Charles Heller, Holocaust Speaker, Prague: My Long Journey Home

Charles Heller, Holocaust survivor, will present Prague: My Long Journey Home, on Wednesday, November 1, 7-8 p.m. in the Garrett College Auditorium on the McHenry campus, as part of the Joan Crawford Lecture Series at the college. The Joan Crawford Lecture Series of presentations are offered free of charge and the general public and community members are invited to attend. Our speaker, Charles Heller, will discuss his memoir, Prague: My Long Journey Home, a true, riveting adventure and moving recollection of a loving family nearly destroyed by the Nazis, it is an inspirational story of a different kind of Holocaust survivor. Son of a mixed marriage, the author was born in Czechoslovakia three years before the German occupation of his country. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and twenty members of his family disappeared. Before his Christian mother was taken away to a slave labor camp, she hid him on a farm to protect him from deportation to a death camp. As the war was coming to a close, he exited his dark closet in order to watch the exodus of the hated German occupiers. He picked up a revolver thrown away by a retreating soldier and shot a Nazi. He was nine years old. The book is a personal account of a long journey of persecution, of struggle and survival in Nazi- and Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, and of eventual escape from tyranny to America. It is the narrative of an assimilated American, who left the horrors of the past – and even his name – behind in the Old World to live the proverbial American Dream. He became a successful engineer, educator, and entrepreneur. Then two cataclysmic events following Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution brought him face-to-face with demons of his former life. On his personal journey, Heller discovered and embraced his heritage – one which he had abandoned so many decades earlier.