The Dead Look On

WHEN the reward notice for information leading to the arrest of the murderer of Max Bertsch, S. S. Obergruppenführer and General of Police, was announced by his successor, “Czechoslovakia became blank and flat like a Slav face.” Dudicka was a small village: ninety little square houses and a grove of walnut trees on the bank of a stream. It was on the bank of the stream that an abandoned motorcycle was found.

What happened in Dudicka on the following day is music as sad, as beautiful, as lingering as the echoes of the glass the Balaban family had made there for two hundred and fifty years. This is not a horror story, but a story of the human spirit which transcends grief and turns horror into triumph. It is a novel of people which you will remember as truth, not fiction. It has the simplicity of the best poetry. It is one of the first works of art directly springing from the war.