Revolt of The Saints

Ernst Sommer was born in 1888 in a German speaking Moravian town bordering Bohemia, which later became known as the Sudetenland, part of the newly-founded state of Czechoslovakia. 


After studying law, Ernst opened a legal practice in Karlsbad where he also developed political and literary interests and joined the Social Democrats, acting as their legal advisor and serving as a town councillor. By 1935 he had published several works of fiction, and other short pieces. 


In 1937 the German occupation of the Sudetenland forced Ernst into exile. As a Social Democrat and Jew he was in imminent danger of arrest. He arrived in London on 5 November 1938. 


Although Ernst was barred from practicing law in Britain, he continued to write, and a grant from the Czech Government in Exile enabled him to devote his time to this. Revolt of the Saints (Revolte der Heiligen) was written at this time.


After the war Ernst learned that his mother had committed suicide in Theresienstadt and his sister had died in Auschwitz. In July 1946 he attempted to re-activate his Czech citizenship, but there was no place for the German-speaking minority in post-war Czechoslovakia, so he remained in exile in London where he was eventually permitted to practice as a consultant in international law. He died at the age of 66 in1955.


REVOLTE DER HEILIGEN was written in 1943 and may be the earliest written account of the Holocaust. The novel is set in a Jewish work camp in occupied Poland. Ernst sets the plight of the work Jews in the context of the political conflict between Nazis bent on their extermination and those who argued that they should be kept alive as long as their labour benefited the German war effort. Their uprising, the climax of the novel, allows him to investigate the importance of Jewish resistance, or the lack of it, to the Nazis, and in particular the role of the Jewish Councils in impeding active resistance, aided by the long Jewish tradition of passive endurance of persecution.