The House on Prague Street is a story told with translucent simplicity and freshness. It is a story of haunting innocence and terrible devastation, of lost love, of survival. It has an impact we have not felt since The Diary of Anne Frank and John Hersey's The Wall.
In pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, Helene Richter's childhood glows with an idyllic richness and grace. Summers are spent in grandfather's great house on Prague Street, tranquil, shimmering days, strung together like shining jewels.
Until the war.
As the half-Jewish Helene reaches adolescence, her serene existence becomes a holocaust of disintegration and death. Her uncles, aunts, cousins are gone–to a place called Theresienstadt, from which they send postcards once a month with the same message: we are well we are healthy thinking of you how are you.
As the war comes inexorably closer to her German father and her Jewish mother, Helene falls in love. But the war will close in on that love too...
The author of several successful novels published in Germany, Hana Demetz was born in Czechoslovakia in 1928 and was educated in Prague. She lived through the Holocaust and in 1949 became an editor for Radio Free Europe in Germany. Ms. Demetz now lives in Connecticut and is a Lector in Czech at Yale University.