Transsibiřská odyssea - Po stopách legionáře Jana Kouby – Píšová Ina (2018)

9288 kilometers. That is the length of the longest railway in the world, the Trans-Siberian Railway. At the end of World War I, this legendary route was taken over by Czechoslovak legionnaires who fought in Russia for an independent Czechoslovakia and later against the Bolsheviks. Exactly one hundred years later, one of them, Private Jan Kouba of the 7th Tatra Regiment, is followed by his great-granddaughter Ina. On her journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, she holds Jan's diary, in which he recorded the horrors of war and the struggle for survival in the endless wilderness for four years. Jan's notes reveal the everyday life of Czechoslovak legionnaires in a new, often critical light. They are also a raw testimony to the gradual loss of faith in the meaning of the entire ordeal, as the legionnaires remained trapped at the end of the world in a foreign civil war long after the republic was declared. Jan buried his diary in the garden and spoke to no one about the horrors of war. Ina's expedition into the freezing taiga, Siberian villages, and the parched plains of the east thus becomes not only a journey in the footsteps of the Czechoslovak legions but primarily a search for her family's story.