The following true story describes our life in Jamaica after my parents and younger sister, Zena, immigrated to Jamaica from England in 1957. Šarka is the older sister who was left behind in communist Czechoslovakia in 1948.

We arrived just before Christmas. The sun was shining, and there were lots of colorfully dressed people milling around the port area of downtown Kingston. I was particularly fascinated by so many donkeys pulling carts, loaded with people and produce. I had never seen a donkey before and, like most young children, was drawn to any animal. A few days later, we were in a place called Havendale, a suburb of Kingston. The small apartment had two rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. As children everywhere, we were constantly fascinated by all the many goats with their kids grazing on any vacant lot, naturally wanting to touch and pet them.

Zena and I accepted the changes in our lives without question. I attended Kingsway High School and assume that one of my parents took me there every day as I was too young to use public transport. There were no school buses in Jamaica.

We were now living in a British colony with its typical racist attitudes. All aspects of life in Jamaica at that time were a direct result of hundreds of years of colonial domination and slavery. One example was the employment of people with black African ancestors. The majority of white British or European descendants had chauffeurs, laundry and household personnel, cooks, and gardeners. Wealthy, mixed-race Jamaicans were often surrounded by staff who sometimes lived on the premises. As in every country, more personnel is a type of status symbol. In Jamaica, the staff was black and the employer was light-skinned or white. The color difference and the fact of being able to afford household help were generally translated into but never put into words—I am better than you.

British colonial attitudes resulting from the domination of other races and slaves were unknown to Mummy. She felt lost in this strange land. She had barely begun to integrate into England when she was uprooted once again into another unfamiliar environment. She had never had any interaction with people of African descent and couldn’t understand the dialect people spoke around her. It took her many years before she no longer wanted to return to England.

 Added to her marital problems came her physical isolation and complete helplessness in all matters relating to Šarka. Little by little, with new problems and challenges to deal with, she gave up and began accepting the fact that she had lost her first child.

After our short stay in Havendale, we moved to a rented house in a town called May Pen, where Daddy’s employer had his headquarters. The partially furnished house was very old and on a slight slope. The roof had wooden shingles. It looked rather uneven with many shingles curling upward, and we soon found out to my parents’ great dismay that it leaked terribly. All rooms had wooden floors made of deep brown, wide, solid planks. Still, as late as the mid-1950s, servants went down on their knees and with a circular motion, usually singing along with swinging hips, waxed them to a bright shine. They used a brush cut from the top of a dried coconut husk.

There in the living room, I found an entire set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, for my curious mind, was heaven, and I loved this place. I spent hours upon hours whenever I could, poring over the pages and staring at the fascinating pictures. Today I still remember the photographs of the fly’s eyes under a microscope. They seemed to have many sides and were so strange.

The house was provided by Daddy’s employer. It had two bedrooms, but in comparison to the tiny apartment in Kingston, it was quite spacious. Behind the house, there were 4 acres of citrus and mango trees. Zena and I were thrilled to have all this land to explore and all the trees to climb. I remember being bitten by wasps and bees on numerous occasions when trying to get to a ripe mango high up in the branches, but that was part and parcel of growing up in the tropics. A scorpion also bit me once when I went crawling under the house. The house had so many dark hiding places under the old wooden flooring that it wasn’t a surprise when I ran screaming to Mummy, holding my aching finger.

After I moved into this old wooden house, I noticed that there were two sets of three rooms outside the main building, which Zena and I were dying to explore. They were full of what one calls junk these days. They smelled of rot and rats, and at night we saw bats flying out of them.

We asked our mother why there were so many rooms outside and whether we could play there. She told us not to dare go into them. Soon, we learned to our dismay that the floorboards were so rotten that they broke easily.

One set of three rooms was attached to the house and may formerly have been used as guest rooms, but we never found out. Our parents were able to make use of the other three, which were in slightly better condition. They had no toilet or bathing facilities, and may have been servants’ quarters earlier. As was the habit in colonial times, our first and only maid, Cynthia, lived with her two children in one of them, bathing her children and herself in an old, large metal tub using a hose. Sometime later, the other room was occupied by a man who helped on the property. Cynthia’s two small girls were our constant playmates, catching lizards and cooking lizard soup for our cats. We learned the Jamaican dialect, and they learned a bit of English grammar.

The few years in May Pen were enough to shape us, Zena and me, into Jamaicans. We attended the local high school next door, Glenmuir High School. There were three other white children. All others were Negro, Chinese, Indian, or of mixed race. Although at times we got teased, the color or race difference was of no significance to us and was never an issue. We all interacted as normal children everywhere.

I remember being teased because of my different lips and nose, but I would counter by mentioning their fat bottoms. We were called names by other children when we walked along small streets, either to go to the corner shop or to May Pen, the closest town. It was quite common for children at the side of the road to shout out “pork” (a demeaning word for a white person) or chiney (Jamaican slang for a Chinese person). Naturally, our strange Czech names were converted into more easily spoken nicknames. To many, I became yam (a potato-like vegetable) or milo (a chocolate drink), and my sister was simply called Zena. This never really bothered me, and generally, we assimilated well, fitting in with the other children in the town.

As I became older, I became aware that although I was accepted by and included in many activities of my colored school friends, I was different. The source of feeling different lay somewhere else and not in my color, per se. We lived across the road from a place called the Clarendon Country Club. Here, there was a golf course, grass tennis courts, and a lovely, large main club building. We often sat high up in a huge old mango tree watching well-dressed people on the putting green across the road. Every weekend, we saw clean, modern-looking cars—not beaten up like my father’s—slowly driving up to the main building. Everyone in the cars was white. The color difference was not particularly significant. Occasionally, there was music, dancing, and parties to which neither our parents nor we were ever invited. What bothered me most was a feeling of exclusion, and I began wondering why I, who was of the same color as this affluent group, was not a part of the country club set. There was a real longing, a yearning to belong to this society, to play tennis, play with the well-dressed children, and go to their social gatherings. And had asked our father on several occasions why we couldn’t belong. One of Daddy’s responses was that they were all uneducated and stupid and that they couldn’t teach us anything, being just a set of bigots.

Daddy was not accepted and was disliked by the majority of colonial families and their descendants living in the area. He was just too different. His ideas of fairness, showing respect regardless of wealth, color, or race, were strange to most. He was known as the eccentric, poor Jew with unacceptable ideas that had brought his family to May Pen. This colonial society ignored us completely. Daddy couldn’t care less and lived his life completely isolated, self-satisfied, confident, and arrogant as he was. He insisted that Czech be spoken at home. He constantly commanded those around him, a result of the life he had learned as a young man on the Czech estate of his father.

Our constant question was why we always had to speak Czech when there were no Czech people around, we would never need it, and we would never go to Czechoslovakia. His standard answer was that we were Czech and should be proud of that. We just left it, as we had learned not to argue for too long with our father. He always had some reply, which at the time we never understood. The only thing that we did enjoy was the food that our mother made on special occasions if she could manage to get some sort of substitute ingredients.

Correspondence with our older Czech sister, as we called her, existed only for our parents. I think it was mainly our mother who wrote with an occasional letter from Daddy. Our parents always showed us any photographs that had been sent, but generally, we glanced at the pictures, asked who was in the pictures, and then stored the information somewhere in the back of our minds. For Zena and me, it was just the two of us. We developed no emotional ties to an older sibling and never felt guilty about that.

Our friends were the children of families that were not members of the Clarendon Country Club. They were of all shades and most often racially mixed. We felt included and made welcome, playing with children who lived close to our home in May Pen. Their parents integrated us into their lives, and we were often invited to their family gatherings and celebrations when all the aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents were present. That sense of family was completely missing in our own lives. We were virtually alone and didn’t think much about that fact, but experienced the wonderful meaning of family whenever we had the opportunity of being amongst those who had many relatives.

As time went on, life became much more difficult for Mummy. Daddy strived to be his own boss and follow in the footsteps of what generations of his ancestors had done, run and operate a farm. Slowly, while still in the employ of the Citrus Company, he built chicken houses, began rearing pigs, the first of which was called Khrushchev, and bought a cow, Suzanna, all on rented property. He was not used to physical work, so as the years progressed, Mummy became the laborer. She did what was necessary with the animals. Later, she told us that she did it all only for her children’s sake, and if it hadn’t been for us, she would have left her husband many times over.

While still employed, Daddy drove to Kingston on weekends to sell eggs. And of course, he needed helpers, so we became his other help on weekends. We hated our father because he constantly blackmailed us into helping him with his egg deliveries. Usually, the blackmail would take the form of threats ‘no pocket money if— or no school books if— or later no payment of university fees if—. He never understood that we needed more than one pair of shoes or that we wanted to go to the movies or a party, as other teenagers did. On one occasion, I wanted to go to watch an Elvis Presley movie, and his comment in Czech was, ‘not that priestly fellow again!’ He refused to take me or collect me after the movie. So, in an act of rebellion, I walked the four miles to May Pen alone. I loved the Elvis movie, but remember being frightened afterward as I ran through the small dark alleys and shortcuts to get home. Often, I told Daddy how I hated him, and we would have many a shouting match, usually ending in my silence and acceptance. One could never win a verbal sparring match with my father. He had an answer or retort to everything. This dislike of my father went on throughout my teenage years and only slowly started to dissipate when I was in my early twenties and had already completed my first university degree. We started having more meaningful adult-type conversations, and I gradually began to understand some of the extreme events that had affected his life, which may have led to his cynicism, his frequent anger, and his outlook on life.

Mummy’s family in Czechoslovakia was under the impression that our parents were well off and comfortable on the beautiful tropical island of Jamaica. The Czech tourist industry advertisements showing beautifully sun-tanned Europeans holding cocktails in nearby Cuba only served to promote the idea that life was easy and relaxed on a tropical island paradise. Trips to communist Cuba were available to affluent party members in good standing and not to Šarka. So, it was only natural that she grew resentful and bitter.

Mummy never let her parents or Šarka know how hard, almost unbearable life was for her in Jamaica, and complained constantly that she didn’t know what to include in the parcels to Czechoslovakia. She and Daddy tried their best, but the usual question was, ‘What can we put in?’ Jamaica, a tropical country, has little of use to a child growing up in a European climate—no enclosed shoes, only flip-flop-type sandals, and no warm clothing. There were few toys or useful items. In the end, what got sent were coffee beans and men’s suiting fabric. I think the fabric was sold, and more suitable clothes or shoes were bought for the cold weather. Once in a while, Mummy added chicken feed bag, cotton fabric with a more European pattern. The feed bags came from America, but often had mice or rat holes in them. This cotton fabric was nevertheless quite popular for making clothes in Jamaica. Mummy selected those with fewer or no holes, washed, and sent them, assuming that Šarka could get a few summer dresses made.

As children, we were completely unaware of the fate of our sister far away in Czechoslovakia, and in our early years, we gave it no thought. No emotional bond grew. We were only concerned with our own lives and the usual things that young people are interested in. Fashion, music, and parties were the norm, naturally with a Jamaican interpretation.

Growing up in Jamaica in the 1960s and ‘70s had the most influence on who I am today. Back in those days, a girl or a woman would never go out alone. One had to go with a boyfriend or be accompanied by a male or a group of friends at a discotheque. Even today, I feel uncomfortable and self-conscious sitting and having a coffee alone in public, so I never do. I would never have a drink or a coffee in an airport when traveling alone. This is a direct result of my upbringing in Jamaica, where girls were thought of as cheap or looking for a man if they sat or went anywhere alone. Also, being Jamaican in the ‘60s and ‘70s meant that it was normal to get married fairly early. If one was past 25, then one started feeling worried. By the time I had finished my bachelor’s degree, aged 22, many of my friends were already married and beginning to raise families.

Sometime during our time in May Pen, the Citrus Company decided to stop shipping fermented sisal juice used in the production of medical drugs abroad. This coincided with the introduction of plastic rope, which began to replace the rope made from sisal. As a result, Daddy’s chemical engineering skill was no longer needed. He decided to resign and started farming on a larger scale. He bought more pigs and cows and built another chicken house. This was a bad decision since the land was rented and the area was substantially residential. When it rained, as it often did in May and October, the area would smell quite badly. People living nearby must have complained to the local parish council, and soon Daddy was ordered to stop farming at that location. Soon, he bought a 20-acre property nearby in Osborne Store and built a small two-bedroom house and a large chicken house for about 3000 laying hens. A pig pen and a milking shed were also added.

I was about 15 years old and now attending a school in Kingston. I had to board with a family and returned to May Pen only at weekends and during school holidays, so I was somewhat physically separated from the details of these changes in my parents’ lives. Nevertheless, whenever I was at home, I saw how hard a life Mummy was leading. She had to get up at daybreak and go out to milk the cows by hand. Every year, there were more cows and more milk. The milk truck came fairly early, so the containers with the previous evening’s milk and the morning’s milk had to be hand-pulled 300m along a bumpy, sometimes muddy track to the main road. She did have one helper, but that was not enough for the growing number of animals.

Poor Mummy was overburdened with work. She and the helper also had to feed 3000 chickens and about 20 pigs. The eggs had to be collected and washed, and the evening milk strained and put into a large milk cooler. Ducks and pigeons were later introduced because feed often spilled from the small holes in the bags. Because there was a good market for both, Mummy ended up killing and plucking these animals. She had so much to do every day that she had no time for herself.

Daddy did little except order people around. His clothes needed constant washing since he refused to wear underpants even in the Jamaican heat—one of his idiosyncrasies! The starched and baggy, stiff, long khaki pants had to be properly ironed with a sharp seam, and it was Mummy who had to do all of this by hand in addition to her work with the animals. He did manage to sort the eggs into sizes and to load his battered and usually dirty vehicle himself. As some of the egg customers also enjoyed the taste of fresh unpasteurized milk, he took ice coolers full of milk as well as the occasional duck to Kingston.

But all in all, the burden of the household and the farm fell on Mummy’s shoulders. No wonder her stomach ulcer finally burst and she had to have emergency surgery. It must have begun when she escaped from Czechoslovakia and left Šarka behind. None of us had health insurance, and no one went for medical check-ups, so her health suffered and her teeth deteriorated during these years.

While we were finishing school and going to university in Kingston, our mother slaved away to keep the farm afloat. One can imagine her exhaustion, working all day in the tropical sun. Daddy had his hobbies—playing cards, gambling (horse races), reading scientific journals, and science fiction. Mummy, on the other hand, just worked and fell into an exhausted sleep for years, 7 days a week, twelve months a year. We had no radio, television, or music system in the house to provide any sort of relaxation, so the first thing I bought for Mummy was a transistor radio as soon as I started working after graduating.

As with all young people, we were self-conscious as teenagers and young adults. Nevertheless, Daddy would pick me up after school twice or three times a week to deliver eggs in my school uniform. Later, he collected me from the university campus in Kingston. My second-floor room at the University of the West Indies faced an open grassy quadrangle, and Daddy would stand in the middle and shout at the top of his voice, “Jarmilo, Jarmilo,” which was so embarrassing! We would drive around Kingston and the suburbs delivering eggs to customers all afternoon. I felt so ashamed to have to be walking into offices and homes where the children of the business or homeowners could be potential youngsters I would meet at a party. Often on Friday nights after the egg round and before driving back home, either to May Pen or Osborne Store for the weekend, Daddy stopped off at his card club. I’d sit there at some table for hours watching old men playing bridge or other card games. I have vivid memories of being the only female and the only young person suffering in those smoke-filled rooms. He said he only played games that needed intelligence, and the two games he played were bridge and Chinese poker, neither for high stakes. Thus, I learned at an early age the basics of bridge.

Because I was living and boarding in Kingston from age fourteen right through my university years, it was more convenient to have me and not Zena help Daddy deliver eggs and his farm products. I did this against my will for many years.

Jamaica’s colonial period ended in 1962 when the island became an independent country. All but those of British heritage were thrilled that at long last the island was rid of its colonial masters. But the hundreds of years of white British domination didn’t just disappear overnight. In the ‘50s, Jamaica had achieved a level of internal self-government and, in a practical sense, was in charge of its local affairs. The more invisible but egregious hold of colonialism on Jamaican minds would last a lot longer; biases of race and class imitating British attitudes long after Independence.

White families in and around May Pen slowly started leaving the area and moving abroad. The Clarendon Country Club continued to exist for another 10 to 15 years with dwindling membership. To make ends meet, the club began accepting non-whites for membership as well. A few years before it closed its doors permanently, I was able to join and partake in some of the activities I had longed for as a child. There was always a party to celebrate some event, and I occasionally joined a bridge game. I now met the people that I had only heard of in earlier years but never knew. But the magic was no longer there, and I found out that I hadn’t been missing much.

After 1962, British citizens were allowed to take Jamaican citizenship. Neither of our parents did. It may have been too much of an effort, and they retained their British citizenship. Zena and I never gave this issue any thought at the time. Then, about ten years later, when I was in my first job at Bata Shoe Company, the police turned up in my office and told me that only foreigners with work permits were allowed to work. I had to leave immediately, and with the help of my best friend, who had contacts in the government, I was issued a work permit. Later, I applied for Jamaican citizenship and got it without a problem.

Life in Jamaica became much more militantly nationalistic with concepts of black power, African ancestry, and Rastafarianism on the rise. Of the two political parties at the time, the PNP (People's National Party) was associated with nationalism and growing and promoting self-esteem, and all issues relating to Jamaica’s history concerning its black population. When the PNP won the elections in 1972, business owners and wealthy Jamaicans of all backgrounds left the island in droves. There followed a serious downturn in Jamaica’s finances. This had already started after the 1962 independence election, but it was made much worse after 1972, when the PNP tried to launch various reform programs, including Operation Land Lease, low-income housing, and free education, all designed to benefit the poor.

The PNP rhetoric led to the selling of assets, and those who could flee the country took as much wealth with them as possible. Land and all real estate prices began falling, including the value of Daddy’s small twenty-acre farm. I imagine my father was alarmed by the prospect of socialism in Jamaica, no matter how democratic. It must have brought back many memories of state-run encroachment that had caused him to flee Czechoslovakia. But our parents stayed. They had nowhere else to go anyway. Zena was often at the Meteorological Office or university, and I had just started working after graduating in 1971.

Daddy was still bringing his farm products to Kingston three times a week, but because we were both not available, he had to take care of all the deliveries himself.

One midday, while I was having lunch at my sister’s flat in Kingston, the landlord, who lived in the main house on the same premises, called out that there was a phone call for me. Neither my sister nor I had a telephone, and even our parents, living in Osborne Store, were without one. Perhaps that is why, to this day, I prefer writing to speaking on the phone. When I answered, a friend from May Pen simply told me that my father was dead. The blood drained from my face, and I went completely silent. Then he explained how Daddy appeared to have had a sudden heart attack at the May Pen Police Station. The police had stopped him because his vehicle had been pumping out terrible black exhaust fumes. Even for Jamaica in 1972, the level was unacceptable. The police told him to drive to the police station and didn’t allow him to continue on the road in that vehicle. Knowing Daddy, I can only assume that he got into such a rage arguing that all his fresh products, particularly the milk, would go bad in the heat. He would have shouted at the police, telling them what fools they were. And right in the middle of this, his face would have gone red, and he would have grasped his chest and collapsed. I assume the May Pen police were not trained or able to help in any meaningful way. So, Daddy passed away on the 18^th of August 1972 at the age of 54.

Naturally, we were all shocked despite all the negativity that had existed between Mummy, his children, and himself. After the initial period of grief and adjustment, Mummy was relieved to be the mistress of her fate. She was only 52 but already marked by hard work and premature aging. But now, at long last, she could make her own decisions and no longer have to obey her husband. We soon asked her what she wanted to do. She said she’d given it some thought and would stay on the farm a bit longer to get rid of the debts and pay off the mortgage. If she had sold the farm then, she would only have gotten a pittance for it.

She quickly got rid of the pigs and continued her hard life on the farm but at her own slower pace. I remained in Kingston for a while in my job and tried to help from afar. The nearest phone was three miles away at the Osborne Store Post Office—a lifeline without which she could not have carried on. The biggest problem was that Mummy couldn’t drive. Running a farm practically alone with no phone and no car resulted in many challenges and changes. The telegraph system at Osborne Store Post Office was very helpful for the ordering of animal feed. The farm produce had to be sold locally, and to help Mummy, I decided to give up my job at Bata. I took up a position as a part-time Physics lab assistant at the university and spent half of my time in Osborne Store with Mummy. After a few months, she was able to organize regular feed deliveries and the sale of her farm products. I began to feel that it was time for me to move on with my own life.

At 23 with a degree in Physics but no worthwhile prospects of a good job, I was ready to leave small and insular Jamaica with its lack of any worthwhile prospects for me.


This story is taken from Ruptured Lives: How Hitler’s Final Solution decimated my family and Stalin’s Iron Curtain tore it apart,
exploring her father’s survival as a Czech Jew during WWII and the family’s postwar struggles in England, Jamaica, and Czechoslovakia. Her writing has been published in the Association of Jewish Refugees Journal and The Beacon newsletter. A synopsis (and more) of the entire story can be viewed here.  This article was taken from my self published autobiographical memoir, "Ruptured Lives How Hitler's Final Solution decimated my family and Stalin's Iron Curtain tore it apart" using my pen name Jarmila Turnovsky. Click here to buy the book at Amazon.

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