"I don't have any flashy bank account, I don't have any glittering jewels, I don't have any show buildings, I don't have any big assets. But I have friends and people to whom I can give my favour. That's what's important - people you can help to become better. Then you become better too."
From Bohuslav Hynek's book Diplomat in African Switzerland.
***
He introduced himself by phone from the hotel and immediately invited me to lunch. I was not used to accepting such invitations. I stood to receive the Czech shoe expert, as he first said about himself at the embassy, to learn who I was dealing with and what was going on. I offered to send a car to the hotel to pick him up.
Entered a gray-haired gentleman of tall stature and neat manners, at first sight a retired worldling, but most of all a Wallachian. He had flown to Zimbabwe to help select applicants to study at "The International School oí Modern Shoemaking, in Zlín, which he co-founded after November.
Shoemaking is nothing new in Zimbabwe. Between 1938 and 1940, several young Czechs, some already in dramatic circumstances, arrived by sea and rail from the Mozambican port of Lourenqo Marques on Protectorate passports to build the foundations of "The Rhodesian Bata Shoe Company" in the towns of Gwelo (now Gweru) and Bulawayo. Until then, all shoes, mostly canvas, were imported into the country from Batanagar, India. The production in Gwelo was headed by Karel Strnad, followed by Jan Kašperlík and after World War II by Konstentin Fiksl, DrSc., a graduate in leather chemistry from the University of Brno, who later (1962-63) even became Mayor of Gwe1a. Machines, rubber and other raw materials were transported to the African shores by Bata's own ship Morava. Latex from wild rubber trees probably came overland from the Congolese province of Katanga.
The first shop was opened in 1939 in Gwelo by Jaromír Vrána. In 1944, the Rhodesian "Bata" was already able to supply the Allies with a million pairs of military boots for the war fields.
During my stay, the Bata business was dominated by Indians. Tomas Bata himself, nicknamed Tomik, visited the remaining Czech Bata community once. I sat at the chairman's table of the international trade union conference. We exchanged a few words in Czech, and the participants praised Bata for the unfamiliar language he could speak to me. Whites in British Africa communicate exclusively in English.
From the conference I took T. Bata to our countrymen's Friday, where the specialists from Martin, who maintained the military equipment we supplied in Zimbabwe, treated him to jelit and jitrnice they had made on the spot. In the debate, he was timidly asked if he intended to help the Czech and Slovak revived state flourish, and how. He chuckled and told the interviewer that that was what the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were for.
The meeting was rushed, with the Canadian High Commissioner waiting for us. From his office, Bata called to Prague to ask his associate there how the restitution of Bata's house in the lower part of Wenceslas Square was going. Charles Besset and I were standing next to him. I could tell by his name and his voice that he was talking to the - until very recently - head of the party group in the commercial policy and integration department of Polytechna, who was hurting me as much as she could as an untested clerk in the publicity department. She was clever, yes. Now I know that foreign businessmen didn't bully applicants for positions in their companies. As long as they were useful. Similarly, and on a higher level, the communist politician Andrej Barcak, when he ceased1 to be a minister in the Chalf government in 1990, immediately took a top job at the American giant General Motors. As far as Tommy was concerned, the Communists were on his side in the post-war property dispute with his uncle Jan Antonin, and he agreed with them that Jan had lost his honour in the war; so they didn't bother him so much even after Velvet, and he didn't admit the idea that he had robbed and disgraced his uncle.
Jan Antonín Bat'a, the half-brother of Tomáš - the founder of the company, they called him Tomina, was blacklisted by the Allies during the war and nobody at home lifted a finger for him after the liberation. Not even Honza Masaryk, who received money from him in London, and not even Benes, although his stationer also cashed cheques from Brazil. Jan, after his acquittal by a court decision, lost the Bata shoemaking empire in favour of Tommy, which after Tomina's death /12.7.1932/ he spread all over the world.
Mr. Pivečka was born in Slavičina in a family with a tradition of shoemakers, tanners and tanners. He attended the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště and the trade academy in Brno. Later, when he showed me around Hradiště, he boasted that he was invited to the local gymnasium every year to talk to the students. He once suggested to the headmaster that they should invite his peer Tomáš Baťa Jr., who, according to his biography, had also studied there. Unfortunately, that name was not found in the archived class books.
Pivecek's role model was the brilliant Tomas Bata, with whom his father maintained business and friendly relations until Bata's tragic death in 1932.
In 1946, Jan Pivečka left his father's business and went to India for three years to work for Bata, and later to Ceylon and Batavia in Java. Political changes in his homeland in 1948 led to his unplanned stay abroad for 44 years. For the last ten years before returning home, he was a consultant to the shoe industry in projects of international organizations.
With work experience ranging from shoemaker's spinning wheel to business management, he traveled much of the world. He spent the end of 1989 in South America and followed events in Czechoslovakia on CNN news. Already at Christmas he received an invitation from the Brno University of Technology to come and give a lecture there.
In Harare, Mr. Pivečka asked me to supervise the selection of applicants to study at the school in Zlín. He was also concerned about their state of health. The German ambassador happened to send a very good ZTV presenter to a course in Germany, but she died of AIDS during her studies. I didn't promise anything. No one in Zimbabwe could know the result of the medical examination as to HIV positivity about the other. True, we knew unofficially why the embassy of a neighbouring country had released the servant after his examination by that country's expert. But what goes in whispers goes in devils.
Had it not been for one programme on Czech Radio, I would have put Mr Pivečka's name out of my mind after my diplomatic mission. But in that programme it was said that in 1992 ]an Pivečka had initiated the establishment of the International School of Modern Shoemaking on the foundations of the former Bata School of Labour and that the new school had already educated more than 160 students. I also learned from the radio about the establishment of the Jan Pivečka Foundation, which cooperates with schools and motivates pupils and students to gain experience abroad. One of the Foundation's projects was the creation of the so-called Pivečka Forest Park in Slavičín.
We renewed contact and I welcomed Mr. Pivečka to Prague at the earliest opportunity. He invited me and my partner, Marlet le Roux, First Secretary of the Embassy of South Africa, to visit his native region. We were driven there by Bata Junior's personal chauffeur during his stay in the Czech Republic, otherwise a Prague taxi driver. He drove like Chiron, there and back. As if he was carrying 1-human organs for transplantation. Later, Marlet mentioned to Mr. Pivecek whether Mr. Bata was not afraid to employ such a driver. He replied, "Don't worry, at his age one doesn't care too much how one gets on in life!"
Mr. Pivečka was waiting for us in Luhačovice. On the promenade he was greeting who. It was obvious that especially the ladies who were walking around were in awe of the New Renaissance intellectual in him. Our host felt at home in the Zlín "skyscraper". As a souvenir, I had my picture taken with a telephon to my ear behind the boss's desk in the office of Tomáš the founder, located in an elevator with clear glass so as to be able to see the production workshops. The office in the elevator was used after his brother's death by Hugo Vavrečka and Jan Antonín Bata. The latter was said to be strict, but at the same time a great democrat and patriot: when the leading figures of the state announced in 1935 a "fund of one thousand military pilots", Jan had two hundred and fifty of them trained. Of these, many joined the Royal Air Force in the war.
From Jan Bata, Pivečka took his life motto: "Never give up!"
Of course, we talked a lot with Mr. Pivečka on the way across Wallachia. He said that when he used to play football as a child, he liked being in goal because he admired František Plánička. I confessed to him my bad experience with Plánička. As a student, first at the School of Economics, then at the University of Economics, I would often sell ice cream on Národní třída in Prague in the season, instead of attending afternoon lectures at the law faculty. The pensioner Plánička would come to get it with a thermos. My manager, a photography fan, told me not to take money from him. But I had to bear the losses of those transactions myself.
We jumped from one topic to another, without any luck, because every now and then it was necessary to look at some pearl of Wallachia from the car. We went from Czech to English and back again. Here is one of the stories.
Before the Bata plant in Batanagara, 20 km from Kolkata, the top boss of the company used to greet the employees at the entrance gate every morning. He also shook hands with Pivecek and asked if he was happy at work. "Well, Mr. Bartos, it's going well," he replied, "but the monkey business is tough." The director invited him to tea that afternoon. "If you say one more time that your co-workers are monkeys, I'll buy you a plane ticket and send you back to Slavičín". Pivečka was taught a fair lesson that he must never call people monkeys, niggers or gypsies. But they can be good or bad, yes.
When Pivečka's Czechoslovak passport, issued in 1946, expired and the issue of a new one was linked by our authorities to the necessity of military service at home, then he would see himself, or become, homeless abroad. The French governor of Senegal offered him French citizenship if he would build a shoe factory in the local town of Rufisqu according to his (Pivecek's) project. He built it and his first name was written in his issued French passport as Jean.
Mr Pivečka got on well with Marlet when he talked about his experience of apartheid in South Africa. When the factory was built in Pinetown, he recalled, they built toa1ettes separately for blacks, separately for mixed-race people, and especially for whites. If there was an African or European among the workers, they had to put a screen around her so that she would not be in direct contact with the blacks. Marlet spent her childhood and youth in such an environment as a privileged Boer. Discrimination reminded me again of the time of normalisation in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, when people of the same skin colour were divided into the privileged and the worthy of rejection. After all, even after the Revolution, we are more likely to pigeonhole the nation than to keep it together.
Mr. Pivečka prided himself on the fact that, in addition to graduating from schools, he also trained as a shoemaker from scratch. He was given his apprenticeship certificate by Karel Mašek from Pitín after an examination in shoemaking. I bragged that I also knew something about the craft. In the fifth grade, I played the role of the apprentice Ferdy in the school performance of the play "The Famous Master Kopřiva". I got the necessary props from the cobbler in Praporišty: a spindle, a hoof, a cobbler's hammer, flocks... The cobbler showed me a little bit what and how, and I performed on stage.
Our guide continued - we were already heading to Jelinek's distillery in Vizovice: "A good shoemaker must be a perfect orthopedist, who knows the structure of the human foot. He must also be a creator and an artist. He creates something beautiful, comfortable to wear. He must also be a psychologist to sell his goods."
At the s1ivovice, Mr. Pivečka confided to Marlet - she still hasn't forgotten - how he helped Lisa, a soloist with the Philippine State Ballet, procure ballet biscuits and toes. In Germany, she asked1 a friend who made ballet shoes for the world's companies to supply him with a size thirty-six. He resisted. He said that every prima ballerina had a hoof at his place where biscuits were made just for her. And he added that the best female members of the ballet companies don't skimp on the footwear. Out of friendship, he provided Pivečka with several pairs of biscuits of different sizes and widths to take with her when she went to Asia again. Liza will try them on and he will make the ones she feels most comfortable dancing in for her. It happened. The next time, eight to ten pairs always left Germany in a package. The Czech shoemaker sponsored a Filipino ballerina!
Marlet and I also visited Piveček Forest Park in S1avičín. The Jan Pivečka Foundation has built a rest and recreation area on the area of one and a half hectares. In cooperation with the University of Applied Arts in Prague, sculpture symposia are held there, with the finished works remaining on site. A wooden snail, a snake, a cuckoo, a seal and a wooden frog basking by the pond under the bridge. Among the artful park benches, children play with their grandmothers and grandfathers on a walk. I thought of Vigeland Park in Oslo, where this pupil of Auguste Rodin, admittedly not of wood, but of bronze, iron and granite, has created statues and sculptures on which, on sunny days, children from the nursery climb.
I mention the frog statue. This is how the young men and girls from the ecological club came to Jan to ask him to contribute from the foundation money to the event of transferring frogs from one side of the road to the other, according to their mating season. He didn't believe it was any good. He replied, "If someone contributes, come again, I'll contribute too". Years later, I read in a newspaper that, in addition to traffic crashes, road salt has a [v]iv on frog conservation: exposure to sodium chloride reduces the number of females in a group of wood frog species by ten percent. The singer stopped hesitating and slapped his pocket. Saving the frogs at the Luhačovice dam is not pointless. Their presence signals the safety of the water. Without frogs, even the storks would move away.
Back to the shoes. In the Czech Republic, the Bata company produces shoes only in Dolní Němčí, in a small factory near Uherské Hradiště, where the secrets of the old craft are still well known. They still make shoes by hand. The factory was built by the national enterprise Svit, Bata ir. bought it from the state for 10 million dollars. At the same time, he took over forty stores in the Czech Republic. A renowned education in shoe manufacturing and marketing is developing. Both in Zlín and in S]avicin. Trade Fairs Brno regularly organises the "Fantastic Shoe" competition for the Jan Pivečka Foundation Prize. The year I watched was held in three categories: Funny shoe, Young spirit and Professional view. The main prize was awarded to Kristýna Honzová from the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Uherské Hradiště for her very creative shoe model "Funny shoe" where she used an umbrella skeleton and food foil as materials. The author, a beginner student, confessed that when creating the design she imagined "a shoe for a person from another world". In 2001, Jan Pivečka received the Jan Masaryk Gratias Agit Award from Minister Jan Kavan. He died three years later. I apologised to the director of his foundation that I could not attend the funeral for work reasons. She confided to me on the phone that no sooner had Mr Pivečka closed his eyes than some vandals had destroyed the statues in the forest park bearing his name. However, the association he founded was not discouraged. Mr Pivečka's place on the board has been taken by his daughter Petra Blumenberg. Although she lives permanently in Germany, she is interested in continuing her father's activities. Here is his confession, as published by the journalist Milan Švihálek: "I have no dazzling bank account, no glittering jewels, no exhibition buildings, no great property. But I have friends and people to whom I can give my favour. That's what's important - people you can help to become better. Then you become better too."
I'll allow myself a not exactly Pivečka-related addendum. I am reading Markéta Pilátová's book, With Bata in the Jungle. It makes me wonder why the Brazilian ambassador often invited me for lunch or dinner in Zimbabwe. Probably because of the respect he had for our country through the memory of the man whom the Federative Republic of Brazil had twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Jan Antonin Bata. After the dismissal of the head of the mission, my good relations with his deputy as chargé d affaires a.i. continued. And before I was called back to Prague, she arranged a picnic for me, to which she invited guests according to my list. I had prepared for the occasion, and learned by heart, something like a speech on the role of women in diplomacy. My colleague took the chance. She skipped the toast out of shame, and I put my essay exercise behind me.
The second addendum is a quotation from Jan Bata's book With Bata in the Jungle: 'My daughters liked to write letters. In general, our time was a time of letters, letterhead, stamp rings, expensive quality ink, postcards and delayed messages. That's why the leggy Lidka thought she'd impress Václav Havel by writing him a letter. She probably should have called him. Or send him a telegram. But she sent him a letter. Do you think Hugo Vavrečka's grandson wrote her back? No, he didn't. And yet I went to Venosha's funeral. I felt it was to Vavrecka, my dearest Bata guy, the big one."
***
Z totalitních a posttotalitních dějin naší diplomacie
J.Š. 30.5.2022
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