A War on Two Fronts

Like Dante, who in exile in middle age found himself wandering confused in a dark forest, Eugene Schlusser found himself here in Australia tormented by his family’s disturbed past, which he realised he had to uncover and come to terms with. The Schlussers lived in Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany.

This review appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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The book’s title refers to the Russian film Burnt by the Sun, meaning those who got burnt by being too close to the totalitarian dictators of the Soviet Union and Germany. Schlusser’s family suffered and survived the twentieth century’s most traumatic experiences. Even though they were not repressed or put into prison or camps, they experienced the worst decades, the worst countries and the worst ideologies, being at the centre of the maelstrom of our times, whose horrors have fortunately not been repeated. This book comes to us as a message from the dark side. Two excerpts were published…