Hostages

FOR sheer horror, physical and mental, scenes in this novel reach — some will say pass — the reader’s limits of endurance. But they are a part of the design, which is not only to tell a tale of Nazi oppression in the city of Prague but to study the psychology of fear. The narrative itself is as engrossing as one is likely to read in many a day, but hardly more so than the analysis of fear in both victims and oppressors.

The analysis is illustrated in three ways. The Nazis exemplify the truth that “fear is the parent of cruelty”; the victims — all but one — that “our fears do make us traitors”; and the one exception among the victims, Janoshik, that “as long as we are unafraid we are invincible.” Gestapo Commissioner Reinhardt is a subtle demonstration of the disintegrating power of fear in men whose strength lies only in their position, and he does not become entirely brutal until he recognizes in the eyes of the tortured Janoshik spiritual forces which, according to Nazi theory, either do not exist or can be beaten. Of Janoshik’s four companions in suffering, each in his way realizes the weakness of the external props that support men in times of peace. Janoshik alone is sustained by motives not egoistical, and though he suffers worst, he never falters. He is a member of the great underground movement of revolt against the Germans, and this spiritual contact with unseen millions obliterates all fear for himself.

The narrative concerns five men, caught by accident and held as hostages because of the death (by suicide) of a German officer: Lobkowitz, a young man of a simple, ordinary sort ; Wallenstein, an eminent psychologist; Prokosch, a famous actor; Preissinger, a powerful capitalist; and Janoshik, a peasant of shrewdness and resource, and notable for earthy humor and humble idealism. The action, concentrated within a week, consists mainly of the examination of these men by Reinhardt and the culmination of a plot outside the prison to broadcast the truth about them and t heir predicament. It would be melodrama if it were not so horribly possible. R.M.G.