Prayer for Katerina Horovitz

A psychological novella about the tragic fate of a Jewish girl who elevated revenge for her fellow tribesmen to the meaning of her existence. The book is based on true events and was first published in 1964. The character of Kateřina Horovitzová herself is inspired by the fate of a real girl, who was the Polish actress Franceska Mann.
In this suggestive novel, Lustig primarily deals with the motif of a sadistic trap, with the help of which the Nazi leaders tried to obtain property from a group of captured wealthy Jewish businessmen, who first escaped from German Nazism by fleeing to the USA, but later, in 1943, They returned to Italy and fell into the hands of the Nazis anyway. Among these merchants was the beautiful Jewish woman Kateřina Horovitzová. The Nazis promised the merchants that they would exchange them for captured German officers, but of course it was all a lie.
The second level of the novella describes the heroine' s own story, a girl who, on the verge of death, resists the humiliation of her human dignity and manages to mobilize within herself the strength capable of overcoming fear and the natural instinct of self-preservation.