"Fever at Dawn" by Peter Gardos

       I picked up “Fever at Dawn” more or less accidentally when I was in the public library and looking at the new books. The back cover had in large letters “An International Bestseller,” but the quoted reviews were all from obscure publications: none from the usual sources of quotes—NYTimes or Guardian or Observer.

       And the book and its genesis are rather strange. Reversing the usual order of things, “Fever at Dawn” was first a film, directed by Peter  Gardos, a Hungarian (acute accents on the first ‘e’ and the ‘a.’), and the novel is adapted, written, whatever, on the basis of the film script.

       Peter Gardos’s father was a survivor of the atrocious Belsen concentration camp, as was his mother. Both were shipped to Sweden at the end of the war, where they were in a succession of hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Miklos—Peter Gardos’s father—was suffering from TB and was told he had six months to live. Each dawn he had to check his temperature, and each morning he had a fever, confirming his illness. It is, however, clear from the outset that he couldn’t have died as the narrator is his son, Peter Gardos.

       Miklos, in his hospital, got hold of the names of Hungarian women who had survived the Holocaust and were in Swedish hospitals and rehabilitation centers and sent letters to 117 of them. He eventually started what was essentially a love affair by letter with Lili, whom he eventually married. The novel plots the course of this relationship, narrating the various attempts--unsuccessful and eventually successful--Miklos made to get together with Lili. And after various problems and setbacks, the two are married by a rabbi in Stockholm.

       Part of the impetus for Gardos to memorialize his father’s story came after his father died, when his mother produced the cache of letters exchanged between her and her husband in the period of their hospital treatment and rehabilitation in Sweden. These letters form an integral part of the story, and are often quoted.

       The novel can, I believe, be criticized on a number of grounds. There is little attempt to develop characters in any detail—apart from Miklos. We learn nothing much about Lili, and there is a certain repetitiveness about Miklos’s attempts to travel to see Lili. There is also a sub-plot about an attempt for Lili and Miklos to convert to Catholicism that I found rather strained and far-fetched. But what kept me reading was the interest of the story and the descriptions of how concentration camp survivors had medical treatment and rehabilitation in Sweden. We all know the pictures of the liberation of Belsen and Buchenwald, and I have often wondered how the cadaverous, skeletal survivors fared after the liberation. So that aspect interested me and kept me reading.

       We are not talking great literature here: but I enjoyed the book--it held my attention until the end. It would, I think, appeal to anyone with a holocaust interest. It’s a reasonably quick read—230 small format pages.