Night and Hope

Night and Hope is a collection of seven stories that center around events and personalities in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the author, Arnost Lustig, was interned during the second world war. He is today most revered as a writer of screenplays, and often referred to as the creative mind behind the Czech New Wave Cinema, predicted on the macabre and gothic sensibilities that beset a troubled youth. Fittingly in these short stories the horror of camp life and the Holocaust is gradually revealed through the eyes of people whose simplicity has been thwarted, and whose thoughts are being suffocated with hopelessness. Lustig has a verve for tarrying through the concerns of the individual, Sartrean in its emphasis, as an agent of his or her own destiny. He explores the nature of personal identity and a search for meaning in a world in which symbols, signs, institutions and language itself have been turned upside down; in which angst and an unfathomable abyss are kept at bay by insitent despair. The way in which his characters - an old shopkeeper, a middle-aged salesman, and two young disillusioned boys among others - react under such conditions is presented as proof that in the face of destruction there is an unvanquished human essence that survives and thrives. -- From http://www.amazon.com (Feb. 13, 2015).