Publisher description
Waiting for the Train is set in Theresienstadt, the ghetto created by the
Nazis in northern Bohemia as a staging post for the transport of Jews to
Poland. The time is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and
they are in a hurry to complete their 'Final Solution'. Rumours are rife among
the Jews in the ghetto, even though nothing definite is known of the Nazis'
intentions, or perhaps it is deliberately not believed. The heroine of the
novel, Leah, an 18-year-old girl from Holland, has, like most of those around
her, given up living in accordance with her beliefs. The narrator is a lad of
seventeen, likewise still relatively unaffected by the moral disintegration
around him. By chance he encounters Vili Feld, a pre-war acquaintance who had
seduced his young girlfriend. Vili takes the narrator to the tiny attic he
shares with Leah. Thus begins an erotic entanglement that ends with the
narrator and Vili being sent to their deaths in the East. Leah travels with
them, but in a different part of the train. Conditions on this journey are
unspeakable; Lustig evokes them memorably in this novel about impossible moral
choices made in appalling circumstances.
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Waiting for Leah
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