Darkness Casts No Shadow

Children of the Holocaust #2

by Arnošt Lustig

English, Czech (translation)

Genres: Czech Literature, Fiction, War, Holocaust, World War II, Novels, European Literature

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Arnošt Lustig (born 21 December 1926 in Prague) is a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.

As a Jewish boy in Czechoslovakia during World War II, he was sent in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where he was later transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, followed by time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp when the engine was mistakenly destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He returned to Prague in time to take part in the May 1945 anti-Nazi uprising.

After the war, he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and then worked for a number of years at Radio Prague. He worked as a journalist in Israel at the time of its War of Independence where he met his future wife, who at the time was a volunteer with the Haganah. He was one of the major critics of the Communist regime in June 1967 at the 4th Writers Conference, and gave up his membership in the Communist Party after the 1967 Middle East war, to protest his government's breaking of relations with Israel. However, following the Soviet-led invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968, he left the country, first to Israel, then Yugoslavia and later in 1970 to the United States. After the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, he divided his time between Prague and Washington DC, where he continued to teach at the American University. After his retirement from the American University in 2003, he became a full-time resident of Prague. He was given an apartment in the Prague Castle by then President Václav Havel and honored for his contributions to Czech culture on his 80th birthday in 2006. In 2008, Lustig became the eighth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize. [1]

Lustig is married to the former Vera Weislitzová (1927), daughter of a furniture maker from Ostrava who was also imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp. Unlike her parents, she was not deported to Auschwitz. She wrote of her family's fate during the Holocaust in the collection of poems entitled "Daughter of Olga and Leo." They have two children, Josef (1950) and Eva (1956).

His most renowned books are A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa (published and nominated for a National book award in 1974), Dita Saxová (1979), Night and Hope (1985), and Lovely Green Eyes (2004). Dita Saxová and Night and Hope have been filmed.

Reviews

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the creative writing professor mentioned in the review of Robert Girardi's The Pirate's Daughter--since I read something by Girardi, his substitute, I couldn't very well forget the man who has been teaching me the other twelve weeks of the semester, could I? Well, actually, I was somewhat hesitant about making an attempt at Arnost's fiction. I'll admit to being intimidated by him (he is a survivor of three concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkneau), especially when our first assignment was to write the most interesting story of our lives. Right, I thought, like anything that has happened in my measly existence would prove exciting to a man who was nearly shot three times, was interrogated by the KGB, and has won an Emmy award for one of his screenplays. On the other hand, maybe I just needed the challenge, because the story I completed is my best ever (in my estimation).

Darkness Casts No Shadow is a roughly autobiographical story of Arnost's escape from a freight train (carrying human passengers to Theisenstadt) with another young man. In class, we got the real biographical details, which have been merged and separated in the fiction. The escape was initiated by an American fighter who mistook the train as one ferrying soldiers, and Arnost and his companion (Manny and Danny in the story) watch while the bullets rip apart the prisoners in the early freight cars, deciding that they will risk jumping and running rather than wait for the sure death of the American's bullets.

It's an exciting tale of adventure, but the adrenaline is muted by the flashbacks that tell the background to the boys being on that freight car, including their former lives and the deaths of many of their family members. I've not read much Holocaust literature, for example, I've never read The Diary of Anne Frank, most of my knowledge regarding this time limited to The Hiding Place and documentaries (but not Schindler's List, which I managed to avoid, somehow). This story is inherently sobering, making one stop and realize the day-to-day horror of the situation. This is not an anti-war story, but one promoting anti-brutality. It is also highly moralistic (in the best sense that all literature should have a moral underpinning). Yeah, I was impressed by it. The ending is a little open to interpretation; I know that Arnost and his friend survived, but the reader wonders if Manny and Danny escape. My feeling is that Arnost selected such an ambiguous ending to reflect the thousands of escapees, rather than just his particular experience. Some did survive; most did not.

[Erica Tuggle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the Holocaust, and so saying that I enjoyed this book has room for misinterpretation.

Everyone has heard of Elie Wiesel, but he's only one of many who have Holocaust survivor stories to tell. Arnost Lustig's novel, based on his own experiences, is different from Wiesel's "Night" though in that most of the action occurs between two boys who have escaped a transport train car and are walking the woods to their new life. The portraits of their time in the concentration camps is told by way of dream and flashback sequences.

The ending is as perfect as it gets for this subject matter. The story is just long enough to resonate and stick with you for a long time. This is a classic that slipped through the cracks somehow. For teachers and students looking for something different to remember the Holocaust, this is a must read.

#5StarRead

[Martha Anne Toll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe if you had to choose one novel to read about the Holocaust this should be it. I agree with the commentator who said "one is grateful ...for the fiction that we are reading fiction." A short fable that screams the truth.

Here is my feature discussing this book--


http://www.washingtonindependentrevie...

For Passover, Fresh New Takes on “People of the Book”

Martha Toll
March 27, 2013

The escape from oppression into a vast diaspora is a theme that has preoccupied Jewish writers from Exodus to modern times: here are a few titles that treat this subject with refreshing originality.

Spring heralds the holiday of Passover, in which Jews celebrate their escape from bondage during ancient times. We receive the Passover story from a major literary work — the book of Exodus. A second book also plays a significant role in the holiday, the Haggadah, providing the script for the retelling of the Exodus around Passover’s ritual family meal, the Seder. The story in a tweet: Moses demands that the Egyptian Pharaoh “Let my people go,” and with divine intervention and some major hassles, Pharaoh relents.

Jews have been called a people of the book. The escape from oppression into a vast diaspora is a theme that has preoccupied Jewish writers from Exodus to modern times. To mark the coming of Passover, here are a few titles that treat this subject with refreshing originality.

Long before Pi Patel was gracing the big screen with his worries about surviving in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, Max Schmidt was caught in the middle of the Atlantic with a jaguar in his dinghy. In Max and the Cats (published in 1981 in Brazil by Moacyr Scliar and translated from the Portuguese by Eloah F. Giacomelli in 1990), Max finds himself in deep water after his lover, Frida’s Nazi husband discovers their infidelity. The book might properly be subtitled “let my felines go.” Cats of all sizes and shapes feed Max’s neuroses, starting from his boyhood spent hiding among the furs in his father’s shop, "The Bengal Tiger” named for the tiger that graces the wall. Max never fully succeeds in escaping either the threat of Frida’s Nazi husband or his own feline demons. Although Frida manages to book Max safe passage to Brazil from Hamburg, Max discovers too late that the Italian zookeeper on board has planned the boat’s sinking to collect insurance. Through a series of miracles, Max makes it safely to Brazil. Once there, he fights off Nazis both real and imagined, and is financially rescued by a Jew who gives Max more than he asks for his mother’s jewels. Max is freed —if not culturally or mentally, at least economically — to live out his days as a member of Brazil’s landed gentry.

Although Max is not Jewish, the mismatch of European Jews in the Brazilian diaspora is a theme Scliar addresses repeatedly in his fiction. Try Scliar’s The War in Bom Fim (translated by David William Foster), in which a band of boys, gangly and pimply, enact a fantasy that they are defending Brazil’s third-largest city against invading Nazis. The phantasmagorical Nazi presence is no less credible than Scliar’s descriptions of Marc Chagall’s violinists leaving their paintings to fly across the Bom Fim sky. Magical realism meets German Luftwaffe, Brazilian prostitutes dance with Eastern European immigrants, and Yiddish spices up Portuguese. Mama Shendl threatens a local black man named Macumba with a carving knife when he enters her backyard on Passover eve, only to befriend him and keep him sated on borscht and kneidlach. “We are alike,” the ailing Macumba tells Shendl’s dying son, Nathan, “But keep it a secret.” Part allegory, part coming of age story, The War in Bom Fim is above all a tale of outsiders struggling to survive in a foreign culture.

In The Invisible Wall, Harry Bernstein’s memoir of growing up dirt poor and Jewish in northern England, Harry’s downtrodden but heart-of-gold mother of six children dreams of escaping to America to avoid bondage to her angry, abusive husband, who drinks away his paltry earnings. Polish shtetl meets Lancashire poverty, replete with the odd English twist. For example, Jewish children bring their fathers daily tea in the tailoring shops. As a “Hebrew,” Harry is banned from the better grammar school on the pretense that his mother can’t buy him proper shoes, and his older brother Joe is invited to interview at a Manchester newspaper in order to be warned that as a Jew, he’d better never try for a job in journalism again. In this memoir, the oppression is both marital and economic, and the longed-for escape is from a gritty English mill town to the New World.

Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson (translated from the German by Damion Searls), recounts a Jew in an attic, but altogether different from Anne Frank. Wim and Marie, a young Dutch couple, fulfill their humanitarian duty by harboring a Jew traveling under the pseudonym Nico. Anyone visiting the house carries the threat of betrayal, putting all three characters in mortal peril. Keilson, himself a German Jewish émigré to the Netherlands, mines the emotional and physical fallout from Nico’s only escape — illness and death in the young couple’s custody. Wim and Marie have risked their secret being exposed long before they face the danger of disposing of Nico’s body. In a mere 135 pages, Keilson explores freedom and incarceration through a simple (or not so simple) act of kindness.

Darkness Casts No Shadow, by Arnošt Lustig (translated from the Czech by Jeanne Nĕmcová), considers a different escape from oppression. Danny and Manny jump from a transport train headed for a concentration camp that is being bombed by Americans. They succeed in fleeing the train, but cannot escape starvation, injury and cold in the forest. Theirs is a story of two friends, doomed to die, who hold themselves together with their love for one another and their will to go on. They trudge through the woods recalling the ordinary and the extraordinary — their parents’ deaths in the gas chambers, and their acquisition of sexual knowledge. In the end they are shot by German civilians. They fade “into the night, like a slim double shadow. The stillness was not silenced.”

In this last sentence of the book, Lustig defines the writer’s role from Exodus onward: to imbue the stillness with meaning.

Martha Toll is executive director of the Butler Family Fund, a nationwide philanthropy focused on ending homelessness and the death penalty. She has been featured as a book commentator on NPR and is represented for her debut novel.

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short novel about two teenage Jewish boys on the run from the Nazis. The main narrative follows their escape and attempts to elude detection, but continually flashes back to memories of life inside the death camps. It's an easy read (in terms of language and style), sometimes suspenseful, but also disturbing at times, especially in the way the boys have become so used to the lack of value placed on human life by the Nazis that they have come to accept it.

A minor quibble I had is that I found it hard to distinguish between the two boys, especially as they were called Manny and Danny. However, Lustig (himself a camp survivor), paints a haunting picture of a world in which humanity's moral compass has not merely been lost, but brutally ground into the dirt.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

My reading of this short novel was handicapped by having just seen the film version by Jan Nemec, Diamonds of the Night, which is beautifully photographed and features very little dialogue, focusing on the physical travails of the two protagonists, Jewish teenagers who have escaped from a train transporting them from the camps into Germany as the war ends. The plot of the film and book is largely the same, but Lustig's version is handicapped by too much expository dialogue between two people who probably would not be speaking very much to each other. It's odd, because Lustig could have covered all of this information in the flashback sequences which are interspersed throughout the story. In any event, this is a story of fighting for survival when one is weakest, and Lustig does a good job of conveying the exhaustion and fatalism which drag the characters down, and the rage and will to live which keep them going onwards.

[Zuza · Rating 4 out of 5]

,,Vápna je ve mně jen tolik, že bys nevybílil ani strop hajzlíku v německým kasínu v Terezíně. Síry, že bys možná zaplynoval kotě. Z mýho fosforu bys vyrobil dvacet čtyři sirek. Ale z tuku a vody tři a půl kila mejdla. Proto z nás dělají mejdlo."

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

no words except to say I read the last paragraph three times.

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 4 out of 5]

After an extensive three-volume trip through the gulags and the unspeakable atrocities that occurred all throughout that accursed archipelago, I found it appropriate to continue onward into further unutterable crimes against humanity - deeper into misery, deeper into human suffering - this time within the grounds of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in which Lustig himself was imprisoned (he was imprisoned as well in Auschwitz and Buchenwald).

Informed by his own experience of escaping from the train leading him to Dachau, this novel follows two presumably teenaged boys following their escape en route to another camp. The narrative shifts between the immediacy of their exhausting trek through German forests toward some indeterminate freedom, and Danny's memories of his experience in the camp they were being transported away from - the memory of his father crying when he and his mother were taken from him, the memory of seeing his mother for the last time after their separation as she stood in line for the gas chamber, the memory of their wounded friend they had no choice but to leave behind in their flight from the camp.

This story is a tragic one, and Lustig delves deep into the mind of the prisoner who is assured that darkness - of starvation, of evil, or of death - awaits them at the end of whatever course they might take, whether in the camps or whether in fleeing toward some refuge they know they will never find. There is no triumph of the human spirit in this novel, and there is no fortunate conclusion. Contrary to the title of Lustig's excellent but tragic story, darkness does indeed cast its boundless shadow over the expanse of the novel.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two young Jewish boys escape from a train hauling the condemned from one concentration camp to another. It describes the hopelessness of their attempt to escape from their fate as they endure starvation while traversing a forest that leads to nowhere. The story includes flashbacks to their experiences in the concentration camp and the deaths of their family members in the gas chambers. They are in extremely dire physical shape and are barely able to keep moving but they keep trying, in spite of the fact that there is absolutely no possibility of reaching any form of safety. An exceptional book that exposed the horrific reality of the holocaust.

[Gena Lott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good telling of the holocaust for children.
Ages 5th-8th grades.