TATRA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CORP. PRESENTS
In the Shadow of Tyranny: Between Hitler & Stalin
Revised Definitive Second Edition (2021)
Revised Definitive Second Edition (2021)
From the bloody Russian front to a military uprising and a Communist putsch, “In the Shadow of Tyranny” takes the reader through two of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. This epic and harrowing Holocaust thriller has all the elements of a timeless story: intrigue; espionage; war; racism; genocide; political tyranny; romance; imprisonment; daring escapes; and freedom. The author and editor also dare to tackle some of the most controversial issues relative to these two tragedies: the origins of the Nazi and Communist movements; the history and etiology of modern anti-Semitism; the Russian Revolution and civil war; the "Jewish Question" in Slovakia; the Soviet Union’s role in the Slovak National Uprising; the 1948 Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia; and war crimes trials and amnesty. In closing out this sweeping, landmark magnum opus, the reader is left with a provocative examination of how humanity in all its progressive modernity could have produced such enormous tragedies, and the timeless lessons, thereof.
This revised definitive second edition (2,228 pages) significantly expands the story presented in the first edition (1973). In addition to a relatively in-depth exploration of the origins of the Nazi movement, the second edition also includes brief biographies of the lives of Peter Vlčko and Georgina Reichsfeld before they met, that lay the foundation for the remainder of the book. Preserved from the original, however, is the moving story of a love affair between a young, beautiful, hunted, and condemned Jew trapped in the lion’s den and a handsome, well-positioned Aryan Slovak Army officer in the Ministry of National Defense whose unlikely fates and disparate backgrounds amalgamate in symbiotic harmony. Their story is the perfect antithesis to, yet microcosm in the thunderous backdrop of war and genocide. The stark contrast of these two settings epitomize the two extremes of the human experience: the insanity and chaos of war and the blissful serenity of love.
Whether or not you have read the first edition, I invite you to take this journey back in time and explore the dramatic events of 1938–1948 Europe and the shocking history of what foreshadowed two of humanity’s greatest tragedies—Nazism & Communism. Europe during that turbulent decade remains for all generations a popular theme in the visual arts, humanities, academia, and memorials. Its legacy will live on forever; the only concern is whether its timeless lessons will continue to press upon us or be lost.
This revised definitive second edition (2,228 pages) significantly expands the story presented in the first edition (1973). In addition to a relatively in-depth exploration of the origins of the Nazi movement, the second edition also includes brief biographies of the lives of Peter Vlčko and Georgina Reichsfeld before they met, that lay the foundation for the remainder of the book. Preserved from the original, however, is the moving story of a love affair between a young, beautiful, hunted, and condemned Jew trapped in the lion’s den and a handsome, well-positioned Aryan Slovak Army officer in the Ministry of National Defense whose unlikely fates and disparate backgrounds amalgamate in symbiotic harmony. Their story is the perfect antithesis to, yet microcosm in the thunderous backdrop of war and genocide. The stark contrast of these two settings epitomize the two extremes of the human experience: the insanity and chaos of war and the blissful serenity of love.
Whether or not you have read the first edition, I invite you to take this journey back in time and explore the dramatic events of 1938–1948 Europe and the shocking history of what foreshadowed two of humanity’s greatest tragedies—Nazism & Communism. Europe during that turbulent decade remains for all generations a popular theme in the visual arts, humanities, academia, and memorials. Its legacy will live on forever; the only concern is whether its timeless lessons will continue to press upon us or be lost.
Peter B. Vlčko
In the Shadow of Tyranny: Between Hitler & Stalin
Revised Definitive Second Edition (2021)
Revised Definitive Second Edition (2021)
Hardcover (2 volumes) purchased individually from Tatra International Publishers with personal endorsement from Peter B. Vlčko - $39.95 each volume Please report any dysfunctional payment links to [email protected] or use the Contact tab, above.
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Preface to the Second Edition
In response to the passing of Jozef Stalin on 5 March 1953, cultural, political, and economic events in Czechoslovakia began to slowly evolve in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The process of de-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia began in 1956 under the once hardline Stalinist President and General Secretary Antonín Novotný but progressed more slowly than in most other states of the Eastern Bloc. Rehabilitation of the condemned in Czechoslovakia during the Stalinist-era, such as those convicted in the Slánský trials in November 1952, was considered as early as 1963, but did not come to pass until 1968. In the early 1960s, Czechoslovakia underwent an economic recession. The obligatory Soviet model of industrialization applied poorly to Czechoslovakia. From the time of its origin on 28 October 1918, Czechoslovakia managed under the leadership of its founder and first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk to rapidly consolidate and expand the strong industrial base it inherited after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The new nation had a population of over thirteen-and-one-half million. It acquired seventy to eighty percent of the industry formerly under the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was located on Czech territory, including the porcelain and glass industries and the sugar refineries, more than forty percent of all its distilleries and breweries, the Škoda Works of Pilsen (Plzeň), which produced armaments, locomotives, automobiles, and machinery, and the chemical industry of northern Bohemia. Seventeen percent of all Hungarian industry that had developed in Slovakia during the late nineteenth century, including mining, forestry, and agriculture, also fell to the new republic. During the interwar period, Czechoslovakia was one of the world’s ten most industrialized nations. The Soviet economic model mainly took into account less developed economies and was therefore ineffective, even counterproductive, in postwar Czechoslovakia. Novotný’s attempt at restructuring the economy under the 1965 New Economic Model had unintended, although predictable consequences spurring increased demand for political reform. A series of cultural and political events between 1965 and 1968 led to the fall of Antonín Novotný and rise to power of Alexander Dubček who launched a series of liberalizations under the name “Action Program,” which included increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement, with economic emphasis on consumer goods and the possibility of a multiparty government with limited powers and federalization into “two equal fraternal nations” (Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic). The “Action Program” was to be a ten-year transition through which Democratic elections would be made possible and a new form of Masaryk-style Democratic Socialism would replace the status quo. These changes came to be known as “Socialism with a human face” and led to the failed “Prague Spring” of 1968.
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets under Leonid Brežnev became increasingly alarmed at the prospect of another of their satellite states departing from traditional Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism that could lead to a counter-revolution similar to what occurred in Hungary in 1956. After the failure of a series of bilateral negotiations between the leaders of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in July 1968, Moscow executed the Brežnev Doctrine and ordered the military forces of the Warsaw Pact—the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary (Romania and Albania abstained)—to invade Czechoslovakia. On the night of 20 August 1968, 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks entered and occupied the country. During the invasion, seventy-two Czechs and Slovaks were killed (nineteen of those in Slovakia) and 700 wounded. Although Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist, there was scattered resistance in the streets. An estimated 70,000 Czechoslovak citizens fled the country immediately with an eventual total of some 300,000 that managed to follow before the borders were sealed.
In the aftermath, the United Nations and governments across the globe mounted only symbolic condemnation. The invasion and occupation of an established sovereign state seeking by its own volition Democratic reforms was once again reluctantly accepted by the international community. This seemed to be Czechoslovakia’s fate since its inception. However, the late provocateur, author, critic, and journalist Christopher Hitchens recapitulated the repercussions of the Prague Spring to western Communism in Slate on 28 August 2008: “What became clear, however, was that there was no longer something that could be called the world communist movement. It was utterly, irretrievably, hopelessly split. The main spring had broken. And the Prague Spring had broken it.”
In light of these historic, cyclical eruptions of a people longing for freedom, General Peter Vlčko felt the moment had come to finally document his memoirs recalling the events he lived through in Czechoslovakia during the turbulent decade of 1938–1948. The original 1,500-page manuscript was drafted and translated into English but judged too massive to economically publish by any available traditional means at the time. Moreover, in the late 1960s and early 1970s publishing houses were averse to publishing biographies, histories, or personal memoirs with traditional military and political themes. The culture at the time demanded more counter-cultural themes. In order to bring this project into reality, General Vlčko was forced to significantly revise and condense his memoirs into the form of a novel emphasizing the romantic, sensual dynamic between his two principal characters under the alias Hronský. In the end, much of the vital political and historical context in the book was excised and whittled down to 860 pages with library cataloging organizations miscategorizing the book as fiction. Correcting this improper genre categorization over three decades later required much work that finally placed this book into its correct genre among world cataloging organizations and academic libraries.
Since the publication of In the Shadow of Tyranny in January 1973 and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in September 1991, vast resources of previously classified government archives from the Soviet Union and its satellite states have become progressively available to academic researchers and the public. Over the course of the ensuing decades since the fall of the Soviet Union and continuing to date, libraries of works analyzing the formerly secret archives have been steadily published, critiqued, and rewritten as twentieth century history is redebated, reinterpreted, and rebooted. Furthermore, extensive official German archives that have slowly become increasingly available for government research (1952) and public access (1988)—the reunited Federal Reich Archives, or Bundesarchiv, comprised of the Central State Archives of the GDR, formerly held by the Soviet government in Potsdam since 1946, and the Federal Archives in Koblenz since 1952, finally became an integrated archive physically accessible to the general public in 1990 and by Internet access in 1997—have found new interest among academic and independent researchers combing Eastern Bloc secret archives. The plethora of academic works produced since the declassification of state secret archives in Europe, Russia, the United States, and the Vatican have helped reframe the contextual understanding of landmark historical events of the twentieth century and beyond.
Moreover, in his attempt to quickly crystallize his memories and thoughts in order to publish and meet the pressing events of the 1968 Prague Spring, General Vlčko was forced to bypass consulting her and write about events and conversations involving his beloved Jirka, details of which he had no first-hand knowledge. Consequently, he created facts and dialogue in the book involving Jirka that were not entirely accurate and projected a misleading message that would later require revision.
The availability of this new information and life circumstances that in 2014 led Georgina Vlčko to come under the care of her youngest child Dr. Peter B. Vlčko, provided an extraordinary opportunity to move forward with this second edition of In the Shadow of Tyranny with the added subtitle, Between Hitler and Stalin. My mother and I worked closely together to revise the history of the events and interactions that she was involved in while separated from her husband during periods of the Second World War, and thereafter. Through years of personal discussion with my father and extensive research of secondary sources analyzing primary source archival materials declassified since 1990, I was also able to expand my father’s memoirs in the greater historical, political, and philosophical context of the tragic events in Europe and Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that laid the foundation to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Added to the first edition of the book is a relatively in-depth exploration of the origins of the Nazi movement, as well as brief biographies of the lives of Peter Vlčko and Georgina Reichsfeld before they met, that lay the foundation for the remainder of the book. Preserved from the original, however, is the moving story of a love affair between a young, beautiful, hunted and condemned Jew trapped in the lion’s den and a handsome, well-positioned Aryan Slovak Army officer in the Ministry of National Defense whose unlikely fates and disparate backgrounds amalgamate in symbiotic harmony. Their story is the perfect antithesis to, yet microcosm in the thunderous backdrop of aggression, war, military occupation, insurrection, political oppression, and the racist policies of extermination that exploded in Europe during the 1940s. The stark contrast of these two settings epitomize the two extremes of the human experience: the insanity and chaos of war and the blissful serenity of love.
Underpinning the motivation for this project was the maturing interest of my youngest child, Sonja Georgina, whose teachers at Grosse Ile High School expressed deep interest in my parents’ story. I felt that the passage of time inevitably dilutes the younger generation’s interest in and true understanding of the series of events and Zeitgeist that led up to one of history’s most notable human tragedies. Pressing upon me was the latent resignation among secondary school educators that the lessons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their reflection on human nature had not been fully explored, understood, and taught, and are losing their significance to approaching generations of students. For this reason, Epimythium (or “moral of the story”) was added at the end of the book to touch on some of the lessons intended by this edited work. It is my sincere hope this new and expanded edition will help future generations move beyond the mere study of historical facts, to become metahistorians with a deeper understanding of history, the world, and human nature when developing their Weltanschauung.
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets under Leonid Brežnev became increasingly alarmed at the prospect of another of their satellite states departing from traditional Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism that could lead to a counter-revolution similar to what occurred in Hungary in 1956. After the failure of a series of bilateral negotiations between the leaders of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in July 1968, Moscow executed the Brežnev Doctrine and ordered the military forces of the Warsaw Pact—the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary (Romania and Albania abstained)—to invade Czechoslovakia. On the night of 20 August 1968, 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks entered and occupied the country. During the invasion, seventy-two Czechs and Slovaks were killed (nineteen of those in Slovakia) and 700 wounded. Although Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist, there was scattered resistance in the streets. An estimated 70,000 Czechoslovak citizens fled the country immediately with an eventual total of some 300,000 that managed to follow before the borders were sealed.
In the aftermath, the United Nations and governments across the globe mounted only symbolic condemnation. The invasion and occupation of an established sovereign state seeking by its own volition Democratic reforms was once again reluctantly accepted by the international community. This seemed to be Czechoslovakia’s fate since its inception. However, the late provocateur, author, critic, and journalist Christopher Hitchens recapitulated the repercussions of the Prague Spring to western Communism in Slate on 28 August 2008: “What became clear, however, was that there was no longer something that could be called the world communist movement. It was utterly, irretrievably, hopelessly split. The main spring had broken. And the Prague Spring had broken it.”
In light of these historic, cyclical eruptions of a people longing for freedom, General Peter Vlčko felt the moment had come to finally document his memoirs recalling the events he lived through in Czechoslovakia during the turbulent decade of 1938–1948. The original 1,500-page manuscript was drafted and translated into English but judged too massive to economically publish by any available traditional means at the time. Moreover, in the late 1960s and early 1970s publishing houses were averse to publishing biographies, histories, or personal memoirs with traditional military and political themes. The culture at the time demanded more counter-cultural themes. In order to bring this project into reality, General Vlčko was forced to significantly revise and condense his memoirs into the form of a novel emphasizing the romantic, sensual dynamic between his two principal characters under the alias Hronský. In the end, much of the vital political and historical context in the book was excised and whittled down to 860 pages with library cataloging organizations miscategorizing the book as fiction. Correcting this improper genre categorization over three decades later required much work that finally placed this book into its correct genre among world cataloging organizations and academic libraries.
Since the publication of In the Shadow of Tyranny in January 1973 and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in September 1991, vast resources of previously classified government archives from the Soviet Union and its satellite states have become progressively available to academic researchers and the public. Over the course of the ensuing decades since the fall of the Soviet Union and continuing to date, libraries of works analyzing the formerly secret archives have been steadily published, critiqued, and rewritten as twentieth century history is redebated, reinterpreted, and rebooted. Furthermore, extensive official German archives that have slowly become increasingly available for government research (1952) and public access (1988)—the reunited Federal Reich Archives, or Bundesarchiv, comprised of the Central State Archives of the GDR, formerly held by the Soviet government in Potsdam since 1946, and the Federal Archives in Koblenz since 1952, finally became an integrated archive physically accessible to the general public in 1990 and by Internet access in 1997—have found new interest among academic and independent researchers combing Eastern Bloc secret archives. The plethora of academic works produced since the declassification of state secret archives in Europe, Russia, the United States, and the Vatican have helped reframe the contextual understanding of landmark historical events of the twentieth century and beyond.
Moreover, in his attempt to quickly crystallize his memories and thoughts in order to publish and meet the pressing events of the 1968 Prague Spring, General Vlčko was forced to bypass consulting her and write about events and conversations involving his beloved Jirka, details of which he had no first-hand knowledge. Consequently, he created facts and dialogue in the book involving Jirka that were not entirely accurate and projected a misleading message that would later require revision.
The availability of this new information and life circumstances that in 2014 led Georgina Vlčko to come under the care of her youngest child Dr. Peter B. Vlčko, provided an extraordinary opportunity to move forward with this second edition of In the Shadow of Tyranny with the added subtitle, Between Hitler and Stalin. My mother and I worked closely together to revise the history of the events and interactions that she was involved in while separated from her husband during periods of the Second World War, and thereafter. Through years of personal discussion with my father and extensive research of secondary sources analyzing primary source archival materials declassified since 1990, I was also able to expand my father’s memoirs in the greater historical, political, and philosophical context of the tragic events in Europe and Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that laid the foundation to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Added to the first edition of the book is a relatively in-depth exploration of the origins of the Nazi movement, as well as brief biographies of the lives of Peter Vlčko and Georgina Reichsfeld before they met, that lay the foundation for the remainder of the book. Preserved from the original, however, is the moving story of a love affair between a young, beautiful, hunted and condemned Jew trapped in the lion’s den and a handsome, well-positioned Aryan Slovak Army officer in the Ministry of National Defense whose unlikely fates and disparate backgrounds amalgamate in symbiotic harmony. Their story is the perfect antithesis to, yet microcosm in the thunderous backdrop of aggression, war, military occupation, insurrection, political oppression, and the racist policies of extermination that exploded in Europe during the 1940s. The stark contrast of these two settings epitomize the two extremes of the human experience: the insanity and chaos of war and the blissful serenity of love.
Underpinning the motivation for this project was the maturing interest of my youngest child, Sonja Georgina, whose teachers at Grosse Ile High School expressed deep interest in my parents’ story. I felt that the passage of time inevitably dilutes the younger generation’s interest in and true understanding of the series of events and Zeitgeist that led up to one of history’s most notable human tragedies. Pressing upon me was the latent resignation among secondary school educators that the lessons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their reflection on human nature had not been fully explored, understood, and taught, and are losing their significance to approaching generations of students. For this reason, Epimythium (or “moral of the story”) was added at the end of the book to touch on some of the lessons intended by this edited work. It is my sincere hope this new and expanded edition will help future generations move beyond the mere study of historical facts, to become metahistorians with a deeper understanding of history, the world, and human nature when developing their Weltanschauung.
In the Shadow of Tyranny
First Edition (1973)
First Edition (1973)
First Edition
Although personal stories of the Second World War are numerous, timeless stories such as this one are particularly poignant and apropos our present struggle over the tyranny of terrorism. Czechoslovakia during the dreadful years of the Second World War is the setting of this massive historical personal narrative, written by a retired Major General of the Slovak Army who personally witnessed and lived through the wartime events he writes about. The book's story covers a historical period from the time of Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland through the victory of the American, British and Russian armies in Europe and the communist putsch and takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The book's central line of interest is how democratic Czechoslovakia, a fledgling nation geographically caught between two tyrannical powers destined to face each other in battle and determined to dominate this small, yet historically-strategic land, was repeatedly betrayed by her allies and left helplessly to herself. Against this thunderous backdrop of modern war, the author carefully interweaves the developing love affair and marriage of his two principal subjects, Peter Hronsky (Vlcko) and his beloved Yirka. Peter is a captain in the Slovak Army, a gentile, whose love for Yirka is complicated by the fact that she is a Jew predestined for deportation during Nazi control of Slovakia. The lovers and their closest friends, relatives, and associates live what amounts to an underground life for several years under persecution. Their success in outwitting their overlords - first the Nazis with their fascist Slovak collaborators, and then the Soviet communists - makes up the essential tension of their suspenseful and gripping story.
Readers will follow the complex ins and outs of Czech, Slovak and European politics, aggression, war, military occupation, insurrection, and the racist policies of extermination that exploded in Europe during the 1940s. As Slovakia is presently turning a new chapter in her rich history by denouncing her 50-year affair with Marxism and embracing Western democracy, we find slowly emerging from the dusty dungeons of her memory a new and honest appraisal of the agonizing and shameful events she endured between 1938 and 1948. Peter Vlcko plainly and truthfully presents the long-suppressed, poorly known and often-misunderstood facts of this tumultuous decade in Czechoslovakia. He candidly embraces the viewpoints of his principal subjects as they try to keep life going under the most hopeless of circumstances. His style is calmly realistic in the midst of violence, chaos and panic. He has an eye for the beauties of life even under conditions of wartime ugliness. And when the Hronskys (Vlckos) finally reach the United States after their years of suffering, the Statue of Liberty is a true symbol of freedom they long for.
Although personal stories of the Second World War are numerous, timeless stories such as this one are particularly poignant and apropos our present struggle over the tyranny of terrorism. Czechoslovakia during the dreadful years of the Second World War is the setting of this massive historical personal narrative, written by a retired Major General of the Slovak Army who personally witnessed and lived through the wartime events he writes about. The book's story covers a historical period from the time of Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland through the victory of the American, British and Russian armies in Europe and the communist putsch and takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The book's central line of interest is how democratic Czechoslovakia, a fledgling nation geographically caught between two tyrannical powers destined to face each other in battle and determined to dominate this small, yet historically-strategic land, was repeatedly betrayed by her allies and left helplessly to herself. Against this thunderous backdrop of modern war, the author carefully interweaves the developing love affair and marriage of his two principal subjects, Peter Hronsky (Vlcko) and his beloved Yirka. Peter is a captain in the Slovak Army, a gentile, whose love for Yirka is complicated by the fact that she is a Jew predestined for deportation during Nazi control of Slovakia. The lovers and their closest friends, relatives, and associates live what amounts to an underground life for several years under persecution. Their success in outwitting their overlords - first the Nazis with their fascist Slovak collaborators, and then the Soviet communists - makes up the essential tension of their suspenseful and gripping story.
Readers will follow the complex ins and outs of Czech, Slovak and European politics, aggression, war, military occupation, insurrection, and the racist policies of extermination that exploded in Europe during the 1940s. As Slovakia is presently turning a new chapter in her rich history by denouncing her 50-year affair with Marxism and embracing Western democracy, we find slowly emerging from the dusty dungeons of her memory a new and honest appraisal of the agonizing and shameful events she endured between 1938 and 1948. Peter Vlcko plainly and truthfully presents the long-suppressed, poorly known and often-misunderstood facts of this tumultuous decade in Czechoslovakia. He candidly embraces the viewpoints of his principal subjects as they try to keep life going under the most hopeless of circumstances. His style is calmly realistic in the midst of violence, chaos and panic. He has an eye for the beauties of life even under conditions of wartime ugliness. And when the Hronskys (Vlckos) finally reach the United States after their years of suffering, the Statue of Liberty is a true symbol of freedom they long for.
In the Shadow of Tyranny
First Edition (1973)
First Edition (1973)