Farewell to Prague

by Miriam Darvas

Book Overview

Farewell to Prague is a memoir set against the turbulent events of the Nazi era in Germany and World War II England. It is the story of a girl who, at the age of six, witnesses a murder being committed by German Storm Troopers. From that moment, the happy life she has known disintegrates. Her family escapes to Prague, where they create a new life. Six years later, the Germans march into Prague. Now she has to escape to England alone and on foot. She...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967370140
• ISBN13: 9780967370149
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An Important Story

This is a wonderful memoir about a twelve year old girl who witnesses the prelude to the Holocaust and is smuggled out of Czechoslovakia a few months before the German invasion of Poland starts World War II. In England, she is bounced around from school to school until finally settling in London. She deals with coming of age during a time when she did not know the fate of her parents, was forced to move from residence to residence during the bombing and V-1 attacks on London, and grieved over the deaths of young expatriot friends who had volunteered to to fight against the Nazis. At the end of the war, she makes an ironic return to Berlin and Prague where she first experiences the effects that the Cold War will have on the remainder of her life. The author also manages to subtly but profoundly provide a testament to the courage of her parents.Displaced persons constituted a large body of people affected by World War II and have continued to do so in the wars since. Farewell to Prague is one of the best accounts of what it is like to experience the anger and insecurity of leaving one's home and never being able to regain one's previous sense of community. This is an excellent book for adults who want to understand the importance of perseverance in the face of bitterness and loneliness. The book would make an excellent gift for teenagers who would benefit from learning to appreciate what they have in life.

The courage to endure...

?You have to start something with a bang!? said Miriam Darvas, author of the recently published ?Farewell to Prague.? The book is written as a memoir that chronicles her harrowing childhood in Nazi era Europe. In it, she masterfully tells the story of fifteen years, at times horrific and other times hopeful, beginning when she was just six years old. The book reads like a suspense thriller, and keeps the reader riveted ? right from page one. In the opening pages, Darvas lays a shocking foundation with a story of her childhood love, Kurt Blumberg. The event that occurs is so dreadful that ?I still sometimes awaken in the night to the sound of screams and the smell of blood,? she said. ?My life, thereafter, became a series of aimless wandering directed by people I did not know and events I did not understand.? And therein lies the story that follows. Shortly after her young friend?s death, and with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the family escapes to Prague and establishes a new home and life. Six years later the Germans arrive in their city, and her mother and father send twelve-year-old Darvas, unaccompanied, to make her way to England. Darvas writes of her final departure from her mother: ?The mass of bodies crushed the air out of me. Mother pushed me through a cluster of people hanging from the train doors and forced me into the corridor. Some unknown hands hoisted me into the luggage net. Through the top of the window I saw my mother?s head disappear in the crush of the milling crowd. I waved frantically through the open window. If only she would turn to wave. ?Mother!? My cry was lost in the tumult. Oh, please dear God, let her not be lost to me, I prayed. I sensed this was my last good-bye to her, and feared I would always have to remember her being swallowed by the crowd?? Alone but for the help of strangers and a headstrong will to endure, the young girl makes the journey to England on foot, train and boat. As if the experience forged in her an unshakeable courage, her approach to life in the years that follow, though they remain rampant with near-misses and hard luck, is nothing short of astounding. ?I would never again go anywhere that I did not want to go,? she writes. ?I knew what I wanted: to study history at London University. I wanted to comprehend the events that created this war and gave rise to Hitler with his despotic hold over countries and peoples.? Perhaps an adventurer above all else, Darvas at one point decides to travel into Russian-occupied Prague to visit her sister and learn the fate of her family. Her means of escape from the country, as borders were closing during her stay, is the essence of what a desperate life she had come to lead. An emotionally charged story written in beautiful English, ?Farewell to Prague? stands on its own in the realm of Holocaust books. It is a view into a life practically incomprehensible to most people today, especially considering Darvas?s age when she experienced it. ?When you l

excellently written book

This is the story of a 12 year old girl who has to leave her parents and escape from the German occupation of Prague on foot and alone. This story is truly gripping and so well written that it is hard to put down

The other survivors

Farewell to Prague is a remarkable odyssey of one the other types of Holocaust survivor; the displaced person. This is a very fast-paced, almost novel-like memoir. The underlying sadness and sense of loss of this memoir is underscored rather than muted by the crisp, rather unsentimental tone of the narrative. Even the humorous notes appear to stem from the author's sense of being an outsider, displaced from her own environment. I strongly recommend this memoir, not only to those interested in WWII and the Holocaust, but to anyone who has ever lost home and family.