Fighting for Road Apples

After World War II, over three million Sudeten Germans were brutally expelled from the Sudetenlands, their ancestral homes in Czechoslovakia. Some 800 years earlier, Czech nobility invited Germans to settle in the uninhabited regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia and to bring their skills, language and religion. They flourished for centuries until Czechoslovakia became a state after WWI, and Sudetenland was annexed to Germany in 1938. These two major events created deadly conflicts between Germans and Czechs and eventually hatred prevailed.

By the time, the author was 6 years old. She was indelibly marked for life as a refugee and had experienced bomb shelters, ethnic cleansing, a cruel separation from her mother, and being contained in a stinking boxcar for livestock, condemned for expulsion from her homeland in Bohemia. Intertwined with her family’s heritage, marked by misfortunes and struggles of survival, are the turbulent, blighted-by-poverty-post war years in Germany, where the author grew up.

Besides describing blithe anecdotes of teen adventures, the author falls in love with a foreign student who had a few secrets. She narrates tales of esteemed ancestors, a glassblower in the Bohemian Forest and his accomplished son, a carriage maker for the Habsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph I at the Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria. She tells of her father’s compelling escape from a British POW camp after D-Day, and his later incarceration in a notorious Czech concentration camp