JOE od třistajedenácté – Doubek Josef (2017)

In the past decades, readers have had the opportunity to become acquainted with numerous memories of members of the foreign resistance who fought both in ground armies and in the air force. In many cases, these were very sophisticated works with detailed descriptions of events, dates, names, etc. In this particular case, the reader might be somewhat disappointed, and therefore I want to explain the following: The book itself was written by the author J. Doubek at the urging of friends living with him in Australia and his relatives. After the war, he did not keep any records, and when he began to write his memoirs, he was already over 80 years old. The problem was that after the war, he lost his flight log and all records, which disappeared somewhere along with a map where he had noted a number of specific actions. Gradually, he put his memories on paper, which his granddaughter Tracy took with her to England and transcribed on a computer there. The book was first published abroad under the title 'Prague Pimpernel,' as he had been advised in Australia. Subsequently, my uncle asked me to translate it into Czech for him. For the reasons mentioned above, the book contains relatively few names and exact dates, which could not be invented or embellished for the sake of the reader. Nevertheless, the book...