Jizvy na duši – Jelínek Jan (2016)

This Czech-language book tells the story of a young boy born to a Jewish mother and a Christian father in 1940. Without his father’s courage, the entire family would have disappeared without a trace into a Nazi concentration camp. The terrifying world of his childhood is recounted through the perspective of a child who did not fully understand it at the time. For his first five years, he was what is now called a hidden child, an experience that influenced his entire life. After his father’s death in 1947, the family moved to Nymburk, where he grew up. The trauma of being alone was eased by two lifelong school friends, and their shared experiences are recorded in a chronicle kept over many years, including the genuinely happy periods of his boyhood. The book also recalls the horrors of the war, entrance examinations for his chosen university, his “bourgeois origins” and work as a manual labourer in steelworks. Contemporary newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as texts from historians’ and statisticians’ studies, document the period. These testimonies are important reminders of life during the Second World War and under communist rule, especially as fewer people who remember those times remain to tell their stories.