Word: ludvik
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...exhilarations -- and perils -- of bold action were part of Maxwell's appetite from the start. Born Jan Ludvik Hoch in the Czech village of Solotvino, he lost his parents and four siblings at Auschwitz. Having left for Budapest in 1939, he arrived in France early the following year and sailed to Liverpool a few months later. He won Britain's Military Cross in January 1945 for leading a platoon against a German defensive position. In London after the war, he launched Pergamon Press, a scientific publisher. In 1969 Maxwell lost the company in a scandal: he was charged with misrepresenting...
...Born Ludvik Hoch, Maxwell was the third of nine children of dirt-poor Hasidic Jews living in the eastern slice of Czechoslovakia known as Ruthenia. During World War II, he lost his parents and four siblings in Auschwitz; he escaped by joining the French underground. He had only three years of schooling but was a genius with languages -- he could speak eight by the time he was grown -- and figures. He joined the British forces and in two years transformed himself from a Czech ruffian into a British army officer who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in charging...
...DIED. Ludvik Svoboda, 83, President of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Soviet invasion; in Prague. Having fled to Poland when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Svoboda returned in 1945 as a triumphant general, alongside Red Army forces. He became Czechoslovakia's first postwar Defense Minister and secretly abetted the Communist takeover three years later. Discredited and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges of the early '50s, he was politically resurrected by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1968, the retired general was selected as a compromise presidential candidate by liberal Czech Leader Alexander Dubcek, who hoped the choice would allay Moscow...
Another prolific, now-silenced Czech writer is Milan Kundera. While he became famous in the West with his political novel The Joke, his work became a classic in Prague where anybody would know the famous quotation from it when Ludvik, replying to his enthusiastically communist girlfriend who wrote to him about the "health atmosphere" prevailing at the summer Party school, quips on a postcard...
...Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik...