The Hot Summer of 1968

It is 1968, the Cold War is raging, and the United States is bogged down fighting the “Communists” in Vietnam. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a world cut in half, a punitive wall, isolating the Soviet republics that then formed the USSR. In the spring of 1968, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party experimented with "socialism with a human face"—known then as the “Prague Spring.” Suddenly there was freedom of the Press; an end to arbitrary wiretaps; and citizens regained the right to travel without prior authorizations and visas. The borders opened to the West, consumer goods appeared in the stores---and the winds of freedom blew over the country. That summer, Alexander and Anna boarded their Skoda Felicia, a brand-new convertible, to join their daughter Petra in Bratislava, where she had just completed her brilliant medical studies. Tereza, the daughter of a railway worker who survived the concentration camps and a Pravda editor who had long taken in Hungarian refugees from 1956, stayed in a kibbutz in Israel to reconnect with her Jewish culture. Józef, a pastor defrocked for refusing to denounce parishioners to the Party, delivered his first uncensored sermons on the radio. Then, suddenly, on the nights of August 20-21, Soviet tanks invaded Prague to put an end to this brief liberalization experiment. For a few hours, the border with Austria would remain open. Vienna was an hour's train away. Everyone now must make a choice: leave or stay? Fleeing violence or resisting the oppressor? Faced with the invasion of our country by an overmatched foreign power, what would we do? Viliam Klimacek’s historical novel looks back at these major events in Czechoslovakian history. Celebrating the identity of a people, its folklore, its beauty, and its vitality, he makes this novel personal and real by focusing on the story of ten people enmeshed in this difficult moment in history. By telling the human stories of the Czech diaspora, Klimacek reveals the impact of these rapidly moving events on his characters and the lives of their families (based on real people whose names have been changed). Through Tereza, Petra, Józef, Sena (Alexander), Anna and Erika, he tells us about the lives of these (extra)ordinary people—their lives in Czechoslovakia, Their decisions to leave, their flight,...