The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig. Trans. Ewald Osers
Michael Pinker

Arnost Lustig. Lovely Green Eyes. Trans. Ewald Osers. Arcade, 2002. 248 pp. $24.95.

Lovely Green Eyes is absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority. Into the Nazi inferno we accompany Hanka Kaudersová, “Skinny,” during her “free” time between successive daily appointments with twelve or more German soldiers, whose sexual needs afford her labor in No. 232 Ost feldbrothel, near the eastern front. Fifteen pretending to be eighteen, Jewish (and blonde) pretending to be Lebensborn Aryan, she has survived the selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau that her father, mother, and brother didn’t. Perpetually compelled to self-restraint, moment by moment Skinny goes numb as around her, in its last throes, the Reich unknowingly collapses. She is privileged to spend occasional whole days with officers: with Captain Hentschel, aristocratic, thoughtful, even kind; twice with Einsatzkommando Obersturmführer Sarazin, whose haughty babble about racial purity and the beauty of violent death seems less lofty while strapped to a bed. Predictably, Skinny proves not ardent enough for his taste. We also glimpse her in postwar Vienna and Prague, where she learns to live without constant expectation of sudden death, where her tragic symbolism eventually fades into emerging womanhood, so precious to the unnamed narrator. How does one live, not as a matter of chance over which one has no control, but on a daily basis, helplessly confronting the nightmare into which one must reawaken daily to suffer fresh agonies, to be indelibly, ruthlessly maimed? In portraying an innocent child who wants only to survive and who by some freak gets her wish when the horror itself expires and she is free, Lustig probes the nether regions of the Nazi obsession, illuminating with awful intimacy Skinny’s grim, sordidly arresting quotidian. His elaboration of the finer details in the experience of those who lived to be sacrificed appeals by its feather-light touch. Rarely has human suffering appeared so pathetically, excruciatingly painful. [Michael Pinker]