Books: A Time to Die

HOSTAGES — Stefan Heym — Putnam ($2.50).

Author Heym’s publishers believe that Hostages is “the first really great novel to be written in English” by a refugee from the Nazis. Coming at a time when the tragic fate of flesh & blood hostages is a steady newspaper item, Author Heym’s fiction is likely to sell on the strength of its title alone.

Stefan Heym, 29, is editor of New York’s anti-Nazi weekly Deutsches Volksecho. He fled the Gestapo in 1933. His father, seized as a hostage, later committed suicide. Author Heym’s novel is dedicated to his father’s memory.

The story: “On the night of Thursday, Oct. 9, 1941, in Prague” (said a Nazi public notice) “Lieut. Erich Glasenapp [of the German] 431st Infantry Division was assassinated. . . . TWENTY HOSTAGES will be shot within a week, if the murderer or murderers are not apprehended.” The notice was signed by Colonel Reinhardt, Gestapo Commissioner of conquered Prague.

Commissioner Reinhardt knew that Lieut. Glasenapp had committed suicide. But Reinhardt reported that Glasenapp had been murdered because among the Gestapo’s hostages was a Nazi collaborationist, Lev Preissinger, coal king of Prague. After shooting Hostage Preissinger the Nazis could confiscate his mines and at the same time show troublesome Czech workers that Naziism does not respect rich capitalists.

Five of the Gestapo’s hostages were together in one cell. Hostage Prokosch, a famous actor, “confessed” to the “murder” because a heroic exitwould let him die believing that he was a better man than his wife’s lover, Hostage Lobkowitz. Hostage Preissinger, who wanted to save his skin, tried to pin the murder on Hostage Janoshik, stalwart member of the Underground movement. Dr. Wallerstein, psychoanalyst and Hostage No. 5, asked only that he be allowed to record the psychological behavior of his four doomed mates, so that his memory would live as the author of a unique case history.

Author Heym approves Dr. Wallerstein’s findings: that all men are not heroes in the face of death. When Commissioner Reinhardt’s scheme finally won out and the hostages were shot, only burly, talkative, astute Hostage Janoshik left a noble record—which bore fruit in the blowing up of three ammunition barges on the morning of the execution.

Author Heym’s main theme is that even an imperfect, crushed human being can outwear a tyrant if he has the will to sacrifice, to die. As a craftsman Stefan Heym is not always equal to his exalted theme.