Joe Vitovec came to this country from Czechoslovakia in 1950 after escaping from the communist regime in 1948 and spending two years in various refugee camps in Germany, France, and Italy.  He has studied history and art at the Texas Christian University, and urban studies at the University of Texas.  He also spent the last forty years as a commercial artist, art director, and developer of training programs and training simulators for the Air Force, and as an instructor in political science at the Tarrant Community College in Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently retired and lives, along with his wife Ruth, in Anacortes, Washington.

Tempered by the war and devastated by the loss of his best friend sent to a concentration camp by the town SS commander, young Jan Neuman finds himself fleeing his country when the government is deposed in a communist coup. A myopic world too preoccupied with the euphoria of victory over the Nazis and the darkening cloud of the Cold War to see the plight of the displaced soon puts him to the test. In the ruins of Germany, sewers of Paris, refugee camps of Italy, and ultimately America, he comes to realize that freedom can exact a terrible price. He plumbs the highs and lows of guilt, betrayal, loneliness, romance, love, despair, and vengeance. Ultimately, in a chance meeting and confrontation with his old nemesis, the former SS commander, now in the service of his adopted country, he realizes that because of his steadfast adherence to principles, he has become an anachronism, suspended in a world that has passed him by. The Cold War ends. He answers the yearning in his heart and returns, only to find himself cast adrift—a foreigner in his own country and stranger in his own home.