A přiveď zpět naše roztroušené – Kraus František R. (2021)

And bring back our scattered ones from the midst of the nations, and gather our dispersed ones from the ends of the earth! ... The prayer Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King) refers to Isaiah's prophecy (Isa. 11:12). It predicts that the Lord will again gather His people in the Promised Land after they have been scattered to all corners of the world. After centuries of historical experiences of the Jewish people, this prayer proves to be timeless. Czech Jewish journalist and writer František R. Kraus chose the opening verse of this prayer as a summarizing title for a collection of his chronologically arranged autobiographical reports about the Holocaust era. The work is one of the first published (1946) testimonies about the tragic fate of (not only) Czech Jews during the years of Nazi occupation. The author conveys to the reader his personal harrowing experiences from the time of the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands through imprisonment in the Theresienstadt ghetto to suffering in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Gliwice, and Blechhammer. He also describes the death march, escape, and journey through the newly liberated Budapest back home to Prague. The text was created shortly after the war, so the author still had the events fresh in his memory, the depiction of which is almost unbelievable for today's person. Nevertheless, it is not just a literary processing...