A hot test

David Rousset, born in 1912, Trotskyist militant, was arrested in October 1943 and deported in successive concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Neuengamme, before his release in April 1945. Only four months later he wrote this report on his prisoner experience.

I was in my reading slowed by the lack of structure of the book, as well as the sometimes confusing style of the author. Readers unfamiliar with the subject will risk, in addition, to be confused by the words to the universe of camps, which the author does not always take the trouble to explain. Yet, at times, he knows revive interest, experienced by anecdotes or interesting analysis. Too bad that the whole is irregular. In addition, David Rousset, as political deportee, had only a partial view of life in the camps, and therefore addresses some treatments reserved to other categories of prisoners.

I enjoyed some analyzes, present in the final pages:
"Normal men do not know that anything is possible. Although testimony force their intelligence to admit, the muscles do not believe. The concentration camp know. The fighter who has been for months in the fire area has knowledge of death. Death concentration camp placed among every hour of their existence. It showed all their faces. They touched all recounts. They lived the worry like an obsession everywhere. They knew the humiliation beatings, body weakness under the lash. They felt the ravages of hunger. They walked for years in the fantastic scenery of all the dignities ruined. They are separated from the others by an impossible experience to pass on. "

Or thereof, more surprising:
"It is too early to draw up a positive assessment of the concentration camp experience, but now it turns rich. Taking dynamic aware of the power and beauty from living in itself, brutal, completely stripped of all the superstructures, to live even through the worst collapses or more serious setbacks. (...) Finally, the exciting discovery of humor, not as a personal projection, but as objective structure of the universe. Ubu and Kafka lose original features related to their history to become the hardware components of the world. "