No Night So Dark

Colin knew nothing about his father's life before he came to England in 1939. He remembered a box that his father had always kept at the back of a bulky cupboard nicknamed the “Black Elephant”. He decided to open it. Thanks to the contents of the box, he was able to unravel the family’s story. 

How I came to tell this story: At the request of my children: Rudolf, Aninka and Otto, I sat down one calm evening and started sorting through the memories of my own life and the lives of my parents.  (Šimon Wels, U Bernatů)

Šimon had great literary talent. His memoir is full of humour and wisdom, and he draws us right into the day-to-day life of a West Bohemian village in the 19^th century. He lived in Osek, about five kilometres north of the town of Rokycany, and had a small shop on the village green.

The story of how Šimon’s mother Josefína had to overcome the anti-Semitic bureaucracy of the Austrian Empire to marry his father Bernard is told in a way that sounds like a fairy tale, but the discrimination was real. The Familiant Law, which defined who could marry whom, was applied until the middle of the 19^th century.

Šimon managed to get Rudolf admitted to the Roman Catholic grammar school in Plzeň, which was unusual for a Jewish family at that time. But Rudolf was deeply unhappy and later his father sent him to the technical school instead.


From his earliest childhood, Rudolf was fascinated by anything connected with building. After completing school and his compulsory military service Rudolf found work with the successful Prague builder Alois Richter, much to the delight of his father. It is likely that one of the buildings he worked on was Prague’s Jerusalem Synagogue.

Several of Rudolf’s projects at the time showed the influence of the English garden city. In 1923 he was awarded a commission to build the multifunctional Miners’ House at the heart of the industrial town of Sokolov. It was completed in 1925.

Some of Rudolf’s most interesting buildings were in Karlovy Vary, where one of his clients was the celebrated glassmaker Moser. He designed several buildings for the Moser factory, including the showroom and canteen, and he also designed glass for the firm. Other projects in Karlovy Vary included hotels and sanatoriums, and the Jewish retirement home. One of his most innovative buildings was the District Health Insurance Office of 1930.

In 1935 the family moved to a spacious top-floor flat with a large terrace on Dobrovského Street, in the fashionable district of Letná. The building was designed by Rudolf together with Guido Lagus. 

The names in Sancta Familia are changed: Martin is Capot, Tomáš is Fridolín, Rudolf is Karolus and Ida Margarita, but they are instantly recognisable. The scenes are set in the near future, in spring 1939. The family is planning to emigrate to America, and Tomáš is already on his way. At the time, none of them could know that on 15 March 1939 Prague would be occupied by Nazi Germany. Sancta Familia ends with a paragraph written by Martin in French. Perhaps the foreign language offered him a way of stepping back from his own fears. 


The family has nothing to fear for the future but let us hope that before long it will find a new place to live, to carry on this play in peace and quiet. THE FAMILY. (Sancta Familia)

For the first two years of the occupation Tomáš and his family could still communicate by letter – through friends and relatives in the United States and Switzerland.


If things don’t get any worse than now, we should all come out of this alive and well. You can’t imagine with what enthusiasm we’ll pick up our lives again!! Once truth prevails! But for now, we just have to take each day as it comes. (From a letter from Rudolf to Tomáš, 1939)

On the night from 8 to 9 March 1944, 3,792 prisoners in the family camp were murdered in the gas chambers, six months after they had arrived. This was the largest mass murder of Czechoslovak citizens during the Second World War. Ida, Rudolf and Martin were among those who were killed. 

After the war, he came back to Prague at the first opportunity and realised that no one in his family had survived. He visited the Štifter family, who gave him as many of the family papers as he could take back to England. He preserved them carefully but never told his children in England about his life before the war. The only thing that betrayed something of his former life was a hint of a Central European accent. 

Colin speaks no Czech, but his friend Gerald Turner translated U Bernatů into English for him. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Colin and his brother Ivan visited Czechoslovakia. They became good friends with the descendants of Josef Štifter. They also got to know Michael Rund, who later wrote a book about Rudolf Wels and his work as an architect. A part of their memory returned, after being all but wiped out by war, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the language barrier.