Lovely Green Eyes

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live.

This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

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Arnošt Lustig, born in 1926, was sixteen when the Nazis sent him first to Theresienstadt (Terezín), later to Auschwitz—where father died in the gas chambers—and finally to Buchenwald. He left the former Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in the United States. He taught literature for many years at American University in Washington, DC. The author of novels, poetry, and short stories, he won the National Jewish Book Award twice and was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2008. He died in his native Prague in 2011.

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

“Absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority . . .
appeals by its feather-light touch.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Lovely Green Eyes could be described in the words of Mr. Kertesz’s Nobel citation, which praised ‘writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.’. . . A work of extraordinary delicacy.”—Washington Times