Customer Reviews

The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle: A Memoir Uniquely Set in a Vanished Sudetenland

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I sat down on Saturday morning around 11:00am to read all my mail, etc. that had piled up over the week and there was your book. I started to read and couldn't put it down. I finished it around 7:00pm. It was absolutely wonderful. My mind was consumed for several days just thinking of my childhood and how it "connected" to all that went on in my life during that timeframe. I remember it vividly, the blackouts, the air raids. But like you I couldn't understand because I was too young.

In "The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle", Frank Koerner brought alive, via chronological stories, his parents' heritage and homeland, which had vanished in 1946. To recapture his parents' homeland, these spellbinding stories include history and emotion from a trip that was made fifty years after the Sudetenland's extinction. No one before has taken on this task in such great detail and with such insight and storytelling ability. "A Flight of Fancy, The Talk of the Town, A Sampler of Ethnic Cleansing, and The Plot of the Mystery" are only a few of the many unique stories where the reader can appreciate the author's unique writing ability. This is a deeply human story of bravery and love, and lost heritage to be sure, but also of the struggle to carry on and function despite the anguish of despair. If you are tempted to read this book, you will certainly love it and will want to curl up by a cozy fire, not putting it down until "the very end".

By,
Marshia Osterhus

One week can make all the difference in the world. "The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle: A Memoir Uniquely Set in a Vanished Sudetenland" is the reflections of a single week in Frank Koerner's life where everything about his life seemed to change. An honest and frank memoir that Koerner hopes will inspire other readers, he holds fast that you don't need to be famous to have an autobiography, and "The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle" is his evidence.

Far too often history is written as an "objective" recitation of "significant" events from which all elements of the merely personal have been expunged, leaving a desiccated shell that belies the profoundly human nature of the subject. Mr. Koerner has the ability to meld his deeply felt personal experiences with the impersonal sweep of 20th century history to create an engaging - and at times chilling - tale of the loss of his parents' homeland and culture, and his own journey to rediscover and reclaim his heritage.

In post-war Europe of 1945-46, Czechoslovakia forcibly expelled practically all of the 3.5 million German-speaking native inhabitants of the Sudetenland, amounting to over 20% of the Czechoslovakian population, via the Benesch Decree. As Mr. Koerner describes it, these people "were expropriated of real and personal property, herded into open railroad cars, transported initially to concentration camps, and then summarily deported. Sudetens who resisted were cruelly beaten or murdered. It is documented that several hundred thousand Sudetens lost their lives during the deportation via direct violence or starvation. The Benesch Decree banned the return of the deportees in perpetuity." Under today's Czech Republic, that Decree is still legally binding.

Although Mr. Koerner was eight years old at the time and living in New Jersey with his parents, who had emigrated to the United States in the period between the two World Wars, the impact of the Decree on him and his family was profound and far reaching. In 1992, after the Iron Curtain had fallen, Mr. Koerner set out for Czechoslovakia in an attempt to find the childhood homes of his parents, and recover the missing piece of his heritage. This book is the story of his travels, the extraordinary ordinary people he encountered along the way, and the heritage he found. His passionate connection with his "homeland" (Heimat) is palpable throughout, and quite contagious. His step-by-step presentation of the puzzle kept me thoroughly engrossed - as though I were reading a mystery novel (or a novel mystery, as the case may be). His inclusion of photos and maps does much to underscore the very personal human face of what is otherwise a deliberately obscured and abstract piece of history.

My two favorite chapters are the ones that describe his parents as youngsters: Chapter 13 A Sampler of Ethnic Cleansing and Chapter 21 The Beat of a Different Drummer. Chapter 5 A Picture-Perfect Day, describes the impact of the Benesch Decree on his parents, particularly his father: "His voice trailed off and became laden with resignation as he continued, `What can you do? Everything is changed. Now it is all gone!' As he spoke, I watched his eyes tear over. Embarrassed, he quickly brushed away the moisture from his eyes."

Throughout the book, Mr. Koerner paints vivid pictures of the individuals he met, rare German-speaking people who had been allowed to remain because they were married to ethnic Czechs. These people welcomed him to their homes, and went out of their way to help him locate his parents' childhood homes, telling stories, sharing photos, and providing connections to long-lost and totally unknown relatives.

Mr. Koerner brings a reflective and insistent intelligence to his search and his writing - coupled with a lively wit and a knack for drawing loops around a collection of disparate facts, gradually drawing the loop in and weaving the facts together to form a coherent whole. A thoroughly enjoyable, fascinating and compelling read!

Judith Hemenway, author of The Universe Next Door: A Personal Odyssey

I much appreciated Frank Koerner's "The Missing Peace of a Heritage Puzzle". It is a timely work because the author is only one generation away from an outcome of World War II that is not generally well known. Millions of innocent people were expelled from their homelands only because of their Germanic heritage.

The concept of "Collective Guilt" for Nazi atrocities should be acknowledged and studied while there are still those alive who can speak of it firsthand. This in no way diminishes the suffering of others who were persecuted or who lost their lives because of the Nazis. It is simply another event in history that should be recorded accurately and fairly. In this very personal account, Frank Koerner does this admirably.

Madeline Stanley

Frank Koerner has brought to life a little known true story that took place in Europe after World War II. The author's parents had been evicted from their home in Moravia in order to create the country of Czechoslovakia from a region that had previously been the loosely defined area of Sudetenland. The big story is not that they were evicted by themselves, but along with 3.5 million others! Occasionally a great movie is released at about the same time as a movie of similar subject matter, only the latter stars the hot celebrity of the day and the former one was done by a little-known production company. It may not have mattered much at the box office that the big movie was not as nearly well constructed as the lesser-known one. This is what happened to this story of 3.5 million displaced ethnic Germans: The Holocaust happens to be the big story everybody knows. This fact does not make Mr. Koerner's story of any lesser consequence.

New Jersey native Frank Koerner and his wife left their warm home in California in 1992 to visit the somewhat bleak, semi-deserted landscape of Sudetenland to seek intimate knowledge of the event in 1946 that had so altered the lives of many. Armed with ancient b&w snapshots and a modern camera that would add to their photo album, Frank and Elke sought to capture the essence of a small bit of property that should have been theirs to inherit. The property was no longer in Moravia or Sudetenland because those regions as a whole no longer existed. Many other descendants of the natives of this area have visited in recent years, too, but mostly from nearby Germany. Frank and Elke took on the expedition from a much more distant perspective. Missing Peace will take you through the process in an enlightening, delightful manner. Both the old and new photos are included within text that is a lot more lighthearted than you would expect from such somber subject matter. Grab your camera and go on vacation with Frank and Elke. You'll be glad you did.

It is amazing how you can easily relate the stories to you, especially if your family has some recent background in Europe. The author transformed a trip to Europe into a very interesting sequence of little stories that keep you imagining the scenarios, picture by picture. You can realize how much he values his family background and the challenges they faced coming to the USA.

As a descendant of Germans from the vanished Sudetenland, I was thoroughly fascinated with Mr. Koerner's account of his parents homeland -- or should I say lack of a homeland. I admire the painstaking research that was involved in compiling this book, which represents what a true memoir is supposed to be: a story of discovery based on fact. In this book, Mr. Koerner tells a touching story about his family's Americanization and his own youthful lack of understanding and confusion about his family's sad history. His parents spoke German, but their passports were Czech because hundreds of years earlier the Koerners had migrated to that region. Then, the book explains that after World War II, the German people who had lived in the area for centuries were summarily deported as undesirable foreigners. Hence, the book does more than just reconnect with his roots; it reveals a seemingly great and long-overlooked injustice. The book says that the German people of the region lost their livelihoods, their homes and their centuries-old way of life not for wrongful acts, but for their ethnicity at an awful time in history. I recently visited the region, and while this story of a forgotten people is little-told here in the U.S., it is an issue that is still very much alive in the newspapers in Prague. Mr. Koerner's book is a contribution to the ongoing battle for recognition of a wrongful government act committed in that world long ago.

This is an extraordinary story, well documented and researched. The story of his father's lost homeland becomes the author's suprising story of personal discovery. The author's dogged research, his trip to the Sudetenland and the subsequent uncovering of family mysteries provide a meaningful family history, as well as lessons in European history, geography, and politics. This book is a very good read.

Most interesting are not just the historical facts about the displaced people of the former Sudetenland, but how the author went about finding out more about his heritage, his family, and answers to some confusing stories and recollections from his youth.

Although the chapters are formerly published articles, together they create an interesting story line. Each chapter reveals a little more of the mysteries and discoveries the author makes about the area, people, relatives, and even old friends of his father.

This memoir is very unique. Mr. Koerner has created a very vivid and interesting book.

From the front cover through to the final page, Frank Koerner held me captive - for fear of missing a clever, playful treatment of wording or phrasing. What a fantastic, easy, interesting, and fun way to learn about a virtually unknown part of history. When we learn the magnitude of the deportation, I wondered if I missed that week of history class. On that issue and so many others, Mr. Koerner made me feel like a part of the story - no, I didn't miss class, this historically significant event is largely ignored. I loved the vignettes so much that I limited myself to a chapter or two each night, so that the book would last as long as possible. The joy in accompanying Mr. Koerner was exceeded only by the fun accompanying unexpected chuckles (often accompanied by a groan) that popped up with deftly managed wording and phrasing. It's a great read!