Word: koestlers
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Darkness at Noon ($2), Arthur Koestler's coldly incandescent novel about the ultimate moral dilemma of Russian purgers and purged...
SCUM OF THE EARTH-Arthur Koestler -Macmillan...
...August 1939, Koestler was also living in the south of France and working on his brilliant novel about the Russian blood purges, Darkness at Noon. He had never loved France quite so much as then, never been so "achingly conscious of its sweetness and decay." He was a young (36), Budapest-born journalist, a Gentile, a man of political action. He had been a trenchantly pro-Loyalist newspaper correspondent in Spain, where Franco forces had caught him and led him through the streets of Malaga in chains. He had been a member of the Communist party for seven years...
Jittery France put both Feuchtwanger and Koestler in internment camps. The difference of their treatment is epitomized in the two books' titles. Feuchtwanger's "devil in France" was the crass indifference, apathy, venality, incompetence of French officialdom. His camp guards were friendly, often respectful-and always bored. The bulk of his fellow internees were "nonpolitical" or nearly so: Jewish scholars, doctors, lawyers, artisans, tradesmen; Saarlanders who had sided with France in the days of the plebiscite, fleeing into France when they lost; ex-members of the Foreign Legion, a few of whom had lost...
...Koestler found himself behind the barbed wire with Croat peasant partisans, Spanish syndicalists, Czech liberals, Italian socialists, Hungarian and Polish Communists, German undergrounders, Russians of various political shades whose only common denominator was that they hated Stalin and denounced one another to the French Surete Nationale. All these were "the scum of the earth." Nearly all "bore the physical or mental marks of torture and persecution in the countries from which they had escaped, and for a more enlightened [French] administration these marks should have been regarded as the stamp of their bona fides and loyalty." But they were indesirables...