Arnost Lustig Children of the Holocaust

Abstract

This chapter reviews Arnost Lustig's Children of the Holocaust. Children of the Holocaust brings together two earlier collections of short stories, Night and Hope and Diamonds of the Night, as well as a novella, Darkness Casts no Shadow. As these titles indicate, Lustig thrusts his readers into a world of perpetual darkness with only the slightest glimmer of light. That dim flicker of hope resides in the survivor's memorial candle, for that alone puts an end to the Nazis' years of terror, brutality, and torture that run through every page of Lustig's writing. Each of Lustig's stories tears at the flesh of character and reader: his fiction provides the phenomenology for understanding the reality of the history of the Holocaust.