Dobrodruhy proti své vůli

The book tells the thrilling life stories of the author's father, family members and their friends during World War II. The author's father, Oswald Holzer, was born in 1911 in Bohemia to a Jewish family. The coming of the Nazi occupation represented a radical turning point in the life of the Jewish community, and Oswald, his relatives, and friends had to decide whether to remain in the occupied territory and hope to survive, or whether to save themselves from the Nazi madness by fleeing and seeking happiness in another country. Some, including Oswald, emigrated. The vast majority of those who remained found death in the extermination camps. Oswald's parents perished there as well.

After his parents' deaths, the author discovered more than four hundred letters from Great Britain, France, Palestine, Sweden, Argentina, Ecuador, China, and the United States in which parents, relatives, and friends described their fates during the war.

She began to uncover her family's past and carefully gathered information about the lost world of Jewish culture in interwar Czechoslovakia in order to portray it faithfully in her work. The result of her efforts is a unique, true story of the will to survive, the flight from certain death, and the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, which won the 2013 Global Ebook Award in the Biography category.

The book provides valuable testimony about a particularly distressing period in human history that future generations should not forget. Beyond this, it also provides significant information regarding the death of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the final solution to the Jewish question, the circumstances of which have not been fully clarified until now.

Czech edition