This was a moving account of a brave young girl and woman surviving a horrendous time in history. I was interested in reading it because I've been researching the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia as my grandparents and father were born there and left before the Nazis completely took over. The writing is clear and it reads like a thriller. I am amazed that the author survived but she used her intelligence and her strong will to do so. Definitely worth reading.

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.

'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 live under the stress of war,' she said, 'civilization disappears. Most people who live in a civilized society don't realize it's a veneer, and it all goes the minute disaster occurs.' 'Farewell to Prague' is the author's first book.