Fortress of My Youth

Published in Australia in 1995 by the translator, Elinor Morrisby, this book sold out its print-run of 2,200 pb copies with minimal marketing. In it, Jana Renée Friesová vividly recalls her adolescent years as a prisoner of the Nazis in the Czech ghetto-town of Terezín, describing delight as well as horror. She saw thousands forced onto the cattle trains heading "east" to Auschwitz, yet she fell passionately in love, and she took part in defiant concentration-camp performances of Smetana's Bartered Bride and Verdi's Requiem. Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary. Her riveting story tells how she survived and what the Iron Curtain era then brought. She was to discover from her own experience how like the weird novels of Kafka the real world can be.