Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning
by Paul Steinberg
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Description
A concentration camp survivor confronts one of the most heated and vexed questions of the Holocaust: what price survival? In 1943, sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. A chemistry student, Steinberg was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize his fellow inmate as "Henri," the ultimate survivor, the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. "One seems to glimpse a show more human soul," Levi wrote inIf This Is a Man, "but then Henri's sad smile freezes in a cold grimace, and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all." Now, after fifty years, Steinberg speaks for himself. In an unsparing act of self-scrutiny, he traces his passage from artless adolescent to ruthless creature determined to do anything to live. He describes his strategies of survival: the boxing matches he staged for the camp commanders, the English POWs he exploited, the maneuvers and tactics he applied with cold competence. Ultimately, he confirms Levi's judgment: "No doubt he saw straight. I probably was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available." But, he asks, "Is it so wrong to survive?" Brave and rare,Speak You Also is a profound and necessary addition to the body of Holocaust writing: a survivor's reckoning with culpability and survival. show lessTags
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Author Information
1 Work 115 Members
Paul Steinberg was born in Berlin in 1926 & immigrated to France at the age of seven. Deported to Auschwitz in 1943, he was the only member of his family to survive the war. After liberation, Steinberg returned to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1999. (Bowker Author Biography)
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Chronique d'ailleurs
- Original publication date
- 1996 [Editions Mamsay]
- People/Characters
- Paul Steinberg; Primo Levi; Victor Young Perez
- Important places
- Auschwitz concentration camp, Oświęcim, Lesser Poland, Poland; Drancy internment camp, Drancy, Île-de-France, France
- Important events
- Holocaust
- Epigraph
- Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.
--Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger - First words
- I was in my junior year at the Lycee Claude-Bernard.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)A delivery, however long overdue, is still a deliverance.
- Blurbers
- Lanzmann, Claude; Semprun, Jorge; Felstiner, John; Anissimov, Myriam
- Disambiguation notice
- Originally published as: Chronique d'ailleurs.
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 940.53 — History & geography History of Europe History of Europe 1918- World War II, 1939-1945
- LCC
- DS135 .F9 .S7413 — History of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania Asia History of Asia Israel (Palestine). The Jews Jews outside of Palestine
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 116
- Popularity
- 280,518
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.54)
- Languages
- Dutch, English, French, German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 10
- ASINs
- 3
