Kapo
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices.
Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself?
The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he likes, not even bothering to salt them—the quantity is what matters. If only he could stop looking over his shoulder and flinching on the street in the fear that some stranger will step forward, smack his face, and say in a loud voice, “Here’s one!”
If only he could stop worrying about Helena Lifka, who turned out to be a Yugoslav, and Jewish too; one of the women he made come naked into the toolshed where he hid the gold, and sit on his lap in exchange for bread and butter and a little warm milk. She could turn up any day, an old woman now, and point an accusing finger.
In this masterful novel, Aleksandar Tišma shows step by step how fear can turn an ordinary human being into a monster.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yugoslavian-born Tisma's ( The Use of Man ) fourth novel is a powerful--if highly partisan--exploration of Croat and Nazi atrocities and of the exceptional crimes of one unexceptional man. During WW II, Vilko Lamian, a baptized, assimilated Jew, survived as a Kapo (a concentration camp prisoner who served as a guard) first in the Jasenovac concentration camp and later in Auschwitz, where his crimes included participating in the mass execution of Serbian women and children. In the mid-'80s when the novel opens, Lamian is an anonymous elderly civil servant living in a Bosnian town and plagued by psychosomatic illness and a terror that his past will be exposed. While glancing through a newspaper, he comes across the name of Helena Lifka, a Jewish woman he raped in Auschwitz. Lamian tries to find Lifka, hoping that she might forgive him and put his demons to rest. Tisma segues between Lamian's past--a series of small and large betrayals at Auschwitz and Jasenovac that preserved his body while poisoning his soul--and his present search. That search maintains the novel's high tension, and Lamian's recollections and contemptuous assessments of his Croatian contemporaries, while provocative and politically shaded, serve to shed light on the background of present-day hatreds.
