Tobě zahynouti nedám… - Česká časopisecká šoa povídka 1945-1989 – Gilk Erik (2017)

The Holocaust is among the significant themes of Czech post-war prose. The presented anthology does not seek to disrupt this image but to enrich it with voices that remained hidden on the pages of literary magazines. The anthology brings together stories by well-known authors (Ladislav Fuks, Arnošt Lustig, or Jiří Weil), but also those less mentioned in the context of literature about the Shoah (František Hrubín) or today already forgotten (Mirek Elpl, Hermína Franková, or Johana Vondřejcová), which have not yet been published in any standalone book or collection. The anthology is divided into three thematic blocks that capture the difficult fates of Jews at the end of the Second Republic and during the Protectorate, in ghettos or extermination camps, and in the post-war years. The stories do not only depict the tragic fate of the Jewish population but also the reality of concentration camps seen through the eyes of the perpetrators, the difficulty or even impossibility of survivors returning to normal life after the Shoah. The anthology is accompanied by an extensive original study by Ivana Cahová, which summarizes the history of the representation of the Shoah in Czech prose in its introductory passages, but its core lies in the motif analysis of the reedited stories.