On the Road to Freedom: and From Captivity
In 1918 a band of Czech and Slovak ex-POWs took over the Trans-Siberian railway in the course of the Russian Civil War; in effect they seized a sub-continent spanning ten time zones. Jesenský was one of these ex-prisoners, although he was not a combat soldier but a journalist working for the propaganda department of the Czechoslovak Legion.
A Slovak lawyer, Jesenský was conscripted into the Austrian army in 1914 and soon afterwards was captured by the Russians. After a winter as a POW, he was released to fight – or rather write – against the Germans and Austrians. Despite the title of the English language-edition of his book, he was a free man for over two years before starting across Siberia on his journey home.
You will find little about the Legion’s military operations in this book. Instead, there is a lot of politics, mostly internal Czech and Slovak politics, and some evocative accounts of prison and émigré life. An interesting memoir of a remarkable episode.
