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Love at Risk
| Article
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17385 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
3,210 Words |
| Author
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Lynne Daly
Lynne Daly is free-lance writer who is studying Eastern
European writers. She lives in Washington. D.C. |
What sustains the human spirit? This is the question that fascinates Czech writer Arnost Lustig in his story "Red Oleanders."
Lustig, like the lovers he depicts, suffered in Nazi death camps, yet he does not focus on the specific events of the Holocaust in this story about life in its aftermath. He only reminds us of the camps' pervasive influence of those who were interned in them.
He opens with a vignette about a nameless old man who escaped from Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Living in an insane asylum in Israel, the old man bears silent witness to the Holocaust. He who, in a single night, lost his wife, brother, and son to the gas chambers of the Third Reich later, "lost all power of speech…not because the Germans ripped out his tongue…[as they] had done to his other son who had survived the war,” but because his words empty of meaning as times change. The author further lets us know, "There wasn't time before his death to tell him that his mute son had hanged himself." Although the son has survived the Holocaust, he cannot make a new life. Here then are the characteristic legacies of the Holocaust: death, insanity, suicide, and muteness, legacies that touch all survivors. This is the void, the chaos, out of which their world must be reborn.
Daniela and Kamil
Lustig - who survived the horrors of the camps himself without becoming insane, suicidal, or wordless - poetically tells us the story of two young Czech Jewish survivors who become lovers, Daniela Klaus and Kamil Dreisler. He does not tell us how these two lived when their humanity
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