Josef Haslinger

Bohumil Modrý was not sentenced to death directly. It was done much more subtly. As a forced labourer in the Jáchymov uranium mine, he was exposed to a dose of radioactivity that caused leukaemia. Before the state–ordered destruction of his health, Modrý was the goalkeeper of Czechoslovakia’s national ice–hockey team and had been world and European champion on a number of occasions. In 1950, his glamorous career came to an abrupt end. Together with most of the team, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. (…)The town of Jáchymov in northern Bohemia, which before 1945 was called Sankt Joachimsthal, was not only a place of communist terror, but also has the world’s oldest radium spa. In Josef Haslinger’s novel Jáchymov, the Viennese publisher Anselm Findeisen goes there to be treated for chronic back pain. He meets Bohumil Modrýs daughter, now an elderly woman, who has gone there to trace her father’s story.

Georg Renöckl: „Triumph und Vernichtung“
© Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 October 2011