In The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, Pater Sís revisits the Czechoslovakia of his childhood. A two-year ordeal, Sís relived painful memories and actually stopped working on the book twice. One of the most difficult things for Sís to assimilate was that his memory is fallible; even though he “remembers” the Red Phone (the hot line between the Kremlin and the U.S. President), in fact it never existed and his editor could not allow it to appear in the story. “I had to find positives in a negative,” says Sís of trying to write a story for children that dealt with the darkest time of his life. [Read the rest of my profile with Peter Sis.]