One of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust I know of. Intense, unrelenting...almost unendurably sad. ( )

Jorge Semprun has lived the novel he writes. He was in the French Resistance, captured, and deported to Buchenwald, where he spent two years. He was 21 years old when he was liberated. Yet, Semprun choses to write this, his first novel, as fiction. He uses as the structure of the book, his five-day train ride to the concentration camp in the winter of 1943. Within this basic frame, Semprun reflects on the decisions that led him to being in that cattle car with 99 other men, the nature of freedom and captivity, and his life back on the outside post-liberation. The unique method of organization, with flashbacks and forwards, provides depth to the story and mimics the way our minds travel, when our bodies can not. ( )