Auschwitz books

[Carolina]

Apart from Spectator in Hell can anybody recommend any other books which tells the Auschwitz story from the POW's point of view?

[WaldoMcFroog]

"If This Is A Man" by the Italian author Primo Levi describe his time in Auschwitz and his subsequent journey back to Italy after the liberation.

I read it when I was about 20 and it has stayed with me ever since.

Obviously any book on this subject is likely to be disturbing but the quality of Levi's heart-rending prose will undoubtedly affect the reader greatly.

It describes in great detail not only the inhumanity of the death camps in terms of the ovens, the random violence and the callous behaviour by the captors, the book also gives an insight into how the environment forced the prisoners against one another by stripping away their capacity for humanity towards each other through their deprivation.

If you've ever wondered 'Why didn't they try and group together and attempt to overwhelm their captors?' or any such similar thoughts, Levi's book will show you just how naive you have been. I knew what had happened in the camps long before I read this book but afterwards I knew the difference between knowing the facts and understanding the reality for the people that endured the camps.

One of the most important books I've ever read.

[Peter Pedant]

Party -pooper pedant wriotes: It wasnt a POW camp my love,

and they werent POWs.

Prisoners of war were protected (English and French) by the Geneva Convention - and there is quite alot written about that. I know of no book in English about how the Russians were (brutally) treated - not signatories.

My father [POW] was threated with a concentration camp after bawling out the German Commandant in insulting terms in front of his subordinates, and laughed and basically said, if you do that we will shoot you after the war......

There was a prog on Sachsenhausen and up popped someone who said he was a POW - and I am still trying to work out how he got there.....If you were a troublesome POW you got sent to Colditz and not auschwitz

Auschwitz was a concentration camp - wasnt it an extermination camp ? These are quite different. They were not protected by anything or anyone and went through appalling treatment and privations. Yellow stars, pink triangles, black squares - that lot, no pilots or troopers. It was these camps that were liberated and amongst other things, gave their liberators typhus. These were quite different - a year worth of medical students went over from Britain to study their return to health [ I think about a third of the concentration camp victims were diagnosed as hopelessly starved and death was an inevitable outcome] and they [medical students] all got typhus as well. Liberation of the POW camps proceeded on a completely sepatate basis.

anyway good luck - I was thinking of Primo Levi as well

[maxi29]

Read anything by Primo Levi - all of his books are excellent. But If this is a Man is the best.

[Aschenbach]

Levi's The Drowned and the Saved shows the dignity of the man.

Eliezer Wiesel also survived Auchwitz and wrote about his experiences in Night.

Kurt Vonnegut experienced the bombing of Dresden as a POW and wrote the Slaughterhouse 5 afterwards. It's not a factual account of events by any means.

[samuel23]

Try readin a book by Rudi (rudolph) Vrba - think his real name was Walter Rosenberg.
be warned the original edition has some very disturbing photographs in it and the story is extremely harrowing