No Night So Dark
2020–2024, exhibition and podcast
The Wels family was meant to be forgotten, but their story was preserved in a box at the back of a cupboard, including two remarkable books that bring a lost world to life.
When Oxford-based Colin Wels first opened a box that his father Tomáš had kept for decades in the back of a cupboard, he entered an unfamiliar world. Through the contents of the box, made up of hundreds of letters and documents, photographs, sketches and drawings, and two remarkable manuscripts, the immense creative energy of several generations of a Czech Jewish family was once again released.
Exhibition
We often think of the past as a very different place from the world we know today, but the more I have come to know the story of the Wels family, the more I have felt that they are people very much like us. In the second half of the 1930s the architect Rudolf Wels, his wife Ida and their sons Tomáš and Martin were living just a couple of streets away from where I live with my family today in the Prague district of Holešovice. Towards the end of 1938, the two boys put together a book with the title Sancta Familia, made up of scenes from their daily life, and gave it to their parents and grandmother. When I had the chance to read the manuscript eighty years later, I felt I could be reading about my own family or about other families I know in Prague today. Their world – their values, the way they spoke, their humour, even many of the details of their day-to-day lives – seemed very much like my own. Yet the circumstances under which they were murdered in Auschwitz just over five years later are quite beyond my imagination. Only Tomáš was to survive the war, escaping to England in 1939.
I came across the family when the publishers Triáda brought out an edition of Šimon Wels’s memoirs U Bernatů (Life at the Bernats) in 2011. Šimon was Rudolf’s father, and the grandfather of Tomáš and Martin. The book was written over a hundred years ago, but as I read it, I had much the same feeling as when I came to read Sancta Familia a few years later – that I was being drawn into the world of a family with which I could identify, sharing their “experiences, their sorrows and their joys,” as Šimon writes in the introduction of U Bernatů. That is the power of this story. Thanks to these two books, along with hundreds of letters, documents, photographs and drawings, that have survived in a box in an Oxford suburb, we can piece together the life of the family over several generations.
I first met Tomáš’s son Colin Wels when he was visiting Prague in 2014 and I was moved by the story of his search for his family’s past. Over the years he has been helped by others who have realised the significance of his family’s legacy: Gerald and Alice Turner, Zbyněk Hejda, Michael and Jan Rund, Lydie Procházková, Marta and Pavel Holeka, Zdeněk Lukeš and others. I went to Oxford twice to visit Colin and his wife Tilly. We pored over the family papers. Material gradually piled up on the dining room table and then on any other table or chair available, while the venerable family cat, Rebel, looked on. When I suggested putting together an exhibition about the family, Colin was enthusiastic.
In Sancta Familia Tomáš and Martin were hoping “to capture the idiosyncrasies and the habits of each individual and to preserve them for all time.” With the exhibition No Night So Dark we have tried to continue in this spirit, to tell the family’s story in their own words. They take us to rural West Bohemia in the 19th century, to pre-First World War Vienna and to the fascinating and complex world of Czechoslovakia between the wars. Then we see how they face with dignity the ever more malevolent bureaucracy that makes the Holocaust possible. We are taken to post-war Britain and to Czechoslovakia in the last years of the communist regime, and we witness the gradual healing process that has been possible in the three decades since the fall of communism in 1989. Today Šimon Wels has ten great-great-grandchildren living in Britain and the United States, and the family continues to thrive.
Catalogue
Here is the catalogue of the exhibition No Night So Dark as a PDF
Virtual Tour
And here is a virtual tour of the exhibition when it was showing at the Winternitz Villa in Prague in Autumn 2020…
Discussion
You can also view an online discussion with members of the Wels family that was hosted by the Czech Centre in London on 25th January 2021:
Resources
A multimedia online summary of the exhibition, combining text, photos, sound and film…
Podcast
There is drama, humour, romance and tragedy as we are drawn into the world of the Wels family over 150 years. This is a true story. Those who are alive today speak for themselves. Those who are not speak through actors, but always in their own words. The family was meant to be forgotten, but their story was preserved in a box at the back of a cupboard, including two remarkable books that bring a lost world to life. Their story is a part of the history of us all.
The story of the Wels family was all but forgotten. When eighteen-year-old Tomáš escaped from occupied Prague in April 1939, he was cut off from his past. His children grew up in Britain knowing almost nothing about their father’s life before his escape. That was until they started to look through a box that lay forgotten at the back of a cupboard.
This podcast is part of the process of reconnecting with the family’s past. It documents a crime, but above all it is a celebration of the many achievements of the Wels family. It is partly documentary but also features scenes that bring to life the rich material that has come down to us from several generations of the family, going right back to the first half of the 19th century. We get a broad picture of a hugely likeable and creative family, held together by the belief that “truth will prevail”.
The author of the podcast, David Vaughan, has spent several years researching into the family and has tried to piece together their story faithfully and in their own words. The story has many layers, and we find threads that connect the generations across the gulf of time and the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Listen via Radio Prague International
As themselves: Colin Wels, Marta Holeková, Gerry Turner, Michael Rund, Lisa Miková, Marietta Šmolková and David Vaughan.
In other roles: Gordon Truefitt as Šimon Wels, Markéta Richterová as Ida Wels, Alex Went as Rudolf Wels, Oliver Paul Dubsky as Martin Wels, Dominik Jůn as Tomáš Wels, Ruth Fraňková as Josefína Löwy, Stephen Weeks as Count Sternberg, Mr Perrins and Emil Vogl, Robert Anderson as the English voice of Michael Rund, John Tregellas as Adolf Loos, Guido Lagus and Josef Poláček, Patricia Goodson as Martha Sharp, and Grant Podelco as Vincent Sheean and J. James Ingle. The poem at the end of Episode 7 is read by Ruth Fraňková.
The podcast was recorded in Prague in November and December 2020 and mixed in the studios of Radio Prague International by Jiří Matějček.