The Unbearable Lightness of Being

As Tereza walks to the sauna, she thinks about her mother. What is gained by exposing someone else’s misery, Tereza wonders? She has been thinking about her mother a lot recently, which is why she told Tomas about her reading the diary at the dinner table. When private conversations are broadcast on the radio, Tereza thinks to herself, it must mean that the world is becoming a “concentration camp.”

Tereza always uses the term “concentration camp” to explain where her family was kept during World War II, but she also uses the term to describe the total lack of privacy. Living in her mother’s house was like living in a concentration camp, and like a real camp, her mother’s house was nearly impossible to escape.