Echoes of Exile reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Daniela Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Spenser’s fascinating work reveals the difficult choices her mother and family faced, the tests to their loves and loyalties, and the lingering scars of exile. More than a family history, it weaves personal and historical narratives with mundane and momentous threads to create a fresh, distinctive fabric. Spenser recovers fragments of the past that contribute to a map of the present and possibilities for the future. An engrossing account of survival, resilience, and the enduring human spirit amid the maelstrom of Europe’s savage twentieth century, Echoes of Exile will interest readers who value firsthand accounts of significant events and who seek to understand the complexities of survival, identity, and political change through intimate, lived experiences.

Daniela Spenser, born in Czechoslovakia, a graduate from King's College, London, LSE and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a fellow at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Mexico City. Among other publications, she is the author of The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s,  Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International, and the co-editor of In from the Cold: Latin America´s New Encounter with the Cold War. In 2007 she was awarded The John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

In Echoes of Exile: A Family’s Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War Spenser blends personal history with political insight, tracing three generations of her family across the most turbulent chapters of the 20th century: from the devastation of the Holocaust and wartime imprisonment, through the vibrant intellectual and political life of 1960s Czechoslovakia, to the trauma of exile after the 1968 Soviet invasion. At the heart of the story are her mother, translator Ruth Tosková, and her stepfather, editor and journalist Vladimír Tosek, whose lives intertwined with prominent figures such as Jiří Pelikán and the émigré journal Listy.

The book - published in Czech by Argo (2025), in English by the University of Alabama Press (2025) and in Spanish by Penguin Random House (2025) - offers a deeply human perspective on survival, displacement, and it ends with a series of shifting relationships between political exiles and the Czech society before and after 1989.

Organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America” in cooperation with the Chair of the History of Southeastern and Eastern Europe (UR), the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, and the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft.