What sustains the human spirit? This is the question that fascinates Czech writer Arnost Lustig in his story "Red Oleanders."
Lustig, like the lovers he depicts, suffered in Nazi death camps, yet he does not focus on the specific events of the Holocaust in this story about life in its aftermath. He only reminds us of the camps' pervasive influence of those who were interned in them.
He opens with a vignette about a nameless old man who escaped from Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Living in an insane asylum in Israel, the old man bears silent witness to the Holocaust. He who, in a single night, lost his wife, brother, and son to the gas chambers of the Third Reich later, "lost all power of speech…not because the Germans ripped out his tongue…[as they] had done to his other son who had survived the war,” but because his words empty of meaning as times change. The author further lets us know, "There wasn't time before his death to tell him that his mute son had hanged himself." Although the son has survived the Holocaust, he cannot make a new life. Here then are the characteristic legacies of the Holocaust: death, insanity, suicide, and muteness, legacies that touch all survivors. This is the void, the chaos, out of which their world must be reborn.
Daniela and Kamil
Lustig - who survived the horrors of the camps himself without becoming insane, suicidal, or wordless - poetically tells us the story of two young Czech Jewish survivors who become lovers, Daniela Klaus and Kamil Dreisler. He does not tell us how these two lived when their humanity and identity were threatened in the camps. Rather, he tells us what happens when their value is threatened by forces in the nature of love itself that combine with their circumstances to thwart them.
As the title "Red Oleanders" suggests, with its overtones of blooming and growth, Lustig's story explores the choices that enable people to flourish. One's humanity and identity, Lustig seems to imply, are not safe simply because one survives the camps. Indeed, they can be undermined at any point depending upon how a person elects to deepen his own humanity and ground his identity in something larger than himself. Initially, Kamil and Daniela choose to love each other, but, unfortunately, love does not mean the same thing to both of them. They begin their love innocent of the forces that drive their natures, and eventually divide, perhaps irrevocably, along lines that have often divided men and women.
For beautiful, nineteen-year-old Daniela, love is “everything." It allows her to be reborn from the inside, blotting out the ugliness of the past, obscuring visions of ravines, funerals, electric barbed-wire fences, trenches, and exploding hand grenades. Moreover, her love for Kamil unifies her past, all the places she has known: "Prague, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the big fortress Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, the military camp…where she'd trained to go to Israel with the Voluntary Jewish Brigade, and on board the SS Casserta from Genoa to Nahariya."
When she and Kamil make love for the first time, she transcends her own identity, becomes one with nature, and is automatically bonded to the rest of
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