Arnost Lustig

After witnessing the suicide of her father and the murder of her mother and brother upon their arrival in Auschwitz, fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersova is forced to choose between working in a German military brothel on the eastern front or death, in a haunting novel that examines the compromises and choices one is forced to make in order to survive. Reprint.

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First published in 1962, Night and Hope is a collection of interrelated short stories by a young Czech writer who was a boy in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague during the war. They have already been received with great acclaim abroad and they now make their appearance for the first time in this country. They reveal what it was like to live in a sealed town which was in fact a reception station for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. A guard thrashes a poor old woman on the counter of her little shop and each are curiously resigned to their roles of giving and receiving degradation. Little boys play in the streets and are quietly regretful that they won’t grow up and wear fine clothes. A guard’s wife and her coffee-party friends stroll round the ghetto to collect anything that catches their eye—a wedding-ring, pathetic clothes.... Arnošt Lustig’s stories are a new and vivid focus on this fearful tragedy as it affected the private individual. They are written with restraint yet nothing is glossed, and they take their place amongst the very best writing to have come out of the shambles of Hitler’s ‘Jewish Question’. “Arnošt Lustig has succeeded in putting truth into a poem. Nothing in art could mean more than that. His style is sober and modern, his sentence carries all attributes of that which connects prose with poetry and makes it obvious how slight and unperceivable the borderlines between genres.”—L. Askenazy, Literarni Noviny (Prague). “Each tale has a genuine unity of its own and is a small work of art in its own right. No one reading them could ever feel that they were only stories.”—The Times Literary Supplement (London). “No writer in Europe, in the East or in the West, has expressed as much truth about the time of the holocaust as Arnošt Lustig.”—Maariv (Tel Aviv). “Outstanding stories.”—The Bookman, London

Night and Hope

Arnošt Lustig's fiction has always been too close to the facts for comfort. In The House of Returned Echoes, he pays tribute to the life of his father, who died in Auschwitz in 1944. In Prague in the difficult time between the wars, a man fights to keep his family and his business alive despite anti-Semitism and economic hardship. Emil Ludvig has always relied on the simple rules of his family and the basic laws of civilization to counteract his misfortunes, and being a decent man himself, he refuses to believe that the Nazi threats will be carried out. Yet, he also becomes a victim of the camps, and his story resonates with both Lustig's personal experiences and the shared memories of the Holocaust.

The House of Returned Echoes

~" Elle avait tenu tête à un monde. " Les cheveux rouges et les yeux verts, elle se trouve sur la rampe de tri à Auschwitz. Elle survit. Une fois, deux fois, juste parce qu'elle sait saisir l'occasion, juste parce qu'elle n'a pas le choix. Hanka se fait prostituée dans un bordel militaire. D'une écriture limpide, sur le fil du rasoir, Arnošt Lustig imagine le destin peu ordinaire d'une jeune fille qui, face à l'inattendu, choisit coûte que coûte la vie et l'espoir.

Elle avait les yeux verts

Auschwitz, 1943. Peut-être est-ce quelque chose dans le regard de Katarzyna Horowitz, son pas souple de danseuse, sa fierté. Ou bien ces simples paroles, sur la rampe, à peine débarquée du convoi : " Mais moi, je ne veux pas mourir. " Prise en pitié par le chef de la section secrète du camp, la jeune femme se retrouve sous la protection de vingt hommes d'affaires juifs américains qui ont monnayé avec des officiers allemands la promesse d'être libérés par un échange de prisonniers avec le gouvernement américain. Quand la promesse se révèle être un cruel stratagème des Allemands pour extorquer l'argent du groupe, c'est la silencieuse et timide Katarzyna qui s'avère détenir, en un ultime acte de courage, la clef de leur liberté. Par ce portrait de femme au destin extraordinaire, Arnošt Lustig offre une réflexion sur le choix et la dignité humaine face à l'inacceptable.

Arnost Lustig

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