Title: What I saw at Auschwitz - Alter Fajnzylberg - new book

• Summary

THE UNPUBLISHED TESTIMONY OF A MAN

DIVING INTO THE HEART OF HORROR

AT AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU

The publication of the notebooks of Alter Fajnzylberg, detained at Auschwitz-Birkenau from April 1942 to January 1945, forced to integrate for eighteen months the Sonderkommando , constitutes an exceptional contribution to the history of the Holocaust. These unpublished writings, written in Polish upon his arrival in France, between the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946, in the urgency of telling what he had seen in the camps, were then buried in a shoebox—like a burning secret. It took his only son Roger decades to extricate them from the past, have them transcribed, translated, and contextualized with the help of historian Alban Perrin.

A testimony all the more important as the survivors of the Sonderkommando are very rare, the Nazis having taken care to eliminate all direct witnesses to their abominable enterprise.

Born in 1911 in Stoczek, Poland, into a modest Jewish family, a communist activist from a young age and imprisoned for it, Alter Fajnzylberg joined the International Brigades in Spain in 1937, was wounded there and returned to the fight. Later interned in the camps of Argelès, Gurs and Saint-Cyprien, he eventually escaped, was arrested in 1941 in Paris by the French police, taken to Drancy then Compiègne, and was part of the first convoy of Jewish deportees sent from France to Auschwitz at the end of March 1942. He survived everything, testified, and died in 1987.

• EAN : 9782021577327
• New Book
• The book matches the photo