Silent mail

Heroism is not a phrase

Four short stories set in the period from the end of World War II to the recent past are united by Jiří Stránský's exceptional authorial erudition, his sense of atmosphere and, above all, his belief in people and mutual help.

Jiří Stránský's four short stories are a powerful testimony about the desire to help others, moral responsibility, bravery and betrayal. The opening Silent Post, in which children from various villages help a wounded French airman in the snowy Krkonoše Mountains at the end of the war, is completely absorbing and moving. In the days when the roads, villages and forests are full of German soldiers, they transport a wounded Frenchman to the front on a sledge. In perfect secrecy, in an imaginary network of an illegal organization they unwittingly created. The short story also mentions the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in the Sudetenland at the end of the war, unchemically, non-violently, humanely... The short story Zelenolhotská Venus takes place in the present-day Šumava border region, where the tradition of smugglers was once continued by smugglers of refugees from the communist regime. In the short story "Picnic," the friends discover years later that one of them, a tormentor, was a traitor in the camp in the 1950s. Memories of the years spent in communist prison also permeate The Interview, set in the present. Jiří Stránský writes with insight, but also with a strength that grips the heart.