Lovely Green Eyes

In the last few weeks before the end of the war, 15 year-old Hanka Kaudersova serves 12 German soldiers a day as an army prostitute in Feldbordell No. 232 Ost on the Eastern front. Her parents and brother having died at Auschwitz, Hanka manages to escape death by lying about her age and somehow, though not clearly explained, her Jewish identity. Working first at a camp hospital lab, where she is sterilized, Hanka is then chosen for the brothel. Once there she endures a starvation diet, rat-infested barracks, the bitterness of winter, and the psychoses and Nazi ideology of the soldiers and officers she must serve. Author Lustig, himself a death camp survivor, recounts the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust evoking those questions that are inevitably asked when confronting the realities of the Holocaust. Why? How did this happen? What does the Holocaust ultimately say about humanity? Lustig alludes to the legacy of the Holocaust when, in post-war Prague, Hanka shatters the faith of a Czech rabbi with a recounting of her days as a Feldhure. Decades after the Holocaust, theologians, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, struggled to reconcile their faith with the reality of the selective extermination of six million lives. As stark and as brutal as this novel is, Lustig allows for hope as Hanka finds friendship with other survivors and begins to seek out a new post-war life. This is not an easy novel to read both because of the subject matter and a sometimes confusing moving back and forth in time and change in narrative voices. Still, it is a worthwhile read that you won’t soon forget.