Аннотация

A devastatingly beautiful novel set in World War II in which a fifteen-year-old girl explores and delineates the compromises one is forced to make in order to survive in a world gone mad. She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she and her family have just been transported from Terezín to Auschwitz. Her mother and younger brother are quickly dispatched to the gas chambers, her father has committed suicide, but young Hanka Kaudersová, working as one of Dr. Krueger's cleaners, is still alive. When Dr. Krueger is suddenly transferred to a new post, Hanka fears that she will meet the fate that awaits the general camp population. On her last day working in the doctor's office, she is suddenly startled to see a girl dressed not in the usual striped prison garb but decked out as if on her way to a party. Inquiring where the girl is headed dressed so strangely, she is told: to audition for a position in a German soldiers' brothel. And you need to be eighteen and Aryan, the girl adds. Hanka is fifteen, and Jewish. As the girls file into the far office, Hanka determines to audition, hoping her acceptance will ensure her survival. Chosen for her alabaster skin and deceptively Aryan features, she joins the other girls and is immediately given the nickname "Lovely Green Eyes." Thus begins her new career in a brothel on the already crumbling eastern front. The only way Hanka can cope with her terrible new role is to shut down her feelings, freeze what is left of her emotions. And from here on her nightmare-peopled with SS officers she despises but is obliged to please-intensifies. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder.