these additional services, which also included pedicures. 

Jimmy
Right. In Singapore, Bata is a very well-known brand. In my introduction I mentioned a lot of people. I thought it was like a local company. A lot of kids got their first shoes in Bata. They had outlets everywhere. I guess as a Czech person, you must feel the pride that the Bata shoes company has done so well. 

Jan
Yeah, I mean, this incredible story, actually, a kind of an absolute success of localisation of a brand that comes from inside. And I do have the same experience that you describe also with my friends and colleagues in India. You know, they think it’s obviously an Indian company. My friends in Indonesia think [it’s] obviously [an] Indonesian company. So everybody thinks it’s actually a local brand, which is fantastic. 

Jimmy
That’s wonderful. How big was Bata and say, how important was Bata in Malaya? Was Bata’s presence in Malaya very large? 

Jan
Yes. The Southeast Asia region has been considered as a high priority for Tomáš Bat’a, the founder of the company. He even traveled there himself in December 1931. He took a very famous, very long and at the time it was a record travel by airplane from Zlín down to Batavia, Indonesia and back. 

And he did some interviews. So that is also in the Singaporean press, a full print where he says Indonesia and Malaysia are the key markets that are millions of feet here that need to be given shoes. And subsequently, he established two core hubs in that region. One was in India, in Kolkata, he built a small city and factory called Bhatnagar. And the second hub has been in Singapore. There was also a factory in Klang, in South Malaya. 

Jimmy
I understand from your book that Bata actually had its own rubber plantation in Malaya. 

Jan
Yes, yes. That was actually even before he opened the factory. He opened and he bought and then expanded a rubber plantation, because that was part of the philosophy of the company. It was, you know, to control the whole supply chain and to integrate the company horizontally and vertically as much as possible. It was really a huge conglomerate and very complex operation. 

Jimmy
You were talking about how, you know, in Singapore and India and Indonesia, everybody thinks Bata is a local company. You know, it’s so widespread. What made Bata so successful in reaching out to all these diverse markets and becoming localised? 

Jan
Because he invented mass production at a very low cost. So he was able to offer affordable shoes for even low-income classes. And that’s what he already invented and launched in Czechoslovakia before he expanded to other countries after the First World War, when there was a big economic depression, he basically figured out a business model that was able to produce massive amounts of shoes at very low cost. 

He introduced the belt production system. He was inspired by Henry Ford in Detroit and he basically applied the same mass production for the shoe industry as well. And that’s what’s allowed him to also sell affordable shoes, you know, for the millions of people in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. 

Jimmy
Before mass production of shoes, it was artisanal. And it would take a long time and undoubtedly be very expensive because it took a long time. Its mass production would have made it much, much cheaper and more and more affordable. 

Jan
So he revolutionised that and he was producing one of the most famous, most successful models so-called Plimsolls, which was shoes made of the rubber sole, and then just a textile cover of the shoe. So it was basically coming with cheap material. He didn’t need any leather. And it was also very easy to produce at a big scale. 

Jimmy
Your granduncle came to Singapore, I think in 1938. Were there a lot of Czechoslovakians in Singapore and in Malaya at the time? 

Jan
Well it was actually a fascinating thing I was discovering step by step. As I was searching for Silvestr, I found that there has been quite a rich and diverse community of Czechoslovaks, about 150 souls. 

Jimmy
In Malaya? 

Jan
In British Malaya and Singapore combined, most of them in Singapore but several dozen have also been based in British Malaya. And of that, a majority of about 80 people have been coming and working for the Bata shoe company, or this were the families of the Bata workers that has not been you know what people who worked for different brands, like the Škoda, which is also famous today, I think, for making the cars. They also worked for some typewriting companies. There have also been artisans and adventurers and travellers. It was a very diverse mix of people. 

Jimmy
Right. You used the phrase “Bata men”. Were the Bata men the largest group of Czechoslovaks in British Malaya? 

Jan
Yes, that is correct. And that’s the term that they’ve been using themselves. They really had a very tight culture and bonds as a tight community, which has been one of the principles the company has been using or applying to all its employees. So this kind of

social cohesion and being a group together was part of the culture that has been really expecting and nurturing across the whole brand. 

Jimmy
Right. In your research, you obviously had to do research into the Czechoslovak community. Who were the earliest of these people to come to British Malaya? 

Jan
I mean, there were the early travellers who wouldn’t probably consider themselves Czechoslovaks because they were still in the time when the Czech lands and Moravia and Slovakia and Siberia had been part of the Habsburg Empire. 

So it was the end of the 19th century. There were about a dozen people who travelled and wrote books and photographed British Malaysia and Singapore. But then, the big first wave of Czechoslovaks as we know them today, came up shortly after the First World War and these were the Czechoslovaks legionnaires, there was an army of about 70,000 people. So quite big army bodies that were fighting in Siberia. At the end of the First World War, they ended up in Vladivostok and they had to find a way home. So they were travelling by ships either through the U.S. or actually through Singapore. It is documented that thousands of Czechoslovak soldiers were passing through Singapore between 1919 and 1922. 

And they were usually making stops for a day or two. And they were, you know, organising performances like there were concerts played by the Army musicians and soccer matches with a British officer. All sorts of things. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

Jan
Okay. But anyway then Bata came as I said, at the beginning of the 1930s. So Tomáš Bat’a came for this famous visit in 1931. And shortly afterwards he opened the presence and built up the presence of Bata shoe company in a proper way. 

Jimmy
What were the impressions that the Czechoslovaks had of Singapore, I mean, whether they were the soldiers or the Bata men or, you know, because obviously Southeast Asia is a very different place from where they came from. And, you know, politically it was very different as well. 

Jan
I mean, there are lots of impressions that I found in the letters and diaries. Obviously the first one is it’s an exotic island and it looks so different to what the people have been used to from the centre of Europe, which is, you know, very moderate climate. And many of these, especially for Bata the employees, have been basically recruited as young people, usually from the poorer areas in the mountains. So coming from very poor families [that have] never been, you know, travelling even outside of their small region. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Jan
And suddenly they found themselves on the super exotic tropical island. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Jan
So the first impression has been of all the greenery, the fruits growing everywhere, the climate, but they were also surprised by the political system, because it was still a British colony, which was applying the segregation of races. And there was something very strange as a concept to Czechoslovak because Czechoslovakia never had, you know, the racial segregation, if anything, it was colonised itself. 

And to them, you know, they considered everyone and it was also part of the culture. Everybody was actually equal. So even within the company ranks, you know, the director was basically considered to be equal to the last gatekeeper. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Jan
And this kind of equality sense or the sense of equality was very deeply rooted in their culture and approach to things. So there are many nodes when they were very surprised to know how arrogant the British are towards, you know, other races or what are the pay differences? And importantly or interestingly as well, once the Czechoslovaks joined the volunteer corps of the British Army, they also noticed several times how even within the army and within the volunteer structure, the foreigners were dealt [with] in a very different way than the British. How they were basically kind of second class citizens. 

Jimmy
I was actually going to ask you because your granduncle came to Singapore in December 1938. When did the occupation of Czechoslovakia begin? Is it ‘38? 

Jan
It happened in two steps. First in September of 1938, there was the so-called Munich Treaty, during which Hitler actually occupied about a third of the Czech Republic or the eastern part of the western part of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands, under the argument that there is a German population there and he needs to protect them and they themselves chose to join the Nazi Germany. So Czechoslovakia had lost a very important part of the land already in September of 1938, which also crippled, you know, the infrastructure because suddenly including Silvestr’s home village or hometown. 

Just 10 km away, suddenly there was a gentleman, a boundary or border, and the train connections were disrupted because suddenly part of the train track was going through Germany. So it was very difficult. So in September 1938, three months before he left for Singapore, he must have already experienced it himself. But then the final blow came in March 1939, when the Hitler army invaded the rest of the country and basically there was a full occupation. They were subject to the Nazi Germany because Czechoslovakia as a state ceased to exist at least. 

Jimmy
And then after that, World War Two officially breaks out. 

Jan
Yes, exactly. So also the Bata company, which had headquarters in Zlín which was basically at the time a German territory, was considered quite suspicious by the Allied authorities and the British. So at a certain point, they even put Bata on the blacklist and after that they created a sophisticated scheme for the operation in Singapore that they had, you know, governmental supervision to make sure that they don’t so-called trade with the enemy. 

And there was no exchange of goods or finances with Zlín, headquarters and the local branch in Singapore. So it was quite complicated. After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, in theory that Czechoslovaks in Malaya would then supposedly be part of Germany, they were not themselves necessarily big fans of Nazi Germany. 

No, not at all. So most of the Czechoslovaks actually declared loyalty to the allies and to the British. And they have been basically also governed by the exiled Czechoslovak government, who was based in London. So there was a certain continuation, but not all of them. There have been some Czechoslovak, some German origin who actually applied for the German passport and there have been some of them interned, even on the island of Saint John. 

The interesting thing is that even after the Japanese invasion, the Japanese were very confused as to how to handle the Czechoslovaks, like are they citizens of Germany and therefore allies or are they still with the British and therefore enemy. So whilst in the first weeks after the invasion, they basically imprisoned all the European citizens. The Czechoslovaks were left to roam freely in Singapore, and they were even pressured to restart shoe manufacturing because the Japanese wanted it for their army. 

Jimmy
Right, right. 

Jan
And so it was only in 1944 that actually the Czechoslovaks were rounded up and put to the internment camps as well. Because the Japanese, you know, figured out that they are not really friendly and they have been boycotting shoe production and it was not working for them. 

Jimmy
How did the Czechoslovaks in Singapore, how do they support the British war effort? You know, because obviously, by the time before Japan’s invasion, Britain and France obviously were at war against Germany. 

Jan
Most of them were patriots. They had their families there. They were very worried and they wanted to fight for the country. So there have been several of them who decided to leave and travel to Europe, and they joined the French army in the Czechoslovak Army in France. 

And then later, even you know, when France was taken over by the Nazis, then they went to Britain and they were fighting basically the whole war on the side of the British. The rest of them remained in Singapore, but they of course felt, you know, they needed to do something. 

So they organised lots of beneficiary activities that have been collections for water funds, different collections also for the London exiled Czechoslovak government. And eventually most of the young men actually volunteered to join the volunteer forces. 

Jimmy
And that included your granduncle? 

Jan
That included Silvestr. Indeed. 

Jimmy
Okay. Do you tell us a little bit about what he did as a volunteer? 

Jan
So there have been, as I’ve said, about 50 Czechoslovaks who volunteered for the volunteer corps. Some of them were joined with the local defence forces, which was kind of Home Guard, so a lower level. But 12 of them, including Silvestr, were actually joining the street settlement’s volunteer forces, where they were going through proper military training. As such trained volunteers, they even joined the fighting with the Japanese eventually in February 1942. Most of them were assigned to the rifle or machine gun units but Silvestr, again, probably had some special talents. He was actually assigned to the armoured cars unit, which is quite special because it required the person to be able to fix the car, drive the car. 

It was a very special operation, and I was very surprised. And this is documented in many sources, that Silvestr was actually attached to the armoured cars of Singapore, which I find very interesting too. 

Jimmy
And in 1942, he disappears from the records and you come up with, I think, four possible scenarios as to what happened to your granduncle. Do you want to run through these scenarios with us? 

Jan
Of course I can. At the end, it’s still an open-ended story, because as I’ve said earlier, there is no body that was found. Silvestr basically had gone missing officially. 

He was last seen during the Battle of Panjang on the 13th of February, 1942. And that’s where his tracks are lost. So there are several options. One is most likely one was that he was injured during the fights with the Japanese. If it was at Pasir Panjang, he was probably taken to the Alexandra military hospital, which was just around the corner. 

And that’s where he might have been killed by the Japanese during the massacre, the infamous massacre that took place on the 14th and 15th of February, where over 300 patients and personnel lost lives to Japanese brutality. But there are also other possibilities, including the fact that he might have been captured alive and he became a prisoner of war, and he survived for a few more weeks somewhere before he ceased, maybe to violence. 

He could have also, you know, managed to sneak onto one of the evacuation ships and lost his life there. There were six other Czechoslovaks who actually died on the evacuation ships when they were sunk by the Japanese. So that’s all possibilities that are open but the most likely one is indeed [that] he was murdered during the Alexandra Hospital massacre. 

Jimmy
But we know that he wasn’t killed at the Battle of Pasir Panjang, he didn’t die there. 

Jan
Pretty much. That is certain, because there is also a record of him being treated for injury. So that’s why I also made the connection that he might have been hospitalised. Unfortunately, it was the Alexandra Hospital where he was put into, which suffered the massacre two days later. 

Jimmy
In your book you have a list of the Czechoslovaks who were in the region and in the appendix of your book, you know, very good of you. Why do you think it was important for you to do that? 

Jan
Well, because it started for me as a personal search for my granduncle. But then as I was discovering more and more, I thought, you know, there are so many interesting stories and individuals that have been forgotten over time that should be mentioned and should be reminded to the people who are interested in the subject. 

So the book, also the stories in the book, basically tell not only the story of Silvestr, but the story of Bata and his colleagues and, you know, other Czechoslovaks who have been living and working in Singapore during the 1930s. And I find these stories very, very interesting, including, you know, the non-Bata people for example, that have been one of the legionnaires of the First World War, soldiers who travelled through Vladivostok, through Siberia, most of Kochi. 

He actually decided not to travel back to Czechoslovakia. He stayed and lived in China in the 1920s. He is actually the author of the statue of Sun Yat-sen in Nanking. A very interesting discovery for me was that it was actually done by a Czechoslovak sculptor. 

And then he also lived in the 1930s in Malaya and then ended up in Singapore. And he’s one of the victims of the sunken ships. He tried to evacuate, and then his ship was bombed and sunk. So he lost his life on the sea. There are many interesting stories, and I really wanted to capture it. 

It’s not just the annex, as I say, but it’s basically kind of one thread going through the whole book. 

Jimmy
You obviously had not that much information about your granduncle, so you had to actually do quite a lot of research. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the research, you know, what it involved and maybe, perhaps, what kind of resources you were able to get in Singapore. 

Jan
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a trained historian. So for me, it was really starting from scratch, more or less. And one of the first things I actually started to do was to set up a blog. And I have been writing about my work and my search online, both in Czech and in English, which was useful because it later had created a basis of the kind of the backbone of the book, but it also worked as a research method. 

So once you know, it became more popular and there were more readers, I’ve got [a] number of contacts coming from them and giving me tips. Networking has been a totally key approach to me. So I even managed to connect with historians in the UK, in Australia of people who have been really experts on the issue of the war in Singapore and including the volunteers, the history of the volunteers, which is a very niche theme, and they have been incredibly helpful. 

One of them has been Jonathan Mulford, who grew up, he grew up actually in British Malaya before and after the war. Now he’s living in the UK and he’s a historian of the Malayan Volunteer Group, which is Association of the descendants of people who have been involved in the volunteers volunteering in Malayan Singapore. 

So that’s very rich information also coming from them. But I also worked through a lot of archives. I do visit three or four different archives in Czechoslovakia, particularly in Berlin, which holds a huge collection of Bata documents, but also to other archives, for example, about Silvestr’s hometown or what are some of the ministry of foreign affairs or the caves that also hold exchanges and information about the community in Southeast Asia? 

I think another very important source has been for me the families and, you know, actually the people who have been part of the story, and at the end of the day, I think I have about 15 connections to 15, 15 different people. I’ve mentioned that there are also about 80 Bata men. So I’ve covered maybe 20 percent of them actually through personal connections now. 

And that helped me to get, you know, personal correspondences, letters, diaries. And that’s also why the book is not only describing Silvestr, but you know, all the other people, because from Silvestr himself, I don’t have much. That is just one letter he wrote shortly after he arrived in Singapore to the family. And that’s pretty much it when it comes to firsthand accounts. 

So a lot of the things, I do actually get from how life and the work has been for, but as friends and colleagues, some of them even remember him. So there was a beautiful connection at the end. 

Jimmy
Oh, wow. Okay. 

Jan
One of them actually is a family of [a] very, Silvestr’s close friend, Frank Berkman, he worked for. But after the war, he decided not to go back to Czechoslovakia. And he actually married locally in Singapore. And I met them, actually. Frank’s wife, an old Chinese lady, Daisy. She’s still alive. And then, actually his son and daughter, and they brought photographs and they remembered how the grandfather was talking about Silvestr. It was an incredibly moving experience. 

Jimmy
That was amazing. What kind of records were you able to find in Singapore? 

Jan
In Singapore I found, I think the most precious thing I found in Singapore has been actually the digitalised archive of newspapers. 

Jimmy
Ah, the NewspaperSG archive. 

Jan
Yeah exactly. That’s an absolutely fantastic tool. Now that it is basically all the newspaper has since, I don’t know, 1870. And it’s also digitalised into full text. So you can really search for keywords for names. And I was reading literally about 1,500 articles that were covering it in Czechoslovakia. And I guess 

Jimmy
Right. 

Jan
Right. So it was a lot of, a lot of reading, but incredibly useful and precious information that came from actually from the newspaper archives. 

Jimmy
Now it’s a great archive. Yeah, it’s great, amazing. 

Jan
You should be proud of it. 

Jimmy
I take no responsibility for it because I wasn’t involved in creating it. But yes, it is a very useful archive. You’ve published this book now actually once in Czech and now in English. Now how has the book been received in the Czech Republic? 

Jan
I think it’s been received reasonably well. We had a bit of unfortunate circumstances that it was published right before the biggest peak of the Covid infection. Right. So we literally had ten days after the book was published, and the bookstores were closed for the next six months. So it wasn’t great, but we’ve got about a thousand copies sold. And it’s a living story. And I’m still getting, you know, people contacting me. 

Jimmy
Really? 

Jan
It was published in 2020. So it’s now five years later. 

Jimmy
Yeah. Yeah. 

Jan
It still, you know, triggers attention. And especially for people interested in either but, or you know, the history of the Czechoslovaks in the war. 

Jimmy
Oh, actually it’s quite interesting. Why do you think that is? 

Jan
That’s a good question. I don’t know, I mean I didn’t think I would be interested in such things myself, especially when I was, as you mentioned, you know, as a child roaming around the house, there was this photo. But you know, I never asked my grandma for more information because it was not really interesting to me. 

Unfortunately at the moment I became interested. You know, she has already passed, and actually also the people who are being who might have, you know, remembered. But as time went on, the stories were all gone. 

Jimmy
Right. 

Jan
So that’s very sad, but I don’t know, maybe it’s a time when you, you basically went a long way through the journey of life, and that’s sort of a point to start to reflect more about what you have achieved. And maybe you want to understand where you come from and what is the bigger picture of your journey. 

Jimmy
You’re not a historian and research is only something you do part time. Tell us about your day job. You work for Greenpeace. What do you do at Greenpeace? 

Jan
I do work for Greenpeace. I’ve been a lifelong activist for the environment and actually against injustice. It started for me as a political activity back in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. But most of my life I am dedicated to protecting the environment. And so I’ve been working on lots of different campaigns. My current job is to be a strategist for organisational development of Greenpeace. 

So I have a small team. Greenpeace has 25 branches around the world. And my job is to make sure that they are thriving. They are aligned on the big strategies that are well resourced where needed. A lot of work goes into resourcing properly the offices in the Global South, like you know, we have a branch in Africa or India. 

Jimmy
I have a frivolous question for you. How many pairs of Bata shoes do you own? 

Jan
I currently own two pairs of Bata shoes. 

Jimmy
Does every Czech person own at least one pair of shoes? 

Jan
That may be an overstretched proposition, but especially in the older generation, like my parents, I’m sure that’s as you’ve said, you know, so popular and so affordable and so spread common as a brand that I think almost everybody had. It’s right in the younger generation, it’s probably not so much because of competition, but yeah, it is still my friend. 

Jimmy
Yeah. Your children wear both shoes. 

Jan
My son actually recently bought it on holidays in the Czech Republic and he bought a pair of shoes for himself that is from Bata. So yes, at least one. 

Jimmy
Okay. Complete the sentence. Family history is… 

Jan
Family history is, to me, kind of a fascinating spring of fresh, fresh water, if I were to imagine it. Where you can come and you can, you know, find reflections, you can actually really gain access to, you know, the refreshing, sometimes fascinating unknown things that actually connect to you. And unless you take that step, you are unaware which I think is a pity.

Jimmy
Jan, thank you very much for coming on to the BiblioAsia+ podcast. To learn more about Silvestr and the Czechoslovak community in Singapore, you have to read Jan’s article In Search of Silvestr on biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg. Of course, his book In Search of Silvestr is available in bookstores and in the library. Jan, thank you for joining us. Very pleased to have you on our show and I wish you good luck. 

Jan
Thank you so much, Jimmy. Thank you for the invitation and I’m glad to have the opportunity to speak with you and your listeners. Thank you.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
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Jan Beránek, In Search of Silvestr: Unravelling My Granduncle's Fate, Bata, Czechoslovaks and World War II in Singapore (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2025).

Jan Beránek, “In Search of Silvestr,” BiblioAsia (April 2025).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Nookcha Films. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Jan for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.