Autograph session for Frantisek Robert Kraus's books
This picture of my father, Frantisek Robert Kraus, was taken during an autograph session for the second edition of the novel "Promenena zeme" ("The Changed Land") in Prague in 1960.
The novel was first published in 1957. In it my father doesn't devote himself to concentration camps any longer, but returns to the issue of the Sudetenland. The countryside around Ceska Lipa, which he had fallen in love with before the war, became for him the location of events and human destinies before and after Munich, during the war and immediately after it. My father drew upon not only his experiences, but also on many historical sources and preserved materials, which he carefully studied. Here too, though, the publishers intervened, and assigned my father a co-author, Jaroslav Pechacek, who added to the book the proper air of 'building socialism' - scenes where factory workers organize Communist resistance. So the entire book gives the impression of a celebration of the Communist anti-Fascist resistance, thus in a way that my father did not intend at all. My father had originally wanted to show in the book that the Sudetenland Germans were actually victims of the Nazi ideology, during the period that the book was published, he couldn't publicly present anything like that.
