THE STORM
REVIEW
Polansky has built his novel on findings from documents about the Lety concentration camp, as well as from facts about the role of Czech nobility and officials in the establishment and operation of the camp, which in its cruelty competed in many respects with German concentration camps. This domestic cruelty, like the cruelty during the expulsion of the Germans after World War II, challenges the false notion that the Czechs were mere victims of World War II. In this sense it is part of a European problem which the formerly occupied European nations prefer to sweep under the carpet i.e., their share in the cruelties of World War II.
In his novel, Polansky undermines the idea of Masaryk's humanism as an ubiquituous matter, which is how Czech interwar society viewed itself. This view has since recurred in Czech historical consciousness after 1989 as an idyllic memory.
This novel is halfway between historical document and fiction, a special kind of hybrid in which the reader is constantly reading against two different backdrops, those of historic vs. aesthetic truth. Even though Polansky's approach is tendentious, he does open up for us the always-suspected (but anxiously concealed) world of our shame over those things we do not want to face.
Prof. Peter Zajac, Bratislava
PAUL POLANSKY
