During the Second World War, countless manuscripts - diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts - were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden - buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors - by those who did not live to retrieve them.
Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered by circumstance alone.
Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children.
Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. "A man's experience of war," he once wrote, "never ends with the war. A man's work, like his life, is never completed."
'Fugitive Pieces' is not just a book about the Holocaust . . . it is the story of damaged lives and the indestructibility of the human spirit. It is a powerful novel of history, loss, love and exile, exploring the themes of memory, understanding, the passing of wisdom and the terror of the moments in history when time runs out.
Winner of the Orange Prize 1997.
