Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersova has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Lovely Green Eyes

Literature & Fiction

Arnošt Lustig

Contemporary

Vintage

"Leah" is set in Theresienstadt, the ghetto created by the Nazis in northern Bohemia as a staging post for the transport of Jews to Poland. The time is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their "Final Solution". Rumours are rife among the Jews in the ghetto, even though nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions, or perhaps it is deliberately not believed. The heroine of the novel, Leah, an eighteen year old girl from Holland, has, like most of those around her, given up living in accordance with her beliefs. The narrator is a lad of seventeen, likewise still relatively unaffected by the moral disinteragration around him. By chance, he encounters Vili Field, a pre-ward acquaintence who had seduced his young girlfriend. Vili takes the narrator to the tiny attic he shares with Leah. Thus begins an erotic entanglement that ends with the narrator and Vili being sent to their deaths in the East. Leah travels with them, but in a different part of the train. Conditions on this journey are unspeakable; Lustig evokes them memorably in this novel about impossible in appalling circumstances.

Waiting for Leah

Vintage Books USA

<p>Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersov- has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers.</p>

Minerva

WEAR ON EDGES OF SPINE AND COVERS. NUMBER INSIDE FRONT COVER. REST OF PAGES ARE CLEAN WITH NO WRITING OR MARKS.

Night And Hope

Northwestern University Press

Darkness Casts No Shadow (Quartet Encounters)

Quartet Books

Night and Hope (Quartet Encounters)

<p>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.</p>

Lovely Green Eyes: A Novel

Literary

Arcade Publishing

Harvill Press

Modlitba pro Kateřinu Horovitzovou

Mlada fronta

Velká trojka (Hvězdy Galaxie) (Czech Edition)

Josef Škvorecký

Milan,Kundera

Galaxie

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Books by Arnošt Lustig