Product Description

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersova has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114911 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-03
• Original language: Czech
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Lawrence L Langer, Washington Post
‘Lustig writes about the Holocaust experience with a modest authority that is virtually unique…'

Johanna Kaplan, New York Times
‘Wholly unsentimental and clean of self-pity, Lustig returns in his novels and stories to the harrowing landscape of his youth...'

About the Author
Arnost Lustig was born in Prague in 1926. In 1942 he was sent by the Nazis to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz, where his father died in the gas chambers, and finally to Buchenwald. He left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation in 1968. He settled in 1970 in Washington D.C., where he is Professor of Literature at the American University. He is the author of The Unloved, Diamonds of the Night, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova and Night and Hope. He is a two-time winner of the Jewish National Book Award.

Customer Reviews

Powerful writing
This is the story of Hanka, a 15 year old Jewish girl who loses her whole family in the Holocaust. Her only chance of surviving is to become a whore for the Germans - she chooses to survive. She has to `service' 12 to 15 German soldiers every day. The horror and terror that she feels is bought only too vividly to life by the author's tremendously powerful writing skills, I could actually feel her fear and revulsion. This book shows us just what lengths we will go to in order to survive and teaches us that life is precious- but can be snatched away at any time. This was a harrowing read but one not to be missed.

Good book.
Lovely Green Eyes is the story of a 15 year old Jewish girl who is about to go to the gas chamber but instead she pretends to be an Ayran girl and ends up working in an SS brothel.The book follows her 2 weeks in the brothel,her escape and her attempts to come to terms with what she did afterwards.It`s a sad book and shocking to think that although this is a fictional story alot of what is detailed actually happened.I didn`t find it depressing though and think it is definitely worth reading.

The choice between life and death is a very thin line
Would you become a whore in order to survive? This is the question that A 15 year old Jewish girl Hanka Kaudersová asks herself when she is given the chance to pass herself off as a gentile in the concentration camp she and her family have been sent too during the last months of the war.

She is lucky to have "lovely green eyes", and reddish hair, she doesn't physically look Jewish and so she has a chance of life and she takes it even though she hates what she has to become in order to survive.

With all her family dead, her mother and younger brother sent straight to the gas chambers, her father choosing to throw himself on the camp's electric fence than to have to live in such terrible conditions, Hanka has no one left to call her own, all she has is her will to live but is it powerful enough to get her through the horrors ahead of her as she learns to ply her trade as a soldier's whore?

With many other girls, all older than she is, no one knows she is only 15 years old, she has pretended to be 18, Hanka or Skinny as she is known as has to service between 12 to 15 German soldiers each day and this she does even though she hates every moment of it.

Her virginity is lost in the brothel, only she knows this, though a German officer asks her with curious detached interest about her first sexual experience which Hanka tells him with equal detachment was "strange". The men she is forced to have sex with she has no feelings for, no passion, no desire, no love, no lust, nothing other than hatred and fear for what she must do in order to see the sun rise the next day.

However Hanka is a survivor, and her friendships with the other girls in the Brothel especially the enigmatic Estelle sustains her each and every dat and she does survive when all those around her perish one by one.

An evocative cruel read that leaves you wanting more even when the last page has been turned.