Živí a ztracení – Feldmanová Ellen (2022)

Loss can be coped with. Pain can be soothed. But there is no remedy for shame. Because shame is not the result of a wrong suffered, but of a wrong committed. But is it really so? The novel 'The Living and the Lost' seeks answers to this question and many others through Millie Mosbach, a Jewish girl who, along with her brother David, escapes from Germany to America as a teenager. After the war, they both return to now-occupied Berlin as employees of the American army. Millie helps with the vetting of Germans at the denazification office for the purpose of establishing new editorial offices and publishing houses. She is consumed by hatred for her former homeland and its inhabitants, but gradually realizes that hating face to face is not so easy, and that guilt and innocence are not as black and white as she thought before her return. And that perhaps she did not come just to search for her family, the truth behind the fog of German job applicants, and satisfaction over the devastation of Germany, but also for forgiveness. The novel set in bombed-out Berlin, where the desperate exploit the even more desperate, where intoxicated occupiers walk the streets in defiance of bans, embracing German women, where only black market trading thrives, and where werewolves, as they call the stubborn Nazis, wait for their next chance, is captivating and...