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Email a friendThe power of human spirit
THIS is a wonderful, terrible and inspiring book. The only wonder is that it has taken so long to find its way into an English translation from the GDR, where it was published in 1971.
It deserves to be placed alongside classics of survival such as Julius Fucik's Report from the Gallows and Primo Levi's If This Is a Man.
The author was born a Jew in Vienna, fled the nazis to France where he was interned as an enemy alien when war began, escaped, was recaptured by Vichy police, deported to Auschwitz and marched over the mountains to Buchenwald.
In all, he suffered in 20 different camps in France, Germany and Poland before he was liberated in April 1945.
After returming briefly to Vienna, he went to live in the GDR from 1955 to 1983.
Though quite different in style and scale, his fictional retelling of those terrible years reminded me of Bruno Apitz's story of life in Buchenwald, Naked Among Wolves, an also fictionalised tale of a child saved by a party cell in the concentration camp, whose story was recently retold by Bill Niven in The Buchenwald Child (Camden House, £19.99).
Though Fred Wander, who died in 2006, was not a communist, like many others after the war, he chose to live not in the "economic miracle" of West Germany, but in the much-denigrated German Democratic Republic.
It is easy to see why his book was so popular in his adopted country. In its brief, 140-page narrative, it demonstrates the power of the human spirit to triumph over the very worst that an inhuman world can subject it to.
Similar stories are being written, even now, in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
KARL DALLAS