Spolhaus – Kovanda Jaroslav O. (2022)

"A double nelson will break your soul in half..." is the introductory motto of the documentary novel dedicated to the author's father – here Jaromír Komín. In addition to the introductory chapters from the childhood of little JK in the Elbe basin, we later find ourselves in the exuberantly developing Zlín, where young Komín meets other protagonists of this book: the Young Men, scouts Velda, Stromek, Acha, Tatyček, Lolek, and their mentor Karel Šustek, and above all with the restless times; how he, the scouts, subsequently shapes them in his image. How the characters of Komín's friends change, how one becomes a protectorate journalist-activist, another a partisan, another a communist, or even a double-dealing informer. How people fall or resist in the face of the times; how some, if at all possible, try to remain clean. (Do they try to hate hatred?) How some, although forced after the war under communist slogans in the style of shifting from offices to factories and plants to change jobs, like the adult Jaromír Komín, do not lose their thread even in various working-class professions and remain former members of the national socialist party – and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk hangs on their wall until death.