The Hitler Kiss: A Memoir of the Czech Resistance

This autobiography is at once a heart-pounding adventure story, a moving recollection of a larger-than-life father, and an important account of the Czech resistance.Radomir Luza's father was a revered army general when the Nazis stormed into Czechoslovakia. After his father went underground to avoid arrest and torture, the nineteen-year-old Radomir spent weeks in a Gestapo prison. Eventually released in the hope that he would lead the Nazis to his father, Radomir instead joined him in hiding. General Luza became the military commander of the Czech resistance, while Radomir secretly helped organize the country's largest resistance network, providing critical intelligence to the Allies and leading bands of resisters and escaped Russian war prisoners in guerrilla attacks.Luza's narrative gives a panoramic picture of the resistance and makes palpable the terror of living in attics, sheds, and holes dug in the woods, constantly hunted and nearly snared by betrayals and Gestapo raids. In courageously intimate terms, he reflects on his relationship with his stern father - whom Luza worshipped from afar until sharing rat-infested barns brought the consummate general and intellectual son closer together.