Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnošt Lustig

Book Overview

"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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559706961
• ISBN13: 9781559706964
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Hard-hitting!

Just finished this very powerful thought-provoking novel. It told the story of 15-year old Jewish "skinny" Hanka Kaudersova who with her family was deported to Auschwitz during WWII. Her mother, father, and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber but skinny survives by claiming to be 18 and by chance being sent to an SS brothel behind the eastern front where her Aryan looks allowed her to disguise the fact she was Jewish. She has to service 12 or more German soldiers per day while at the brothel except when an officer claims her for a whole day. She services one of the SS officers --Obersturmfuhrer Stefan Sarazin who personifies all that was evil with Nazi Germany. This quote from Sarazin briefly shows his perspective on life: "Beauty is beyond morality. Beyond good and evil. Beauty is Germany, the Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the Jagdkommandos. The bomb that drops on an inhabited site. A town consumed by flames. Anything that dissolves into nothing. A captured enemy division turned into ashes like those vermin at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek. The hand grenade we thrust between the legs of that Jewish prostitute. I pulled the pin and watched from a distance as she lay there, with her hands tied, screaming, and then turned into a firework." Skinny's life as a prostitute servicing these German officers was more than horrific! It is really unbelievable that the atrocities of the Holocaust could have happened. The descriptions in this novel really hit hard.

The choice between life and death is a very thin line

Would you become a whore in order to survive? This is the question that A 15 year old Jewish girl Hanka Kaudersová asks herself when she is given the chance to pass herself off as a gentile in the concentration camp she and her family have been sent too during the last months of the war. She is lucky to have "lovely green eyes", and reddish hair, she doesn't physically look Jewish and so she has a chance of life and she takes it even though she hates what she has to become in order to survive. With all her family dead, her mother and younger brother sent straight to the gas chambers, her father choosing to throw himself on the camp's electric fence than to have to live in such terrible conditions, Hanka has no one left to call her own, all she has is her will to live but is it powerful enough to get her through the horrors ahead of her as she learns to ply her trade as a soldier's whore? With many other girls, all older than she is, no one knows she is only 15 years old, she has pretended to be 18, Hanka or Skinny as she is known as has to service between 12 to 15 German soldiers each day and this she does even though she hates every moment of it. Her virginity is lost in the brothel, only she knows this, though a German officer asks her with curious detached interest about her first sexual experience which Hanka tells him with equal detachment was "strange". The men she is forced to have sex with she has no feelings for, no passion, no desire, no love, no lust, nothing other than hatred and fear for what she must do in order to see the sun rise the next day. However Hanka is a survivor, and her friendships with the other girls in the Brothel especially the enigmatic Estelle sustains her each and every dat and she does survive when all those around her perish one by one. An evocative cruel read that leaves you wanting more even when the last page has been turned.

"A hard-edged story of hope and survival"

Czech-born Lustig is known for his penetrating stories of survival and suffering, often revolving around his own experiences in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. There is little sympathetic about his treatment of the Holocaust, but in Lovely Green Eyes we learn the story of Hanka, a young Jewish girl who manages to survive in the camp by passing herself off an Aryan, thus her nickname, Lovely Green Eyes. Lustig's prose is stripped bare and reveals all the horrors of such an existence but at the same time, the novel is a hard-edged story of hope and survival.