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Inside the Concentration Camps. Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler’s Death Camps. Aroneanu, Eugène (Ed.). Translated by Thomas Whissen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. 174 pp. $17.95

Although this book was published in English in 1996, it was actually compiled and published in French a half century ago (1946). This fact is one of its greatest strengths: the accounts by the victims are acutely vivid, unrevised, and unmediated. They provide raw descriptions of events in the camps that are untouched by time and the reworkings of memory. Eugène Aroneanu, a Romanian who had emigrated to Paris and joined the resistance in 1940, was commissioned to compile evidence of Nazi atrocities for the Nuremberg trials. One outcome of his task was this book which has, only now, been translated into English. Aroneanu’s role in the project was especially meaningful, because he escaped the Nazis himself and dedicated his entire life to fighting crimes against humanity, authoring fifty-eight publications in this effort. With this book he was the first "to classify testimonies, . . . to reveal the inner workings of the camps, . . . to list the names and functions of over 400 camps, . . . to list the names and functions of over 400 locations in which millions died; . . . to publish terrifying photographs of unparalleled horror" (Note).

The format chosen by Aroneanu is dissimilar to that of most subsequently published interviews with concentration camp victims. He draws on two sources of information: the testimonies of one hundred individual survivors, most of whom are French, and supportive documental information from twenty-five additional sources such as reports on individual camps made by the military or carried out by various ministries. Aroneanu has then delineated subject categories such as deportation, internment, life in the camps, labor, sanitary conditions, medical experiments, methods of execution, and extermination, under which he has arrayed all pertinent observations by the survivors, identified in the text only by the numbers he has assigned them (their names and professions are provided in a list preceding the text). Each larger chapter topic is broken into subtopics, for example: "Life in the Camps: Discipline, Practices, Religion, Daily Scenes, Roll Call, Punishment and Torture." These provide handholds of a sort for the reader who inevitably becomes immersed in the overwhelming pain and suffering reflected by the survivors’ statements.

This format-by-topic produces several effects: it clearly builds and authenticates the testimony through multiple observations of similar phenomena; it intensifies and dramatizes the narratives, since they are unrelieved by names or identifying marks such as gender, age, or profession; and it draws the reader into the immediacy of the narratives because there is no contextualizing commentary by either the editor or the survivors themselves. Some readers may question Aroneanu’s decision to represent his survivor-interviewees by mere numbers in the text, when they had all too recently been reduced to numbers by the Nazis. Perhaps he thought it would be too cumbersome or distracting to give the name after the comments, some of which are only one sentence in length. Some readers may also be disconcerted by the lack of distinction among female and male voices, since it is now generally believed that there were differences in the concentration camp experience based on gender. In many passages the gender is obvious, but occasionally I found myself referring back to the initial list of witnesses’ names. Aroneanu does note the gender difference with reference to labor in his introduction written in 1946, but leaves unexplained his decision not to distinguish between female and male: "since the treatment of women as workers deviated considerably from that of men, we have devoted a separate section to that in chapter 6. In all other cases, we have proceeded without differentiating between the two so that sometimes the narrative moves from the male to the female experience without grammatical distinctions" (xv).

Various topics emerge from the accounts. Constant throughout the testimonies is an acute awareness of nationality. The survivors predicate almost every reference with a national marker. Since most of the interviewees were French, many observations include references to French victims, but this is merely a primary identification. Other typical markers include various nationalities ("a young Pole," "a Belgian prisoner," "a group of Russian POWs," "all communists [four Germans and two Poles]"); ethnicity ("Gypsy women"); profession ("Since I was a priest," "a professor of Oriental languages"); and race ("A certain number of Jews"). In addition to a basic national identification with other French internees, the witnesses occasionally single out the behavior of French inmates as unique or admirable. Several witnesses comment on the French women workers: "To speed up production, the Germans . . . promised prizes consisting either of money or Red Cross packages . . . The few French women who were offered such prizes refused them categorically. It was very noble of them when you realize that the prize consisted of food . . . I am proud to say that the women I was with, all of us French political prisoners, were looked upon by our enemies as the worst possible workers" (61). In another passage under"Revolt-Flight-Suicide," one witness comments: "There was also a sort of bond between the French and the anti-Fascists of all countries. Thanks to this brotherhood, I survived" (110). It is difficult, of course, to evaluate the objectivity of these kinds of statements.

The arbitrariness of punishment, torture and death also surfaces repeatedly in all of the chapters, but especially in the descriptions of life in the camps (chapter 5): "One SS guard would use anything he could lay his hands on . . . to beat any prisoners who came near him, for no reason whatsoever" (29); "[The camp commander] . . . would torture us with senseless and malicious punishments which he called ‘sport’" (30); "We were also supervised by SS matrons who beat us for trivial reasons" (63); "Whether you worked or not, it didn’t matter. They beat you anyway" (62). Several witnesses also note the relative youthfulness of some of the most brutal guards, including sixteen-year olds. Linked to arbitrariness is a peculiar kind of irrationality, in which rules assume a life of their own: "Three times I had to prop up dead bodies at roll call. Finally, I told an SS guard that this didn’t make any sense. His answer was: ‘Dead or alive, everybody has to be there.’ The he added: ‘Roll call is roll call’" (54).

Women’s experiences, in that they differ from men’s, are marked in particular by sexual abuse: "If they were pretty and healthy, the women and young girls were taken to a special barracks where the SS guards raped them until they were half dead. From there they were sent to the ovens"; "our women officers, some with peculiar propensities, had no qualms whatsoever about taking their pleasure with gypsy women, who then received special treatment" (30). But women were not the only victims of sexual exploitation and abuse: "A certain number of Jews were retained in the camp for the use of the Kapos; the homosexual Kapos used them to gratify their lust and therefore protected them" (31).

Some readers will perhaps be surprised by the extent not only to which German companies were directly linked with the concentration camps, which provided slave labor, but also by the general public knowledge of these links as early as 1946, as evidenced in these testimonies. The Bayer Company was—horrifically—involved with medical experiments of the cruelest sort (chapter 8), including the "purchase" of inmates for experimental testing: "150 Jewish women, who had been ‘bought’ by the Bayer Company from the camp authorities at Auschwitz, were put in a women’s compound outside the camp and made to participate in experiments with unidentified hormone preparations" (85-6). Other companies and industries which were directly involved include Krupp, Kohlen-Syndikat, BMW, Borsig, IG Farben, Malachit AG, Henschel, Daimler-Benz, and Heinkel; many of these concerns functioned without interruption in the immediate post-Nazi period, and in fact, still thrive in contemporary Germany.

The text of Inside the Concentration Camps is interspersed with numerous photographs from the camps—photographs that could be stills taken from Alain Resnais’ film Night and Fog. Some of the most chilling photographs I have ever seen on this subject conclude the chapter "Medical Experiments and Vivisection." The captions alone reveal the extent of the physical degradation: "Gross abuse of a corpse does not begin to describe atrocities like these"; "Human cadavers were butchered like farm animals—and for the same purpose" (94-5). The more than forty photographs lend graphic support to the survivors’ testimonies; they function as a visual supplement that was perhaps felt even more necessary in 1946 to dispel any possible public skepticism or disbelief.

Some readers will find particularly useful the appendix which provides a comprehensive listing (twenty-four pages) of "Camps, command posts, and prisons used as places of incarceration"; this table includes not only the name and location of the internment site, but also its primary purpose or function. A brief index also facilitates use of the text for those with more narrowly defined interests in the topic. The translation seems to have been done carefully, although I have not compared it with the original, and the English flows smoothly; according to the translator’s own words, he has "taken care to preserve the tone and style of the speakers. These are not literary people making literary statements. They are people from all walks of life who try to express the reality of the nightmare they survived as sincerely and straightforwardly as they can. . . . But sometimes the very banality of their expressions has greater impact than the phrase that strains for effect" (preface). In this latter observation, I concur with the translator wholeheartedly. What this book is not, is a cohesive narrative by a single survivor, the story of a life with a beginning and end; rather it offers a slice of life, a few years in the lives of a cross-section of internees. It is also not a "lyricized" rendering of the experience such as one finds in the works of Elie Wiesel with his dramatic and metaphoric language—I found only a single such instance in the entire book ("I myself saw the camp strewn with bodies; they looked like white seagulls lying prostrate in the snow" [40]). Rather it is factually oriented. Both sober and sobering, it is a very moving book, one that is difficult to read, but that is well worth the emotional investment.

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Dr. Elaine Martin, emartin@woodsquad.as.ua.edu