“All this correspondence took place in August 1938 and at that time we were staying in Manly with my father in the house of our uncle in America. The letter exchange was between my father and Albert Einstein, who was staying in some summer residence as well. I don’t remember where it was, but the address is in those letters. It was all in August 1938, and then father left and it was over. I don’t think that they ever met personally. I think that they did not, that it was only letter writing, and that there was no meeting in person, because Einstein was no longer in New York afterwards. He was somewhere in West Point, I don’t remember the name of the place anymore. Well, to put it simply, he was in some summer house at that time, as well. But it was a lively correspondence; there was a letter every week. And as you asked, of course, the letters were kept hidden, and nobody knew about them throughout the whole war. The first letter to Einstein even emphasized that this had to be kept totally secret, so that the information would never get revealed, which it did not.”
“I remember one thing about the stupid election, you know. That was how the elections looked like under the communists. It was the year of the election and one day they ordered us all: ‘Everybody get changed into your city clothes and you go to an election meeting in Levice.’ Well, so we had to go. We were led by a non-commissioned officer, he was a chairman of some unified cooperative from some village, and he talked in Hungarian for an hour and a half. Levice is in southern Slovakia, and nearly everyone there spoke Hungarian. We did not understand a word, what a bother. I fell asleep during his speech, of course. And then there was the election. They told us: ‘You will go to vote and each of you will receive a ballot card. One of you will play an accordion and you will place that ballot card into that box so that all can see it.’ There was nothing like a covering screen. The election had to be done in order to manifest this.”
“The way it began was that I got up in the morning as usual. I prepared to leave the student dorm where I had my student room at that time and go the institute, and suddenly I could see – there was a room with a television on the ground floor . There was only black and white TV at that time, but the TV was normally turned on in the evenings and students would go there to see evening programs, films and news. Nobody would go to there to watch the TV in the morning. But suddenly as I was standing in the lobby, and about to go out, I noticed that they were all going inside that TV room. I asked them: ‘For God’s sake, what is going on? What’s so interesting on TV?’ And they replied: ‘Don’t you know anything? This is a report from Prague.’ And I could see what was happening in Prague, that there was the occupation. And I could see it like that, from far away from a foreign country, but the Swedish television obviously broadcast it immediately that morning. Well, you know, as I wrote, I did not go to the institute that day, because I was in shock. I thought: My wife is in Košice, my daughter is in America now, are they going to close the borders or not? What will happen next?”
Erik Navara was born February 24, 1931 in Brno. He grew up with his parents in Telč. His father took him to the USA before WWII to visit his uncle. Erik’s father František had a secret meeting with technicians of the US Navy there, and he handed them his proposal for an anti-submarine torpedo. The person through whom Erik’s father established contact with the US Navy was Albert Einstein. František exchanged several letters with him. Erik returned to Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of the war. In 1953 he graduated from the faculty of mining and subsequently he did his basic military service in Slovakia. While in Slovakia, he began working at the Academy of Sciences in Košice. In the 1960s, Erik had an opportunity to travel to Sweden to do an internship there. He was there at the time of the Soviet Invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968. His wife managed to leave Czechoslovakia and follow him there. They have not returned from Sweden anymore. Erik Navara worked at first at the university in Göteborg and subsequently at a new university in Luleå. From there he went to work in Zambia for two years. After his return to Sweden, they were missing Africa and Erik thus found a job at the university in Zimbabwe where the Navara family then continued to live until 2001. After several more years in Sweden they decided to return to the Czech Republic. At present they live in Jihlava.
