The Lithuanian news, culture and religion website bernardinai.lt has published a review of a work of fiction by the former Lithuanian minister of culture about a Jewish child surviving the Holocaust in Lithuania.
Rimgailė Kasparaitė reviewed Saulius Šaltenis’s book “Žydų karalaitės dienoraštis,” or “Diary of a Jewish Princess,” published by Tyto alba publishers in Vilnius in 2015. The newspaper and website Lietuvos rytas provided a short synopsis of the book on their page kultura.lrytas.lt, describing it thus:
“‘Žydų karalaitės dienoraštis’ is a novel about young Jewish girl Estera Levinsonaitė’s life in Lithuania during and after the war in the family of a young couple in love. Naked and covered with blood, she crawls to the home of Vladas and Milda on their wedding night…
“This is the story of the physical resurrection of a girl from the pit filled with corpses, and her more difficult spiritual rebirth. It is the story of her secret loves, nightmares, fears and joys.
“The conviction of the teachers Vladas and Milda to live every moment in happiness whatever might be, surrounded by so much brutality, uncertainty and deadly danger, seems deeply paradoxical, but at the same time it is a testimony to their incredible vitality, resolute internal resistance and rejection of the inhuman regime of the occupiers.
“This is a story of the strength, courage and victory of the meek.”
Here is an excerpt from Rimgailė Kasparaitė’s review:
“The description says this is a novel about the life of the Jewish girl Estera Levinsonaitė during and after the war in Lithuania in the family of a young couple in love, but after reading the book I began to wonder whether Estera could really be considered a Jew. The girl who finds herself in a loving Lithuanian family receives an extraordinary gift: the life of a different girl. She becomes Eliza, her hair is bleached and the Nazi German symbol adorns her clothing. The girl doesn’t just constantly repeat she is Eliza to others, she tells herself that as well. It’s as if Estera died along with all the other Jews during the genocide. She is reborn as a Lithuanian princess, as Eliza. Unfortunately, after a while her happy life is again disturbed by reality, when not one but five Jews arrive who believe Vladas’s door is open to them. And of course it happens that one large family, of Jews and Lithuanians, lives under a single roof and breathe the same air suffused with hopelessness and evil.”
Full review in Lithuanian here.