Farewell to Prague

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1 MAR 2001

"Life," Darvas writes, is "the history of individual tragedies" not such a surprising sentiment from an author who first witnessed a murder at the age of six. In this engaging memoir, she relates in modest terms what can only be described as an extraordinary narrative of wartime survival. After witnessing her childhood sweetheart's brutal death at the hands of Nazi soldiers, Darvas and her family fled their native Germany for Prague. But when the Nazis invaded Prague, Darvas's parents thought their only recourse was to send their 12-year-old daughter to England on her own, with some help from an underground resistance movement. The journey involved, among other things, climbing the snow-covered Tatra Mountains and outwitting Nazi bureaucrats. (Darvas's mother, trying to calm her, told her to think of the life-risking enterprise as "a great adventure.") Fortunately, Darvas, starving and cold, was given shelter and food by various strangers. But while the actions of these generous individuals momentarily restored her faith in humanity, the hellish wartime circumstances produced irrevocable emotional scars (her parents eventually perished in Nazi death camps). In rejecting a lover who wanted to marry her, Darvas movingly writes, "My fear of losing him was more powerful than my desire for him." A compelling and quick read, Darvas's story is sure to find an appreciative audience among devotees of wartime memoirs and history.