Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (filmová obálka) – Tučková Kateřina (2026)

This novel follows a life broken by history and explores the guilt of Czechs and Germans, as well as whether forgiveness and understanding are possible. On the night of 30–31 May 1945, Gerta Schnirch, the mother of a baby daughter, is expelled with only her personal belongings along with Brno’s Germans and forced to march towards Vienna. The exhausting journey ends in Pohořelice, where many of the deportees succumb to typhus and dysentery. Gerta and several other German women survive by being assigned to forced labour in South Moravia, where they remain after the transports end. Once she regains Czechoslovak citizenship, Gerta returns to Brno and experiences the turbulent events of the second half of the twentieth century. Alongside painful questions of guilt, retribution and forgiveness between Czechs and Germans, this powerful and richly detailed novel portrays an unconventional mother-daughter relationship, distorted not only by the restricted environment in which they, as German Czechs pushed to the margins of society, are allowed to live, but also by the mutual incomprehension of two generations, difficult communication and the impossibility of passing on personal experience. The book receives the 2010 Magnesia Litera Knižní klub Readers’ Choice Award and nominations for the Josef Škvorecký Award, the Magnesia Litera for Prose and the Jiří Orten Award, all in 2010.