A Very Short Version in the Author's Own Words

I was born a few years after the Second World War and just a year after the Communist takeover of my country, Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was our big brother and leader. Red flags and stars were everywhere; we were surrounded by an iron curtain. Because of my father's growing reputation as a documentary filmmaker, he was drafted into the army film unit and ordered to go to China to make films and teach filmmaking. It was supposed to be only a two-month assignment.

He had hoped to be able to pursue his passion, filming butterflies and rare plants; instead, he was teaching the Chinese how to make documentary films. They wanted to document the building of a highway in the Himalaya. Construction had already begun. So my father found himself in the highest mountain range in the world, in what was described to him as a remote western province of China. Gradually, he learned that this "western province" was actually Tibet and that he had been sent to film a military operation -- the construction of a highway that would open Tibet to China. An act of nature separated him from the project and he was subsequently lost in Tibet, where he lived through unimaginable experiences and met with the Boy-God-King [the Dalai Lama] in the forbidden city of Lhasa. Six months later, the Chinese army arrived with the Lhasa highway. My father witnessed its arrival and saw Tibet undergo great changes. He was lucky to get home at all.