"I want to be a poet with all my heart. With all my heart and, even more, I want to die for it " These were the words Jiri Orten wrote to the poet Frantisek Halas in 1939, who published his first book of poetry The First Reader Spring, which appeared under the pseudonym Karel Jilek because Orten, being a Jew, could not be published under his own name. On the 30th August 1941, the day of his twenty-second birthday, he was knocked down by a German ambulance in a Prague street. As a Jew, he was refused first-aid treatment in a nearby hospital. He died two days later of a brain hemorrhage in the...