I survived Auschwitz

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." – George Santayana

 

A few weeks ago, some family members bought this book for me. I'm interested in history and this book reminded me of Anna Frank. I'm not sure what I expected but this book was really mindblowing. 

Note: If you are looking for a fictional story to spend some nice time, don't pick this one. 

It's not a novel so don't expect nice language or complex sentence structure. If you've written Anna Frank's diary, then you can probably imagine what this is about. However, this story begins when the writer is already caught and sent to a concentration camp. 

Krystyna (that's not the name she was born with) manages to show the reality of the camp, the difficulties, and the obstacles toward survival. She doesn't try to make things look nicer. You will read about the experiments, the tortures, the living conditions, and the relationships between the people in the camp. I liked that there were chapters dedicated to gypsies or Greek Jews, for example. 

Page after page, I felt powerless and horrified by what Krystyna and so many others had to go through. I've read history books, yes. I've watched many movies and read many novels about it, but this book is different. The writer isn't afraid to speak, to show her sorrow and her despair. But she also shows strength, optimism, and hope for a better future. 

I found out that she has written another book "Empty Water", about two decades after she wrote this one. According to this description in GoodReads because she realized that people still didn't understand what had happened in Ghettos and during the resistance. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21124626-empty-water

I recommend this book to everyone. It's eye-opening, it's real, it's the legacy of a woman who survived. Now, it's our turn. We must learn and remember the past!