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This is a collection of moving stories that transcend the guesome realities of concentration camps.
Stories about young people in the unique concentration-camp ghetto organized the Nazis in the Czech city of Terezin are based on the author's own childho experiences and observations.
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.
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.
For the first time, Arnost Lustig's short story collections Street of Lost Brothers and Indecent Dreams and his novel Dita Saxova are brought together in an omnibus edition. As with all of Lustig's works, these tales reverberate with themes of loss and contradiction, with the torments of suffering and survival. In The Bitter Smell of Almonds, Lustig asks questions as old and as universal as humankind's search for the meaning of existence; and his characters, often juxtaposed against people or situations they cannot comprehend, attempt to come to terms with the unthinkable and with life itself.
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.