ABOUT THE BOOK

Daniel Faigel remembers the bright summer days of his childhood; remembers being a small boy growing up in a big mansion by the sea. He recalls the sound of the ocean and the squealing seagulls and the sun high up in the sky. But Daniel remembers other things as well. He remembers what he saw one morning in that house, a terrible secret he must carry with him for the rest of his life.

One day, in 1943, he finds himself lying on his back in a putrid cattle truck; 26 years old, with a medical degree, while the war is at its peak. With its load of Danish Jews, the train wobbles through a Germany bombed to pieces. Its destination is Theresienstadt, the bizarre town to where the Nazis shipped all the rich and famous European Jews.

Like a Dante of his time, Daniel is caught in an inferno. During the day he works as a physician in the camp's largest hospital where he struggles to save just a few of the too many patients from death or from the feared convoys going east. At night, he is taken into Prague to attend to the prostitutes at the SS-soldiers' brothel.

Yet inside the hell of Theresienstadt Daniel meets the Czech Jewess Ludmilla Zippora, and the unlikely love that grows between the two prisoners imbue them with enough strength to endure the grotesque environment. If only he could forget what he saw that morning in the mansion by the sea.

THE AUTHOR

Morten Brask is a director, freelance writer, partner in an advertisement bureau and the author of several books spanning a wide variety of subjects, including Indonesia, movie propaganda, prostitution and political satire. For more information, please visit his website.

RIGHTS SOLD

Presse de la Cité / FRANCE

press

"'The Ocean in Theresienstadt' has a surprising virginal freshness of experience, a tenderness of tone and an impressive perfection.[...] Morten Brask hits a note of pureness which is neither the sober journalistic tone nor the self-experienced, but a third kind ...a quiet, intense and measured poetry." POLITIKEN

"Morten Brask's novel is sympathetic. Well-meaning in the best meaning of the word. " JYLLANDSPOSTEN

"It starts on page one. And then it goes on. Well-written, melancholy entertaining and eminently structured. I'm reading and reading, so go away, I'm captivated! [...] With his first book of fiction, Morten Brask is able to combine an authentic historical frame with a finely told human drama without selling out on any of these." WEEKENDAVISEN

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