100 hodin, kdy umírala republika – Moulis Miloslav (2019)

Time is a significantly variable value. One hundred hours, or just over four days, is a period that usually means little in the lives of any of us or in the functioning of states. In the fateful year of 1939, it was the opposite. The dramatic and twist-filled one hundred hours that elapsed between the first minutes of Monday, March 13, and the fourth hour of the morning on March 17, fundamentally and destructively marked our history. The gripping narrative, depicted by the authors in the form of a chronological sequence with numerous insights into human destinies, begins at the rectory in the sleeping Bánovce nad Bebravou, from where the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso is hastily transported through Bratislava to Berlin. It concludes in the early hours of Friday, March 17, when Adolf Hitler had already left the subdued Prague, where a military parade of German armed forces was being prepared in Wenceslas Square, and was heading towards jubilant celebrations of his triumph in Vienna via Moravia. It was one hundred hours during which a republic that had just celebrated its twentieth anniversary the previous year was subjected to a stifling occupation regime for a long six years.