Chudí v Lodži

During the war, the Nazis concentrated an incredible two hundred thousand Jews, including five thousand from Bohemia, into the small ghetto of Litzmannstadt, today's Baluty district. Lodz is still overshadowed by the more famous Warsaw ghetto, yet the horrific conditions - overcrowding, hunger, disease, fear, death, torture not only by the Nazis but also by the Jewish administration - were unmatched by Warsaw. Under German occupation, the Lodz ghetto gradually turned into a concentration camp from its establishment in 1940 until 1944, when the Nazis closed it down.

Swedish writer Steve Sem-Sandberg based his novel on a detailed study of documents. While the fates of the several families he depicts, some of whom are Czech displaced persons, are brought to life by the author's fiction, many of them are not fictional. Above all, however, they take place against a very real backdrop. The book, which critics say is the best Swedish novel of the last thirty years, has quickly become a bestseller in Sweden and is now about to be published in several European countries.

Czech edition