DOLLY BOY

Dolly Boy follows Franz Belsen as he violently leaves a sheltered young adulthood and is imprisoned at Flossenburg concentration camp. During this agonizing journey, through loss, suffering and the inner workings of grief, Franz discovers his true self and realizes that only love, unconditional, unrestrained and full of empathy, will help him start to heal.From KIRKUS REVIEWS: "In Rousseas' World War Il-set novel, a gay German man is sent to a concentration camp to work and die.Franz Belsen enjoys a happy childhood growing up in Berlin, the son of a celebrated general who died valorously in the Great War. A bookish boy with a love of poetry, he takes a job arranged by his mother, Maria, with the foreign ministry, largely working as a translator and typist. He harbors a dangerous secret: he is gay, which, under the Third Reich, is a crime. One of Franz's former lovers, Manfred Schreiss, lets his secret out of the bag under the duress of an interrogation, and Franz is quickly arrested and sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp to perform hard labor. Franz befriends Pavel Eustasovic (the two become lovers), a universally reviled member of the Sonderkommando who turns tricks to secure extra rations for his dying father, Dmitry. Rousseas intelligently portrays Franz's grim predicament-gay prisoners shared the lowly status of Jews in the camps, "untermenschen" who were given no respect or protection from the worst treatment. While there is an inexhaustible storehouse of literature on the German concentration camps, there is comparably little that specifically explores the plight of gay people, who were brutally persecuted under Hitler. The author ably fills this gap in the historical record, furnishing a vivid tableau of their appalling treatment in the camps." Read more