Uprooted and Transplanted: A Sudeten Odyssey from Tragedy to Freedom 1938-1958

The terrible events of the Second World War have written millions of stories on the face of history. Uprooted and Transplanted: A Sudeten Odyssey from Tragedy to Freedom 1938-1958, is one such story, a personal account of displacement, kindness, terror and triumph by Hanns Skoutajan.

Told through the eyes of young Sudeten boy, Uprooted and Transplanted chronicles the Skoutajan family's tense flight from Europe in 1938 to a new life in Canada. "In 1938, after annexing Austria, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland-that region of Czechoslovakia which had been inhabited for over three centuries by ethnic Germans. Some of the Sudetens sided with Hitler and welcomed the German troops. There was, however, a significant number of Sudetens who stood in solidarity with the Czechs against Hitler. They became targeted for retaliation by the Nazis and suffered humiliation and death in Hitler's concentration camps and elsewhere. Thirty-five thousand ethnic German anti-fascists did not manage to escape as my parents and I did, to Britain and then to Canada," Skoutajan writes in this powerful new book.

Settling at first in northern Saskatchewan with other Sudeten families, the Skoutajans spent three years hewing a life for themselves out of the prairie bushland. The family then left behind the dilapidated shacks in search of a better life in wartime Canada and settled in Batawa, near Trenton, Ontario. Throughout their travels, the Skoutajans maintain a remarkable ability to adapt to the situations forced upon them and to retain a dignified understanding of the tragic events unfolding in Europe.

Uprooted and Transplanted rings with the voice of young Hanns who suffered the pain of displacement and alienation with tremendous spirit and good humour. From the initial escape out of the Sudetenland to ordination as a United Church minister, the author's true life story documents one family's dramatic journey in search of home.

Hanns F. Skoutajan was born in Czechoslovakia and educated at Queen's University and Theological College in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Muenster in Germany. Ordained into the United Church of Canada in 1956, he has served the church as chaplain and minister including sixteen years as the minister of St. James-Bond United Church in Toronto. In 1986, Queen's University honoured him with the degree, Doctor of Divinity. Skoutajan retired in 1993 and now lives in Owen Sound with his wife, Marlene.