Shlomo Venezia, a survivor of the "hell" of Zyklon B, flame ovens, executions, hunger, disease ... !!!

It is in this exceptional book, the interview with Shlomo Venezia in 2006 by Beatrice Prasquier.
It tells us first, came from a modest family, he grew up thanks to the "resourcefulness", before being deported in cattle car as a Jew in the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 11 April 1944 at the age of 21.

Shlomo Venezia is one of the few surviving members of the Sonderkommando (special teams). His testimony is all the more essential for the transmission of our Universal Memory.
The SS had formed these Sonderkommando (consisting mainly of Jews) in the SINGLE goal of exercising the horrible "work" mandatory, of:
- Make undress deportees;
- Then, get them into the gas chambers;
- Then once gassed out the bodies of the Gas Chambers by dragging them into the ovens!

Tragically, some time later, the members of the Sonderkommando were forced to follow their "compatriots" in this process of extermination "to the industrial chain", uninterrupted, to the "hell".
Indeed, these victims forming teams Sonderkommando were murdered dual titles: first, "obviously" because they were Jewish, and secondly because they were direct witnesses to the Nazi atrocities, thus eliminating !

A poignant testimony about the obligation to carry dehumanizing acts in filthy conditions and extreme duty to obey to keep the "right" to survive.
In these terrible situations, choice and individual reflection are completely annihilated, prohibited.
The only "choice" imposed by the Nazis that still exists is: obey or be executed on the spot!
The ultimate limit to this "non-choice" is having to affect the lives of others.
Shlomo Venezia only saw the horrors in his "work" every day, but still, it did not face to face, in addition to the terrifying "non-choice" absolute.

On 7 October 1944 the Sonderkommando trying to revolt, but this attempt fails and almost all are exterminated or 452 innocent ... more
Fortunately, Shlomo Venezia is among the few survivors.

He ended his tragic journey in deportation camps: Mauthausen, Melk and Ebensee, before finally being liberated by the Americans on 6 May 1945.

A dense book abominable facts revealed by Shlomo Venezia, on the operation of camps and particularly that of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This work is complemented by a touching foreword by Simone Veil, drawings by David Olère (himself, another of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando) of the unspeakable "work" forced Sonderkommando, photos of the camps, schematics, detailed explanation of the configuration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps; Also, a very interesting summary of the historian Marcello Pezzetti Auschwitz specialist, about the historical development that led to the Holocaust, and a summary of the historian Umberto Gentiloni about the history of Nazism and Fascism Italy and Greece (countries of origin of Shlomo Venezia).

Confer also valuable testimonies on the theme of totalitarianism, of:
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago);
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich);
- Jacques Rossi (She was beautiful this utopia!);
- Jacques Rossi (manual Gulag);
- S. Eugenia Ginzburg (Vertigo Volume 1 and The sky Kolyma Volume 2);
- Margarete Buber-Neumann (Deported to Siberia Volume 1 and Volume 2 was deported to Ravensbrück);
- Yuri Chirkov (It was so ... A teenager in the Gulag);
- Boris Shiryaev (Pilot Solovki);
- Malay Phcar (Childhood in hell: Cambodia, April 17, 1975 - March 8, 1980);
- Sergei Melgunov (The Red Terror in Russia: 1918-1924);
- Zinaida Gippius (Journal under the Terror);
- Jean Pasqualini (Mao Prisoner);
- Kang Chol-Hwan (Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag);
- Aron Gabor (The cry of the Taiga);
- Varlam Shalamov (Tales of the Kolyma);
- Lev Razgon (Life without tomorrows);
- Pin Yathay (You will live, my son);
- Ante Ciliga (Ten years in the country's disconcerting lie);
- Gustaw Herling (A World Apart);
- David Rousset (The Concentration Camp Universe);
- Joseph Czapski (Memories of Starobelsk);
- Barbara Skarga (An absurd cruelty);
- Claire Ly (Revenue from hell);
- Primo Levi (If This Is a Man);
- Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved: forty years after Auschwitz);
- Harry Wu (laogai, the Chinese Gulag);
- Anastassia Lyssyvets (happy life ... Tell: Memories of a survivor of the Great Famine in Ukraine);
- François Ponchaud (Cambodia Year Zero);
- Sozerko Malsagov and Nikolai Kiselev-Gromov (The Origins of the Gulag, stories of Solovetsky Islands: The island of hell, followed by: The death camps in the USSR);
- François Bizot (Portal);
- Marine Buissonnière and Sophie Delaunay (I regret being born there: North Korea: Hell and exile);
- Juliette and Dorian Malovic Morillot (North Korean Escapees: Testimonies);
- Barbara Demick (Ordinary Lives in North Korea);
- Vladimir Zazoubrine (The Chekist story on it and always on It.).