I am writing a novel, using stories from my family, friends, and stories I make up. The real stories are fictionalised, and the most unbelievable.Real life is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

The novel is partly about the previous generations, the Holocaust survivors or the lucky ones (or smart ones) who managed to escape. It is also about the ones who didn’t make it. But it is also about the new generation of people who emigrated from Czechoslovakia, in the communist times. People like me.

So, my novel is not going to be a Holocaust novel. It is about the questions of emigration.

If? Why? When?

These are questions affecting millions of people all around the world now. Their stories are different, but also similar. Let us not forget this.

Refugees, we should not ignore the new ones when we are remembering the old ones.