From Publishers Weekly
Raising his family in Britain during the Cold War, Joe Kobak was frequently in ill temper and given to oppressive silences. As she reached late middle age, his daughter, Annette, found she needed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding him—the result is this unusual, and unusually personal, account of WWII. The story belongs equally to father and daughter, as the author forges a new intimacy with Joe and receives an accelerated dose of recent European history. A Czech living in Poland when hostilities began, Joe was a bright young man with a technical cast of mind and a tenacious memory. During the war, he smuggled people out of Poland, was strafed by German fighters during the fall of France, and relayed intercepted German radio transmissions to British code breakers. Kobak (biographer of Isabelle Eberhardt) uses her investigations into these experiences as an occasion to document one of the many tragedies of WWII—the prewar and wartime betrayal of the smaller Eastern European countries by France and Great Britain. Along the way we learn of the heroes of prewar Czechoslovakia, Masaryk and Benes, and of the deep enmity between Poland and the Ukraine. Kobak interpolates a diplomatic history of the 1930s and early 1940s with her father's adventures in Eastern Europe and her own as she retraced some of Joe's wartime travels in 2001. Part memoir, part Joe's first-person narrative, part historical account, the book violates genre boundaries—but it is precisely this lack of affectedness, couched in graceful, perceptive writing, that makes it such an engrossing and informative work. 20 photos, 2 maps.
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From Booklist
World War II got rolling after Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler and ended with Churchill and Roosevelt serving up Poland to Stalin. Kobak, author of a well-received biography of nineteenth-century French writer Isabelle Eberhardt, reflects on both of these history-altering events in the course of trying to understand her father's WWII experiences. Born in Czechoslovakia and reared in Poland, young Joe escaped Russian and German occupied territory in the war's early days, making his way to England to work on Russian radio intercepts. Separated from his family, Joe suffered hardships and close scrapes, but it took his daughter years to see the truth in a Jewish survivor's characterization of him as lucky. Even though Joe's story is insignificant compared to those who suffered atrocities, Kobak ably employs his history to revisit the unconscionable treatment of Czechs and Poles by the hapless and cynical Great Powers. In the process, she reminds readers of journalist Martha Gellhorn's timely admonition to "never believe governments, not any of them, not a word they say; keep an untrusting eye on what they do."
Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
