num_pages: 144
description: During the Second World War, it was not unusual for “death trains” to cross Europe loaded with thousands of starving Jews. Having spent his teenage years in concentration camps, Arnost Lustig found himself on one of these transports in 1945, on the way to his own death. Along with a close friend, who was also a teenager, he made an incredibly daring escape. This is the story of that escape, and the weeks that the two boys spent in the dark forests of Germany trying to survive against hunger and cold, to avoid capture by the Germans, and to return to their native Prague.On the psychological plane, the book explores the subconscious minds of the two protagonists as they experience extreme fear, starvation, and physical exhaustion in their desperate flight toward freedom. The escape journey—undertaken against incredible odds—is described in such careful detail that the reader enters into the experience almost without realizing that he has slipped into a new kind of reality, and the frequent flashbacks to life in the concentration camps and ghettos give the entire book an unforgettable cinematic quality.This is the first publication in the United States of Darkness Casts No Shadow. The author has carefully recast it for this definitive edition, and it has been brilliantly translated by Jeanne Němcová, whose translation of Lustig’s A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974.A selection of photographs from the film version are included in this book; the cover photograph depicts the two protagonists after their escape.
language: Czech
title: Darkness Casts No Shadow (His Children of the Holocaust)
titlecomplete: Darkness Casts No Shadow (His Children of the Holocaust) (English and Czech Edition)
characters: Many, Dany
genres: Holocaust, Fiction, Novels, Czech Literature, War, European Literature, World War II
ratings_count: 71
places: Germany
series: Children of the Holocaust
publisher: Inscape Corp