Arnost Lustig is one of several writers who based their work on the suffering of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps. He personally witnessed these horrors as an adolescent and made up his mind to use his experiences in fictional form to warn against the dehumanization of people in totalitarian regimes. His first works from the end of the 1950s shed a new light on the theme of war and the Holocaust. Lustig's approach to the subject was new because he did not write about conventional heroics but concentrated on nonheroic types such as old people and children. In his works the moral values recognized by the human conscience are represented as "diamonds" in the "night" of inhuman suffering. These moral values come to the surface in extreme situations when a man's life hangs in the balance and when, in spite of everything, he is able to overcome...