Valley of the Shadow: After the Turmoil, My Heart Cries No More - Hardcover

Helfert, Erich A.

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9780887391170: Valley of the Shadow: After the Turmoil, My Heart Cries No More

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0887391176 ISBN 13: 9780887391170

Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co, 1997

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A fourteen-year-old boy witnesses the upheavals, tragedies and displacement sweeping central Europe right after World War II. The action centers on the Sudetenland, where the native German-speaking population was uprooted and forced into exile by the Czech goverment at the end of the war. The Sudetenland, a former province of Austria which had been given to newly formed Czechoslovakia by the Allies at the end of World War I, was annexed in 1938 to Germany by Hitler before he occupied all of Czechoslovakia. The territory was returned to Czechoslovakia by the victorious Allies in May 1945. Sudden mass expulsions of the native German-speaking population by the new Czechoslovak government began soon after. From occupation by the Russians to dispossession and displacement by a new Czech government, and the tragic loss of his father and older brother, Dr. Helfert relays the history of his family and country during the tumultuous years just after World War II.

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About the Author:

Erich Anton Helfert was born in Sudetenland in 1931. He gained writing experience as a journalist and correspondent. Dr. Helfert has published extensively in the field of finance during a career of teaching at Harvard, corporate management, and management consulting. His bestseller Techniques of Financial Analysis is in its ninth edition. Valley of the Shadow is his first literary work.

From Publishers Weekly:

When the Sudetenland was returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of WWII, the former Austrian province, annexed by Hitler in 1938, became the site of "ethnic cleansing" as the Czech government expelled ethnic Germans and expropriated their property. An estimated 250,000 died and more than three million Sudetens became refugees. Among them was Helfert, then 14, and his newly widowed mother; his father, an industrialist, died in a botched operation for a bleeding ulcer shortly after their villa was confiscated. Mother and son eked out a living and narrowly avoided being arrested and taken to an internment camp where Sudetens and Germans died from torture and neglect. Expulsion led them to the U.S. occupation zone of Germany, and this poignant autobiographical memoir closes in 1950, when Helfert departs for America as an exchange student. A management consultant, former Harvard Business School teacher and author of a book on financial analysis, he views the Sudeten's extinction by a chauvinistic, vengeful Prague government as a precursor of contemporary tragedies involving mistreatment of ethnic minorities. Regrettably, by telling his harrowing personal story in a charged yet plodding style, with fictitious names, he considerably blunts its impact as a documentary. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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