My Dear Boy

Joanie Holzer Schirm was the founding president of Geotechnical and Environmental Consultants, Inc., in Orlando, Florida, which she directed for seventeen years. She is now a full-time writer, speaker, and curator of the Holzer Collection, her father’s World War II legacy. Schirm is the author of Adventurers Against Their Will: Extraordinary World War II Stories of Survival, Escape, and Connection—Unlike Any Others, winner of the Global Ebook Award for best biography.  

Preface: Valdik’s Flight (Valdik Holzer: March 1939)
Introduction: How Emptying Boxes Filled My Life (Joanie Holzer Schirm, 2018)
Valdik’s Story
1. A Gifted Life
2. Bohemian Recollections
3. A World at War
4. A House of Many Rooms
5. “Without books, history is silent.”
6. Proud Czechs First
7. As if Stopped Mid-Gesture: Cafe Mánes
8. In Service of a Doomed Country
9. Compassionate Strangers
10. The Long Route to China
11. China Pulls Me In
12. A World Apart
13. Snowdrifts, Machine Guns, and Prayers
14. Learning to Love Peking and Its Forbidden City
15. Outback of Nowhere—Pingting
16. Love Breathes Life into the Heart
17. Leaving China
18. From Freedom to Infamy
19. A New Life in a New World
20. The Letter That Changed Everything
21. Dealing with the Outcome
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index