I first glimpsed Vladimir Krajina thirty years ago when he stood, somewhat unsteadily, and maybe a little stooped, to dissect a forester who was giving the annual MacMillan Lecture in the old H.R. MacMillan forestry building at the University of British Columbia. I had absolutely no idea who was standing formally and speaking in perfect English, questioning the precepts of the entire lecture with regard to stated and achieved reforestation results. I wish I had known.

Jan Drabek's book, Vladimir Krajina: World War II Hero and Ecology Pioneer (Ronsdale 2013) has filled the gaps in my own (and, I suspect, many others') knowledge of this determined, stubborn, intelligent, and brave individual.

To myself and many, many undergraduate and graduate forestry students, Krajina was the icon of ecological knowledge and systematic land-based ecological classification. Drabek articulates his importance to forestry here in the second half of the book. Together with some of his most prominent students, Karel Klinka and Hamish Kimmins among them, Krajina definitively wrote the book of ecological classification, indicator plant species, and prescriptive reforestation practice for British Columbia. In addition, Krajina's work to establish the ecological reserves program in British Columbia was, and remains, a hugely important part of our natural heritage and scientific database.

What, to many, was unknown was the story - ably captured by Drabek - of Krajina's life and family before he arrived in Vancouver in 1949 as a political refugee. He came from the recently subjugated country of Czechoslovakia, a country that was released from Nazi occupation only four years previously, but was quickly immersed in what has been shown to be an equally sinister and criminal occupation by Soviet Russia. Drabek chronicles how Krajina was not only a professor of botany in pre-war Czechoslovakia but also fought alongside good friends against the German occupation as a member of the Czech resistance. Krajina lived through the execution of some of these friends - as well as his brother - at the hands of the Gestapo, and was separated from his beloved wife, Marie, for years (two of which she spent in the Ravensbruck concentration camp). In postwar Czechoslovakia, Krajina became an active member of a democratic Czech political party, living among a people steadily undermined by Soviet operators who tortured, imprisoned, terrorized and executed political adversaries. In 1948, along with his wife, mother-in-law, his teenage daughter and infant son, Krajina fled their homeland for the safety of the UK and eventually Canada.

I think that my life and the lives of many of the students around me in that early 1980s lecture hall would have been changed, perhaps forever, if we had known the story of this man's previous life told by Jan Drabek in Vladimir Krajina: World War II Hero and Ecology Pioneer. Although Krajina was a man known in BC for an almost religious fervor of devotion to sound ecological land management principles, he was also a man who had been a part of - and survived - one of the most tumultuous and violent decades of human history. Drabek refers to Krajina's generation as the "Greatest Generation,"; people who lived through the Great Depression and survived World War II. As a middle-aged parent and participant in the very global community of the "wood business"; I reflect that given today's many regional conflicts and great economic and political uncertainties, we as a people engaged in many layers of societal governance require the stamina, courage and integrity of a "Great Generation"; in order to move forward and continue to celebrate the good in our world.

[Reviewer Greg Antle is a hardwood specialist who lives in Fort Langley. This review was first published in British Columbia History, Spring 2013 | Vol. 46 No. 1]