THIS WAS LIDICE

In May there was published a powerful and tragic novel, The Dead Look On, by Gerald Kersh (Reynal & Hitchcook -- P. 127). In contrast, this novel, dealing with the same grim episode of Nazi brutality, seems pallid, amateurish. And yet, for the average reader, This Wes Lidide would carry the message more surely than the other, since it could be read as a story of the small people who paid the price of their faith, a romance, an adventure story of underground operation, of adroit evasion, of apparent cooperation cloaking subversive activities, in a village under the Nazi heel. The story starts before the Austrian invasion; it carries on through the years of fear and futile preparation and abortive resistance; it tells of the Nazi occupation, the humorless, inhuman brutality, the final sacrifice -- but somehow it does not cut deeply enough below the emotional surface to seer and scar as does the earlier book. People who would not read the other, would read this -- and remember.