Jan Otčenášek

Who was Jan Otčenášek?

Jan Otčenášek was a Czech novelist and playwright.

Limping Orpheus is a semiautobiographical description of resistance by a group of young people mobilised by the Germans as munitions workers in the Totaleinsatz. His most popular work Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, about a young couple during the Nazi occupation after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, was made into a film directed by Jiří Weiss and starring Ivan Mistrík, Daniela Smutná, and Jiřina Šejbalová in 1960, then set as an opera by the Soviet composer Kirill Molchanov in 1963.