Book Review: Hanged at Auschwitz: An Extraordinary Memoir of Survival by Sim Kessel

Hanged at Auschwitz: An Extraordinary Memoir of Survival

by Sim Kessel (940.531 Kes)

 

This is the true story of Sim Kessel, a Jewish Frenchman, and member of the French Underground for two years before the Nazis captured him and sent him to Auschwitz.

 

As the title indicates, he really was hanged but something went wrong with the rope and he survived. He also avoided being executed by handgun and via the gas chamber. As Kessel writes, “…survival boiled down to pure luck, the result of successive tosses of the dice. Each lucky throw granted a few days’ reprieve, or at most a few weeks…And so to be a survivor of Auschwitz is really nothing to boast about. In that hell there was no survival of the fittest. Intelligence, courage, knowledge, vitality, the desire to live — all counted for nothing…common misery reduced everyone to the same level, erasing all values, breaking down all wills…life or death depended on the whim of soldiers and kapos.”

 

Kessel begins his book with the story of his capture, and provides a riveting narrative of his two years at Auschwitz. He doesn’t gloss over the horrors but neither does he provide a constant stream of blood and gore. I can’t say I enjoyed this book (as one would enjoy a pleasurable activity), but rather found it compelling and hard to put down. His was such a fascinating story that I put aside all my other books to concentrate on this.

I wish he had provided more of a background of himself and his family prior to WWII, and an epilogue of his life and recovery — physical, mental, and emotional — that he writes could not have happened without his family. I wanted a short bio of his life after the war but he ended the story so abruptly telling us, “A few hours later, I was finally able to rejoin my family in their temporary home at Villeparisis. And then my true rehabilitation began, for without them, I would never have recovered my enjoyment of life.”

 

Regardless, this story will stay with you, and I highly recommend this book.

 

Recommended by Charlotte M.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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