Sketches from Childhood

Milan Svanderlik, author of Sketches from Childhood, was born in Czechoslovakia on 27 February 1948, the day its democratic government was overthrown by the Communist Party. The ensuing doctrinaire regime, committed to a more just and equal society. Focussed first on dismantling the bourgeois establishment, and what had been the post-war ethnic cleansing of non-Slav peoples metamorphosed into the persecution of anyone failing to espouse Stalinism – once-free citizens soon found themselves imprisoned within borders that bristled fiercely with barbed wire and armed guards. Milan's Czech parents were born in Yugoslavia, where his father fought with Tito's Partizans…