ENG / RUS
125х200 (84х108/32)hard cover, 608 pp., ill., 2012
ISBN 978-5-86793-951-9 Rights sold: Czech language
The protagonist of Elena Makarova's novel is Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an Austrian artist of German extraction. Together with her husband she was deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in 1942, and in 1944 she was sent to Auschwitz. In Theresienstadt, Friedl worked in an orphanage for girls and gave art lessons. The drawings created during her lessons were preserved and taken out of Thersienstadt to serve as witnesses of life in the ghetto. The novel is written in the first person, and we see an entire epoch, an entire generation of artists who grew up during World War I and became adults during World War II, through the eyes of Friedl herself. Makarova has collected material for many years, organized exhibitions, spoken with Friedl's contemporaries, and studied archives, letters and diaries. The memories of the contemporaries – students and children in Theresienstadt – are interwoven with Friedl's voice. The tragedy of this era becomes increasingly apparent as the everyday details accumulate, and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is transformed from an abstract figure into a living person, with a complicated personality and unique understandings of good and evil, talent and vocation. A person who, despite everything, did not lose faith in mercy, higher reason and art.
Yelena Makarova is a writer, historian and teacher. She has been the artistic director of 16 international exhibitions and is the author of fiction books, works on art therapy and the history of Theresienstadt. Her works have been translated into 12 languages.
"Students remember her voice. To the sound of her voice they drew spirals, pressed charcoal to a sheet of paper, strained from their seats like locomotives, and slowed when her voice quietened. She seemed to have won total understanding from the children in Terezín. Her life accumulates inside my own. I learn to think her thoughts, muddled with regard to time, clear with regard to space. I listen attentively to the charcoal dashes and colorful strokes, I become absorbed in her letters referencing Kafka, Hegel, Klee, Kierkegaard, Egyptian art and Rembrandt's shadows."
A bright light. White, alabaster bodies are pressed against each other. The doors are tightly closed. Warm eyes freeze over in the land of the dead. What time is it? Sleep, it's still early. No, it's too late! Bodies are sprawled in the dirt and slime. The alabaster whiteness is mixed with blood and filth. Someone in black pulls pearly teeth from the mouths... little streams of blood flow from slender nostrils. The bodies turn purple, blue, gray. Pavel pressed me to him with all his strength. No, I'm not alabaster! Light. But a different light, bright. Pavel is giving me hot tea from a thermos and strokes my head: You're very tired, my Friedl... It's all so meaningless... Evidently meaning is there where we are not. Or are we searching for it where it has no place? We cling to everything that reminds us of the presence of meaning.
We need eight things. I took only one – a sieve for straining water. To avoid killing a living creature while drinking.
