the last book I ever read (Gottland by Mariusz Szczygiel, excerpt one)

from Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia by Mariusz Szczygiel:

Emil Zápotek, the world’s top athlete of 1952, keeps his hands above the quilt. Others who will do so too include: the famous (forty years on) writer Ludvík Vaculík, and the leading representative of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema (also, forty years on) director Karel Kachyňa. Kachyňa starts work at Bata as a cleaner, and finished as a trained draughtsman. “I was a Bataman,” he’ll say, in the early twenty-first century. “At Zlín I learned to fight against fear.”

Each of Bata’s students is a Bataman.

You can become a Bataman through obedience and hard work.