»Even if Roped Together recounts the most terrible things, the book possesses a hopeful radiance.«

»[. . .] a story of displacement and survival which explores the bonds of friendship and family. [. . .] The work not only paints a vivid picture of the hardships forced upon people by war and separation, but also depicts the ravelling and unravelling of relationships as a fact of life in times of peace and freedom.«

»Roped Together reads like an exciting case record based on circumstantial evidence to investigate a case of moral courage.«

»With Roped Together, Erich Hackl has produced an insistent lesson on empathy.«

»… jumps from a third-person to a first-person narrator. This simple trick gives the deliberately matter-of-fact and simply told story an emotionality that is at the same time distressing and impressive.«

»A book, reduced to the essentials, so that nothing appears to be embellished.«

»… his books, which capture the Nazi past in chronicles of loss, grief and death, are complex sums of many little moments of remembering and forgetting. […] Small form, great art.«

»A great book that erects a monument to Reinhold Duschka, who was a modest man all of his life. Required reading at school!«

»One of Austria’s virtuoso masters of language, who has done more to correct our image of history than a dozen historians put together.«

»The tone is restrained, the story vast and stirring.«

»The ambiguity of a person turning into a hero because it just so happens is the real strength of this book.«

»An important book!«

»The Me-Myself-and-I literature, as he likes to call it, has never been his thing. […] Just like for all of his books, Hackl researched archives and talked to relatives and contemporary witnesses.«

»Hackl depicts powerful scenes, like a the longing of a child, on the verge of despair at the monotony of having tolive in hiding.«

»As always Erich Hackl tells this story of survival with great detail and carefully researched.«

»This captivating story continues to work in me, a convincing appeal for humanity and solidarity.«

»Erich Hackl’s On the Rope is a compelling story of unheralded courage and survival. With prose stripped to the bone, it reminds us that humanity in the middle of great inhumanity is still a possibility.«

»This moving, gripping account of survival over a terrifying four years is based on interviews with Lucia by the well-known Austrian author.«