MY BACTRIAN CAMEL
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A few days after Hitler committed
suicide in his Berlin bunker and shortly after the Red Army passed through
Caslav, I looked out of my window in the gasworks and saw a wonder no less
amazing than the fact that the war was finally over. The factory stood on the
edge of town; so the view from my room was of bright-green field running to the
horizon.
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In this field, calmly grazing on
the sprouting wheat stood a two-humped camel.
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The animal population of the
countryside had been decimated by the war, I hadn't seen a pig in months, dogs
were a luxury, and here was this exotic animal from the deserts of Asia
cropping the lime-colored wheat under my window. I threw my clothes on and
sprinted outside, fearful that I was seeing a mirage, but the Bactrian camel
was real. I cautiously advanced to his side. He seemed comfortable around
people and went on gorging himself on the luscious wheat, so I ran off to get
my buddy Karel Bochnieek and a couple of other friends. They were all excited
by my discovery. How did the exotic beast get there? It was absolutely
incomprehensible. But there was a good reason, as we found out later.
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"Let's take him to the
zoo!" someone suggested.
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It was a fine idea, which had
only one thing wrong with it. The nearest zoo lay in Prague, some eighty
kilometers away, and the country was in chaos. The trains weren't running. Red
Army convoys criss-crossed the country, confiscating watches. Wehrmacht stragglers
were still trying to slip through and make it back to Germany. The roads were
full of people displaced by the war as the prisoners, the concentration-camp
survivors, the forced laborers were all heading back home on foot, on carts, in
coal-burning cars, on army trucks.
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The only way to get a camel to
Prague was to lead him there on foot, so a camel relay was organized over the
telephone. We Caslav boys would take the camel to Kutna Hora and hand him over
to the local Boy Scouts chapter, which would walk him to Kohn and so on, all
the way to the pen in the zoo.
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Karel, two other boys, and I tied
a rope around the camel's neck and dragged him out of the wheat field, which
was a big job. We discovered that it took all of us to pull the creature onto
the main road and that if he saw a leafy bush, there was no stopping him. You
had to wait till he slurped the foliage off a few branches, and only then could
you yank him away. The animal was as strong as he was stubborn.
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We had pulled the camel halfway
to Kutna Hora when a long convoy of Russian trucks and tanks swung up on the
horizon. When we moved to clear the road, the beast refused to budge, even when
all four of us hung on the rope with all our weight.
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The first Russian to reach us was
an officer riding in a gazik, the Russian jeep. He stopped and watched for a
while, so we got suitably frantic, but the camel held his ground and now the
military trucks were starting to pile up behind the jeep, blaring their horns.
The officer got out. I thought he would help us get the animal of the road, but
he had a better idea. He pulled out his service revolver and aimed it at the
camel's head.
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I hadn't thought we could try any
harder than we were already trying, but the funny thing about guns is that they
give your energy an incredible boost. Half hysterical now, we started kicking
the animal, twisting his tail, pushing and pulling him, yelling wildly, but it
didn't help. The camel just leaned back and kept on chewing in the middle of
the road, so Karel ran and knelt down before the Russian and begged him not to
shoot. For a long while, neither the Russian nor the camel were impressed with
our effort, but then, suddenly, the camel burped and a mass of green fodder
flew out of him. The stream of dense and vile liquid caught me square on the
head.
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I stank from the horrible camel
vomit for a week, but it didn't matter because the Russian officer had cracked
a smile and put his gun away while the unburdened camel, too, had come back to
life and let us drag him off the road.
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The officer jumped back into his
jeep and the Red Army convoy set into motion again and roared past us. Behind
it marched a weary infantry batallion, followed by a pair of horses pulling a
khaki field kitchen. I never knew that camels and horses had a problem with
each other, but the moment the horses saw our camel, they panicked. They were
so spooked that they jumped over the ditch and tore away down the field on the
far side of the road. I can still picture in my mind the clanging field
kitchen, bumping down that field, the utensils bouncing of it. The first to go
was its short chimney, then the pot covers popped off, and after that
everything went, all the pans and dippers and kettles and cans, strewn all over
the weedy field.
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We handed the camel over to the
Boy Scouts in Kutna Hora, but I don't know if it made it to the Prague Zoo.
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In May of 1945, the wonder of
this exotic beast showing up under my window, coming out of nowhere, a symbol
of peace, my two-humped dove, completely overshadowed any sense of history
being made for me. But then I found out that my symbol of peace hadn't come out
of nowhere.
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Toward the end of the war, a
small German circus had gone to Russia to entertain the depressed troops. When
the Eastern Front started turning into a rout, the circus raced back to the
Reich and put on shows in villages, performing for provisions. One paid with a
chunk of bread or an egg or a bale of hay to see the few acrobats, the dressage
of some scrawny nags, the toothless bear, the monkeys, and the two-humped ship
of the Gobi desert.
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The end of the war stranded the
circus just outside a small Czech town not far from Caslav. The Czechs there
had been waiting for six years to take revenge on Germans, some Germans, any
Germans, but they didn't dare mess with the Wehrmacht tanks and the army trucks
still streaming west in long convoys. They did collect enough courage to attack
an exhausted circus troupe.
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They killed all the circus people
and shot their bear, too. Man, woman, child, beast, they were all Germans. They
slaughtered the horses and ate their meat, but in the confusion of the
skirmish, the Bactrian camel got away and he kept running till the delicious
spring wheat stopped him under my window.
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Milos Forman, "Turnaround: A
Memoir" (1993)
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