Darkness Casts No Shadow

During the Second World War, it was not unusual for “death trains” to cross Europe loaded with thousands of starving Jews. Having spent his teenage years in concentration camps, Arnost Lustig found himself on one of these transports in 1945, on the way to his own death. Along with a close friend, who was also a teenager, he made an incredibly daring escape. This is the story of that escape, and the weeks that the two boys spent in the dark forests of Germany trying to survive against hunger and cold, to avoid capture by the Germans, and to return to their native Prague.

On the psychological plane, the book explores the subconscious minds of the two protagonists as they experience extreme fear, starvation, and physical exhaustion in their desperate flight toward freedom. The escape journey—undertaken against incredible odds—is described in such careful detail that the reader enters into the experience almost without realizing that he has slipped into a new kind of reality, and the frequent flashbacks to life in the concentration camps and ghettos give the entire book an unforgettable cinematic quality.