Arnošt Lustig Books

Stories about young people in the unique concentration-camp ghetto organized by the Nazis in the Czech city of Terezin are based on the author's own childhood experiences and observations

During the Second World War, it was not unusual for “death trains” to cross Europe loaded with thousands of starving Jews. Having spent his teenage years in concentration camps, Arnost Lustig found himself on one of these transports in 1945, on the way to his own death. Along with a close friend, who was also a teenager, he made an incredibly daring escape. This is the story of that escape, and the weeks that the two boys spent in the dark forests of Germany trying to survive against hunger and cold, to avoid capture by the Germans, and to return to their native Prague. On the psychological plane, the book explores the subconscious minds of the two protagonists as they experience extreme fear, starvation, and physical exhaustion in their desperate flight toward freedom. The escape journey—undertaken against incredible odds—is described in such careful detail that the reader enters into the experience almost without realizing that he has slipped into a new kind of reality, and the frequent flashbacks to life in the concentration camps and ghettos give the entire book an unforgettable cinematic quality.

The stories in this collection take place in the Nazi concentration campus, on death transports, and during the last turbulent days of World War II. Lustig explores the very essence of humanity. His characters, mostly children and old people, are ravaged by torture and loss. Faced by conditions of extreme inhumanity and moral nightmare, each must fight his way forward realizing his particular identity and fate, salvaging some form of inner sanity and decency. Out of this chaos, in moments of resistance and improbable acts of heroism, Lustig's characters discover truths about the human condition which shine like diamonds in the night of Nazi terror.

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersova has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, Hanka is faced with a choice: follow her family to the gas chamber, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. Choosing life, she fights cold, hunger, fear and shame.

Dita Saxova is an eighteen-year-old concentration camp survivor trying to start a new life in postwar Prague. Living in a special hostel for orphans from the camps, too old to be cared for parentally, too young to be fully adult, too soaked in reality to harbor many illusions, Dita struggles to reconcile struggles to reconcile her unfathomable past with her enigmatic future. First published in Czech in 1962, then in English in 1979, Dita Saxova confirms Arnost Lustig's place as one of the masterful storytellers of the Holocaust period.

Three novellas about resisting brutality, and the stupidity of dehumanizing power: a German prostitute assigned to Prague; a girl in a Nazi home for orphans; and a young woman working as a cashier in a movie theatre.

It is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'final solution'. Compromises are being made on all sides, conditions are unspeakable, rumours are rife, but nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions. On the outskirts of a concentration camp in northern Bohemia three people - two eighteen-year-old men and a desperately lost young woman, Leah - are thrown together, sharing their precarious existence in an attic room. While the world disintegrates around them their relationships are charged with passion, their days filled with erotic and spiritual attraction. Caught in the web of their relationships, their futures are uncertain and any choices they have left to make will be made in the face of almost certain death...

The Unloved traces five months in the life of Perla S., a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who, while living in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, becomes a prostitute. Capturing Perla's voice through a series of entries in her diary, Lustig tells how she, living in a world of lies and horror, maintains her integrity, honesty, and hope. This first paperback edition of The Unloved has been extensively revised and expanded by Lustig.

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