A Time to Speak

15 March 1939: German troops enter Prague and for Czechoslovakian Jews the terror begins. This is the story of one of the survivors. ‘It is difficult to categorise this book. I suppose you could say it is an autobiography and leave it at that, yes; but it is slightly other than that. It is an autobiography with the shape and rhythms of a novel, the orderliness of a novel, the heartbeat of a novel. All the baggage of the novelist is here – love and loss, friendship and betrayal, terror and humour, joy and despair, good and evil, death and survival – but there is no fiction, none of the novelist’s attention-seeking tricks, nothing is manipulated as a novelist would manipulate, the pattern is inherent not imposed. Helen Lewis does not speculate, she never invents; there is only Truth, witnessed Truth. She tells her story with awesome integrity and in her hands it becomes more than just her story, it becomes history. ‘This book is the testimony of a woman who has survived the unsurvivable. That in itself is a miracle, if you believe in such things; the book is another. It is written with such stylistic grace that it is impossible to believe that English is not the writer’s mother tongue. There is wit and candour as well as sorrow, and a good, controlled anger, which never displays itself in censure or rancour… ‘Only the dead know the whole truth and some of those witnesses who survived have taken upon themselves the painful task of speaking for them. It is our task to listen and never to forget.’.