Fighting for Road Apples

Book excerpt: Author Erika C. Stevenson was just six years old when, after World War II, soldiers expelled more than three million Sudeten Germans from their ancestral homes in the Sudetenlands of Czechoslovakia. In Fighting for Road Apples, she tells the story of how she was indelibly marked for life as a refugee. In this memoir, she discusses her experiences in bomb shelters; with ethnic cleansing; of enduring a cruel separation from her mother; and of being contained in a stinking boxcar for livestock, condemned for expulsion from her homeland in Bohemia. Intertwined with her familys heritagemarked by misfortunes and struggles of survivalshe narrates the stories of the turbulent, blighted-by-poverty postwar years in Germany. Stevenson describes blithe anecdotes of teen adventures and of falling in love with a foreign student who harbored a few secrets. She also recounts her fathers compelling escape from a British POW camp after D-Day and his later incarceration in a notorious Czech concentration camp. A story of challenges and triumphs, Fighting for Road Apples narrates the true story of what ordinary people endured during an extraordinary time.