Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning

by Linda Coverdale (Translator), Linda Coverdale (Translator), Paul Steinberg (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.36

  In 1943, 16 year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. He survived the death camp due in part to his admitted ruthlessness and not a little to luck. Some 50 years later, Steinberg describes his strategies for survival, the maneouvres and tactics he applied with cold competence. In an unsparing act of self-examination he traces his passage from artless adolescent to a ruthless creature determined to do anything to live. 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. Of Levi's judgment, Steinberg says, no doubt he saw straight. I probably was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available. I will never know whether I am entitled to ask for clemency from the jury. But, he asks, is it so wrong to survive? .