Student Odyssey

Slovak writer and historian Jozef Leik has been working for forty years on the events after November 17, 1939, when the Nazis forcibly established Czech universities, where many Slovaks also studied. On the orders of Adolf Hitler, young people and 1,222 students were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, under threat of execution for deviance, with the aim of liquidating the future Czech and partly Slovak intelligentsia. The book describes in detail the atrocities that the students had to endure in the concentration camp, but also those Czech and Slovak students who fled to the regular Czechoslovak foreign army. They fought in France and after the country's capitulation, they moved to Great Britain, where they helped defeat the German enemy. Some students managed to study at English universities and, together with English students, established International Students' Day on November 17, 1941. The book was translated into English by Jonathan Gresty and published in London.