Pohlednice z východu – Monforte Reyes (2023)

In September 1943, a young French woman named Ella arrives in a transport to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp commandant, the bloodthirsty SS woman Maria Mandlová, nicknamed the Beast by the local prisoners, notices Ella's perfect handwriting and immediately assigns her to the position of a copyist in the camp's women's orchestra. Shortly thereafter, Ella begins working in Block Canada due to her language skills, where she finds numerous postcards and photographs in the luggage of gassed fellow prisoners, leading her to decide to record the story of each such person and preserve their memory. While forming valuable friendships in the camp and trying to survive the malice of her captors, a rebellion breaks out among the prisoners, bringing her and the man she loves to the very brink of life and death. Forty years later, young Bella receives a box full of postcards. 'These are the postcards your mother wrote when she was in the East, which is why she called them postcards from the East. She wanted you to have them and, above all, to read them at the right time. And that time is now.' Reyes Monforte brilliantly combines fiction with the stories of real historical figures. Therefore, on the pages of the novel Postcards from the East, we will encounter some of the most bestial...