About a book
I was a child spy
Original title: Bol som detský špion
Genre: novel
Slovak edition: Forza Music
Foreign edition: Czech (Mladá Fronta - 2013)
CONTENT
The riveting story of children trained and used for espionage, written according to real events,
is a sad testimony to the practices of a totalitarian regime. Now in his fifties, Pavel K.,
returns to his childhood in the south of Slovakia and to the times when he was scouted as a boy
by the counterintelligence of the Ministry of Defence of the Czechoslovak Republic for
the purpose of espionage, told to the author of the book this sad story. The "father" of the depraved idea of child agents was a Prague psychologist who claimed that children between the ages of 9 and 14 are the best material for monitoring and eavesdropping on government officials. They operated at home and abroad. The training ended only in 1985 due to lack of money.
After the Velvet Revolution, all materials related to the training of children were shredded. There has been no official evidence of child agents, but that does not mean that if there is no evidence, nothing happened.
REVIEWS
“The author wanted to write a novel based on the autobiographical narrative of Pavel K., but apart from the testimony of a former spy, no evidence of the training of child spies has been preserved. That's why I feel justified in approaching this book as a novel. However, since it is impossible to overlook the persistent non-fictional references to the former reality, as well as the evident effort of the author to conceive the work as detached as possible, without symptoms, emphasizing the authenticity of the narration, it would probably be most appropriate to consider Kollár's book as a kind of Capote documentary novel.”
Luboš Svetoň , Literárne a informačné centrum
“Even if it was "just" mere fiction, the book raises questions to which it is good to return (spying, infiltration into children's thinking, strategies to get a child for political games) and is worth reading. If not, it should not fit in, but on the contrary, it should stir up the entire societal discussion. But there are too many anonymous people and too few concrete facts to rely on for that.”
Topi Pigula, Blog Respect
“I do not dare to evaluate whether the book was based on real events or not, in any case it was fictionalized, which the author does not hide. Interesting topic, hard to believe even for me, especially considering that it was political child abuse, and yet managed to keep everything a secret? I can't imagine a young child keeping a secret without their parents noticing.”
Zorka, 2022 Book database
EXTRACT
The survival courses were terribly strenuous. Even the captain, who was in charge of the paragons, paid attention to us during the training. He woke us up at five in the morning.
We survived three cold days and nights in the nature of the Tatra mountains. It was so cold at night that it was unbearable. I would prefer to run away somewhere. Fortunately, at about 12:30 the cold wind died down and the clouds revealed a large moon. I looked at him, zipped up to his ears in a sleeping bag, and thought of Miloš from the pioneer camp. He must be tucked away in a warm room somewhere, reading a book about the Universe.
The order was clear, but how to fulfil it was unclear to us in the bitter winter. Frightened, we clung to each other as if our lives were at stake. In fact, our lives were at stake, it started getting really cold, the temperature apparently dropped to zero. Breathing exercises helped us a lot in those moments. All night long we kept repeating to ourselves that we weren't cold. To make it easier to survive, I thought of Spider-Otto, who I had made up as a small child.
It might have been freezing that night on the Tatra hill, I had the feeling that frost was forming on the leaves of the trees. We shivered from the cold, huddled together desperately, hoping to keep warm. The captain watched us from the warmth of his sleeping bag, sometimes shining a flashlight on us like frightened and frozen hares. I tried to at least touch her light with my gaze and draw some warmth from it. However, before I could do it with exhausted and heavy eyes from the winter, the captain turned off the flashlight and put it next to him in his sleeping bag. I think I survived that night only thanks to the memories of Spider-Otto, who helped me drive away gloomy thoughts. My Otto took me between waking and sleeping to the land of warm cobwebs where he came from. His translucent brothers and sisters live there. They are like humans, but their bodies are soft and fragile. Even the relationships between them are fragile, because they are all connected only by the threads of a spider's web. They need each other when they are cold, they warm each other. I was surprised how the Spiders take care of their old species. When the Spider-Otto gets old and his web closes, the youngsters wrap him in theirs. When the wind blows in their country and destroys their webs, they immediately start weaving a new one and fix everything. Thoughts of the hot cobweb world warmed me pleasantly.
After returning from the Tatra Mountains to the sanatorium, they evaluated our stay. Only I and Tučko came to the evaluation. Lato couldn't handle the hard training and left for home early in the morning. After a night without sleeping bags, he was sneezing and coughing, maybe even had a fever. The captain concluded that things did not look good for him. That's why we came back down a little earlier. In a short time, an equally thin, sinewy boy was assigned to us. They replaced it as a piece for a piece.
Website made by @monisrll © 2023