Opožděné vzpomínky - Životopis, který se nevešel na jednu stránku – Merová Evelina (2021)

This Czech-language memoir follows Evelina Merová, who is born in 1930 into an assimilated Jewish family in Prague. Her peaceful, financially secure childhood is shattered in the late 1930s by the Nazi occupation, discrimination, dispossession, humiliation and uncertainty. At the age of eleven she is in Prague, at twelve in Terezín, at thirteen in Auschwitz, and at fourteen on a death march. She survives the war, ill, starving and haunted by the fear of death, and is liberated in East Prussia before being evacuated to the Soviet Union, where a military doctor adopts her. Instead of a loving family, she finds herself living with a dysfunctional married couple who want an “own” daughter to create the appearance of a normal family. For the next four decades she lives in the Soviet Union under a new identity and with old memories that nobody wants to hear. Her life unfolds against the background of war-ravaged and rebuilt Leningrad, where Jewish identity must remain hidden, ideology dictates daily life, poverty is presented as prosperity, and fear is everywhere. Yet she also experiences great private happiness with her husband and children. With engaging, factual prose and remarkable composure, Merová recounts three faces of the twentieth century under three political regimes—not to settle scores, but so that her children, grandchildren and perhaps all of us may know.