photograph: Julio Lopez Saguar

In February 1994, when i was 23, i decided to move to Prague, the capital of the recently divorced Czech Republic, to join a professional basketball team. I didn’t have much of a clue what I was doing—I wasn’t positive, for example, that there were any Czech professional basketball teams. But it seemed important, in some transitional way, to attempt something hard, even a little crazy.

To prepare, I sought the advice of the toughest man I knew, and one who happened to be Czech: a formidable septuagenarian and Holocaust survivor named Jan Wiener. By the time he was my age, Jan had attended the death of his father and escaped an Italian concentration camp; he’d been recaptured while hanging from the undercarriage of a train in northern Italy; eventually, he’d been liberated, and he’d joined the Czech resistance in London and flown bombers over Prague.

Jan lived in my hometown in western Massachusetts, where he worked as a cross-country ski instructor and held local-legend status. Every October he went back to Prague to teach classes on modern Czech history at Charles University—I had sat in on one the previous year at his invitation.

I went to visit Jan one day deep in winter, when the narrow driveway that wove through the woods to his house was banked with snow. I slithered up in my Ford Festiva. Outside Jan’s garage sat a sizable white husky, which greeted me with cool indifference. It looked like the kind of dog that came with a military option and against which my Festiva would provide about as much protection as the helicopter had for the pilot in Jaws II.

Jan met me at the open garage door. With piercing blue eyes, close-cropped white hair, and a ramrod carriage, his looks were a reflection of his no-nonsense character. Behind him, a heavy punching bag hung from a hook in the ceiling. I had no doubt that even in his seventies Jan would be able to beat the hell out of me.

We sat by the fire, and he made tea. We talked generally about Prague—the alleys of the Old Town, the hidden courtyards near the Bethlehem Chapel, the small, wooded island in the Vltava. I asked for, and he recounted, his personal stories of death, incarceration, escape, and eventual triumph. By the end, I felt energized enough to broach my own adventure. I said I’d been struggling since graduation, not sure what to do with myself. Now I’d settled on a mission: basketball in a foreign country—a future that held hardships, border crossings, the stuff that builds character.

The more I talked, the more childish and inconsequential my plan seemed. Jan was discussing life and death, and I was babbling about running off in my sneakers to play a game. My heart began to sink. Jan sipped his tea and said nothing. It was time for me to leave.

I was at the door, keys in hand, when Jan took me by the shoulder and fixed his blue eyes on me. “David,” he said, flexing his fingers on my arm and nodding toward some difficult future.

“Don’t back out.”

I swallowed hard. There it was, I thought—a straight-up challenge from a Holocaust survivor. He got it. He got what I was talking about. Sure, it wasn’t World War II, but there were trials to be endured. That kind of challenge, from that kind of man, didn’t come along often.

“I won’t,” I said, and I meant it. We shook hands; Jan’s grip was firm and steady. I thanked him and went out to the Festiva, nodding in solidarity at the husky. The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was in the cassette deck, and I gunned the engine in time with the opening horns of “Brass Monkey,” feeling like my life was really, finally, beginning to take shape. I checked the rearview mirror, hit the gas, and immediately skidded the tail end of the car up and over the low snow bank at the edge of Jan’s garage and on to his pristine lawn.

When I got out to push on the fender, I saw Jan watching from his kitchen window. He looked concerned. I gave him the thumbs-up. Mission accepted.

Later that year, I moved to Prague and began my quest for a basketball team, looking and listening for signs of the game in the gyms, cafes, and alleyways. It was months before I figured out that when Jan had said, “Don’t back out,” he had not meant “of this formative life challenge.” He had meant “of my driveway.”

David Fromm is a lawyer, writer, and, for the moment, a stay-at-home dad. During the 1994–95 season he played point guard for the Czech semipro team Sokol Vinohrady. His essay is adapted from Expatriate Games (2008), by arrangement with Skyhorse Publishing.