In the Garden of Men

the long version

From back cover: In 1968, an inconsequential government worker finds himself swept into the mechanism of state oppression after the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia. Put to work processing the warrants for anyone who opposes the new regime, he falls quickly into the moral no-man's land of repressive bureaucracy. As his signatures send thousands to their fate, a series of chance encounters with a priest, a prostitute and the ghosts of the disappeared forces him to face a fundamental choice: to stay hidden in the embrace of anonymity, or to act and seal his own doom.