The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S.. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S.

The ``unloved'' are the Jews of Europe during the Nazi regime and, specifically, two 17-year-old Jewish Czech girls interned in Theresienstadt in 1943. One, Perla Sara, occupies an attic room and lives by extending her favors to Jewish menand one Nazi officer. The other, innocent Ludmilla, yearns to live and love, yet knows well enough that she will be sent to Auschwitz, that not even her friend Perla can save her. Through Perla's diary entries we get to feel the anguish, the despair, the absurdity of the ghetto. Her faithful, matter-of-fact record starts August 1; on December 22, the diaryand Lustig's novelcome to a powerful and grisly end. Lustig, best known for his A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova (Harper, 1973) was himself an inmate of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and re-creates the climate and the atmosphere of those times and places with the skill of a master. Gerda Haas, Bates Coll. Lib., Lewiston, Me.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This fictional diary, stoic jottings by a 17-year-old inmate of Theresienstadt, underlines the anguish of the Holocaust through its very absence of complaint. Tiny, exquisite, a self-styled Jewish whore, Perla contemplates her body and the men who use it; she does so without disgust, easy with the knowledge of her sexual power. From the moment she enters the camp at age 14, Perla submitsfor a gram of bread, some matches, fur from a coat collarto men's desires. Mostly they are fellow-Jews, but there is also a Luftwaffe officer, unable, despite his disdain, to stay away, whom she murders the night before she is to be sent to the East. Although she looks on with proper compassion when her parents and friends are led into the transport cars, her enduring companion is the rat beneath her floor-boards, the one living thing who, like herself, is emotionless. Scorning nothing and no one, she welcomes intrusions into her body because they provide sensation but never penetrate her closed heart. For her there is pain not in approaching death but in life, from which she has banished love. Lustig, himself a concentration camp survivor, is a professor at American University. October 30
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.