Death Is Called Engelchen (Smrť sa volá Engelchen)

About the Author: Ladislav Mňačko (1919–1994) was a Slovak writer and journalist. He became the most translated Slovak author in the world. His parents were Czechs living in Moravia. He spent his childhood and youth in the town of Martin in Central Slovakia where his father worked as a postmaster. He did not finish his studies at high school and instead got training to work in a drugstore. In 1940, he tried to cross the border between Germany and the Netherlands; he was detained and imprisoned. In 1944 Mňačko escaped from the forced labour camp in the Ruhr region in Germany and took part in the partisan movement in East Moravia. After the war, he was at first a staunch supporter of the Czechoslovak Communist regime and one of its most prominent journalists. He travelled both in Czechoslovakia and abroad and wrote many reports (for instance books about Israel, China and Vietnam). His works of fiction were also based on actual events and real characters. In 1961, Mňačko took part in the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (see his book I, Adolf Eichmann). In the 1960s, he became a vocal critic of the Communist regime, for which he was censored. Due to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he emigrated first to Israel, later to Austria, where he lived for the next 20 years. His works were forbidden in Czechoslovakia. After the fall of the Communist regime in November 1989, he returned and lived in Slovakia. But subsequent political developments and the growth of nationalism in Slovakia disappointed him. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia (1992), he moved to Prague.