H. G. Adler wanted to be a writer, but history intervened. He was born in 1910 in Prague. In 1942 he was deported with his wife to Theresienstadt, the camp that acted as a way-station for Central European Jews. Before his liberation in 1945, Adler was imprisoned in several other camps, including Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Despite having lost eighteen family members, including his parents, his wife, and her family, Adler, near death, returned to Prague. He emigrated to London in 1947, where he was finally able to build up a life as a freelance writer. In 1950, in a period of ferocious intensity, he wrote Eine Reise, now translated by Peter Filkins as The Journey.

Adler wrote in isolation, and even in his lifetime he was never an easy writer with a large audience. Members of the “Prague school,” the tradition of Kafka to whom Adler was indebted, were gone. In the years immediately following the war, Germans did not want to read about the horrors of the camps, the ostensible subject of Adler’s book. Many publishers rejected Eine Reise. Elias and Veza Canetti, to whom the book was dedicated, admired the manuscript, as did Heinrich Böll. Still, the famous German publisher Peter Suhrkamp vowed that the book would never see the light of day while he was alive. Sure enough, it wasn’t until a year after Suhrkamp died in 1961 that Eine Reisefound a home at