A Widow, a Memoir and the Czech Resistance
A Widow, a Memoir and the Czech Resistance
What do these three things have in common: a widow, a memoir and the Czech resistance? The Answer is: the subjects of this blog and the stories I will be telling you in future blog posts.
A widow, that’s me. And this is the day I became one – July 13, 2007. On this day my husband Charles Novacek died following head injuries from a fall. Four years, nine months and two days ago. My heart was broken. I had lost my best friend and confidant. We were married nearly eleven years. Each of us had been married before – I was divorced and Charles was a widower, nearly twenty years my senior. In spite of his age, I didn’t expect to lose Charles so soon. Learning to live without him has been a challenging and continuing journey.
A memoir, that’s why I started this blog. Before he died my husband finished writing a memoir, lessening the pain of his past. It was about his life growing up during World War II in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and the subsequent communist-dominated Cold War. Charles wanted his memoir manuscript published to tell his story and increase awareness of his homeland’s history. Few Americans know what happened to Czechoslovakians during these tragic and brutal times. To grant Charles’ wish I made the decision to self-publish his memoir. This blog is part of the platform I am creating to build a readership for the book.
The Czech Resistance, that’s the heart of the story in my husband’s book:
Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance. Born in Czechoslovakia, Charles was a master of survival techniques by age 11. Recruited into the Czech Resistance against the Nazis, he greeted, hid, and exchanged information and weapons with Czech soldiers and R.A.F. flyers parachuting into the Moravian Hills. When World War II ended for the rest of the world, Charles’s war continued as he watched Soviet troops roll in and occupy his town. He then became active in the resistance against the Communists, surviving prison torture, taking drugs to distort his facial features and narrowly escaping execution several times. After Charles died I regretted I hadn’t asked him enough questions about the history of his time. I have researched Charles’s family history and the Czech Resistance, in the process of getting the manuscript ready for publication. Like most people when my life changed four plus years ago, I was not prepared. But, I’m learning a lot and am looking forward to sharing it with you. I hope you’ll feel free to share what you know, too – about Widowhood, Publishing a Memoir and the Czech Resistance.
