What circumstances can you imagine that would bring two brothers to try and kill each other?

In one form or another I’ve pondered this question almost all my life. The aromas and after-tastes of that violence have been persistent, and maybe even infectious.

I was brought up to know like a litany that, in the year in which I was born, my father tried to kill his brother. Or my uncle tried to kill my father. Or both! What would it take to bring two physically strong fit and above all intelligent brothers to that state, and then pass through incandescent rage to an exhausted battered bleeding and staggeringly empty silence. And then forgive each other and themselves?

As I grew up I was told by mother and my aunt, who both were present at the time, that the fight was vicious, serious and intent; using any object easily to hand as a weapon, with the resultant destruction of much of the furniture and decorations in my uncle’s London house. My cousins and I, all too young to have witnessed or recall the fight, grew up amidst a hushed determination that, whatever had brought them to such a state, we would never allow such passionate angers to divide us: we would be above such petty things, we would remain friends. What hubris: over time what has divided us is quite the opposite; a complete lack of passion.

So what happened to bring about such anger, such passionate violence?

After spells painting and teaching in Prague Berlin and Moscow my uncle left continental Europe for the UK in late 1934, after suffering considerable social political and personal antagonism. Selling his remaining shares in the family business to his brother to raise the funds, he took with him his wife, three lovers, a young son, and whatever survived of his paintings which could most easily be transported. My father meanwhile continued to live most of the time in what was then called Aussig, near the family business, with his wife and young daughter and his elderly and infirm mother. Barely three years later, in the autumn of 1937, it had become terrifyingly clear that they were not going to be safe where they were, so father decided to make his own efforts to emigrate. Having done business with many British companies in the past, and because his brother was already here, he decided that he would try and bring his family over here too. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? So logical.

By that point it was anything but simple; in the summer of 1937 the British Government became increasingly concerned at the slowly rising tide of emigration from Europe to the UK and began to impose restrictions; would-be émigrés now needed sponsors who would vouch for them, stand political surety for them, and in most cases also offer guarantees of work or financial security. Arranging all of this took time and money, and more paperwork than any of us today would care to contemplate; and let us not forget the trauma and sheer work involved in disposing of or transferring the family assets. So, backwards and forwards flew the papers, backwards and forwards went my father between London and Aussig and Prague, trying to ensure that all was correct, that monies were transferred to London banks, that certificates and authorisations and stamped papers were notarised and supplied or applied, as and where required, as all the while the political and social pressures to escape inexorably increased.

In the late summer of 1938 all seemed to be progressing well, despite the surrounding doom and gloom and the decreasing value of the Czech currency; all necessary papers had been supplied to His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Prague and everything seemed to be on track for an orderly exit to the UK. Except that things are never what they seem, let alone what we might wish. Early in the first week of September grandmother fell ill. It was nothing especially serious, a mild influenza, but in those days it was enough reason for an elderly woman with minor infirmities to delay the journey. My father decided to use the time to visit the UK and ensure that all was well, that his funds had arrived in a UK bank and the home they expected to occupy was all in order: most of the family furniture and clothes and other possessions had already been shipped, the rest were packed and waiting to be taken with the family when they left.

In the week in which he was in London the “affair of the Sudetenland” went from being merely an “affaire diplomatique” to an international crisis. After much pusillanimous prevarication the European powers gathered finally and urgently in Munich to broker their infamous deal. Shortly afterwards my father made it to Paris, hurrying back to Aussig in a panic; when the German Army marched into the Sudetenland the next day all flights and trains to Prague were cancelled. For several days no rail or air traffic could get into a now drastically diminished Czechoslovakia, whilst all non-military traffic to or from the Sudetenland itself was entirely interdicted. All the towns and cities south and east of the Sudetenland were inundated with panic-stricken refugees fleeing the occupation. My father fumed in Paris, frustrated and frantically anxious, entirely unable to communicate with any family members back home.

By the time he was permitted to take a train to Prague more than a month had passed since the occupation: the train crawled slowly across an increasingly nervous and embattled Europe towards Prague. Crossing that City to board the local train for Aussig was a nightmare of haste and panic, with a new international border to cross at the end of his next train journey.

By the time he got to Aussig he was nearly six weeks late.

By the time he got to Aussig all of his family were missing and the house was gutted and empty; not even a lock on the door. No sign of his wife and child, no sign of his mother, and none of the neighbours would speak openly about the many operations by the German security forces who had begun to perfect their 4 a.m. house-calling technique, rounding up all those of questionable ancestry or dubious political or social disposition and shipping them off – somewhere, nowhere, nobody knew where.

With the benefit of an artificially reconstructed hindsight I now believe that in the week following his return home my father went insane and entirely lost his reason and his wits: in some senses I don’t think he ever recovered them. Searching for news, trying to find someone, anyone, who knew what had become of his family, his community, his friends. His devastated home was useless to him and, had he stayed in the building, there was every likelihood that he too would also be picked up by the security patrols. He lived on the streets during those days, hunting like a feral animal hunts for scraps, in a city that was slowly starving to death as new supplies failed to arrive. The towns and cities of the Sudetenland were under siege. He crossed and re-crossed the city searching for anyone he knew who might have news. At some indifferent point I know that he stood in utter shock staring from across the street where squatters had taken possession of the family home, burning the remaining furniture and wood panelling to keep warm, wondering if he dared to try and join them. Eventually, after two weeks, he found a distant cousin and his cousin’s best friend; both had also lost track of their families and their friends and were now sleeping in a tumbledown shack in the northern industrial outskirts of the city while trying to decide what to do next. By then rumours were flying throughout the city and also, most dynamically and forcefully, through the street population of the dispossessed and displaced and itinerant wanderers who somehow managed to evade German security: that the German’s had killed everyone they took, that everyone had been deported to temporary camps in the countryside, that all of the seized would soon be released back into their communities after processing – whatever that meant. Too much information; not enough information. A new rumour with every breath of the increasingly icy winds. No way to know; no way to make decisions or determine how next to act. It would have been bad enough to be a sedentary and indecisive man in such a situation; for a fit active and decisive man such a situation of ignorance and enforced inactivity was intolerable. Something had to happen. Something had to be made to happen!

In those early years after the war we children were given to understand that the dispute between the brothers was over property: that after the war finished my father was unable to pay the Custom’s duties to redeem his possessions from the bonded warehouse where they had lain gathering dust throughout the war; that my uncle somehow paid the duties and then retained the property as a surety against the loan. So we children thought “how silly, to fight over possessions and money like that.” If only it really had been that simple.

My uncle was always one for appearances: he wanted to be seen as a great painter; he wanted to be seen as successful; he wanted – perhaps above all else – to be seen as a great intellect; but most of all he wanted to live in the style of a great and successful man of Mitel-Europa. To be sure, in so many ways he was all of these, but his vanity always exceeded his grasp in all respects. He and his somewhat eclectic family spent most of the early years after his arrival in the UK living in rural towns and villages doing manual labour on farms and in small factories until, slowly, they managed to accumulate enough money to afford to set up home and a small studio for him in South Wales where he began once more to paint. I imagine that during this time the market for paying work such as formal portraits of politicians and industrialists and the odd industrial landscapes were probably about all he could offer at this time, which probably explains how some of his earliest UK works ended up in the collections of various City Museums; sold to pay the bills. The family must have suffered somewhat after the comparative luxury afforded by public success and high teaching positions that he had enjoyed throughout Europe and Soviet Russia a decade earlier.

For several weeks the three of them patrolled relentlessly across the city, stealing food when necessary, hiding when necessary, sleeping in their shack bundled up together for warmth; making odd expeditions into the countryside wherever they thought they might find news, or food to beg or steal. They lost weight and strength; they began to lose hope. Finally, deep into the Bohemian winter, starved and cold, they concluded that if the Germans had their families then the only way to be with their families was to surrender to the Germans. On a freezing morning in February 1939 they walked into the German HQ and “surrendered”. By this point my father had recovered something of his rationality but, none the less, he was convinced that his wife and daughter and mother were probably already dead. I suspect the other two believed the same, although I never got the chance to ask them this question.

For several weeks the three of them were locked in the freezing basement cells of the old police station, fed only on slops, whilst the German bureaucracy tried to work out what to do with them.Finally in early March of 1939 they were herded out into the cobbled courtyard in front of the station, joined to many dozens more male prisoners, all shabby cold depressed and inadequately dressed for the weather, like themselves. Shortly afterwards a convoy of army lorries carried them off to the railway station under guard. They were finally on their way to join their families. Or so they hoped.

Throughout my life I’ve wondered what I would have done in those circumstances.Would I have gone out into the countryside, to the underground, and fought? Would I have given up and simply huddled in hiding until I died? Was surrendering to the German authorities the right decision? I still don’t know. I’m not sure any of us can make rational decisions in such circumstances; something decides for us; the decision seems to come from outside ourselves, like an ill wind passing through us, leaving us chilled but somehow knowing and decided, or else something vital breaks within us and we have no decisions left to make, no life left to live.

This wasn’t the first life-shattering adversity my father had faced: he’d passed through the worst of the horrors and traumas of the first war’s eastern front; he’d survived Siberian winters in the earliest gulags, and finally came home in the summer of 1921 to find himself a citizen of an entirely new country. A country he believed he’d fought for even before it existed. So he wasn’t a stranger to adversity, or to fighting for what he believed in.

In those early days of deportations the Germans still used passenger trains – third class of course – with wooden seating and squads of armed guards in the gangways, an officer in every carriage. The illusions of civilisation and a pretence at manners and punctilious right and order were maintained with Prussian correctness, partly it seems because the army was unused to guarding civilians and didn’t know how to handle them. Papers were exchanged, stamped, returned. Vouchers for food, of a kind, were issued and redeemed. People began, carefully under the watchful eyes of the guards, to move through the carriages, and from carriage to carriage, seeking news or a familiar face. The train crawled out of Aussig heading north-west and the rumours flew through the carriages – they were going to Dresden, to Chemnitz, to Wroclaw. Everyone had a theory, but nobody really knew, and their German guards answered no questions; indeed they seemed to know as much or as little as their prisoners. For three days and nights the train crawled through the countryside, stopping at rural stations to take on food and water, allowing small parties off in the dawn mists to exercise with armed guards, occasionally passing through marshalling yards on the outskirts of various towns, where vast phalanxes of other trains seemed caught up in a bizarre dance like roaming elephantine herds, coming together, merging and then diverging for no apparent reason.

By noon of the third day the outskirts of Dresden emerged from the gloom and fog, obvious to all who knew the city and its churches. The train pulled into the marshalling yards to the south of the city and halted there whilst the engine was changed and packed coaches were added to the train. New guards emerged from the winter gloom to replace those who had been with them since Aussig; guards dressed not in the familiar khaki of the army but the browns and blacks of the Einsatzgruppen. A shiver of fear ran through the train.

What does one do when confronting evil? How does one recognise it, let alone deal with it? The platoons of the regular army which escorted the trains out of the occupied Sudetenland were just men: people like your fathers and uncles and brothers and sons; following orders from officers they recognised and maybe even respected. Those of the Einsatzgruppen were something else; even in those early days they were already known for what they were: the living breathing active arm of the Nazi’s deluded campaign to cleanse Europe of all they disagreed with, all they hated: above all, to destroy everything that was different and other than what their revered leaders wished them to be. As Hannah Arendt described it, they were menacingly evil precisely because of their total banality.

I know now that at this time, sitting in an icy train in the smoky foggy icy and desolate yards of Dresden, surrounded by overwhelming force, my father made a pact with his cousin and his best friend; by now they deemed themselves troika: inseparable. All for one, one for all; they had determined to survive together. Viktor, Peter and Robert.