'It didn't occur to me to ask my father as I grew up why he had nothing from his past before the war - no pictures of himself when young, no family photographs, no mementos of any kind. He was a man without a past, and I failed to notice.' Annette Kobak's father, born in Czechoslovakia, escaped as a nineteen-year-old from German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940 and joined the Polish army in France, ending up intercepting morse code in a top secret unit in London. This, and very much more, she discovered only half a century later when she started, with his help, unravelling his past after the collapse of the Soviet union. This mesmerising book is at once a daughter's search for an understanding of her father and a search to understand - through her father's life - the Czech and Polish experience of the war.
- ISBN10 184408079X
- ISBN13 9781844080793
- Publish Date 4 November 2004 (first published 5 February 2004)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 22 August 2011
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Virago Press Ltd
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 432
- Language English