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WW2 and 2000 -In pre war Prague, a story of love and hope and the redemptive quality of the human spirit.
The Lost Wife
What you need to know before your trail
New York City 2000
Josef is preparing for his grandson’s wedding and is to meet the bride’s grandmother for the first time. But when he does so, he gets the biggest shock of his life for the lady looks very much like the woman he fell in love with in Prague and who he thought had died in Auschwitz. Could this really be his lost wife, Lenka?
In prewar Prague all those years ago, Josef and Lenka were two young Jewish people in love, leading their lives, dreaming their dreams when the war came and their Jewish identity made them a target for the Nazis
Is this really her and if so what happened all those years ago? Where has she been all this time?
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This is a story of two people and two very different outcomes. Lena’s fate was very different to Josef who has ended up in America. It is her journey which resonates the most for the brutal journey she has been on to get where she is today.
As the jews of Czechoslovakia face torment and the most brutal treatment by the Nazis, many are rounded up and taken to Terezin, a town or rather ghetto that the Germans have built especially before taking them to Auschwitz.
The scenes here are harsh and raw. The events evoked in the novel are heart-wrenching and graphic.
Despite the raw emotion however, the setting of Auschwitz, Lena uses her love of art to get through as best she can, hoping above all hope that this nightmare will end soon. This art work, much of which was produced in the working camp of Terezin is actually now on display in art galleries around the world and there is a book of it which shows the reality of what they did there despite the horrors around them.
Lenka was partly inspired by one of the people the author found had really lived at Terezin and painted for Mengele amongst others. The fictional story becomes all the more heartbreaking and poignant because of this.
Meanwhile what has Josef’s journey been like? How did he come to be in America and has he been happy all those years? He has never escaped his memories which still haunt him so is he any freer than Lena?
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