SOURCE: Zamoyski, Adam. “Bearing Witness to the Truth.” Spectator 273, no. 8683 (10 December 1994): 43.

In the following review, Zamoyski praises Klíma's skill with prose and narrative in The Spirit of Prague and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light.

Ivan Klima has had quite a life. He was eight years old when the war began to impinge on his Prague childhood, restricting his movements in the city, banning him from school, forbidding him from going to the cinema—though he challenged the Gestapo on that one when Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came to town. He describes these things in The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays as they appeared to him then—as minor nuisances—and he records the exhilaration he felt when the whole family were pushed on to a train bound for the concentration camp of Terezin. It was the excitement any child feels...