Arnošt Lustig
in Washington D.C., November 30th 2001


... and suddenly, as in a fairy tale when the just prince finds and punishes the unfair king, here come school children, who ask where have their Jewish (Roma) neighbors disappeared. The fact that they are mostly not Jewish or Roma children is as refreshing as the lifegiving water in the fairy tale. When I read each one of these works, of which many are outstanding and not one is bad, I thought the authors resemble young sailors far out on an ocean, looking into the deep waters, thinking that there must be an ancient civilization, the Atlantis, hidden down there.
The disappeared neighbors are our modern Atlantis, a civilization which we never saw, and wonder what it might have been like.
There where refusal talks about error (those who refuse the holocaust say "but it is not possible to gas, kill by famine and disease six or seven millions of people"), the works of the school children raise the overpowering question of conscience:
How could it have happened? Where are all who disappeared? What has happened to all of them?
And the echo: Is it possible for this to happen all over again? The world into which the authors of these works, the children, were born doesn't say no to that question. It is beautiful that Czech children have undertook the goal to search for the neighbors who disappeared. They have achieved a deed which reaches beyond their intentions. I feel a personal gratitude in the times when the second world war is already only a part of history, because the world keeps running on. Many don't understand, that this war is a turning point in history of the same importance as the transition from the ice age to the stone age or the discovery of America, which separates the middle ages from the modern age, that it is a new definition of morality, invention of modern evil, which is the indifference of some to the fate of others, and the slowly emerging virtue which cannot disregard the fate of even the least man on earth.
The authors have displayed many good features which they might not even know about. I value their diligence, their patience, their detective abilities, their courage not to get scared by the ages which have passed, the lost traces.
They are looking for the lost, to find at least the soul, when the life has perished.
Perhaps it is also about the immortality of soul, an attempt to touch this immortality.
The work "Neighbours Who Disappeared" returns some meaning to life.