Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance, a memoir, chronicles the remarkable life of Charles Novacek? one that took him from his youth spent in the Czech resistance against the Nazis and the Communists to the displaced persons camps of Germany, to the military dictatorship of Venezuela, before granting him access to the American Dream. Charles Novacek was born in Czechoslovakia in 1928 to a Hungarian homemaker mother and Moravian policeman father. In 1938, his idyllic childhood was shattered with the Munich Agreement, displacement of the Novacek family to Moravia and the ensuing Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The family became actively involved in the Czech resistance. At the age of eleven Charles and his sister Vlasta were trained for wartime resistance by their father Antonin and Uncle Josef Robotká: how to resist pain, hunger and fear'and to trust no one. Novacek continued his work in the resistance after World War II ended as the Soviets occupied his homeland. He endured arrest, capture, and torture ultimately escaping across the German border. Novacek's memoir brings the experiences and thoughts of the young resistance fighter sharply to life while also bearing the sage perspective of a man in his eighth decade of life. ?Border Crossings is the well-told and dramatic story of a young man whose comfortable life is abruptly transformed by the savagery of World War II. Forced to rely on primal instincts and his familiarity with the rugged highlands of Moravia, Charles Novacek casts his lot first with the anti-Hitler Underground and then with the resistance to the Nazis? Communist successors. ?My recollections pain me,? he writes, ?still, they have made me who I am.' Novacek's experience as a Hungarian-speaking Czecho-Slovak patriot demonstrates the folly of petty nationalism and the resilience of human decency and love.'?Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State