So after the concentration camps were liberated, what happened next? How did people resume their tragically interrupted lives? This novel by Hungarian film director Péter Gárdos is a fictionalized account of his parents' courtship, conducted primarily by letters as they recuperated in Swedish hospitals after the end of World War II.
Gárdos' father, Miklós, was 25. Doctors told him his advanced tuberculosis meant he had only six months to live. But Miklós figured he had not survived the Nazis only to die in Sweden. He ignored the diagnosis, picked up a pencil and began to write. He had a list of young women recuperating in Swedish hospitals who were from his home region of Hungary, and he wrote to them — all 117 of them.
Several answered, but the correspondence that stuck was with 18-year-old Lili Reich. Their love story — fictionalized, but punctuated with excerpts from their actual letters — is inspiring and delightful, and Miklós is an unforgettable character, daring, stubborn, funny, dreamy, determined. The couple faced tremendous obstacles. Not just frail health, enormous grief and uncertain futures, but also the meddling of friends who tried to thwart their romance. (After tragedy, pettiness.)
Gárdos' parents preserved the letters through the 50 years of their marriage, but Gárdos did not know about their existence until after his father's death. "The past was locked up in an elegant box that was forbidden to open," he writes. "I could no longer ask my father about what happened. My mother answered most of my questions with a shrug."
But through this charming novel, the remarkable Miklós and Lili are immortalized — their pluck, their determination, their insistence on saying yes to life after so much death.
Laurie Hertzel is senior editor for books for the Star Tribune. Twitter: @StribBooks.
