“An absolute corker… a triumph.”

            --Frank Delaney, novelist and broadcaster

 “Stephen Weeks’ DANIELA is serious history written as an historical novel. From its hero/narrator’s believable boyhood in the Ukraine to an epic, painful description of the Battle of Stalingrad, it moves swiftly but credibly to Nazi-occupied Poland’s ‘Fortress Breslau’ (alias Wroclaw) and Bohemia-Moravia’s Prague “Protectorate” via double-dealing… kinky sex, the machinations of Barrandov Studios under Hitler into the best account yet written in English of how a Stalin-hating Soviet general, A.A.Vlasov, captured by the Germans, formed a renegade army under Wehrmacht auspices that turned on its sponsors and liberated much of Prague in May 1945. Weeks’ portrait of Vlasov as a tragic human figure is the most complete and verifiably accurate that I’ve read and sheds light on an embarrassing wartime chapter that was conveniently ‘forgotten’ by both sides in the Cold War. DANIELA is a good read and a class act.”

-- Alan Levy, editor-in-chief, The Prague Post and author of The Wiesenthal File.

 

“Producing a book that is such an epic but is also a page-turner is not something many writers can pull off. It is a fantastic achievement. The book is rich with striking thoughts and images, and it told me a story I was not familiar with at all.”

-- Dr. Peter Wakelin, historian and arts reviewer

 

“A terrific read.”

            -- Michael Weigall, broadcaster and former Reuter’s correspondent in Prague.

 

“I admire the extent of your research, and the way you conjured up those troubled times and dreadful dilemmas facing people caught up in events over which they had no control.”

            -- Nicolai Tolstoy, author and historian
           

About the Author:

 

Writer, director and movie producer (Ghost Story and Sword of the Valiant) Stephen Weeks has always had a deep interest and respect for past ages but, paradoxically, a curious empathy with the present. When he restored, Penhow Castle, a ruined 12th century castle in Wales, which he bought aged 25, he invented stereo audio-tours as the way of presenting it to the public. Since then he has written and narrated over 150 tours to other historic places in Britain and elsewhere. The work of researching and writing Daniela took two years.

 

Excerpt:

 It was still an enchanting city. Whatever happened to it, Prague could never lose its beauty but nearly six years of German occupation had left it grey, with paint peeling on sculptured façades and in the winter a dense fog of acrid brown-coal smoke billowing between the high stuccoed apartment houses of a grander, Austro-Hungarian age. The lightness and gaiety of the baroque buildings too seemed saddened by the presence of the Nazi institutions that so many of them harboured. Steel helmeted guards seemed out of place outside palaces whose wedding-cake interiors should have been echoing to balls beneath glowing chandeliers, to the sweet music of Mozart.

 

Only a few weeks before I had been an escaped POW. The Gestapo in Breslau had barely believed my story. Luckily I had made up such a preposterous lie, it had overstretched their ability to disbelieve it. And now I was freshly shaved and riding in a big black staff car to an evening away from the War. It bumped over the cobbles in a large square with a park of yellowed, unsunned grass and bare, wintry trees, not far up from the river. For a while we were travelling level with a tram. Prague people looked down into the leathered luxury of this limousine with its single passenger. If they could have spat at this fellow who I was surprised to realise was me--now in a German officer’s uniform, I was sure they would have. My driver speeded up and the pastry-white faces peering out from the unlit tram windows receded behind us.

 

“It’s a telephone club,” announced Larisa, almost as soon as I had found them there. The outside of the Kosí Hnízdo, or Blackbirds’ Nest, had been dark--as was everywhere in the blackout, but inside a sweep of twitching neon led one down to the main floor, crammed with tables. But I had not reckoned on encountering Veit’s eyes. I tried to avoid them, to avoid the accusation that would fill them as I knew I would not be able to deny it with mine. But when I did catch them, they were just turning away from looking at Larisa--full of love and care for her, which in some way he wanted me to share. What I had shared with her was something else.

 

My whole arrival in Prague--of being given my own quarters, of that sudden intimacy with Larisa, of everything that was so far removed from the slavery of the last years and all in just two days--was overwhelming.

 

On every table was a telephone and every table had a number which you could read from the other side of the room. “Now the idea is you see a pretty person you like and you can ring them up at their table. You give your number and hey-presto: the magic of meeting.” As I had already found out, Larisa liked mischief.

 

“Most of them are whores,” she said matter-of-factly, seeing I had noticed that many of the tables were occupied by single attractive young women. I also noticed that at a lot of the other tables sat single seedy old men. There were also several tables with groups of blonde, square-jawed officers in their Wehrmacht uniforms, mostly already sitting with bevies of girls. The constant ringing of telephone bells gave a strange background music to the noisy alcoholic camaraderie of some SS officers from the Leibstandarte-SS “Adolf Hitler.”

 

“Come on Veit. You must have some fun. All work and no play... as they say. Now just watch this.” Larisa then picked up the phone and dialed. “Look at number eighteen,” she said.

 

A sad character at table eighteen picked up his phone.

 

“You look so darling,” she almost whispered, her voice cupped into the mouthpiece. “I want to sleep with you...”

 

She continued to tease number eighteen: “Now I want you to close your eyes for a moment... just imagine I’m taking my clothes off--just for you...” It was a game to shock poor Veit, or to impress me? But while it was being played out, my attention was being taken up by something much more arresting. I had yesterday looked down on the whole city of Prague from the gates of the Castle and wondered how a man might begin looking for a needle in a haystack.

 

Over in a shadowy corner, at a table with two quieter SS officers, sat Gabrielle. So that meant she definitely had left Breslau and returned here, as I had hoped. The hardness of her face was softened by the haze of cigarette smoke trapped by the Kosí Hnízdo’s low, vaulted ceiling. I could see her black-gloved left hand kept under the table as she sat talking and joking with the two men. I would wait: perhaps in a while she would be on her own.

 

I did not leave with Veit and Larisa. Alone at my table I now watched Gabrielle intently. The SS men showed no signs of ending their conversation. After all, it could go on all night until, perhaps, she sold one or more of her girls to them... I suddenly stopped. I didn’t want to think of that, of the particular girl she might be selling--even as I watched. Maybe the only thing to do was to call her.

 

I summoned up my courage, although why I was nervous I couldn’t quite understand. Perhaps it was because she was the only possible link I had to that girl I was so desperate to find again. She was the owner of a secret worth infinitely more to me at that moment than the twenty-five Reichsmarks she was no doubt trying to squeeze out from each of these bastard Nazis. I dialed twenty three, the number of her table.

 

She picked up the phone, sharing it in her right hand with her cigarette, and looked around the room. Perhaps I was the only one who was also on a phone at that moment, or perhaps she recognised me. I did not say my number. She glanced over to me without any visible sign of recognition however and exhaled a slow, long whistle of smoke from her mouth. “Sorry,” she said, “wrong number,” and hung up. I saw the SS men sharing a laugh with her... in the Blackbirds’ Nest there weren’t any wrong numbers.

 

A cabaret singer left the tiny stage and gramophone records began. A piano-accordionist with only one hand took longer than the two other musicians to pack up his things.

 

I didn’t know quite what to do. Maybe I should go over to her. Maybe not. The officers turned away from her and spoke amongst themselves for a minute as she made a brief call. I wished I could understand what was going on. I wildly speculated. What if she didn’t want to speak to me for some reason... how would I ever find her then? I was riding an emotional big dipper.

 Then my phone rang. Since I was staring at Gabrielle I could see it wasn’t her.

 “Sergei?”

 “Yes.”

 “You know who I am?”

 My God. It was her. I was certain it was... “Yes, yes. I do. I thought I’d never...”

 This was incredible.

 “My real name is Daniela. See, I remember you! Don’t look for me now. Another time, maybe.”

 The phone went dead. I did look frantically around but I could not see her. Nor was she in the street outside. I was in a daze. I had found her. Almost.

 Why I had this sense of excitement at discovering her again then I shall perhaps never quite understand. It’s far too late for me now to speculate, all these years on. But I want to recall my story, all of it, to myself--just as I would recount it to those television people, if they ever come back: to tell it simply, as it happened, making no judgements.

 Perhaps that is just as well--for it is in the nature of memory to store events rather than feelings: sometimes the digits of telephone numbers rather than painful conversations; the hard, bare, plastered walls of situations rather than the soft furnishings. From only this little snippet of the past I was already aware that my recalling of events would be a mixture of intimacy and detachment, depending not only on the strength of memory, but of conscience too. However, judgements--they would have to be for others to form. But to tell my story properly I should start at the beginning, what is left of it...