Erika Storey was born in Saaz, Bohemia, on December 29, 1936. At age eight, she was expelled with her mother and sister during the mass displacement of Sudeten Germans in June 1945. Interned in an SS barracks camp where children died daily, she was transported in open coal wagons to East Germany, where the family endured two years of starvation and disease that reduced them to “skeletons.”

Her father, returning from Yugoslav captivity in 1947, wept at their reunion. The family risked being shot crossing the border illegally into West Germany to escape certain death in the Soviet zone.

After rebuilding her life in Bavaria, Erika moved to England as an au pair in 1958, where she married a teacher. They raised four children together. Following her husband’s death in 1987, she wrote A Childhood in Bohemia and the Flight to the West to document events largely unknown in English-speaking countries.