The Treasure

In April of 1945, with the Red Army having long since crossed the Oder River and making their way toward Berlin, Otto Ther decided to bury a treasure chest. Inside it were a diamond crucifix, jewellery, and freshly polished silver cutlery. The idea was for the valuables to remain hidden at the foot of the Giant Mountains until the family could return to the town that in German was called Hohenelbe and in Czech is known as Vrchlabí. Like millions of Germans, the Thers had to flee, becoming scattered along the way. Otto died in a Bavarian refugee camp, officially from pleurisy, but in truth he succumbed to despair.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ottos's grandson, the historian Philipp Ther, makes repeated trips with his father to their lost hometown in the north of the Czech Republic. They wander through the town and the rolling hills surrounding it. They don’t find the legendary treasure chest, but the local museum does give them three crates full of photos and documents that turn out to be a treasure trove for the historian. They enable him to reconstruct his family’s entanglement in the rise of the Sudeten German Party and of national socialism in the region, in the fate of Jewish tenants, and provide insights into his father’s trauma, who at the age of sixteen had to enlist in the Volkssturm on two separate occasions. What results is not just a real-historical family novel, but also a portrait of a region of Europe that was long shrouded by the shadow of the Iron Curtain.