I am just finnishing the book Survivor, Auschwitz, the death march and my fight for freedom, by Sam Pivnik.
I bought it by pure chance at the airport last week. When I saw it I though "Here we go, yet another book about Auschwitz" and figured that since it was written so long after the war (2012), it probably wouldnt be very precise. However as I had a long plane, then train, then bus ride to look forward to I bought it.
I was very, very pleasently surprised by the book and litteraly could not put it down. I have been forcing myself to ration my reading to a dozen pages at a time so as not to finnish it within a day.
The book is very precise and detailed, well written, balanced and interesting. The author starts by describing life in Poland before the war, then being in a ghetto, then being sent to Auschwitz, then off to a mine, then on the final death march, and being in a ship that was bombed by the RAF outside Lübeck in the last days of the war.
I have read quite a few autobiographies about the holocaust, but it seems to me that this is the first one that described the whole process from being a free citizen in pre-war Europe, to being completely trapped by the nazi war machine and being considered as a less then nothing. Of particular interest to me was the very paculier relationship that the prisonners had with the director of the mine they worked in near Auschwitz, and what they did to that director at the end of the war.
Anyways, I may not have described this very well, but it is a great book, availlable in English and French (also other langages?), that should be highly interesting to anybody who likes good biographies, or who is interested in the holocaust.
This book would deserve to have a just as great movie made about it.
Has anyone else read it?
JL
I bought it by pure chance at the airport last week. When I saw it I though "Here we go, yet another book about Auschwitz" and figured that since it was written so long after the war (2012), it probably wouldnt be very precise. However as I had a long plane, then train, then bus ride to look forward to I bought it.
I was very, very pleasently surprised by the book and litteraly could not put it down. I have been forcing myself to ration my reading to a dozen pages at a time so as not to finnish it within a day.
The book is very precise and detailed, well written, balanced and interesting. The author starts by describing life in Poland before the war, then being in a ghetto, then being sent to Auschwitz, then off to a mine, then on the final death march, and being in a ship that was bombed by the RAF outside Lübeck in the last days of the war.
I have read quite a few autobiographies about the holocaust, but it seems to me that this is the first one that described the whole process from being a free citizen in pre-war Europe, to being completely trapped by the nazi war machine and being considered as a less then nothing. Of particular interest to me was the very paculier relationship that the prisonners had with the director of the mine they worked in near Auschwitz, and what they did to that director at the end of the war.
Anyways, I may not have described this very well, but it is a great book, availlable in English and French (also other langages?), that should be highly interesting to anybody who likes good biographies, or who is interested in the holocaust.
This book would deserve to have a just as great movie made about it.
Has anyone else read it?
JL
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