The year 1938. A bloody autumn echoed with a requiem for the last bastion of democracy in Central Europe. In the Czech and Moravian borderlands, the fire of war ignited. A war all the more devastating because it pitted Czechoslovaks against each other. On one side were hundreds of thousands of German, usually fanatical supporters of Adolf Hitler and Konrad Henlein, backed by Nazi Germany. On the other side were the Czechs and, notably – which is not always mentioned – thousands of German opponents of Nazism. They were determined. They were brave. They fought. They refused to capitulate. Despite this, they were soon to be sacrificed. By the politicians whom many of them trusted so much. Forgotten fates. Forgotten people. The dramatic events at the onset of the Great Twilight were then exploited by Beck's Poland. Its soldiers invaded Czechoslovakia right behind the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, eager to carve out as large a piece of Silesia as possible from the fallen and humiliated country. The war, which had already ignited a year before the Second World War began, had its fallen, its victims. At a time when our still loyal allies threw us, to put it somewhat hyperbolically, as a bone to Adolf Hitler, the fates of the heroes of this book were being fulfilled: a Czech policeman who survived only because the attackers believed him to be dead. His wife –...
