Prague Winter is my attempt to record a demented time during which I was both witness and involuntary participant. For many years I was haunted by nightmares of being recaptured by the Gestapo or of being trapped in Prague under the communists.

Nikolaus (Claude) Martin was born in Bohemia in 1919 of a German father and Czech mother. He grew up in Prague, becoming life long friends with several of his early schoolmates. They indulged in all the distractions available to young men in Prague, neglecting their studies as much as possible, exemplifying what the world has come to know as "Bohemian." It was a good life until the Czech universities were closed by Nazi occupation at the beginning of the Second World War. Martin spent the last year of that war in a concentration camp. He was both witness and involuntary participant of that demented time. Haunted by nightmares of being recaptured by the Gestapo or of being trapped in Prague under the Communists, he tried to put those demons to rest with the telling of his story. He may not have quelled the nightmares entirely, but he has dispassionately shown that prejudice and hatred are not the province of only one country or people. After the war his facility in several languages land him a job as a journalist on the international desk of a Czech press agency until the Communist regime established in Czechoslovakia in 1948 threatened his freedom and compelled him to flee his country to France. He immigrated to Canada in 1950, married a Canadian, and became a citizen in 1955. Over the years, Martin, his wife, and three children lived in many countries, and his work took him all over the world. Eventually they settled on a rural property in the south of France overlooking the Pyrenees, enjoying the pastoral life of sheep, dogs, gardens, and the fine foods and wine of France. In 1993, there was an international commemoration of a political leader who died in the Terezin Ghetto. The President of the Czech Republic, the Austrian Chancellor, and the chair of the German Social Democratic Party in the Bundestag all spoke. Martin read from his book, PRAGUE WINTER. After his wife of 40 years died in 1994, Martin began thinking about how and where to live out the rest of his life. In 1996, Martin,along with his two Great Pyrenean Mountain Dogs Racqel and Farah, moved back to Canada permanently and established residence in the mountains of the West Kootenays of British Columbia.