Only four months

Auschwitz-Birkenau, autumn 1944. The prisoner Kalina punches his fellow prisoner, Jerman, to the ground just seconds before Jerman, in an attempt to end his life, throws himself onto the electric barbed-wire fence. “Just wait,” Kalina tells him, “You wouldn’t get a very grand funeral here.” This is how, aware of the absurdity of the situation and the drama of human existence in the midst of the final stages of genocide, Pavel Fischl describes the martyrdom in the death factory to which he was deported from Terezín at the age of 22. Tormented by longing for his beautiful childhood in Moravia, for his beloved sister Minda and his brother Viktor, Pavel faces the horror of the Holocaust bravely, with empathy, and even a certain dose of dark humour, thanks to the unbreakable friendship of his companions, who literally drag him, suffering from severe dysentery, on a death march, alive, until the very end of the war. The chasm that opens between Pavel's poetic, deeply moral inner world and the morbid reality of the years of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question, during which six million people were murdered, feeds his imagination and refines his purely humanistic stance.