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A review by screen_memory
Darkness Casts No Shadow by Arnošt Lustig
4.0
After an extensive three-volume trip through the gulags and the unspeakable atrocities that occurred all throughout that accursed archipelago, I found it appropriate to continue onward into further unutterable crimes against humanity - deeper into misery, deeper into human suffering - this time within the grounds of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in which Lustig himself was imprisoned (he was imprisoned as well in Auschwitz and Buchenwald).
Informed by his own experience of escaping from the train leading him to Dachau, this novel follows two presumably teenaged boys following their escape en route to another camp. The narrative shifts between the immediacy of their exhausting trek through German forests toward some indeterminate freedom, and Danny's memories of his experience in the camp they were being transported away from - the memory of his father crying when he and his mother were taken from him, the memory of seeing his mother for the last time after their separation as she stood in line for the gas chamber, the memory of their wounded friend they had no choice but to leave behind in their flight from the camp.
This story is a tragic one, and Lustig delves deep into the mind of the prisoner who is assured that darkness - of starvation, of evil, or of death - awaits them at the end of whatever course they might take, whether in the camps or whether in fleeing toward some refuge they know they will never find. There is no triumph of the human spirit in this novel, and there is no fortunate conclusion. Contrary to the title of Lustig's excellent but tragic story, darkness does indeed cast its boundless shadow over the expanse of the novel.
Informed by his own experience of escaping from the train leading him to Dachau, this novel follows two presumably teenaged boys following their escape en route to another camp. The narrative shifts between the immediacy of their exhausting trek through German forests toward some indeterminate freedom, and Danny's memories of his experience in the camp they were being transported away from - the memory of his father crying when he and his mother were taken from him, the memory of seeing his mother for the last time after their separation as she stood in line for the gas chamber, the memory of their wounded friend they had no choice but to leave behind in their flight from the camp.
This story is a tragic one, and Lustig delves deep into the mind of the prisoner who is assured that darkness - of starvation, of evil, or of death - awaits them at the end of whatever course they might take, whether in the camps or whether in fleeing toward some refuge they know they will never find. There is no triumph of the human spirit in this novel, and there is no fortunate conclusion. Contrary to the title of Lustig's excellent but tragic story, darkness does indeed cast its boundless shadow over the expanse of the novel.