At the famous ramp where the selections took place, you could go one way to the gas chambers and you were immediately dead; if you went the other way to slave labour, it was extermination through work. Average life expectancy, if you were selected for slave labour, was precisely three months. So, it’s not exactly a good chance of survival, but nevertheless it was the chance for survival for those who did survive. It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past; that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive?

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There was also “Auschwitz III,” the concentration camp at Monowitz (Polish Monowice), sometimes designated the Buna subcamp, four miles from the main camp. I.G. Farben, the chemical conglomerate, operated, in conjunction with the SS, a gigantic and brutal forced-labor network there. One of the reasons Auschwitz has loomed so large in the public imagination is because there are so many survivors from all across Europe writing memoirs in all European languages and representing quite different communities—whether the French Resistance or the Polish resistance or Greek Jews or Hungarian Jews. There were many, many different communities who could subsequently identify with survivors after the war and who provided audiences for their memoirs and publications and accounts. The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community on returning after the war. They returned singing as well as having entered singing. They could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she’s in striking contrast to somebody like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a Jewish French prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. When he returned to France, he had to keep the fact that he was Jewish quiet and pretend he was just French because the myth of resistance was so big in post-war France and there was still a festering antisemitism. So, his return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s. I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate, actually. This does really challenge notions of historical objectivity. I simply don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons which include the selection of examples and the style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. It is possible to be historically accurate, writing an account that is true to and commensurate with the evidence, and yet at the same time be personally engaged with the material. History-writing is as much a creative act as an intellectual outcome of scholarly research.That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways. The other thing to add about Bauer is that he was the guy who gave Mossad, the Israeli secret service, the tip-off on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann so that they could kidnap him and bring him to Jerusalem for trial. Fritz Bauer didn’t trust the West German government to give Eichmann a decent trial and an appropriate sentence, so Bauer tipped off Mossad to ensure that Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem and not in West Germany. One of the reasons why it’s become so incredibly significant in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp that combined both an extermination camp and a labour camp. It had the largest single number of murders in the Holocaust—more than a million people were murdered there—but also an enormous number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labour camps and subcamps that it ran. So it combined the two functions.

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Few names in any language prompt a sense of horror as does “Auschwitz.” When a person says “Auschwitz,” they rarely have to explain the reference; a chain of associations, images, and feelings—all of them dreadful—are borne with its utterance. Rarely does a word inflict such sharp, immediate, and lingering effects on listeners. Leslie Epstein’s greatest novel, this 1979 book gives a fictional account of Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as the head of the Council of Elders (known as the Judenrat) in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland. Rumkowski was seen as a villain, famous for his role in delivering children to the Nazis for extermination. Ponary Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz Before we get into detail discussing your book choices, I think it might be helpful to understand exactly what Auschwitz was. It wasn’t just one camp, but a group of camps—is that right? KL Auschwitz seen by the SS - This volume contains reminiscences and a diary by three members of the SS: Rudolf Höss, the first camp commandant, Pery Broad, an SS non-commissioned officer in the camp Gestapo, and the SS physician Johann Paul Kremer. Yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. What it also brings out well is the public reactions to, and the wider significance of, the Auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal of it and that’s in part because there was massive media coverage, largely because of the way Fritz Bauer mounted the trial. Bauer was determined to ensure there was media coverage. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

Introduced to the American public in the early 1960s by Philip Roth, Borowski’s spellbinding short story collection was based on the writer’s two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Borowski, who was a non-Jewish Polish journalist, provides a perspective on camp life quite different from the more common survivor narratives. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi GermanybyMarie Jalowicz Simon Yes, there’s another book that I could have put in, Rebecca Wittmann’s book on the Auschwitz trial, Beyond Justice. Both, in different ways, point up that the West German choice to use the ordinary criminal law definition of murder was totally inappropriate for trying people who had been involved in a genocide. Collective violence is different from individual violence. The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder.