Night: Auschwitz

Through startling first-person narratives, a rare collection of photographs, and expert storytelling, a renowned authority traces the history of Auschwitz from World War II to the present day.

In Sybille Steinbacher's terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to anyone on earth in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the Second World War. How Auschwitz grew and mutated into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.

"Yet, my little Diary, I don't want to die, I still want to live . . . " va Heyman, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, wrote these words in her last diary entry in the spring of 1944. Soon after, she was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered more than one million people at Auschwitz. The largest of all the Nazi camps, Auschwitz was both a death camp and a forced labor camp. Author James M. Deem examines this place of unspeakable horror from the perspective of those who experienced it, from the construction of the camp to its final days.

At the book's opening, the author and her daughter Mathilde meet Berthe, a friend of the author's, on the beach, where they see the number that was tattooed on Berthe's arm at Auschwitz. The book, following Wieviorka's answers to her daughter's nearly eighty questions, provides a concise yet unsentimental and unsparing history lesson that explains Hitler's rise to power and the rise of anti-Semitism, the creation of ghettos and concentration camps (not only Auschwitz), the genocide of the Jews, the "Final Solution," Jewish and other resistance, and the guilt of the Germans.

Filip Muller came to Auschwitz with one of the earliest transports from Slovakia in April 1942 and began working in the gassing installations and crematoria in May. He was still alive when the gassings ceased in November 1944. He saw millions come and disappear; by sheer luck he survived. Muller is neither a historian nor a psychologist; he is a source--one of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it.